Hewitt Blog

Many will be suspicious of the timing of these leaks, coming as they do against the backdrop of mounting criticism of the Obama Administration's terror policies.

To assure the public that the Mirandized Abdulmuttallab is cooperating, AG Holder or FBI Director Mueller should make some general statements to that effect while testifying to an oversight committee.  A simple statement confirming that he is answering all questions fully and that his answers are consistent with all other information available to counterterrorism experts would put that issue to rest without any damage to national security.

I discussed this case with Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and the Council on Foreign Relations' Max Boot on today's show.  (Isikoff transcript here and Boot transcript here.)  Boot and I also discussed Iran, and here is that exchange:

HH: Ahmadinejad made one of his crazy talk statements yesterday about on February 11^th, the world will see that you can’t mess around with me, or something like that. What did you make of that?

MB: More bluster from Ahmadinejad. I mean clearly, he is a leader who is prone to extremist rhetoric, who is in the throes of this millenarian religious ideology, and who is hell bent on having Iran go nuclear, and ultimately wind up eradicating the state of Israel. I mean, that’s what we know about him, based on his public statements and his actions. The question is what are we going to do about it? And the Obama administration’s overtures to the Iranian leadership have been rudely rebuffed, and the Obama folks that promised that there would be “serious consequences” forthcoming, but I have yet to see any of those consequences. And part of that has to do with the fact that they thought that they could charm Russia and China into signing up for serious Iran sanctions at the U.N. Security Council. And again, that’s another foolish illusion they came into office with, which they have been rudely disabused of by the reality they have found in the past year.

HH: Now what about the idea that we are sending a lot of missile defense to the region? Does that indicate a level of fear about Iran’s willingness to initiate attacks that did not previously exist? Or is it a continuation of long standing deterrent policies?

MB: It may be an attempt to send a signal to Iran, but it’s not clear what that signal is, because it could be interpreted either as a warning that we will not tolerate Iran going nuclear, or conversely, it could be interpreted as preparations for dealing with a nuclear Iran, and trying to contain a nuclear Iran. It’s hard to know which it actually is. In either case, it’s hardly a substitute for the kind of tough sanctions that are necessary to really punish Iran for its nuclear weapons program, and also for, it’s not a substitute for really backing the Green movement, which is ultimately the best way to deal with the Iranian nuclear program, by trying to encourage and help the people of Iran to change their own regime.

 

Best wishes to Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams as he heads to our country for his heart surgery.

Many ironies here, especially as President Obama was in New Hampshire today to declare that it is overtime, and health care is on the five year line and that "we need to punch it over." 



 

Senior Obama Administration officials are predicting an al Qaeda attack within the U.S.

How can we not be interrogating the underpants bomber?  Around the clock?

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Zack Smith was part of the second team that traveled to Haiti to assist the injured.  He heard about Team Rubicon, called Jake's dad, and got himself to North Carolina and from there to Haiti and spent 10 days using his paramedic training to assist the surgeons and other volunteers. (Jake's an EMT from Roseville, CA).

He called the program today, and Duane will post the audio here later.  Please give it a listen. 

02-01HHS-Zack.mp3

One of Zack's colleagues, Gregg LaVeau, writes about the mission here.

 C.S. Lewis once wrote that "We make men without chests and then expect of them virtue and enterprise."  The Team Rubicon volunteers demonstrate that our country continues to turn out men with very great chests.  It isn't surprising that many of them came with military service in their backgrounds, though some did not have that training, nor is it necessary for "virtue and enterprise." 

Team Rubicon is going to look into developing their model further so that it can be made to work after other disasters strike.  New media allows men and women of courage and spirit to act together quickly, and I hope my listeners will continue to support the team as it organizes for the future.

One further note:  I think every first responder in California could benefit greatly from listening to one or more of the folks from Team Rubicon.  When the big one comes to California, I hope Jake and gang aren't far behind, and that the self-organizing lessons they learned in Haiti have been widely disseminated and absorbed.  

"Banker Guy" is the CEO of a mid-sized bank.  He occasionally sends me his thoughts on the financial industry in these years of crisis and, hopefully, recovery:

I would like to add a banker’s perspective to President Obama’s and Paul Volker’s efforts at financial system reform.  Former Chairman Volker outlines his prescription for reform in Sunday’s New York Times.

