SECURE BORDERS ADVOCATE Brian Bilbray, the recently elected North County Congressman, endorsed Mitt Romney today.

THINKING OF VOTING FOR JOHN MCCAIN? Mark Levin would like you to think again.

"ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER ENDORSES JOHN MCCAIN."

Alternative headlines: 

"PRIVATE JET COMMUTER ENDORSES JOHN MCCAIN"

"LIBERAL ACTOR ENDORSES JOHN MCCAIN"

"STATE RUN MEDICINE ADVOCATE ENDORSES JOHN MCCAIN"

"HUMMER OWNER ENDORSES JOHN MCCAIN"

"BIG SPENDING LEFT COAST GOVERNOR ENDORSES JOHN MCCAIN"

JOHN MCCAIN has a significant capacity for dishonesty in the service of his ambition for power. That's the new thing I've learned about the Arizona senator this campaign season.  The most significant McCain dishonest is not his willful mischaracterization of Romney's record on the Iraq war. Rather, it's McCain's dishonesty about his hostility to Supreme Court justices who believe in following the words of that document, rather than their own policy preferences.  This dishonesty is now well-documented from multiple sources who tell identical accounts of McCain's true opinions of Justice Alito.

One thing few pundits have noticed is to what extent McCain's own temperament is ill fitting with a judicial temperament which respects the original meaning of the Constitution.  McCain is an incredibly willful person with a contempt for views contrary to his own preferences, preferences which often align closely with his own interests.  He's not a man very respectful of barriers between him and what he thinks he should have.  Even the barrier of common public civility is often violated by McCain.  One thing we have no reason to believe he'll have that much respect for if it proves a barrier to his own preferences is the Constitution.   He's already show  great  contempt for the Constitution with his repeated attacks on the 1st Amendment of the Constitution -- attacks which the Supreme Court itself have turned back even within the last year.

STIMULATE THIS! The Bush stimulus package rushing through the House of Representatives will put a Federal check in the hands of millions of illegal aliens -- all of those with an IRS "taxpayer identification numbers".  Most of these illegals pay little or no taxes.  And yes, you heard that right.  In a typical politician's lie, millions of people who pay no taxes will get what President Bush and your Congressman are calling a "tax rebate", even when millions of those checks are going to people who are not taxpayers, and therefore have contributed nothing to the country which can be rebated.  Source -- CNN: "People who did not pay federal income taxes but who had earned income of more than $3,000 would get checks of $300 per individual or $600 per couple."

I can't tell you how sick I am of the Bush Presidency or how ready I am for it to end.  If we're going to get stupidity and dishonesty on this kind of scale, we might as well be getting it from a Democrat President who doesn't burden us with Bush's utterly bogus pretense of caring about the economic requirements of a successful functioning free society.

STEVE SAILER isn't satisfied learning that John McCain overwhelmingly attracts the large GOP "negative on Bush" vote.  He wants to know why.  Here are some suggestions:

1. As much as many Americans don't like war, even more of them don't like losing wars.  John McCain has been Bush's biggest critic on how to fight this war.  And the success of the surge and the firing of Rumsfeld seems to have proven him right.  Steve and others might not see it that way, but many GOP voters do.
2. McCain is winning the "fiscal conservative" vote by wide margins because he's the anti-Bush when it comes to spending and fiscal sanity with the budget.  The one thing that has been missing from the "fiscal conservatism" of the Bush / Club for Growth / WSJ / Sean Hannity "fiscal conservatives" has been, well, fiscal conservatism.  McCain has credibility on restraining spending, cutting pork, and closing the budget deficit gap.  Bush has a record on fiscal indiscipline that makes LBJ look like Calvin Coolidge.  In Florida, about half of all GOP voters believed controlling the budget deficit was more important to them than the promise of future tax cuts (a rather pie-in-the sky Bush-like promise if you look at the required spending outlays already on the books, including the millions of Baby Boomers now moving out of the tax producing workforce and onto the tax sucking Federal dole.)
   
