There is an old saying in the Middle East that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee. That thought came to my mind as I listened to President Obama trying to explain the intervention of America and its allies in Libya ”” and I don’t say that as criticism. I say it with empathy. This is really hard stuff, and it’s just the beginning.

When an entire region that has been living outside the biggest global trends of free politics and free markets for half a century suddenly, from the bottom up, decides to join history ”” and each one of these states has a different ethnic, tribal, sectarian and political orientation and a loose coalition of Western and Arab states with mixed motives trying to figure out how to help them ”” well, folks, you’re going to end up with some very strange-looking policy animals. And Libya is just the first of many hard choices we’re going to face in the “new” Middle East.

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Last summer, as President Obama’s premier plan to save millions of Americans from foreclosure foundered, the administration tossed a new life preserver to homeowners.

Officials unveiled a $1 billion program to offer loans to help the jobless pay their mortgages until they could find work again. It was supposed to take effect before the end of the year, but as of today, the program has yet to accept any applications.

“We wait and wait, and they keep saying it’s coming,” said James Tyson, 50, a Philadelphia homeowner who lost his job a year ago.

That could be an epitaph for the administration’s broader foreclosure prevention effort…

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I estimate that Fannie and Freddie alone are hiding $200 billion worth of bad loans on their books simply because there is no market for these foreclosed homes. Ditto for the largest servicer banks such as Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup. To clean up this mess with finality is going to cost $1 trillion or so in round numbers. But nobody in Washington wants to go there.

The Obama Administration and the Congress need to put aside their respective fantasy world views and focus on the horrible economic reality ongoing in the housing and banking sectors. It may be that the degree of self-delusion in Washington has reached the point that only another financial catastrophe can wake us from out collective distraction. But if President Obama really believes he can win reelection with housing prices falling from now till November 2012, then perhaps those who liken him to Louis XIV are right.

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Before the financial crisis, many Americans had never heard of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Today, we own them.

The federal government took over Fannie and Freddie after bailing them out in 2008. The bailout cost taxpayers more than the bailouts of GM, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup combined.

By 2010, roughly 90 percent of all new mortgages issued in this country went through the U.S. government. For all intents and purposes, the $1.5 trillion U.S. mortgage market is now a government-run industry.

How did we get here?…

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The President’s difficulties in positioning himself as the champion of a jobs renaissance were compounded by two new reports on the nation’s fiscal condition, one by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), another by the General Accountability Office (GAO).

The CBO analysed the President’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year and estimates the federal deficit over the next decade will clock in at $9.5 trillion (£5.8tr), a mere $2.3 trillion (£1.4tr) higher than the White House estimate. And the GAO, re-assessing the nation’s long-term outlook, concluded that the fiscal situation has deteriorated. If the nation’s debt is to be stabilised at 62% of GDP, an immediate tax increase of 15%, or a spending cut of 13%, or some combination of the two is needed.

The Peter G Peterson Foundation, a sort of budget watchdog and nag, concludes that even under a set of optimistic assumptions, “large and persistent deficits still lead to an unsustainable growth in debt… and a steady growth in net interest payments to service this growing debt”. By 2030, unless the President and Congress come to grips with the fiscal situation, net interest payments and entitlements (pensions, healthcare costs) will consume almost the entire budget, leaving nothing for spending on defence, education and other programmes.

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A new assessment of President Barack Obama’s budget released Friday says the White House underestimates future budget deficits by more than $2 trillion over the upcoming decade.

The estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says that if Obama’s February budget submission is enacted into law it would produce deficits totaling $9.5 trillion over 10 years — an average of almost $1 trillion a year.

Obama’s budget saw deficits totaling $7.2 trillion over the same period.

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The Obama administration may not care to admit it, but it did make a decision, and one of benefit to Gaddafi. Why? One factor was surely Obama’s preference for a less activist foreign policy in general.

But there were special considerations in Libya, and they were clearly stated in a piece by General Wesley Clark for the Washington Post last Friday. The former US commander in Kosovo and a 2004 Democratic presidential candidate wrote: “We don’t have a clearly stated objective, legal authority, committed international support or adequate on-the-scene military capabilities, and Libya’s politics hardly foreshadow a clear outcome.”

The key phrase here is “Libya’s politics”. For the past few days, Washington policy circles have been worrying over a piece of research circulated last week: “On a per capita basis ”¦ twice as many foreign fighters came to Iraq from Libya ”“ and specifically eastern Libya ”“ than from any other country in the Arabic-speaking world. Libyans were apparently more fired up to travel to Iraq to kill Americans than anyone else in the Middle East. And 84.1 per cent [74] of the 88 Libyan fighters ”¦ who listed their hometowns came from either Benghazi or Darnah in Libya’s east.”

