All the talk about whether or not the Iranian presidential election was legitimate and fair is rather strange. People talk as if the president in Iran really matters much. Of course, the real power in Iran is with the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. In Iran you have a dictator right out of the 13th century ruling over a country where a lot of its citizens would really rather have a government suited to the 21st century.

Khamenei is a real swell guy. His day is packed with approving the imprisoning and torturing Iranian political dissidents, executing homosexuals, and training suicide bombers to blow themselves up in public marketplaces in Iraq. And of course his people are real keen on making the roadside bombs that have killed and maimed so many American soldiers in Iraq.

So with Iran in the international spotlight, the real questioning that should be going on is not about whether the presidential election in Iran was legitimate - but about whether the theocratic dictatorship in Iran is a legitimate form of government. This form of government makes the elections in Iran a kind of cruel joke played on the Iranian people. And for some reason the world plays along without condemning the whole system in Iran. It’s like Hitler is ruling Germany and by him allowing a president to be elected under him the world gets distracted from the key point that Germany is still ruled by Hitler.

It’s strange that President Obama would come down so hard on Honduras for the Supreme Court there ordering a president removed from office who was making an unconstitutional power grab - but regarding Iran he never points out the absurd form of dictatorship that rules that country.

The Supreme Court made the right call today in the New Haven Firefighter’s affirmative action case, Ricci v. DeStefano. It is a relief to see at least one small thing go right on the political front. Scary though is that this was another 5-4 decision. Imagine the damage to American laws that could be done if the court ever picks up one more liberal member.

The decision today was important because it helps protect using objective civil service tests in hirings and promotions for many government jobs.

We shouldn’t forget one crucial reason why civil service tests are used for hiring and promotions in many government jobs. These tests are used to establish a system of merit-based employment and promotions to avoid the cronyism that naturally infects all branches of government. This is especially important for public services that deal directly with public safety.

In the private sector, businesses have strong market incentives to maintain merit-based hiring and promotions. If you don’t maintain a competitive workforce, then you will go out of business. Government departments don’t have to deal with market forces constantly getting in your face.

But besides achieving high-quality police and fire departments, these tests give a path for the less socially and politically connected to get jobs and rise in position. So the tests are part of a fairer system than would otherwise exist.

These tests are win-win. The public gets better services and employees are judged by objective tests.

ObamaCare - This is a giant trillion dollar mess that should be opposed and I sure hope the bill fails to pass in Congress. The country has no idea how we are going to pay for the existing unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security. (You mean there is no lock box as Al Gore told us?) It is madness to make a giant new expansion to the welfare state with no long term plan of how we are going to fund it - unless taxes are pushed through the roof. California is learning right now that years of pushing off bills to the future - well, the bills eventually come due. Fast forward 20 years and the US federal government is going to be in the same boat.

And creating a public health insurance plan to compete with private plans is a real threat to our system of private health insurance. Congress can rig the system so that businesses and people all start migrating to the public plan because it is artificially cheaper. Single payer, here we come, just give it time.

Cap & Trade - I could almost support this. After all, as I have written before, if anything makes sense to tax, pollution does. People and businesses should not be able to just dump tons of pollutants into the air that we have to breath with no cost to them. It makes more sense to tax pollution than people’s wages.

On the other hand, I don’t trust the Democrats with this issue. If I was in Congress, unless I could truly figure out nothing insane is going on in the 1200 page bill, I would vote against it.

And why the fixation with carbon emissions? There are a lot worse things being dumped into the air around the country. I am not convinced that Global Warming is certain and troublesome enough that the country should make it such a high priority. If it’s so important, then let’s spend to invent technologies to cool the planet rather than tax trillions away from consumers and businesses as we damage the economy.