3. Since December, when most people first started paying attention, John McCain has been running hard as the "secure the borders first" candidate.  This may seem bizarre to those who closely follow politics all year round, but polls clearly show he's fooling large segments of voting population, pulling in significant percentages of those who reject amnesty and want to control the border.

I'll add more later.

BUSH DID TO THE GOP what Clinton did to the Democrats, says Jonah Goldberg.  For my own part let me suggest that the Clinton Presidency, on an array of metrics, was better for American than the Bush Presidency.  And there's a further important difference.  The damage done by Clinton to the Democrats and the country was mostly short term.  The damage Bush has done to the GOP and the nation will far more lasting in its effects.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

the worst part for the Right is that McCain will have won the nomination while ignoring, insulting and, as of this weekend, shamelessly lying about conservatives and conservatism.

You think he supported amnesty six months ago? You think he was squishy on tax cuts and judicial nominees before? Wait until he has the power to anger every conservative in America, and feel good about it.

-- Michael Graham

THE NEGATIVE ON BUSH vote continues to power John McCain to the Republican nomination.  If we take a look at the Florida exit polls, we see that Romney handily defeated McCain 35% to 31% among GOP voters who have a positive opinion of the Bush Presidency.  But McCain crushed Romney 2-1 among those voters who are not satisfied with the Presidency of George W. Bush.  This huge negative on Bush vote provided McCain with his comfortable victory margin over Romney in Florida.

And one has to think this has something to do with it:  Florida Republicans are split just about 50-50 over whether reducing the budget deficit is more important, or if additional tax cuts are more important.  Romney narrowly edged out McCain among voters who see tax cuts as more important, but McCain topped Romney by a full 15 percentage points among those who identify the budget deficit problem as more important.

Romney also had problems with the Hispanic vote and the amnesty for illegal aliens vote.  Romney narrowly edged McCain among white voters, but lost to McCain more than 3-1 among Hispanic voters.  Romney also edged out McCain among voters who are opposed to amnesty for illegal aliens, but McCain's 2-1 edge among voters who favor amnesty gave McCain more than the margin he needed to win Florida.

If Romney is going to win the Republican nomination he must find a way to pull in the significant segment of Republican voters who have a negative opinion of the Bush Presidency, and who are now turning to McCain as their hope for a significant improvement on Bush's performance in the Presidency. Closely tied to this, Romney must attract the large segment of  Republican voters who are more concerned with the nation's enormous and growing budget deficit than they are with George Bush-style tax cuts promises, in the face an out of control political class and a retiring baby boom generation.  Finally, Romney needs to do much better among Republicans who are opposed to amnesty for illegal aliens.  During the campaign McCain has represented himself as a "control the borders first" guy, in contradiction to everything he's ever done on the issue of amnesty for illegal aliens.  This false pose has won McCain a big slice of the anti-amnesty voters, a vote Romney must take back if he is to win the GOP nomination.  And no where is this more true than it is in California, the biggest delegate prize of them all.

BUSH PUNTS AGAIN, this time on earmarks, pushing action on the nation's problem on into the years after his own Presidency has ended.  Read about it here and here.  Most of us at this point have had enough of Bush's kick-the-can act.

JOHN FUND GAVE US the article on Mike Huckabee which crystallized the Governor's reputation as a tax and spend big government "conservative".  Now Fund has another reputation making article out on Senator John McCain and McCain's Supreme Court problem.

UPDATE:  McCain pushes back hard against Fund.  The record seems to confirm McCain's side of the story.

SADDAM HUSSEIN MISCALCULATED because he assumed that George Bush was just another weak and full of it American President like Bill Clinton.  If you've followed this closely you'll remember that Bill Clinton insisted that Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power.  But that was all phony bluster for domestic consumption, and Clinton backed up his promise with, well, most nothing.  A few bombs in the night and .. nothing.  So Saddam rightly assumed that American Presidents were not to be taken seriously.  George Bush the First had the power to take off Saddam's head, and when the opportunity showed itself, Bush I wilted.  Bill Clinton promised to take off his head, and again nothing.  America had established a powerful reputation not following through and not going for the jugular.  You would have expected the man not to have taken George Bush the Second seriously.

