It’s Wednesday, December 14th, 2011….and before we begin, a brief bit of commentary on Tim Tebow.  First, the question: what’s the difference between these two professional athletes:

Answer: other than the fact the former, highly recruited out of high school, won the Heisman, and the latter, passed over by every major college in the country, prevailed in Super Bowl XLV (and was MVP at that!)….and neither started as a rookie, not much.  Both are unapologetic born-again Christians.  So why the fuss over Tebow?  After all, since October 9, 1977, when the Eagles’ Herb Lusk took a lateral from Ron Jaworski, rumbled 70 yards for a touchdown and first dropped to one knee and bowed his head in prayer, professional athletes in every sport have been acknowledging the author of their achievements.

So why the focus, indeed the manic obsession, with Tim Tebow rather than Aaron Rodgers?  Simple; despite an amazing college quarterback career at Berkeley, outside of the world of NFL coaches and scouts, Rodgers was relatively unknown.  And six years as Brett Favres back-up did nothing to increase his notoriety.

On the other hand, Tim Tebow’s life story is common knowledge for anyone with even a passing interest in college football.  Raised and home-schooled by his missionary parents….the first sophomore to win the Heisman….the first college quarterback to run and pass for 20 touchdowns in a season….led the Gators to two BCS championships in three years….the list goes on.

And all the while, only the MSM’s made an issue of Tebow’s faith.

We are not of the belief God takes an interest in the outcome of professional sports contests beyond the level of concern he shows for any aspect of man’s existence.  After all, Roger Staubach, as fine and upstanding a Christian athlete as has ever walked the planet experienced his share of defeats.

And though ’tis true God honors those who honor him, God’s definition of honor is not necessarily the world’s.  So to counter the forthcoming claim of those anxiously awaiting the Bronco’s coming up short as reproof of Tebow’s belief, we offer this simple response: Christians aren’t perfect….only forgiven!

By the way, given the alternative….

….we’ll take an entire league of Tebows!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the mid-week edition, the WSJ‘s Holman Jenkins see this as….

Mitt’s Moment

He fixes problems; we’ve got ’em.

 

Week 3,334 of Mitt Romney’s quest for the presidency hasn’t been a good one. Newt Gingrich has seized the lead in the polls. The voluble front-runner has even lined up with Ted Kennedy, Paul Krugman, Obama’s campaign brain trust and the Pulitzer department of every major newspaper in assaulting Mr. Romney as a job killer for his role in private equity.

Oddly, though, these are now the discordant media notes. For the first time, and perhaps here we can blame the Gingrich phenomenon, the press has suddenly found Mr. Romney a fascinating, nuanced figure.

The New York Times discovers him frugal in his personal habits, generous with his family, personally U-Hauling the clan’s gear between vacation homes. The Washington Post says that in debates Mr. Romney’s “body language speaks of physical modesty, discipline.” Another Post profile finds him “supremely rational,” a “problem solver,” “devoted to data,” keenly appreciative of the role of “incentives.”

Stereotypes are fun: The greedy businessman. The sneering, tenured professor. The clapped-out pundit who hides his creative destitution behind crude appeals to prejudice. But Mr. Romney never really fit his assigned part as Gordon Gekko or Milburn Drysdale. His Bain Capital period has already been in the rearview mirror for 12 years. When other private equity pioneers were turning their millions into billions, he left to rescue the Winter Olympics.

Before Bain, he spent two years proselytizing for Mormon converts in the unpromising vineyards of France. After Bain, once his financial independence was secured, he turned with suspicious enthusiasm to politics and policy.

Of his Bain period, a former colleague (not a supporter) said it best: The goal wasn’t to maximize job creation but to maximize returns for the private equity fund’s investors. (What an odd concept….at least to Newt….and every Liberal around the globe!)

At that, he succeeded. At rescuing the Olympics, he succeeded. At winning the Massachusetts governorship, he succeeded. At crafting a bipartisan Massachusetts health-care plan, he succeeded. At subsidizing demand for health care without breaking the bank, he didn’t succeed.

RomneyCare has been his biggest albatross, yet it merely makes him the soulmate of our two most recent presidents, ideological opposites though they are considered to be. Both Presidents Bush and Obama also expanded access to health care without figuring out how to pay for it.