Regarding my last post, I would like to know how the federal government plans to use the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency to accomplish this Whitehouse stated goal:

“A critical part of the CFPA’s mission should be to promote access to financial services, especially for households and communities that traditionally have had limited access. … Rigorous application of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) should be a core function of the CFPA. “

In other words, lots of loans need to be made in poor neighborhoods that would not otherwise be made. Now since people are poor in these neighborhoods, on the average they are going to have far less money for down payments, worse credit, and less ability to make payments after they get the loans. So how is this to be solved? The only results-oriented path forward is to relax the amounts needed for downpayments, overlook poor credit scores, downplay the likelihood that payments will not be made on time, and reduce interest rates to make payments lower. But wait - haven’t we been here before?

It is appropriate that banks are monitored to see that they are not discriminating on race regarding loans, such as in poor neighborhoods. But you can be sure that activist groups empowered by the CRA are not going to be satisfied with that. I mean - then what would they have left to do? The goal is not to be simply watchdogs to prevent discrimination. The goal is to get more loans made. But how is that done? See the prior paragraph.

Update: For a highly prescient article about the CRA, by Howard Husock, in the Winter 2000 edition of City Journal, see here. And how can all of this be ignored by the mainstream media? They seem to only repeat the Democrat’s talking points.

The Obama administration has big plans for overhauling the regulations of the banking industry. They want to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). Surely, as a starting point, they will want to make sure that more bad home loans, to people that don’t really qualify for them, are not made on a large scale. After all, low down payment and subprime loans made to people who couldn’t pay them back was a big factor in causing the whole financial mess. All it took was a recession for people to start walking away from these loans. They had no skin in the game regarding down payments. But if normal rules for qualifying for loans had been in place, they would have never got the loans in the first place.

Ever since Jimmy Carter was president, every president, especially Clinton and GW Bush, pushed to increase loans to low income persons, especially low-income minorities. They used Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac to give out loans that should not have been given out. The Community Reinvestment Act (Carter’s brainchild) was used by local activists to shake down local bank branches so that the banks gave out home loans to poor people that they should not have given out. Basically the federal government had a vast scheme to prod lending institutions into giving out loans to poor people, who would not normally qualify, in the name of increasing home ownership and to help low-income minorities move toward the middle class.

So this brings us back to the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). Have Obama and the Democrats learned anything from this financial crisis regarding the unwise practice of pressuring banks into giving out loans to people that don’t qualify? You be the judge. The following is from the White House Proposal Paper:

The Agency should enforce fair lending laws and the Community Reinvestment Act and otherwise seek to ensure that underserved consumers and communities have access to prudent financial services, lending, and investment.

A critical part of the CFPA’s mission should be to promote access to financial services, especially for households and communities that traditionally have had limited access. This focus will also help ensure that the CFPA fully internalizes the value of preserving access to financial services and weighs that value against other values when it considers new consumer protection regulations.

Rigorous application of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) should be a core function of the CFPA. Some have attempted to blame the subprime meltdown and financial crisis on the CRA and have argued that the CRA must be weakened in order to restore financial stability. These claims and arguments are without any logical or evidentiary basis. It is not tenable that the CRA could suddenly have caused an explosion in bad subprime loans more than 25 years after its enactment. In fact, enforcement of CRA was weakened during the boom and the worst abuses were made by firms not
covered by CRA. Moreover, the Federal Reserve has reported that only six percent of all the higher-priced loans were extended by the CRA-covered lenders to lower income borrowers or neighborhoods in the local areas that are the focus of CRA evaluations.

The appropriate response to the crisis is not to weaken the CRA; it is rather to promote robust application of the CRA so that low-income households and communities have access to responsible financial services that truly meet their needs. To that end, we propose that the CFPA should have sole authority to evaluate institutions under the CRA. While the prudential regulators should have the authority to decide applications for institutions to merge, the CFPA should be responsible for determining the institution’s record of meeting the lending, investment, and services needs of its community under the CRA, which would be part of the merger application.