In his op-ed, Chairman Volker did not mention President Obama’s proposal for a “financial crisis responsibility fee.”  This tax is just another populist attack on bankers.  Given the mood of most people and politicians, no one will be against the unprecedented punitive tax on the 50 largest financial institutions.  Other than raising revenue for the government, the tax does nothing for reform.  At 15 basis points (0.15%) the tax will not change behavior by any institution, nor will it reduce balance sheet leverage.  It does not cover participants such as GE Capital and retailers with large credit card portfolios.  Most likely the tax will be passed on to customers of these institutions.  In his announcement the President uses the term “massive profits” in talking about the institutions covered by this tax when in fact most are producing subpar earnings.  So this fee is all about revenue and politics not reform.

The so-called Volker Rule announced by the President on January 21, 2010 also does not produce real reform.  The rule would restrict any banking institution from owning a hedge fund, private equity fund, or engage in proprietary trading.  In his op-ed, Volker argues that such funds can operate independently of commercial banks (true) and that those funds would not be “too big” or “too interconnected” to fail.  (Not true – remember Long Term Capital Management that was bailed out.)  He admits that the rule would only apply to four or five banks.  No banks failed due to these funds or proprietary trading.  So other than diverting attention from the Massachusetts results or Obama Care, the rule has little meaning.  By the way, this time the President in his remarks referred to “massive bonuses.”

It seems to me that the administration is trying to use the broad anger at bankers to salvage its effort at financial reform and the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (“CFPA”).  It has pitted to community banks against the large banks, which is not good for the economy.  The crisis was caused by a number of issues; government interference by pushing for more mortgage lending to low- and moderate-income borrowers; way too lax mortgage underwriting due to high demand for mortgages to be securitized; too much leverage by investment banks (Bear Stearns and Lehman); unregulated competion by the “shadow banking” industry (GE, GMAC, mortgage brokers, collateralized mortgage obligations, money market funds, etc.); aggressive ratings by the rating agencies; lack of understanding the risk of complexity and interconnectedness; and over dependence by some community banks on brokered deposits and construction and development loans.  I should also mention poor management and weak regulatory supervision.  For example, how can Corus Bank have over 80% of its loans in condos?  So while Volker mentions “improved capital requirements and leverage restrictions”, they are not part of the administration’s plan.

The law of requisite variety states that the solution must be a complex as the problem.  There needs to be comprehensive reform that addresses “too big to fail”, capital requirements and leverage, and brings the shadow banking system under regulation.  The CFPA does none of that.  Instead it creates a czar that will add costs and make it more difficult for consumers to get financial products.  Today at my bank we are attempting to be compliant with over 20 new laws and rules.  All of this has only made getting a mortgage more difficult, more time consuming, and more costly.

As we begin 2010, I am worried.  Regulators are being overly difficult which is restricting lending and the administration wants to add even more rules and regulations adding costs and reducing services.  At the same time we are not making the reforms to protect the financial system in the future.  I’ve asked our outside counsel if we can benefit from the recent Supreme Court ruling that would allow us to advertize to elect a new Congress that would deal with these issues in a way that would truly benefit our economy.

I can be contacted at BankerGuy2009@gmail.com.

 

Guests today will include three GOP Congressmen --David Dreier, Mike Pence and Mark Kirk-- all reacting to the president's astonishingly irresponsible budget with a deficit of $1.6 trillion.  The budget deficit was $161 billion in 2007.  It has increased ten fold in three years, and there is not a TARP or gigantic stimulus  bill to blame this spending spree on.  President Obama is courting a national fiscal stroke in the form of a currency crisis or the crash of the dollar with these policies.  November cannot get here soon enough, though the Republicans will have to run on their willingness to spare nothing and no one --including earmark lovers-- from the strong spending medicine that must occur.

I will also be covering the extraordinary press conference by Steve Poizner who is running for the GOP nomination for governor against Meg Whitman.  This seems like the move of a desperate campaign, and not one likely to inspire confidence in California's Insurance Commissioner.  

The Monday column from Clark Judge:

Democracy Deficit?
By Clark S. Judge, managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc. (www.whwg.com)
 
Despite a weekend Rasmussen report showing a post State of the Union uptick in Strong Approval for Mr. Obama, the president’s performance last Wednesday was a setback for the Administration.
 
Yes, Democrats liked it.  A large block of Democratic Party loyalists moving from neutral or weakly supportive to strong support was the reason for the jump in the president’s numbers.  But Democrats are not the key to this coming November’s ballot. Independents are.  And according to Rasmussen, Independents were less favorable toward this White House than ever in Saturday’s polling.  By that measure, the speech was a failure.
 
This was bad news for the strange political bedfellows that make up the president’s core of glitterati support.  These include: the Congressional Democratic leadership; unions, trial lawyers, and the leftist menagerie that allies itself with them; various global elites, including in European elites and many global journalists.

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My Washington Examiner column from this morning summarizes my remarks to the House GOP retreat from Saturday morning. 

