Student:

To the little boy’s mother, it was just a 6-year-old boy playing around. But when Mason Jammer, a kindergarten student at Jefferson Elementary in Ionia, curled his fist into the shape of a gun Wednesday and pointed it at another student, school officials said it was no laughing matter. They suspended Mason

School board president:

Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watch dog?

And then of course there are the teachers themselves. Delightful.

Bipartisan tomfoolery. Why can’t these people spend 150% of their time on jobs — where there’s a crisis unprecedented in the postwar period — instead of idiocy like this? Sports Illustrated:

The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday to a senator who had asked for an antitrust review. In the letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch, obtained by The Associated Press, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote that the Justice Department is reviewing Hatch’s request and other materials to determine whether to open an investigation into whether the BCS violates antitrust laws…

President Barack Obama, before he was sworn in, had stated his preference for a playoff system. In 2008, Obama said he was going to “to throw my weight around a little bit” to nudge college football toward a playoff system, a point that Hatch stressed when he urged Obama last fall to ask the department to investigate the BCS…Hatch, a Utah Republican, was steamed that his home state team was deprived of getting a chance to play for the title last year.

“I’m encouraged by the administration’s response,” he said in a statement. “I continue to believe there are antitrust issues the administration should explore, but I’m heartened by its willingness to consider alternative approaches to confront the tremendous inequities in the BCS that favor one set of schools over others. The current system runs counter to basic fairness that every family tries to instill in their children from the day they are born.”

Under the BCS, the champions of six conference have automatic bids to play in top-tier bowl games, while the other conferences don’t. Those six conferences also receive more money than the other conferences, although the BCS announced this week that the ones that don’t have automatic bids will receive a record $24 million from this year’s bowl games.

As a reader put it at Instapundit: “If they try to control how much sugar I drink in sodas and how college football is played, I can’t think of anything they would not try to control. And, Orrin Hatch is equally to blame. His role lends credence to the idea that the ‘old guard’ Republicans are equally unprincipled.” Indeed.

The AP reports on a new deadly threat to mankind, the ancient practice of sitting:

a new warning from health experts: Sitting is deadly. Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods — even if you also exercise regularly — could be bad for your health. And it doesn’t matter where the sitting takes place — at the office, at school, in the car or before a computer or TV — just the overall number of hours it occurs…Figures from a U.S. survey in 2003-2004 found Americans spend more than half their time sitting

And all this time we thought that cow and sheep parping was the deadliest thing going.

TNR suggests an electoral strategy for Democrats and a certain species of Republican:

it’s hardly a shock to hear that some Dems would prefer to set aside tackling climate change–especially so soon after a grueling health care fight. “We need to deal with the phenomena of global warming,” Indiana Senator Evan Bayh recently groused, “but I think it’s very difficult in the economic circumstances we have right now.”

Difficult, but maybe less so than Bayh thinks. The House has already passed its own climate bill, complete with a cap on heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and, in the Senate, Democrats have begun to get some welcome support from the other side of the aisle. Susan Collins is co-sponsoring a cap-and-dividend bill, which would essentially tax carbon dioxide at the source and refund most of the proceeds to households, while a few Republicans (like Lisa Murkowski) had positive things to say about last month’s Copenhagen accord, which put key developing countries on a path to curtailing their own emissions.

\Interestingly, one of the most forceful advocates for a Senate climate bill in recent weeks has been Republican Lindsey Graham. “All the cars and trucks and plants that have been in existence since the Industrial Revolution, spewing out carbon day-in and day-out, you’ll never convince me that’s a good thing for your children and the future of the planet,” he told a crowd in South Carolina, the day after being censured by Charleston County’s GOP for working with Democrats on the issue. “Whatever political pushback I get,” he added, “I’m willing to accept, because I know what I’m trying to do makes sense to me.” Lately, he’s been huddling with John Kerry and Joe Lieberman on a “tripartisan” bill to reduce emissions.

Some have argued that Congress would be crazy to take on an issue as divisive as climate change in an election year, but the Senate, with only one-third of its members up for reelection, is less susceptible to that calculus than the House. And election-year timidity may be more an invention of pundits than historical fact.

To us these people seem out of their minds. We’re in a crisis and these bozos are in cloud-cuckoo-land. (a) When 20$ of American men do are not employed, the number 1, number 2, and number 3 issue is jobs, jobs, jobs — good, private sector jobs. Which means government needs to help and get out of the way at the same time. Furthermore, even if we weren’t in a time of pronounced global cooling, why fiddle around with nonsense like this when it is perfectly clear that countries like China and India aren’t going to play along (except to go to conferecnes where they laugh at us behind our backs). Washington: fools and damned fools.