The CFPA should also vigorously enforce fair lending laws to promote access to credit. Furthermore, the CFPA should maintain a fair lending unit with attorneys, compliance specialists, economists, and statisticians. The CFPA should have primary fair lending jurisdiction over federally supervised institutions and concurrent authority with the states over other institutions. Its comprehensive jurisdiction should enable it to develop a holistic, integrated approach to fair lending that targets resources to the areas of greatest risk for discrimination.

To promote fair lending enforcement, as well as community investment objectives, the CFPA should have authority to collect data on mortgage and small business lending. Critical new fields should be added to HMDA data such as a universal loan identifier that permits tying HMDA data to property databases and proprietary loan performance databases, a flag for loans originated by mortgage brokers, information about the type of interest rate (e.g., fixed vs. variable), and other fields that the mortgage crisis has shown to be of critical importance.

Conservative activists want David Letterman fired because he made a sex-related joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter. Okay, let’s fire him. And while we are at it let’s also fire these guys:

“Saturday night, Sarah Palin is going to drop the first puck at the Philadelphia Flyers’ hockey game. Then Palin will spend the rest of the game trying to keep the hockey players out of her daughter’s penalty box.” –Conan O’Brien

“Did you see what Sarah Palin said yesterday? She made a speech in Alaska and she said that the money the federal government is sending to states to help bail out, well that’s not good, because that’s the federal government getting in there and trying to ‘control people.’ Yes that’s right, Sarah, it’s all about the Federal Reserve making your daughter use a condom.” –Bill Maher

Update: Letterman apologizes again today.

Update2: Upon re-reading this, it sounds like I may be serious about firing these guys. That’s not what I meant. See here.

Glenn Reynolds is exactly right when he writes today:

TYLER COWEN ON MEDICARE SPENDING: “MEDICARE expenditures threaten to crush the federal budget, yet the Obama administration is proposing that we start by spending more now so we can spend less later. This runs the risk of becoming the new voodoo economics. If we can’t realize significant savings in health care costs now, don’t expect savings in the future, either.”

I agree with Virginia Postrel: Fix Medicare First! “Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let’s see what ‘better management’ looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country. “

I have often said that universal health care coverage will eventually happen in the US. It just shouldn’t happen now, in the middle of an economic crisis, and when Social Security and Medicare spending is about to explode out of control. Just look at the CBO budget projections for upcoming years.

And universal health care coverage shouldn’t be implemented the way the Democrats and President Obama are proposing. We need less government intervention in health care, not more.

The way to someday achieve universal health care is to have universal health savings accounts (HSAs) where each person has the same amount saved each year. Each person’s HSA funds are used to buy private health insurance and to also pay for medical expenses up to the deductible. True, the government will need to include subsidies to many people who can’t afford to fully fund their HSAs - but this is far better than today’s system where government is heading to expand forever into health care.

With universal HSAs, Medicare and Medicaid could be phased out as a form of government health insurance and government control. Good riddance.

Many conservative activists are now trying to get David Letterman fired. Glenn Reynolds seems to like the idea since he keeps bringing up the Letterman flap. I am not sure why Reynolds has it out for Letterman.

Yes, Letterman and his staff should have checked which daughter was at the baseball game before creating the joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter having sex with a baseball player. Letterman has admitted he and his writers screwed up by not looking into which daughter was at the game. But sheez, conservative bloggers and pundits just won’t let it go. They are now calling this a rape joke and are saying Letterman is a disgusting creep and should be fired.

Assume that the joke was about Bristol, the older daughter that was knocked up in real life. You might say then that this is a mean joke. But hey, the young and famous in the spotlight get poked fun at all the time in the media. This may not be nice, but why is the Palin family off limits?

When I heard the joke, I immediately knew the reference point was Bristol Palin, so I thought it was kind of funny, even though it was rather brutal. But all of the jokes told in late night monologues are making fun of people in the news, and typically the people in the jokes don’t look all that great. If you take the jokes too seriously, then they are often very brutal. When you get famous, late night talk show hosts are going to lampoon your personal life and sometimes it is going to sting.