PAUL KRUGMAN -- what is wrong with this guy?  Doing the work so you don't have to, Dan Klein has read 654 of Paul Krugman's New York Times  articles (Klein's pdf article here), and he comes to the conclusion that all of the partisanship, all of the shading of the truth, all of the sacrificing of the good of the poor for the cause of the left -- all of it -- come down to to a narcissist's resentments and ambitions to wield elite power in a struggle with rival centers of control from which he has been alienated:

Robert Nozick (1986) has suggested that "[t]he intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated." Nozick suggested that "wordsmith" intellectuals resent "capitalism" for not according them the high status they come to feel entitled to from their experience in school. I am inclined to see such high strata statist intellectuals as indulging the mythology of society as organization because that mythology gives structure and vision to the yearning to see oneself as part of the governing set--a mentality betokened in phrases like "the best and the brightest." It is a mentality of those whose selfhood places them "near the top," and who from such high station gaze upward. That such a penchant would be selected for in the environment of evolutionary adaptation is certainly plausible. It's good to be the alpha male or one of his close companions. To my mind, Krugman typifies the profile. I find especially telling the enmity he holds toward Republicans in power. He seems to resent not being among or not being able to identify with the people at the top. I suspect that Krugman's ideological direction has been determined more by a will to see oneself a part of what one perceives to be society's leadership than by infatuation with the people's romance. That penchant contributes to his dedication to a kind of politics that, given his setting and personal history, serves him in pursuing such sense of self and that, by delineating and inculcating a "society" that like an organization has and requires "leadership," accommodates the governing-set mentality itself.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "[Caroline Kennedy] says that Obama could be a president like her father. I assume that means that he'll be overrated, not that he'll bring us to the brink of nuclear war."

GIVE THE PRESIDENT credit for this.  It took some guts and some leadership to course correct midstream in the face of a partisan opposition and a stuck in the mud Joint Chiefs of Staff.  John McCain is saluted in this account for putting a fire under the President's chair:

If Bush was skeptical of the small footprint, he never expressed it. He accepted the assurance of his commanders that the strategy was working--until Samarra.

After the bombing, NSC officials were increasingly dubious. They weren't alone. General Keane kept in contact with retired and active Army officers, including Petraeus, who believed the war could be won with more troops and a population protection, or counterinsurgency, strategy--but not with a small footprint. At the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, a former West Point professor, Frederick Kagan, was putting together a detailed plan to secure Baghdad. But the loudest voice for a change in Iraq was Senator John McCain of Arizona. He and his sidekick, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, traveled repeatedly to Iraq. McCain badgered Bush and Hadley with phone calls urging more troops and a different strategy. Together, McCain, Keane, Petraeus, the network of Army officers, and Kagan provided a supportive backdrop for adopting a new strategy.

White House thinking about Iraq changed quickly, at least at the staff level. The reigning assumptions about the conflict were discarded. American troops weren't seen as targets and catalysts for violence anymore. Iraqis wanted their protection. Nor was the insurgency the biggest threat to stability. Sectarian violence, fueled by Al Qaeda in Iraq, was. To tamp it down, a new strategy was required.

I'm no military strategist, but from the beginning I didn't like Rumsfeld's "small footprint" theory, and his sister idea that rampant looting and lawlessness is no big deal.  It is a big deal.  Why Rumsfeld felt it necessary to go with the "small footprint" strategy has never been clear.  I have lots of guesses but I've not seen a straight explanation from Rumsfeld himself.  I have no idea either why we went with a near "open borders" policy in Iraq, letting arms and terrorists cross freely back and forth between Iraq and its neighbors. 