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As the Obama administration wrestles over what to do about Libya, the voices on Capitol Hill offer no consensus on military action.

Influential senators John McCain, a Republican, and John Kerry, a Democrat, have kept up a drumbeat for U.S. military action such as a “no-fly” zone to aid the rebels fighting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

But other senior lawmakers, like Republicans Senator Richard Lugar and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, are warning against getting the United States into a Libyan war.

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As expected, the U.S. Senate failed Wednesday to advance either the House Republicans’ spending bill or an alternative proposal offered by Democrats, leaving lawmakers just nine days to work on a compromise plan or face a government shutdown.

Neither plan achieved even a simple majority of support in the chamber. The vote in the Senate was 56-44 against the plan approved by the Republican-led House last month, which would cut current spending levels by $61 billion. A subsequent vote on the alternate proposal from Senate Democrats, which offers cuts of $6.5 billion, failed 58-42. Sixty votes were needed to advance the measures.

The vote comes as President Obama faces new pressure to exert greater influence over the congressional debate. As the Senate readied for votes on the competing measures Tuesday, freshman Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) accused both parties of engaging in “political theater.”

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Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York is decrying the “alarming and grave injustice” of U.S. President Barack Obama’s instruction to the nation’s justice department to cease its defense of marriage.
The president’s instruction to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was announced on Feb. 23 by the U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder.
Archbishop Dolan, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, released a statement in response to this announcement, and also sent a personal message to Obama regarding the administration’s move.
“Marriage, the union of one man and one woman as husband and wife, is a singular and irreplaceable institution,” the archbishop affirmed.
He asserted, “Only a man and a woman have the ability to bring children into the world.”

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[KEVIN] ECKSTROM: Right, and it’s biblical language on both sides. The more traditional churches, Catholic bishops and your mainline churches and your Jewish groups are saying, you know, we have a biblical and ethical, moral obligation to care for people who can’t help themselves. On the other side, from the more conservative side, especially from the Tea Party, you have arguments saying that it’s actually immoral to leave debt to future generations. And they sometimes chafe at the notion of, you know, what would Jesus cut? They say, well, Jesus didn’t have opinions on this, you know, that it’s up to us to sort of make the decisions on what to cut. But you get various moral arguments from both sides, and we’re just waiting to see who wins the day.

{KIM] LAWTON: Well, I was at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention this week, and one of their keynote speakers was House Speaker John Boehner, Catholic, who used a lot of biblical language in his speech. He had a very receptive, mostly evangelical audience, and he quoted Scripture. He quoted from Proverbs, “A good man leaves behind an inheritance to his children’s children,” and he said Republicans want to not just be hearers of the word, but doers of the word, another scriptural reference there. And, you know, I found that very interesting, that you had the congressional leadership on the right also trying to seize the biblical and moral language on all of this.

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Despite skepticism from Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, three influential United States senators from both political parties on Sunday called for the United States to consider carving out a no-flight zone in Libya to prevent Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from massacring the rebels trying to overthrow him.

But the Obama administration continued to resist such appeals.

“Lots of people throw around phrases like no-fly zone ”” they talk about it as though it’s just a video game,” William M. Daley, the new White House chief of staff, said in at appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” television news program.

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I was talking the other day with a new member of the U.S. Senate, and conversation turned to what had surprised him most in his first months on Capitol Hill. He said it was the number of people who still don’t seem to understand that we’re in crisis, that if we don’t move now on spending, it could do us in.

I’m always surprised when I hear this, yet I’ve heard it a lot. “There’s no sense of urgency up here.”

[Why is This?]

I think some of the answer has to do with what, for lack of a better word, I’ll call crisis-ism. This is a condition in which you don’t know you’re in crisis because you’re always in crisis, you’ve always been in crisis, and you’ve always gotten through, so what the heck. Crisis-ism is the inability to apprehend that this time it’s different, that this time the crisis is an actual crisis….

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The federal government isn’t simply bleeding money. Because of its addiction to red ink, it’s bleeding power, which is starting to flow away from the nation’s capital and out to the states. This is the little-recognized reality behind the remarkable political upheaval being seen in state capitals.

Republican governors such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Indiana’s Mitch Daniels are pursuing their own controversial fiscal policies out of what they consider financial necessity; they have budgets to balance, and little time and few options to do the job. But governors of both parties also have less reason to wait and hope for help from a federal government that, with overwhelming budget deficits, is losing its ability to offer financial goodies to the states.

For decades, the implicit deal between Washington and state capitals has been that the feds would offer chunks of cash, and in return would get commensurate influence over the states’ social policies. Now that flow of federal goodies has begun what figures to be a long-term decline, as the money Washington has available to pass around to the states is squeezed.