A guidebook from the Bloomberg administration, paid for by New York taxpayers, gives detailed instructions to that sliver of the heroin-injecting community that is (a) able to read English and (b) interested in instructional government guidebooks:

The guidebook, called “Take Charge, Take Care,” has sections on overdosing, testing for HIV and hepatitis — and how to “prepare drugs carefully” and “how to take care of your veins.”…

The Health Department defended its brochure, saying it was helpful and necessary, and has been distributed only to addicts or those at risk of becoming abusers. “Our goal is to promote health and save lives with this information,” said Daliah Heller, assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Alcohol and Drug Use Prevention, Care and Treatment.

We noted the bloated payrolls of government in a recent post. If the Bloomberg administration is interested in reducing its deficit, one easy fix (as it were) would be to eliminate every single person who was involved in the guidebook project.

From a MoDo piece that we’ve previously excerpted:

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

Answer: Michael Yon and Joan Rivers. (Moral of the story: pass healthcare now, and in secret, because it’s clear that government bureaucrats need even more power over the American people.)

We don’t have much to add to the story of Al Qaeda in Yemen sending over a fellow to blow up a NWA flight approaching Detroit with PETN in his underwear, only to be taken down by a quick-witted Flying Dutchman, except that it provides a lesson as to why the healthcare bill deserves to be deep-sixed.

The US government is inept and lacks common sense. Evidence: (a) this guy’s own father apparently tried to turn him in to US authorities and he still managed to board the plane; (b) as is typical of the politically correct inanity infecting the government in all areas, TSA surveillance of grandma in her wheelchair will now be heightened so as not to offend suspicious looking young men at airports; and (c) the government has now imposed rules outlawing the quick moves made by the Flying Dutchman to save plane and passengers. And you think these guys in Washington deserve even more money and power?

Rajendra K. Pachauri -– the chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change –- veered into self-parody in the Guardian about the East Anglia scandal and the IPCC (HT: Roger Simon):

“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report…Every single comment that an expert reviewer provides has to be answered either by acceptance of the comment, or if it is not accepted, the reasons have to be clearly specified. So I think it is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening.”

He also said that people fly on airplanes far too frequently, and he “denounced” the practice of serving ice water to some patrons in restaurants in a different piece in the Guardian:

“Today we have reached the point where consumption and people’s desire to consume has grown out of proportion…The reality is that our lifestyles are unsustainable.”…”We should make sure there is a huge difference between the cost of flying and taking the train,” he said. Despite the fact that there is often little benefit in time and convenience in short-haul flights, he said people were still making the “irrational” choice to fly…Pachauri also denounced the practice in some restaurants of providing iced water to customers who had not ordered it. “It is just an enormous amount of waste that we don’t even think about”…

BTW, Pachauri also wants to regulate how much meat you can consume.

The Punchline, via Mark Steyn: “Dr Rajendra Pachauri flew at least 443,243 miles on IPCC business in this 19 month period. This business included honorary degree ceremonies, a book launch and a Brookings Institute dinner, the latter involving a flight of 3500 miles…So strong is his love for cricket that his colleagues recall the time the Nobel winner took a break during a seminar in New York and flew in to Delhi over the weekend to attend a practice session for a match before flying back. Again, he flew in for a day, just to play that match.” God save us from these creatures!

The East Anglia CRU was apparently the epicenter of AGW alarmism. Christopher Booker in the Telegraph recounts the scandal that has almost resulted in the world’s kleptocracies picking the pockets of American taxpayers to the tune of trillions of dollars:

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

This is an incredible scandal, and not one red cent of the taxpayers’ money should be spent in furtherance of this hoax. However, since America is currently governed by a clueless college professor (who is apparently entirely untroubled that his enablers are thugs), keep a close eye on your wallet.

This is just the beginning of the absurd spectacle of the 9-11 terrorists putting the United States on trial a few blocks from the World Trade Center. WSJ:

Military lawyers for Ramzi Binalshibh, an accused organizer of the 9/11 plot, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the conspiracy’s alleged paymaster, say their clients have mental disorders that make them unfit for trial, likely caused or exacerbated by years of harsh confinement in Central Intelligence Agency custody.

No good can come of the farce that will be made of the KSM trial, unless it is that the American people decide once and for all that such witless self-abasement must cease. HT: American Thinker

Apparently there’s no recession in the UK since government bureaucrats and others have plenty of time to fool with nonsense like this. London Times:

Among the everyday sayings that have been quietly dropped in a bid to stamp out racism and sexism are “whiter than white”, “gentleman’s agreement”, “black mark” and “right-hand man”…The National Gallery in London believes that the phrase “gentleman’s agreement” is potentially offensive to women and suggests that staff should replace it with “unwritten agreement” or “an agreement based on trust” instead. The term “right-hand man” is also considered taboo by the gallery, with “second in command” being deemed more suitable.