Mr. Romney should probably just tell the truth: He faced a political imperative to act but no political consensus to act effectively, so he acted ineffectively. Oh well. His lack of a consistent ideological lodestar might be a handicap when a lodestar is needed. But—and we know this contravenes everything you’ve been taught—America is not headed in 2012 for a landmark decision on the size and role of government. America is headed only for a moment of recognition.

Like Greece. Like the troubled businesses Bain overhauled. Like the failing Salt Lake City Olympics. There’s no money to pay for bigger and bigger government. There’s no money to pay for the government we’ve already promised ourselves. Yes, around the edges, there may be room for adjustment, if we can get the economy growing again. But that means tax reform to make the fiscal engine more efficient, not tax hikes on some imaginary motherlode of billionaires to get us off the horns of our dilemma.

On the particular problem that made a fool out of Mr. Romney (and Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama), don’t worry, bankrupting the nation to pay for health care is not an option. If we do nothing, if entitlements remain unreformed, the money simply will be withheld to pay for them. You’ll still be entitled to that knee operation at taxpayer expense. Good luck finding a doctor to perform it. The waiting list will be long.

Our world that’s coming is a world of narrowing, not widening, choices. It’s a world that suits Mr. Romney’s skills and history, his knack for operating within constraints and making choices based on data, data, data. Mr. Obama lives in the same world, of course, but is unequipped to deal with it given his dubious gifts for execution, execution, execution. Also, given his inclination to seek refuge in a clueless reverie of big new programs at a time when the resources simply don’t exist.

Nor is there a Big Idea that can transform our unhappy prospects. Lunar mining will not rescue Medicare. People like Mr. Gingrich play a useful role in politics: It’s good to be able to talk thrillingly about history, civilization. But they make bad—perhaps we should say, unnecessary—presidents. When ideas are new and unfamiliar, they’re not executable. When they’re executable we need people who can execute.

The consensus for painful reform comes when the status quo hits the wall. It’s a myth that we don’t know what our choices are. That’s the Romney moment. His strong suit has always been to do what everyone else has put off.

As the late Arte Johnson might have observed….

….verrry interestink!

Meanwhile, Thomas Sowell maintains the current stalemate in Washington may well prove, at least to The Obamao….

Gridlock to the Rescue

 

Washington gridlock may turn out to be the salvation of the Obama administration.

Not only does gridlock allow the president to blame Republicans for not solving the financial crisis that his own runaway spending created, the inability to carry out as much government intervention in the economy as when the Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress means that the market can now recover on its own to some visible extent before the next election.

Such a recovery would of course be credited as a success of the Obama administration’s policies. With this theme being echoed throughout the pro-Obama media, enough voters might be sufficiently impressed to give the president a second term.

The media and the intelligentsia seem obsessed with the idea that government intervention is necessary to get the economy out of the doldrums. This is certainly the prevailing dogma but it is contradicted by history. Yet who reads history any more?

If you look back through history and compare what happens when the federal government intervenes during a downturn in the economy with what happens when the government leaves the market free to work its own way back, doing nothing has by far the better track record.

First of all, this country existed for a century and a half without the federal government intervening to save the economy. No downturn in all that time was as severe or as long-lasting as the downturn that persisted throughout the decade of the 1930s, when both the Hoover administration and the Roosevelt administration intervened on an unprecedented scale.

There was no Federal Reserve System to help — if that is the word — during downturns before 1914. One of the few things on which liberal economists like John Kenneth Galbraith and conservative economists like Milton Friedman agreed was that the Federal Reserve made the Great Depression of the 1930s worse. Economists writing in a leading scholarly journal in 2004 concluded that government intervention prolonged the Great Depression by several years.

Back in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes cautioned President Roosevelt about demonizing and threatening business. Yet FDR, who said in his famous first inaugural address, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” spent the rest of the decade spreading fear to businesses and investors — and wondering why there was still mass unemployment, despite his record-breaking spending.

Back in 1920-21, there was a sharp economic downturn, with unemployment spiking to 11.7 percent. President Warren G. Harding did nothing, except for cutting government spending. Yet the economy quickly recovered and annual unemployment rates ranged from a high of 6.7 percent to a low of 1.8 percent in the rest of the decade.