One thing I hate about news business today is that I can't count on getting a honest and informed answer to any of these questions from a journalist.  Reporters at, say, TIME or NEWSWEEK aren't objective enough, competent enough, or honest enough to be relied upon to give me the accurate story.  No doubt the story will eventually be told in books, unfortunately I likely won't have the time I need to read them.  I'm left dependent upon the best of the military and foreign policy bloggers to learn about these things as they come out.

ED MORRISSEY ENDORSES Mitt Romney for President, and I've got to say I think Morrissey focuses on the central issue in the upcoming Presidential election, competence in executive leadership.  True executive competence in the Presidency is something the country has sorely lacked.  The problem is a long standing one.  It's hard to think of anyone during my life time whose shown really first rate executive competence in the White House.  But this incompetence usually fails to register with the public.  Things are different with the current Republican President -- the failures of Katrina and Iraq have galvanized public opinion.  So after 8 years of the widely perceived executive incompetence of a Republican President, the biggest advantage a GOP candidate can have going into November is the real promise of providing fundamental change in the White House from the current incompetence to proven executive experience and success.  And the glaring contrast between from the highly successful Mitt Romney, and the never-run-anything candidates Hillary and Barrack couldn't be more stark.

A side note.  One reason Fred Thompson would not have been a great candidate against the Democrats is his demonstrated lack of executive ability as shown in the current campaign.  By contrast, during the current campaign Mitt Romney as shown all sorts of executive talents -- including the ability to course correct mid-stream as conditions change.   A skill it looks like Rudy Giuliani certainly could have used.

OBAMA VS. ROMNEY  in November -- I'm sticking with my pre-New Hampshire prediction.  I'm not saying it's a slam dunk, never did.  But it's still my best guess.

Here are some remarkable poll results.  Over 60% of voters in the South Carolina primary were women, and over half of those women were African-American women.  In fact, black women outnumbered black men almost 2-1.  And it was this vote which really put Barack Obama over the top.  Obama took only 22% of the non-black female vote, but a whopping 78% of the very large black female vote.  Oprah Winfrey is clearly not the only black woman in the country who's highly motivated to turn out at the polls for Obama.  The white female vote was split almost equally between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. 

UPDATE:  Looking at the exit polls, Rich Lowry sees Hillary Clinton holding tough with the demographics she needs to win the Democratic nomination.  My November prediction assumes that outside of the deep South Obama will continue to erode away chunks of that demographic.

And the quote of the night goes to ABC's Jake Tapper:

Said Bill Clinton today in Columbia, SC: "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign.  And Obama ran a good campaign here."

This was in response to a question about Obama saying it "took two people to beat him." Jackson had not been mentioned.

Boy, I can't understand why anyone would think the Clintons are running a race-baiting campaign to paint Obama as "the black candidate."

DON'T STAB THE COUNTY IN THE BACK and tell me it's raining -- Peter Wehner puts the hook back on Harry Reid and other "I hope we lose" Democrats.

Also this: E. J. Dionne, Clinton hater.  Hugh Hewitt long ago identified Dionne as perhaps the most unprincipled columnist in America.  A champion partisan hack in a profession of partisan hacks.  In an age when you can get better political commentary almost at random for free on the web, one wonders how such people keep their jobs.  Then I take a look at such leftist sites as the DailyKook and I see that Dionne and his left-wing peers at the WaPo and NY Times are something like Immanuel Kant's among the fevered leftist writers.

UPDATE:  And the newest Clinton hater is .. Jonathan Chait!  Got to love it.  Another dishonest partisan hack is offended by the dishonest partisan hackery of the Clintons.

IT'S NOT A STIMULUS, it's deficit spending -- economist Andrew Samwick in an NPR commentary:  "It's ironic that the proposed cure for our economic woes is just a different strain of the disease. Cheap credit and imprudent lending policies by some bad actors in recent years led to over-consumption and over-investment in the real estate sector .. But hindsight does not appear to be 20/20. If we acknowledge that bad loans fueled the mess, then why would we [continue to precipitate over-consumption and malinvestment] through additional borrowing by the government?  No good explanation comes to mind."