Many institutions have urged their workforce to be mindful of “gender bias” in language. The Learning and Skills Council wants staff to “perfect” their brief rather than “master” it, while the Newcastle University has singled out the phrase “master bedroom” as being problematic…“Terms such as ‘black sheep of the family’…serve to reinforce a negative view of all things black”…

Words like “black sheep” and “right-hand man” are now considered a threat? Who knows what lies ahead? After all, this is the same mentality that told us: “The livestock sector presents the greatest threat to the planet.”

Many articles that have been written about the urgent need to reform the US healthcare system cite a WHO study that claims America ranks 37th out of 191 countries in the quality of its healthcare. Here are the top ten countries on that list:

1. France
2. Italy
3. San Marino
4. Andorra
5. Malta
6. Singapore
7. Spain
8. Oman
9. Austria
10. Japan

Leaving aside the question of whether you’d go to any of these countries for an operation, could you even find Oman, Andorra, Malta or San Marino on a map if you needed to? San Marino is kind of cool since it has a population of 30,000 and nonetheless is said to be a real country with membership in the Council of Europe and all. Andorra, another completely landlocked micro-state where people live to ripe old ages, has a population of 84,000.

So two of the top ten countries are quite a bit smaller than the 217th largest US city, Rochester, Minnesota (population 100,000), home to the Mayo Clinic. Question: if the town of Rochester, Minnesota seceded from the union and became a country, would it become #1 on the WHO’s list?

And speaking of #8 ranked Oman, how would you like to flag down a cab to go to a hospital in Muscat for an emergency appendectomy — a city where taxis have no meters and you’d have to negotiate your fare with the driver? That could be an interesting negotiation indeed. So you can believe the WHO study (which also ranks Chile, Colombia and Greece ahead of the US) or you can use your head. Your choice.

Bloomberg:

The ICE’s Dollar Index fell below 80 on the call from China for an alternative to the dollar as the world’s main reserve currency. The gauge tracking the greenback versus the currencies of six leading trading partners decreased 0.5 percent to 79.90.

“To prevent the deficiencies in the main reserve currency, there’s a need to create a new currency that’s delinked from the economies of the issuers,” the People’s Bank of China, or PBOC, said. China is the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries, with $763.5 billion in April.

China sees clearly what is happening in America. Pity that there is apparently no national mood for adult supervision in the US government at the moment.

You can’t look at the chart above without thinking that America has lost its mind. The intergenerational theft from our children and grandchildren is evidence of insanity or idiocy. James Lewis in The American Thinker makes some points that have appeared here as well:

As a nation we are under the thumb of idiots. Not just indoctrinated, or wrong-thinking, or power-hungry, or manipulative, or even malevolent people. No, I mean real lowbrows, people who constantly fall for really stupid ideas. Neanderthals. (Look at the Governor of California just running the state budget into the ground. See what I mean?…

The Federal EPA is about to officially declare carbon dioxide to be a pollutant. That’s not just false and unscientific; it’s not just an excuse for taxing everything in sight, including breathing. It’s not merely wrong. It’s idiotic. It marks a low point in our national conversation. Scientists or engineers with a grain of sense shouldn’t be taking the EPA seriously for a second. Forget the “climate experts,” with their grossly inadequate computer models…

Or look at Obama’s unbelievable spending spree. No sane and sensible taxpayer could possibly believe that spending trillions and trillions of dollars on blue-sky fantasies makes any sense at all; the only reason Americans aren’t in open rebellion yet is that half of them can’t believe it’s happening, and the other half are idiots. We haven’t seen the effect (yet) on our pocketbooks…

Or look at the global warming farce, still hotly pursued by the political classes in Europe and this country, although the Australians seem to be coming to their senses. China now has more millionaires than the UK, because they use all their resources, like coal, to fire their industrial plants. They will never sacrifice a single luxury car to the cap and trade fraud. Neither will India. China and India have been under the thumb of egomaniacal socialists (in the case of India) and communists (in the case of China). They’ve been there, done that, seen the suffering…

No wonder those Chinese college students fell all over themselves with laughter when Timothy Geithner assured them that Obama would never spend the United States into debt. What an idiot! They laughed because Geithner’s stupidity or mendacity was too obvious for words…

Obama’s power-grab over the medical sector of the economy? It’s profoundly stupid…Even if we already have two national lemons in our garage, Medicare and Medicaid, which nobody likes. Now Obee is trying to sell us on a really, really expensive dream mobile that will fix our problems forever, plus it’ll be cheaper than what we have now!