In the mid-1940s, as World War II neared its end, Keynesian economists were frantically trying to come up with postwar plans to prevent massive unemployment when 12 million people were to be discharged from the military and millions of civilians would lose their jobs when plants producing military supplies shut down.

Two things prevented those wonderful Keynesian plans from being put into operation. First, the atomic bomb brought the war to an end much sooner than anyone expected. Secondly, the Republicans got control of Congress, producing the “do-nothing 80th Congress” that President Harry Truman excoriated during his 1948 election campaign.

In short, plans for vastly expanded government intervention were thwarted — and the “problem” that such intervention was supposed to solve did not materialize. There was a G.I. Bill of Rights for returning military veterans but this was a fraction of what liberal Keynesians had been contemplating.

Anticipating postwar employment problems, former Vice President Henry A. Wallace wrote a book titled “60 Million Jobs,” advocating sweeping government interventions to achieve this otherwise unattainable goal. Wallace’s interventions never took place, but the free market created 60 million jobs anyway.

A stock market crash in 1987 broke some records set in 1929. But Ronald Reagan did nothing, despite howls from the media, and the economy recovered — leading to 20 years of prosperity.

Obama may yet be re-elected, as a result of gridlock.

Next up, in the WSJ, Jonathan Macey, law professor at Yale and a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on Property Rights, describes a classic cure worse than the disease:

Congress’s Phony Insider-Trading Reform

The denizens of Capitol Hill are remarkable investors. A new law meant to curb abuses would only make their shenanigans easier.

 

Members of Congress already get better health insurance and retirement benefits than other Americans. They are about to get better insider trading laws as well.

Several academic studies show that the investment portfolios of congressmen and senators consistently outperform stock indices like the Dow and the S&P 500, as well as the portfolios of virtually all professional investors. Congressmen do better to an extent that is statistically significant, according to studies including a 2004 article about “abnormal” Senate returns by Alan J. Ziobrowski, Ping Cheng, James W. Boyd and Brigitte J. Ziobrowski in the Journal of Financial and Qualitative Analysis. The authors published a similar study of the House this year.

Democrats’ portfolios outperform the market by a whopping 9%. Republicans do well, though not quite as well. And the trading is widespread, although a higher percentage of senators than representatives trade—which is not surprising because senators outperform the market by an astonishing 12% on an annual basis.

These results are not due to luck or the financial acumen of elected officials. They can be explained only by insider trading based on the nonpublic information that politicians obtain in the course of their official duties.

Strangely, while insider trading by corporate insiders has long been the white collar crime equivalent of a major felony, the Securities and Exchange Commission has determined that insider trading laws do not apply to members of Congress or their staff. That is because, according to the SEC at least, these public officials do not owe the same legal duty of confidentiality that makes insider trading illegal by nonpoliticians.

The embarrassing inconsistency was ignored for years. All of this changed on Nov. 13, 2011, after insider trading on Capitol Hill was the focus of CBS’s “60 Minutes.” The previously moribund “Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act” (H.R. 1148), first introduced in 2006, was pulled off the shelf and reintroduced. The bill suddenly had more than 140 sponsors, up from a mere nine before the show.

The “Stock” Act, as it is called, would make it illegal for members of Congress and staff to buy or sell securities based on certain nonpublic information. It would toughen disclosure obligations by requiring congressmen and their staffers to report securities trades of more than $1,000 to the clerk of the House (or the secretary of the Senate) within 90 days. And it would bring the new cottage industry in Washington, the so-called political intelligence consultants used by hedge funds, under the same rules that govern lobbyists. These political intelligence consultants are hired by professional investors to pry information out of Congress and staffers to guide trading decisions.

Publicly, House members echo bill sponsor Rep. Louise Slaughter (D., N.Y) in saying things like: “We want to remove any current ambiguity” about whether insider trading rules apply to Congress. Or as co-sponsor Rep. Timothy Walz (D., Minn.) put it: “We are trying to set the bar higher for members of Congress.”

On closer examination, it appears that what Congress really wants is to keep making the big bucks that come from trading on inside information but to trick those outside of the Beltway into believing they are doing something about this corruption. For one thing, the rules proposed for Capitol Hill are not like those that apply to the rest of us. Ours are so broad and vague that prosecutors enjoy almost unfettered discretion in deciding when and whom to prosecute.