I complimented the Congressmen, and especially Mike Pence, for effectively engaging with the president.  The display of the detailed GOP proposals was the image that won the exchange, but between now and November, the GOP will need many more such days. The message discipline from top to bottom has to increase dramatically, and the leading GOP lights have to be as on point as John Boehner was on today's Meet The Press.  ("And the American people are saying 'No!  Stop!'")

New opportunities and new settings have to be found to keep the focus on (1) the president's fecklessness on the fiscal crisis we are entering (2) the president's irresponsible, unconscionable and incoherent decisions on the trial of KSM and the Mirandizing of Abdulmutallab, and (3) the president's refusal to take immediate and obvious steps to save and return jobs killed by the federal government in places like the California's Central Valley where the federal Endangered Species Act has cost tens of thousands of jobs and because of absurd federal legislation like the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act of 2008 which has cost hundreds of millions of dollars and untold jobs in the 18 months of its crazy operation.  On jobs, the GOP must stress that the federal government's first task is to do no harm, and it is doing a lot of harm in places like Fresno and with laws like CPSIA.

The GOP has to have its numbers locked down --the budget deficit in 2007 was $161 billion and it is going to be $1.35 trillion in 2010-- and it has to have stories of what the president could have done, but hasn't.  Th epresident talks and talks and talks, but what he needs to do is cut and cut and cut. Right now.

Mostly Congressional Republicans need to remind people that Democrats control everything and could undertake entitlement reform and budget cutting right now, with strong Republican support, but are not doing so, even as the possibility of a currency crisis becomes more real every day.  The Democrats could turn on the water in California.  The Democrats could fix CPSIA. The Democrats could design and pass tort reform.  They are choosing not to do so.  Nixon went to China, but Obama is refusing to take on the deficit, the trial lawyers, or the ACLU.

I also spoke about how the party has to understand that sending money has become the same thing as sending a message, and that thousands and thousands of small donors stand ready to message the White House via high profile appeals for contributions of $10, $20 and $100.  The massive flood of contributions to Scott Brown demonstrated that when individuals understand themselves to be sending a strong message via a contribution, they will gladly do so.

An example of how to turn sending money into sending a message.   I'd like to see three very different GOP Senate candidates --Mark Kirk running in Illinois, Jane Norton in Colorado, and Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey -- traveling across the country together as a team and asking for contributions that would be divided among the three.  Kirk is a "moderate," Norton "center-right," and Toomey a "conservative." If these three hit the road together with all of them pledged to (1) the defeat of anything like Obamacare (2) significant deficit reduction and rolling back the president's enormous increase in the size of government, and (3) seriousness on the treatment of KSM/Abdulmuttallab, the message of unity on the core agenda within the Republican Big Tent would be effectively delivered and the contributions would flow in.  If this trio held a series of townhall events, they could invite the public and the MSM to hear the core message of the fall campaign introduced now.  Add in Scott Brown and Sarah Palin to the tour and every auditorium would be full.  This isn't the way the GOP has done it in the past, but when the grassroots are with you and fired up, throw the playbook out and start netting up the activists and filling up the coffers.

How much enthusiasm would be gained and channelled if Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney and John Thune were to campaign together across the country in the cause of fiscal sanity over the next few months?  This trio will start debating each other in early 2011 for the right to lead the party against the president in 2012, but now is the time for them to work together to focus the country on the issues above. 

If the GOP embraces the view that every day in the next nine months matters as much as the nine days before November 2, anything is possible when next the country votes. 

But everyone has to focus and everyone has to work as though the country's future is on the line.

And it is. 

Nicholas Kristof column today on the killing fields of the Congo is tough to read but deserves an enormous audience, just as the people of the Congo deserve much more from the world than it has received.  I have no idea how much force would be necessary to impose order on the country, but there doesn't even appear to be a debate on what to do much less how to do it.  The country's troubles have been going on for more than a decade with staggering casualty rates. " A peer-reviewed study," Kristof notes, "found that 5.4 million people had already died in this war as of April 2007, and hundreds of thousands more have died as the situation has deteriorated since then."

 

My review of Mark Haleprin and Robert Heilemann's Game Change is here.  Today, the New York Times' "Public Editor" Clark Hoyt got around to some of the issues the book raises, including one involving Maureen Dowd.  The story within the story is nine paragraphs long:

I was curious about one incident involving Maureen Dowd, the star Times Op-Ed columnist, who in early 2007 quoted David Geffen, the Hollywood mogul, disowning Bill and Hillary Clinton. Geffen, who raised millions for Bill Clinton and then became disenchanted, said of both Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.” The column had an enormous impact at the time.

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