On the last point, health care, it is very hard to believe that Americans are that stupid or gullible. There are fewer than 800,000 doctors in the US. The Obama plan intends to provide insurance to 47 million additional people. So there is a 15% increase in potential demand from physicians, and a 0% increase in supply. Whether you support Obama or not, increasing demand while supply remains constant raises prices, the opposite of what Obama claims. It’s just not possible to do what he says he wants — price control regimes always result in rationing, lower quality, and black markets — but no one seems to care (at least so far).

Here’s the thing, perhaps: The young are disconnected from the past, and live in a world of digital utopian images. They don’t remember a hard past. So they are in the process of creating a hard future. This seems to us one of the greatest avoidable tragedies in history. Sigh.

China once again called for a new reserve currency other than the dollar, as it did first in March. China won’t pay the bill for America’s current idiocy or insanity. Who is going to pay for Obama’s party? The rich can’t. What will it take to end this madness?

More on the folly that is called cap and trade from Bloomberg:

America’s biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. Under the Waxman-Markey climate bill that may be voted on today by the U.S. House, refiners would have to buy allowances for carbon dioxide spewed from their plants and from vehicles when motorists burn their fuel. Imports would need permits only for the latter, which ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer Jim Mulva said would create a competitive imbalance.

“It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment,” Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. Houston-based ConocoPhillips has the second-largest U.S. refining capacity.

The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported…One in six U.S. refineries probably would close by 2020 as the cost of carbon allowances erases profits, according to the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington trade group known as API. Carbon permits would add 77 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline

So what? Who cares anymore in the ridiculous TV show that is called America? Who cares if cap and trade won’t even address any real problems, and creates incentives that are precisely the opposite of its stated goals? Don’t bother us. We’re America and we’re sleeping.

The AP reports uncritically, indeed excitedly, on the latest fantasy of the administration:

Obama wants increased fuel efficiency, less smog — President Barack Obama outlined Tuesday the nation’s first comprehensive effort to curb vehicle emissions while cutting dependence on imported oil, calling the plan an historic turning point toward a “clean-energy economy.”…

“As a result of this agreement,” Obama said, “we will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in the next five years. And at a time of historic crisis in our auto industry, this rule provides the clear certainty that will allow these companies to plan for a future in which they are building the cars of the 21st century.”

Let’s do some arithmetic. Car sales were 13 million last year, and five years of sales of all vehicles might be over 70 million. Cars last for a decade or more, so the total savings touted by the administration are trivial indeed (not that much more than the US’s dangerously tiny 35-day Strategic Petroleum reserve) particularly when looked at as being generated over 700 million car-years. No matter. The point is that we can all now feel better about ourselves and helping the earth.

The fact that this massive government program will only produce 50 days of oil supply in ten years — while the US continues to remain dangerously 70% dependent on oil imports — is apparently beside the point to the Obama administration.

The Telegraph reports new thought crimes:

Euro chiefs ban ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ — The European Parliament has banned the terms ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ in case they offend…rules also mean a ban on Continental titles, such as Madame and Mademoiselle, Frau and Fraulein and Senora and Senorita…

Officials have also ordered that ’sportsmen’ be called ‘athletes’, ’statesmen’ be referred to as ‘political leaders’ and even that ’synthetic’ or ‘artificial’ be used instead of ‘man-made’. The guidance lists banned terms for describing professions, including fireman, air hostess, headmaster, policeman, salesman, manageress, cinema usherette and male nurse. However MEPs are still allowed to refer to ‘midwives’

It’s almost impossible to imagine that people get paid to think up pernicious foolishness like this.

We first encountered Corporate Gadfly Evelyn Y. Davis 35 years ago at Citibank’s annual meeting. Even then she was a well-known figure. She bought shares of common stock in major companies, and she’d use her position as a shareholder to ask provocative questions at the company’s annual meeting.

Sometimes her questions would be about executive compensation, sometimes about governance issues like the elimination of staggered boards. She was quirky but she did her homework. She read the annual reports, 10-K’s and proxy statements before she opened her mouth.

In this CNBC video from last year, she praised Jamie Dimon and his ability to handle the Bear Stearns takeover, said judgment was pending on Vikram Pandit, and scolded Hank Paulson because he no longer had time for her. She also said that the managements of Fannie and Freddie should be tossed out, and that it was outrageous for those entities to make loans to people who are not creditworthy. In our experience, some CEO’s really disliked her, and they were usually the weaker sort.