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The president is right ”” if America is to be competitive in this new knowledge-based global economy, we must invest in education, infrastructure and high-value-added research in a fiscally responsible manner.

But House Republicans are also right ”” spending is out of control, and there is no way possible to address our burgeoning debt without real spending cuts. That means finding ways to make government perform more efficiently, while scaling back or even eliminating certain government functions altogether.

Yet by focusing primarily on domestic discretionary spending, neither plan goes at all far enough to deal with our medium- or long-term fiscal challenges.

With the Fiscal Commission, we spent 10 months closely studying the cold, hard facts. Together, we came to the unavoidable conclusions that the problem is real, the solution will be painful, there is no easy way out and everything must be on the table.

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John Boyd writes:

The leaders of both political parties have come to embrace the philosophy of the common box turtle. They believe the key to success is to refuse to “go first” and never “lead with your chin.” They are convinced the loser will be the one who is forced to propose solutions to the problems they were elected to solve. This behavior is not acceptable.

We expect our leaders to analyze the pressing issues of the day based on the best information available and then to reach a consensus concerning the best course of action.

Read the rest of his letter and the others also.

Get ready for more undernourished infants, dangerously cold homes and disease-stricken communities in developing countries if proposed federal budget cuts become law.

That’s the message coming from left-leaning religious advocacy groups, who’ve been rallying supporters and blanketing Capitol Hill since budget debates kicked into high gear last week (Feb. 14-18). Declaring budgets to be “moral documents,” they’re prodding lawmakers to honor their respective faith traditions by sparing poverty-related programs from the cost-cutting axe.

But efforts to save funding are meeting resistance””not only from number crunchers, but also from others with different views of what constitutes moral budgeting.

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One of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s legacies in the new health care law, intended to allow the chronically ill and people with disabilities to continue living in their homes, is too costly to survive without major changes, Obama administration officials now say.

Republican lawmakers, who have vowed to repeal the health care law, cite the administration’s acknowledgment as yet another reason to do so. But the health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, says the law gives her plenty of authority to make the necessary changes to the program without Congressional action.

To make the program viable, Ms. Sebelius said, she is considering changes in the eligibility criteria, including employment and earnings requirements, to ensure that only active workers may enroll. She also said she favored adjusting premiums to rise with inflation.

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President Obama’s budget director, Jacob Lew, said as much last week during his briefing on the president’s budget. Obama wants to find ways to “work together to find a solution to the long-term issues in Social Security,” Lew told reporters, but the program “does not contribute to the deficit in the short term.”

That would be nice if it were true. It’s not.

Social Security is a cash-in/cash-out program. It went into the red last year, when payroll tax revenue came up about $37 billion short of the benefits paid to retirees. Initially, that shortfall seemed a temporary consequence of the recession. But new projections from the Congressional Budget Office show that factors such as the payroll tax cut Obama and congressional Republicans agreed to last year mean that Social Security will instead come up short every year from now on ”” at least $45 billion this year, and a staggering half a trillion dollars over the next decade.

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Fannie and Freddie are failed experiments in social policy. Their government charters allowed them to borrow for less than other companies, which gave them easy money and easy profits. And their odd status as government-chartered entities that were also publicly traded corporations set them up to profit by putting taxpayers at risk.

The Treasury Department presented three options. The first would simply wind down Fannie and Freddie as the housing market recovers, leaving nothing in their place. The second would create a government agency that would lend during crises when private credit died up. The third would put government in the reinsurance business, selling policies that would guarantee mortgages in case a primary guarantor from the private sector foundered.

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When Congress takes up President Obama’s fiscal 2012 budget, the debate will center on just a fraction of the overall $3.7 trillion budget: his proposals on spending and how to pay for them.

Not counting what the government spends on national security and social safety-net programs such as Medicare and Social Security, spending on other domestic programs accounts for just 12% of the overall budget.

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I wonder if Mr. Obama is at all embarrassed by the 2012 budget. Like his previous two budgets, this one breaks all those “Morning in America” campaign promises of a “new” Washington.

The 2012 budget also is a repudiation of the findings of his very own bipartisan deficit commission.

The Bowles-Simpson commission had plenty of sensible recommendations, like cutting funds for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, eliminating the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools and raising the qualifying age for Social Security.

But you’ll find precious little of this in the 2012 budget. At the White House, political sense apparently matters a lot more than common sense.