IF FDR in 1933 had attempted to "stimulate"  the U.S. economy under today's regulations, those FDR projects would have gotten under way sometime in the mid 1950s, if you go by Medan McArdle's estimates of how many years it would take to get Mike Huckabee's public works project off the ground.  Oh, and by the way.  FDR's public works idea didn't work, it simply made economic conditions even worse and helped stall the economy for another half-decade.  Amity Shlaels has a little book out documenting the whole sorry record of the FDR led economic non-recovery.  If truth be told, the story of the "Great Depression" is the story of how the Federal government turned a short-term market correction into a titanic economic train wreck.  Yes, Virginia, the cure often is worse than the disease.

"THIS NEEDS SAYING" I couldn't agree more:

On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it!"

This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

Were there other causes? Yes, of course. But there was an immediate and essential cause.

And this needs saying, because if you don't know what broke the elephant you can't put it together again. The party cannot re-find itself if it can't trace back the moment at which it became lost. It cannot heal an illness whose origin is kept obscure.

I believe that some of the ferocity of the pundit wars is due to a certain amount of self-censorship. It's not in human nature to enjoy self-censorship. The truth will out, like steam from a kettle. It hurts to say something you supported didn't work. I would know. But I would say of these men who are fighting one another as they resist naming the cause for the fight: Sack up, get serious, define. That's the way to help.

UPDATE:  There's a growing sense in the country that after 28 years we're right back to where we were with the Carter Presidency, just before Reagan swept the country with the conservative revolution:

the 2008 tax rebate brings us full circle back to 1980, as the final year of the Bush administration increasingly resembles the final year of the Carter administration -- including national malaise, getting tough on Israel but not on Palestinian terrorists, support for the DC handgun ban, the Olympics hosted by a communist regime with contempt for human rights, and a consensus that the current administration is lacking in competence.

Bush certainly reminds us of the pre-Reagan Presidents.  Massive Federal spending increases like Johnson.  Keynesian macroeconomic policies like Nixon, Ford and Carter.  A war without end fought under politicized rules of engagement like Johnson and Nixon.   Betrayals of the conservative Republican base like Nixon.  An utter disregard for the long term consequences of Federal programs and spending increases like Johnson and Nixon.  I could go on.

ECONOMIST LAWRENCE WHITE on the Fed's rate cut, including this: "By very standard analysis, then, the Fed has already overdone the rate-cutting."

THE FORMER CHIEF ECONOMIST at the labor deparatment says "I wish I had this book when I stepped into the job."  Morgan Reynolds reviews Gene Epstein's Econospinning.  Looks to me like the book would be useful to just about anyone reading the financial pages.

HERE'S the Florida Republican debate transcript.  I'll have commentary a bit later.

PRESTOPUNDIT wasn't the only voice warning of the Feds mismanagement of the money supply in the early 2000's.  David Beckworth at Macro Musings was also flagging the Feds failure to understand the housing bubble and the non-threat of "benign deflation", as did Zanny Minton Beddoes, the economics editor of The Economist.  Beckworth recently had a chance to meet Beddoes and complement her dead on analysis of the macroeconomic situation of the early 00's, some of which he reprises here.  I think they both deserve a round of applause.  And here's hoping that those like Beckworth and Beddoes who actually got it right over the past decade are the ones people are listening to as we move into the next decade.

UPDATE:  Randall Parker notes that the 10 year U.S. growth rate in consumption has outpaced the U.S. growth rate in GDP by almost a full percentage point: "That adds up to $3 trillion dollars worth of living beyond our means. I've been writing about this problem for years and now I take no joy out of finding more agree with me. The seriousness of the problem outweighs being right about it."

MITT ROMNEY told a cutting Bill Clinton joke that managed to deck Hillary in the same swing.  This is the sort of thing people have been looking for from Romney, and some were beginning to think he was incapable of producing.  The capacity to do such a thing is a huge advantage in a Presidential race -- and in the Presidency itself. Part of the power of Kennedy and Reagan came from this capacity to get away scoring serious points while leaving a grin on everyone's face.  There couldn't have been a more important moment in any of the Republican debates so far.