Congress’s rules would be clear and precise. And not too broad; in fact they are too narrow. For example, the proposed rules in the Stock bill are directed only at information related to pending legislation. It would appear that inside information obtained by a congressman during a regulatory briefing, or in another context unrelated to pending legislation, would not be covered.

At a Dec. 6 House hearing, SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami opined that any new rules for Congress should not apply to ordinary citizens. He worried that legislators might “narrow current law and thereby make it more difficult to bring future insider trading actions against individuals outside of Congress.”

This don’t-rock-the-boat approach serves the interests of the SEC because it maximizes the commission’s power and discretion, but it’s not the best approach. The sensible thing to do would be to rationalize the rules by creating a clear definition of what constitutes insider trading, and then apply those rules to everyone on and outside Capitol Hill.

If the law passes in its current form, insider trading by Congress will not become illegal. I predict such trading will increase because the rules of the game will be clearer. Most significantly, the rule proposed for Congress would not involve the same murky inquiry into whether a trader owed or breached a “fiduciary duty” to the source of the information that required that he refrain from trading.

If enacted, the law of insider trading will remain one of many where one reality applies to Congress and an uncomfortable and insecure reality applies to everybody else. Just as Congress is protected from the vicissitudes of ObamaCare, Congress will remain safe from the vagaries of insider trading law. The rest of us will still be vulnerable.

My….what a surprise.  We’re all equal….some are just more equal than others; Orwell truly saw it coming!

And since we’re on the subject of ineffective-yet-damaging regulation, the WSJ offers….

Regulation for Dummies

The White House says its rule-making isn’t costly or unusual. The evidence shows otherwise.

 

The White House is on the political offensive, and one of its chief claims is that it isn’t the overregulator of business and Republican lore. This line has been picked up by impressionable columnists, so it’s a good time to consider the evidence in some detail.

Jan Eberly, an Assistant Treasury Secretary, kicked off the Administration campaign with a white paper in October that purported to debunk the “misconceptions” that “uncertainty is holding back business investment and hiring and that the overall burden of existing regulations is so high that firms have reduced their hiring.” Then the Administration mobilized some of the worst offenders, such as Kathleen Sebelius of HHS (“There has been no explosion of new rules”) and Lisa Jackson of the EPA (her opponents are “using the economy as cover”).

To answer the most basic question—has regulation increased?—we’ll focus on what the government defines as “economically significant” regulations. Those are rules that impose more than $100 million in annual costs on the economy, though there are hundreds if not thousands of new rules every year that fall well short of that.

According to an analysis of the Federal Register by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, the Cabinet departments and agencies finalized 84 such regulations annually on average in President Obama’s first two years. The annual average under President Bush was 62 and under President Clinton 56.

Cass Sunstein, the director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has been shopping around lower numbers that selectively compare Mr. Obama’s first two years favorably with Mr. Bush’s last two. Administrations are typically most active on the way out, and in any case the Bush regulatory record is nothing to crow about. But Mr. Sunstein’s numbers are even more misleading because they only include the rules that his office reviews while excluding the prolific “independent” agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission.

This means that if Congress tells, say, the Securities and Exchange Commission to write a new rule, it doesn’t enter Mr. Sunstein’s tally. So it omits, for example, some 259 rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reregulation law along with its 188 other rule suggestions. It also presumes that Mr. Obama is a bystander with no influence over his own appointees who now dominate the likes of the National Labor Relations Board.

As important, Mr. Sunstein focuses on final rules, when the regulatory future matters as much. The Administration’s pipeline is clogged with proposed rules and plans to propose rules, which every business survey says are contributing to the policy uncertainty that is harming growth and hiring. Backward-looking analyses like Mr. Sunstein’s ignore the undefined and discretionary future rules that are convulsing health care or the EPA’s industrial planning in energy.

A useful proxy for the overall level of regulatory activity is the government document known as the Unified Agenda, which details all proposed or final rules and is compiled twice a year by the federal Regulatory Information Service Center. The nearby chart shows the trend of major rules under contemplation since 1995, including the most recent from this spring.