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Mr. [Bobby] Maldonado, 26, is one of the dozens of young aides throughout the city who rise before dawn to pore over the news to synthesize it, summarize it and spin it, so their bosses start the day well-prepared. Washington is a city that traffics in information, and as these 20-something staff members are learning, who knows what ”” and when they know it ”” can be the difference between professional advancement and barely scraping by.

“Information is the capital market of Washington, so you know something that other people don’t know and you know something earlier than other people know it is a formulation for increasing your status and power,” said David Perlmutter, the director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. “So any edge you can use to get stuff faster, earlier, better or exclusively is very important.”

For Mr. Maldonado, who said that “the information wars are won before work,” that means rising early to browse all of the major newspapers, new polling data, ideological Web sites and dozens of news alerts needed to equip his bosses with the best, most up-to-date nuggets.

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…this is where civility comes from ”” from a sense of personal modesty and from the ensuing gratitude for the political process. Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation. They are useless without the conversation.

The problem is that over the past 40 years or so we have gone from a culture that reminds people of their own limitations to a culture that encourages people to think highly of themselves. The nation’s founders had a modest but realistic opinion of themselves and of the voters. They erected all sorts of institutional and social restraints to protect Americans from themselves. They admired George Washington because of the way he kept himself in check.

But over the past few decades, people have lost a sense of their own sinfulness. Children are raised amid a chorus of applause. Politics has become less about institutional restraint and more about giving voters whatever they want at that second. Joe DiMaggio didn’t ostentatiously admire his own home runs, but now athletes routinely celebrate themselves as part of the self-branding process.

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It would be merciful if, when tragedies such as Tucson’s occur, there were a moratorium on sociology. But respites from half-baked explanations, often serving political opportunism, are impossible because of a timeless human craving and a characteristic of many modern minds.

The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience. Time was, the gods were useful. What is thunder? The gods are angry. Polytheism was explanatory. People postulated causations.

And still do. Hence: The Tucson shooter was (pick your verb) provoked, triggered, unhinged by today’s (pick your noun) rhetoric, vitriol, extremism, “climate of hate….”

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What made this rampage worse than others was the pall it cast over the freedom and ability to perform elected public service — the necessity for political officials to interact openly with their constituents, the need for the public to approach freely the people they send to office. Whatever his intent, Jared Lee Loughner and the rounds he fired took aim on this American form of democratic discourse and, in so doing, put a treasured right of all citizens in jeopardy.

When investigators executed a search warrant at Mr. Loughner’s home, they found an envelope with messages saying, “I planned ahead,” “My assassination” and the name “Giffords.” His YouTube videos contained rambling and incoherent passages, some of them about his becoming the treasurer of a new currency, his belief that he had powers of mind control and the need to fix “English grammar structure” in a congressional district he believed was mostly illiterate.

Newly installed Speaker of the House John Boehner, a Republican, was right Saturday when he said “an attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve.”

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Many analysts described the November 2010 midterm elections as a sea change, with Republicans taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives and narrowing the Democratic majority in the Senate. But this political overhaul appears to have had little effect on the religious composition of Congress, which is similar to the religious makeup of the previous Congress and of the nation, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The 112th Congress, like the U.S. public, is majority Protestant and about a quarter Catholic. Baptists and Methodists are the largest Protestant denominations in the new Congress, just as they are in the country as a whole.

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Left unsaid [by the President], however, was the fact that job growth was not enough to absorb people entering the work force in the United States, much less to shrink the unemployment rolls.

R. Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia University’s business school and former chairman of the council of economic advisers for President Bush, remains a guarded optimist. He sees signs of the economy gaining speed.

“We could run as high as 200,000 per month this year, but keep in mind that might only bring the unemployment rate down to 9 percent,” Mr. Hubbard said. “That does very little for the person who is long-term unemployed.”

The so-called real unemployment rate, which includes those workers who are discouraged or have given up looking for work, stands at 16.7 percent.

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When New York Rep. Peter King, the new chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called for congressional hearings on radical Islam in America this fall, the reaction from the official Muslim community was swift. Ibrahim Hooper, president of the Council on American- Islamic Relations, said he feared the hearings would become an “anti-Muslim witch hunt.” Abed A. Ayoub of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee asserted that Mr. King’s proposal had “bigoted intentions.”

While Mr. King has a reputation for adopting polarizing positions””particularly when it comes to immigration””his hearings deserve serious consideration. “There has to be an honest discussion of the role of the Muslim community””what they are doing, what they’re not doing,” he explained to the New York Observer in a Nov. 30 article. “I talk to law enforcement people across the country; they will tell me. . . . They don’t feel any sense of cooperation.”

These concerns are reasonable. Histrionic objections to them only deter Muslims from fulfilling a fundamental Islamic obligation: Meeting our duty to the society in which we live.

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