Asked about running against the tag team of Bill and Hillary, Romney replied that he can't wait to run against them, saying,  "The idea of Bill Clinton back in the White House with nothing to do is something I can't imagine." And then implied the nation wouldn't want to imagine it either.  Watch the video clip here.

I guessing most American's wouldn't.  An important moment for Romney and the 2008 campaign.

HERE COMES President Bush's "stimulus" package:  "the stipend of at least $300 would be paid to all workers receiving a paycheck, even those who did not earn enough to pay taxes last year."

Time to speed up the software running this:

The Gross National Debt:

Looks like we're fated to relive the 1970s.  Don't be surprised is by the end of the year George Bush isn't wearing flare pants and a "Whip Inflation Now" button.  The only explanation I can come up for all this is that Bush went through the 70s drunk (semi-confessed) or stoned on cocaine (rumored) and he thinks he's doing this for the first time.

The reason drug use during the 1970s should be a disqualifier for President is because the 1970s was the great period of economic education for the American people,  the golden moment in time when people learned that price controls don't work, Keynesian economics doesn't work, welfare doesn't work -- and the only thing that does work is the American economy when the shackles are taken off, as they were in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the transportation and energy sectors.  The only current candidates we have good reason to believe didn't use drugs during the 1970s are Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and  John McCain.

DONALD BOUDREAUX -- the chairman of the George Mason U. economics department -- weighs in on the foolishness of economic "stimulus".  I particularly liked this quote attributed to Warren Buffett, "It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked."

And this is even better.  Another George Mason economist -- Russ Roberts -- debunks GOP spin about the magical powers of the Bush "tax cuts" in the face of Bush's massive government spending increases.  Roberts writes,

"Bottom line: [Federal income tax] revenue in 2006 was still below 2000 in real terms ..

[And] Government's share of the pie has grown dramatically under Bush II. You can argue it was worthwhile. You can argue that he had no choice. (I think you'd be wrong on both counts, but never mind.) But you can't argue that Bush has cut our taxes. Our taxes are higher and they've been shifted into the future via debt."

For details, read the whole thing.

IT'S CLEAR WHY JOHN MCCAIN hates Mitt Romney.  John McCain very badly wants to be President.  But he's helped develop a system where it's incredibly difficult to run a competitive campaign for President without great personal wealth, Romney has that wealth, and he's using it to beat McCain to the dirt using ads which lets people know how McCain has opposed many of the things they believe in.  It's the one loophole that McCain has failed to close in his campaign against free speech and the 1st Amendment.  So what is driving that campaign?  First and foremost what we've learned about the Senator is that if you're getting information about John McCain, McCain believes John McCain has the right to be delivering that message, and not anyone else.*  We've seen this attitude from the race in 2000 against Bush, we've seen it in his arguments against free speech on the part of independent political action committees during the debates over McCain-Feingold, and we've seen it in his repeated anger against candidates who expose his record on television or in the Presidential debates.  It's essentially the attitude of a ship's captain who won't brook competitive feedback from the crew.  And it's a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy and the American system.

The John McCain we've come to know is a man with an enormous belief in his own right to shut up or angrily denounce people who speaks "truth to power" when it's his own position of power which is being contested.  The problem with Romney is that he has too much money to shut up -- and McCain can't hardly stand it.  It just isn't fair that that only thing that keeps him from rightly being shut up by McCain supported campaign finance law is that fact that he has more money than everybody else.

And in a less extreme form, I think a little bit of the same thing lies behind many of the candidate's evident resentment of Mitt Romney.  But self-financing by the very, very rich is a constitutionally protected part of a legislative regime handcuffing free speech and the 1st Amendment, a scheme which all of them have supported, and I think these candidates need to grow up, stop whining, and live with it.  If we unbound the 1st Amendment and let free speech once again rule the land, all of these candidates would have more than enough money.  The fact that they don't is their own fault.  Again, here's my advice for John McCain and the rest.  Be a man.  Stop whining.