The current number of major new rules is 149, which is an historic high. Regulation started to grow in the aftermath of 9/11, and even more with the Pelosi Congress in 2007. Yet both the rule-making rate and number are surging to even higher levels under Mr. Obama.

Not every rule in the Unified Agenda will ultimately go on the books, while others will appear in multiple seasons. On the other hand, the agenda is a lagging indicator. It often skips over “interim final rules” that bypass the ordinary process of notice and comment, like many of those for ObamaCare. The independent agencies also do much of their rule-making through “guidance” that is technically exempt from Unified Agenda reporting.

As for costs, Mr. Sunstein estimates that the total costs of the first two years of this Administration’s executive branch regulation range between $8 billion and $16.5 billion. The Heritage Foundation puts the total, including the agencies, at $40 billion, compared to $60 billion over the life of the Bush Administration.

One problem with all such estimates is that they are based on self-reporting by government. Some agencies like the EPA have a habit of exaggerating benefits and hiding costs, but more importantly its analysis is done before the rules take effect in the real world. Often the true cost of regulation isn’t merely compliance but slower growth that diminishes consumer welfare by allocating capital and labor to less valuable or productive uses.

The evidence is overwhelming that the Obama regulatory surge is one reason the current economic recovery has been so lackluster by historical standards. Rather than nurture an economy trying to rebuild confidence after a financial heart attack, the Administration pushed through its now-famous blitz of liberal policies on health care, financial services, energy, housing, education and student loans, telecom, labor relations, transportation and probably some other industries we’ve forgotten. Anyone who thinks this has only minimal impact on business has never been in business.

Mr. Obama can claim he is the progressive second coming of Teddy Roosevelt as he did in Kansas last week, or he can claim to be a regulatory minimalist, but not both. The facts show he’s the former.

Next, we take time for the Muslim Minute, courtesy today of NewMediaJournal.com….

Palestinians Blocked from ‘Statehood’ Ploy at UN Climate Conference

 

A slick little attempt by the Palestinian Authority to gain statehood recognition — at least on paper — in a listing at a United Nations convention on climate change was stymied over the weekend by the United States and Israel. Israeli envoys to the conference, held in Durban, South Africa, discovered upon their arrival that the PA delegation had been listed on the Saturday program as representing the State of Palestine, rather than that of an observer entity.

The diplomats immediately informed Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan and the Foreign Ministry, who took steps to have the error corrected, according to a report in the Sunday edition of the Hebrew-language newspaper Yediot Acharanot. U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern, meanwhile, informed the United Nations staff that America would yank its funding from the U.N. climate change initiative if the listing were not changed.

Joining in the effort, delegates from Australia and Canada warned that they, too, would submit letters of complaint to U.S. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Within hours, the listing was revised.

Aaahhh!  The old….

….”representing the State of Palestine” ploy!  Very good, Cato….you yellow swine!

Speaking of swine….

Eric Holder to Challenge Voter ID Laws

 

Soooo….what are we missing?  Dimocrats are indisputably the party of Big Labor….so shouldn’t whatever serves the interests of Big Labor….

….naturally serve the interests of America?!?

Then there’s this in the “Defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign…” segment:

Last F-22 Raptor Rolls Off Assembly Line

 

Meanwhile….

China’s Hu Reportedly Tells Navy to Get Ready for Military Combat

 

Feelin’ safer NOW?!?

On the Lighter Side….

And finally, in the Entertainment Section, as James Taranto reports, Chelsea Clinton debuts on NBC to what can charitably be described as less-than-rave revues:

Chelsea Clinton, daughter of the former president and the secretary of state, “didn’t electrify broadcast journalism with her debut Monday night on NBC’s ‘Rock Center With Brian Williams,’ ” Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever reports:

What was surprising to see on Monday night’s show is how someone can be on TV in such a prominent way and, in her big moment, display so very little charisma–none at all. Either we’re spoiled by TV’s unlimited population of giant personalities or this woman is one of the most boring people of her era.

Oh come on. Lots of people aren’t good on TV, or wouldn’t be good but never find out because they never have an opportunity to appear. We doubt very much that Miss Clinton is “one of the most boring people of her era”; we’ve met people who are way more boring. Our theory is that NBC had some reason for hiring her other than her talent and charisma.

Just as Bill obviously married her mother for some reason other than her looks….

….and personality!

Magoo