This year there’s a new breed of Corporate Gadfly. The government of the United States has bought some shares in some public companies, and so some elected officials and some citizens want to play a new version the Evelyn Davis role. However, they haven’t bothered to read the annual report, the 10-K or the proxy statements. But that doesn’t stop them. The administration and Congress just make things up and no one in the media calls them on it. And that’s not the worst of it.

In the relatively decorous Golden Age of the Corporate Gadfly, an individual like Ms. Davis would cast a vote at an annual meeting, and would live with the results, win or lose. Today’s citizen-gadfly is apparently a more robust character. In the matter of AIG, for example, he wants to garrotte executives with piano wire to make his point. As a result, corporate executives will no doubt become ever more productive as they travel in pairs, disguise themselves, and prepare themselves to dial 911 on a moment’s notice. (The government won’t guarantee the anonymity of the threatened, by the way.)

With the ignorance of the inquisitors and the threats of violence against private individuals, the Golden Age of the Corporate Gadfly would appear to have ended. This all looks a bit like the French Revolution, as the government and the citizenry compete to determine which is the more vile.

You thought last month’s grotesque $3.6 trillion budget was bad. It turns out that the projected deficits are now $2.3 trillion worse than the estimate made just last month. Incredible. AP:

$1 trillion deficits seen for next 10 years…The Congressional Budget Office figures released Friday predict Obama’s budget will produce $9.3 trillion worth of red ink over 2010-2019. That’s $2.3 trillion worse than the administration predicted in its budget just last month.

Worst of all, CBO says the deficit under Obama’s policies would never go below 4 percent of the size of the economy, figures that economists agree are unsustainable. By the end of the decade, the deficit would exceed 5 percent of gross domestic product, a dangerously high level. The latest figures throw a major monkey wrench into efforts to enact Obama’s budget, which promises universal health care for all and higher spending for domestic programs like education and research into renewable energy…

“What we will not cut are investments that will lead to real growth and prosperity over the long term,” Obama said. “That’s why our budget makes a historic commitment to comprehensive health care reform. That’s why it enhances America’s competitiveness by reducing our dependence on foreign oil and building a clean energy economy.”

Which would be worse: (a) Obama has no idea what he’s doing; or (b) Obama knows just what he is doing? We ask again, where is the adult supervision in the Democratic Party?

Ben Bernanke actually understands what is going on in the economy. While the administration fixates on generating outrage and destroying AIG through Soviet-style persecution as opposed to fixing the real (and relatively simple) problems, and clueless Obama absurdly compares child actor Timmy Geithner to Alexander Hamilton, Ben Bernanke uses such (deeply flawed) tools as are at the Fed’s disposal to attack some problems central to improving things. Bloomberg:

By committing to buy Treasuries and double his purchases of mortgage debt, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke signaled his determination to avoid a repeat of the Great Depression and his willingness to pump as much cash into the economy as needed to end the current crisis.

U.S. central bankers decided yesterday to buy as much as $300 billion of long-term Treasuries and more than double mortgage-debt purchases to $1.45 trillion, aiming to lower home- loan and other interest rates. The Fed kept its main rate at almost zero and may keep it there for an “extended” time.

The moves sparked the biggest drop in 10-year Treasury yields since 1962, rallies in the stock market and gold and a plunge in the dollar against the euro. Economist Richard Hoey said Bernanke has created the “Rambo Fed,” referring to the Sylvester Stallone character skilled with weapons.

“This is a very powerful and aggressive move,” Hoey, chief economist at Bank of New York Mellon Corp., said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “One of the reasons I’ve been arguing we won’t have a depression is we’ve got a Fed chairman who understands the problem and is going to come with the right diagnosis and the right medicine.”

With the purchases of Treasuries and housing debt, Bernanke is effectively using the Fed’s powers to print money and aim it where he and other officials believe it will have the greatest impact in lowering borrowing costs.

The Obama administration seems obsessed with creating a daily TV show of corporate villains who are thrown to the lions (the auto companies yesterday, AIG today, Merrill next week, maybe you after that). It’s hard to know anymore what percentage of this pathetic performance is due to incompetence and what part is due to ideology. But there is at least one adult around, Mr. Bernanke, and he seems to be doing what he can to attack the mortgage rates that are one prong of the problem. Good for him.

As for Obama, the economy may well recover soon, but it will do so in large part despite his awful budget and other policy prescriptions. Obama is a good politician, but when it comes to the real world of business and economics, he doesn’t know much, and that which he knows is mostly wrong. It’s going to be a long four years — no, that’s not quite right; it seems like it’s already been a long four years.