*Of course, if the McCain message is coming via McCain friends in the MSM, well, John's willing to make an exception for that.  Kind of him, isn't it.

THE NEW YORK TIMES and America's newsrooms appear to be an ever increasing source of the country's drunks, child molesters, and killers -- Iowahawk spots a national trend.  [background here.]

DUNCAN HUNTER GIVES Mike Huckabee a strong endorsement for President.  The most interesting thing here is that Huckabee has managed to convince Hunter that he's credible on Hunter's two standout issues -- building a border fence and competing with China.  Most in the pundit class have yet to believe that Huckabee is to be taken seriously on illegal immigration or foreign policy.  Has Hunter been fooled, or does he know something the rest of us don't?

YOUR MUST READ of the day --  Amity Shlaes gives Bush and Bernanke a richly deserved spanking.

GREG IP has the behind the scenes story of the Fed's panic cutting of the Fed fund's rate.

Take a look at this picture of intellectual incompetence:

DEBRA SAUNDERS -- the problem with Romney.

And Michelle Malkin on McCain -- "This is cynicism on steroids with a speedball chaser."

IN THE WAKE OF 9/11 historians have been calling the 1990s America's "vacation from history" in the area of national defense. Now, with the financial industry in trouble and the housing market in collapse, the NY Times is suggesting the end of America's "vacation from history" in the ream of economics, taking direct aim at Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's theory of a new economic age he calls "The Great Moderation". But as the NY Times points out, "These days .. the great moderation isn't looking quite so great -- or so moderate."

Here's my view.  America has been on an economic "vacation from history".  However, this policy vacation is largely the consequence of the economic profession's vacation from science in the domain of macroeconomics. The problem of bad economic policy begins and often ends with the bad science, taught at all of the top economics departments in the country.  So we get the repetition once again of the fiasco of a Keynes engineered artificial boom - bust cycle, with the economists having no idea what they have wrought, or why their nostrums for "fixing" things only makes things worse.

What I'm saying here is little more than a quick rendering of Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek's famous account of what has gone wrong with economic theory and policy since the time of Keynes.  Readers interested in an accessible account of Hayek's non-Keynesian macro-economics are encouraged to take some time working through the well-written articles found at economist Roger Garrison's web site.

JOHN MCCAIN: "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated [about economics]".  That was McCain speaking with Stephen Moore in Nov. of 2005, at the Senator's office in Washington, D.C. In the same interview McCain identifies former economics professor and U.S. Senator Phil Gramm as his leading economic adviser on economic issues.  Here's the whole incident as recounted by Moore:

On a broader range of economic issues, though, Mr. McCain readily departs from Reaganomics. His philosophy is best described as a work in progress. He is refreshingly blunt when he tell me: "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated." OK, so who does he turn to for advice? His answer is reassuring. His foremost economic guru is former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm (who would almost certainly be Treasury secretary in a McCain administration). He's also friendly with the godfather of supply-side economics, Arthur Laffer.

The always reliable "Huffington Post" re-writes history, and transforms this incident into a recent meeting with editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, one in which Sen. McCain is made to say he "doesn't really understand economics."   A pure fabrication, and a rather nasty one at that. Here's the opening paragraph from Sam Stein's article "Short on Economic Understanding, McCain Brings Phil Gramm to Meeting" in the Huffington Post:

At a recent meeting with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Republican presidential candidate John McCain admitted he "doesn't really understand economics" and then pointed to his adviser and former Senate colleague, Phil Gramm - whom he had brought with him to the meeting - as the expert he turns to on the subject, The Huffington Post has learned.

The incident was confirmed by a source familiar with the proceedings of the meeting.

Perhaps no surprise this -- Paul Krugman has picked up the fabrication and he's spreading it via the New York Times.

John McCain did in fact have a recent meeting with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal -- but note well that Phil Gramm wasn't present, and John McCain didn't tell anyone that he "doesn't really understand economics".