I for one will keep watching David Letterman. After watching him all these years, I am not about to turn on him for one ill-conceived joke. Conservative activists need to chill out.

Update: Look here at many examples of non-Letterman sex jokes about Bristol Palin. This is nothing new.

Tyler Cowen tells us:

Current administrators are using stimulus funds to buy off the old interest groups, under the view that these are temporary bad times. Relative to what will come, these are “good times,” and much of that surplus ought to be put in reserve funds. That is not happening.

And why are these good times? Tyler explains:

The higher education bubble has burst. The expiration of stimulus funds in 2011 will be a crushing event for many public sector universities.

I stumbled across Daily Kos while searching for articles about Newt Gingrich. Daily Kos is such a pointless website. Every time I read anything there, it comes off as stuff written by a not-too-bright outraged 15 year old. (I guess that is why they call them the Kos Kids.) At the same time, the posts just ooze with out-of-control intolerance toward political opponents. God I am glad that I am not a lefty.

When Gingrich declared Obama’s economic policies a failure, the post a ran across at Daily Kos carried the headline: “Hate-filled extremist speaks out at fundraiser for hate-filled extremism“. Then it declares: “GOP ideology is that such an assertion cannot possibly be true because the GOP is fundamentally a racist organization: The Ku Klux Klan without the bedsheets.”

Glad we got that cleared up.

It is hard to get offended or even a little worked up by this kind of writing because it is just so dumb. How on earth is this the #1 visited blogsite in the US?

I apologize in advance for linking to Daily Kos.

I am a non-liberal. I think of myself as a libertarian-conservative. Lately, however, I feel rather alienated from mainstream conservatives. This is because when conservatives talk of President Barack Obama they relentlessly spout out every lame critical thought that pops in their heads. It doesn’t matter how illogical it is - just throw it out there.

So we have conservatives saying that Obama is trying to take over industries and socialize them. GM, Chrysler, and the banks - Obama wants them all to be run by the federal government. But it’s all nonsense. Obama has made it clear that this is all intended to be temporary. Of course the government cannot do a good job of running these institutions in the long term. These are emergency measures to ward off a potential economic disaster during the nationwide recession.

If McCain had been elected, there would have been bank mega bail-outs too. After all, George Bush had already started spending hundreds of billions on the banks. And the GM and Chrysler bail-out/bankruptcies would have happened too. No president would have stood by while GM, the largest manufacturing company in the US, was liquidated. In fact doing the bail-out as part of a bankruptcy process is pretty smart. It made things go much faster and forced many cuts in business expenses, as well as unloaded these companies from many obligations that they could no longer afford.

Over the past year the consensus among economists is that a potential 2nd Great Depression loomed. This called for strong action by the federal government. This was needed to try to stem a further slide in banking and to stem the slide in confidence in the banks. And a major stimulus to boost the economy was needed. Any president would have done the bank bail-outs and created a large stimulus package. So for conservatives to talk like all of this spending is done just because Obama is a big-spending liberal is just ignoring the facts of the situation.

Sure, Obama is very liberal. But what he has done so far has been pragmatic, not super liberal. Everything he has done can be cut back later once the recession is over. GM and Chrysler can be cut loose. The banks will be free again once the TARP money is paid back. And the stimulus spending can all be cut back once the recession is over and confidence in the economy is steady again.

Today Newt Gingrich announced that Obama’s economic plan has failed. That is ridiculous. The plan has barely started. Furthermore, economists are predicting the recession will end later this year. All the talk of a second Great Depression is fading. How is that a failure?

Obama is going to get credit for saving the banks, saving GM and Chrysler, and averting a 2nd Great Depression. Meanwhile conservatives offered no constructive input during this period other than screaming that “this is terrible - Obama is a big-spending liberal!”

In the future, like on health care reform, conservatives will have a legitimate fight on their hands. But will voters any longer believe them? After crying wolf on Obama’s efforts to prevent a depression, they may have lost too much credibility. Oddly, in a way they have helped Obama.

Sometimes politics is just no fun.