WE'VE GOT THE HIGHEST INFLATION RATE in 17 year, but the Fed has decided that what we really need is more inflation.  The Fed has cut the Federal Funds Rate to 3 1/2 percent -- here's their announcement and explanation.  It's clear at this point that the Fed has no idea what it is doing -- dropping rates to near zero, then jacking them up again, now dropping them once again below the equilibrium rate.  This is economic malpractice on an enormous scale -- and the intellectual travesty behind it makes the fraud of "intelligent design" theory look like Newtonian mechanics.  The befuddled economists sponsoring such policy chaos need to be called on this.  These folks don't know what they are doing, and it's a grand dishonesty for the Fed and its economic enablers to pretend otherwise.

Those seeking some understanding of how the Fed has managed to create the current boom and bust cycle -- and why most economic discussions of the cycle can be counted as the scientific equivalent of creation science -- let me recommend these interviews and articles by Auburn economist Roger Garrison.   If you'd like to start at the "easy" level look here, here, and here.  Bonus classic:  Friedrich Hayek, "Can We Still Avoid Inflation?"

UPDATE:  It's Helicopter Ben to the rescue!

I'VE TALKED ABOUT HUCKABEE'S role as McCain's wingman in South Carolina.  It looks like Romney may have his own wingman in Florida -- assuming current polls are reliable and Romney is surging in Florida (a perhaps risky assumption).  Giuliani is smacking McCain hard like only a New Yorker can do with hits like this.  If Giuliani were a bit more conservative he'd be my pick for the nomination -- we need a Republican leader of temper and caliber to lead the charge against the left.  If Rudy stages a late comeback and helps crush McCain in Florida, I wouldn't be unhappy.

TO HEAR THE WASHINGTON POST spin it, you'd think it was a contest between John McCain and Rush Limbaugh in South Carolina -- and that Rush and the conservative movement had suffered a serious defeat at the hands of Senator Kennedy's favorite bill co-sponsor.  The WaPo certainly makes it sound like McCain had swept the Republican vote in South Carolina, in some grand turn-around from his 2000 race against George Bush.  But the facts -- ignored by the Post -- do not bare that out.  It turns out McCain lost the GOP vote to Huckabee.  In other words, he came in 2nd among Republicans, squeaking out a win with a plurality of Democrat and independent voters.  So how big was this McCain win, compared with 2000?  Not big at all. Some might even say piddling:

In 2000, running against George W. Bush and the entire Carroll Campbell machine in South Carolina, John McCain got 42% of the vote, and 240,000 votes out of 573,000 or so cast.

Tonight, he got 33% of the vote in a field where his top challengers--Romney and Giuliani--aren't even running, and 135,000 actual votes. If just the same people who voted for McCain in 2000 had voted for him today, he would have won 50+% of the South Carolina vote. That would have been truly impressive.

Instead, John McCain LOST the support of 100,000 people--and he's the winner?

Compare those numbers with the anti-Rush, pro-McCain dish served up by the Washington Post:

though McCain failed to persuade many of the old Republican power brokers, he wrapped up the Republican establishment where it counted most, South Carolina. His win Saturday underscored how different McCain's campaign has been this year compared with eight years ago .. "I think the people of South Carolina are getting to know John McCain now, a little more than they know those folks [e.g. Rush Limbaugh, et al] anymore," longtime McCain aide Mark Salter said Saturday night of the senator's old nemeses.

In fact, McCain failed to "wrap up" the Republican establishment -- former governor David Beasley endorsed Huckabee and Sen. Jim DeMint endorsed Mitt Romney.  And of course, McCain lost the Republican vote to Huckabee, and he did poorly among conservative voters, especially very conservative voters.  McCain wasn't wiped out in South Carolina, as we was in 2000, but he wasn't a titanic winner either, as the Washington Post would like you to believe.

INFLATION IS AT A 17 YEAR HIGH and Larry White wants to know, "where have the inflation hawks gone?"

(It's great to have you back Larry -- we wish you the best.)

THIS IS SURPRISING. But I guess not that much of a surprise. David Broo