Barack Obama has been president for just under 10 months but he’s added two trillion to the national debt and will double it by the end of the decade.  CBS’ Mark Knoller:

This latest milestone in the ever-rising journey of the National Debt comes less than eight months after it hit $11 trillion for the first time. The latest high-point is not unexpected, considering the federal deficit for the just-ended 2009 fiscal year hit an all-time high at $1.42-trillion – more than triple the previous year’s record high.

Much of the increase in the deficit and debt is attributed to government spending outpacing revenue – both exacerbated by the recession and the government response to it – including hundreds of billions in bailouts and stimulus spending and tax cuts along with decreased tax revenues due to rising unemployment.

[...]

The National Debt has increased about $1.6 trillion on Mr. Obama’s watch, though less than $4.9 trillion run up during the presidency of George W. Bush.

But the White House budget review issued in August projects that by the end of the current fiscal year on Sept 30th, the National Debt could top $14 trillion.  It gets worse. The same document projects that by the end of the decade, the National Debt will hit $24.5 trillion — exceeding the Gross Domestic Product projected for 2019 of $22.8 trillion.

According to the Treasury Department, the debt stood at $5.727 trillion on January 19, 2001, Bill Clinton’s last day in office, and $10.627 trillion when Bush left office eight years later.  That’s $612.5 billion (or $0.6125 trillion) a year, during which we fought two major wars, had the 9/11 attacks, and at least two major bailouts to deal with a global financial crisis.

We’re thus far averaging $1.92 trillion a year under Obama, or a factor of 3.146 more.   And the government is projecting that we’ll continue spending at this crisis rate for the next decade, more than doubling the current record level?

That ain’t good.

Presumably, we’d have had another major bailout had Bush stayed in office for a third term (were that Constitutionally or politically possible) or had John McCain been elected.  So spending and thus the debt would have escalated substantially regardless.  But we likely wouldn’t be talking about adding a massive health care payment on top of the pile.

Inspired no doubt by President Obama’s visit to China, American editorial writers and columnists are seizing on the opportunity to pile on China. In his column today Paul Krugman takes China to task over its policy on its currency:

Despite huge trade surpluses and the desire of many investors to buy into this fast-growing economy — forces that should have strengthened the renminbi, China’s currency — Chinese authorities have kept that currency persistently weak. They’ve done this mainly by trading renminbi for dollars, which they have accumulated in vast quantities.

And in recent months China has carried out what amounts to a beggar-thy-neighbor devaluation, keeping the yuan-dollar exchange rate fixed even as the dollar has fallen sharply against other major currencies. This has given Chinese exporters a growing competitive advantage over their rivals, especially producers in other developing countries.

What makes China’s currency policy especially problematic is the depressed state of the world economy. Cheap money and fiscal stimulus seem to have averted a second Great Depression. But policy makers haven’t been able to generate enough spending, public or private, to make progress against mass unemployment. And China’s weak-currency policy exacerbates the problem, in effect siphoning much-needed demand away from the rest of the world into the pockets of artificially competitive Chinese exporters.

I think that Dr. Krugman is right about this and further believe that the asset inflation that has put us into the fix that we’re in right now can be traced to China’s decision to establish an effective peg of the yuan to the dollar by using the earnings it derived from its export to buy dollars and dollar-denominated securities. This decision followed a recession in China which underscored for them their problems in controlling their currency in the absence of such a peg.

That policy has been abetted by American politicians of both parties who’ve shrewdly observed that borrowing has been politically less painful than raising taxes or curtailing spending. That’s a process that may be grinding to a halt as observed by Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick:

Intervening in the currency market served two goals for China: by keeping the renminbi from rising against the dollar, it promoted the competitiveness of Chinese exports; second, it allowed China to build up foreign currency reserves (primarily in dollars) as a cushion against the risks associated with growing financial integration, painfully illustrated by the experience of other countries in the Asian crisis of the late 1990s. The result was that by 2000 China had currency reserves of $165 billion; they now stand at $2.3 trillion, of which at least 70 percent are dollar-denominated.

This intervention caused a growing distortion in the global cost of capital, significantly reducing long-term interest rates and helping to inflate the real estate bubble in the United States, with ultimately disastrous consequences. In essence, Chimerica constituted a credit line from the People’s Republic to the United States that allowed Americans to save nothing and bet the house on … well, the house.

[…]

Given the bursting of the debt and housing bubbles, Americans will have to kick their addiction to cheap money and easy credit. The Chinese authorities understand that heavily indebted American consumers cannot be relied on to return as buyers of Chinese goods on the scale of the period up to 2007. And they dislike their exposure to the American currency in the form of dollar-denominated reserve assets of close to $2 trillion. The Chinese authorities are “long” the dollar like no foreign power in history, and that makes them very nervous.

Writing in The Guardian Ambrose Evans-Pritchard draws what I think is the correct conclusion about China’s policy:

It is fashionable to talk of America as the supplicant. That misreads the strategic balance. Washington can bring China to its knees at any time by shutting markets. There is no symmetry here. Any move by Beijing to liquidate its holdings of US Treasuries could be neutralized – in extremis – by capital controls. Well-armed sovereign states can do whatever they want.

If provoked, the US has the economic depth to retreat into near autarky (with NAFTA) and retool its industries behind tariff walls – as Britain did in the 1930s under Imperial Preference. In such circumstances, China would collapse. Mao statues would be toppled by street riots.

The editors of the New York Times are also correct in reminding us that China’s trade policies aren’t the only issue we need to discuss with them:

Ever since Richard Nixon opened the door in 1972, all presidents have faced a balancing act with China. For President Obama, who arrived in China on Sunday, the challenge is even tougher and more urgent. He needs Beijing’s help on a host of hugely important and extremely difficult problems, including stabilizing the global financial system, curbing global warming, prying away North Korea’s nuclear weapons, and ensuring that Iran doesn’t get to build any.

To do that he needs to encourage China to play an even stronger international role — but also curb some of its darker instincts, including its mistreatment of its own citizens, its less than savory relationships with countries like Sudan and its tendency to bully its neighbors.

If you need an illustration of the urgency of encouraging China’s leaders to take environmental considerations more seriously, this photo essay on pollution in China should be enough a chamber of horrors to convince you. I don’t believe this is something we can be satisfied with leaving to China as a purely internal matter for several reasons. First, Americans and Europeans have been complicit in China’s environmental degradation by exporting our heavy industry to China; many of those polluting companies in China have American and European parents. Second, Chinese air pollution crosses the Pacific to pollute our air and our water, too. Further, as long as China maintains its present course there are no steps we can take which will reduce our carbon production enough to avoid serious effects. That is not to say we should not use resources more efficiently: we should. However, no plan which doesn’t include China is worth a damn.

The picture at the right has created something of a kerfuffle in the blogosphere. It captures President Barack Obama being introducted to Japanese Emperor Akihito and bowing profoundly. Scott Johnson is overly exercised:

Obama’s breach of protocol is of a piece with the substance of his foreign policy. He means to teach Americans to bow before monarchs and tyrants. He embodies the ideological multiculturalism that sets the United States on the same plane as other regimes based on tribal privilege and royal bloodlines.

Kathy Kattenburg is flat out wrong:

Once again, Barack Obama has demonstrated his appalling hatred for America, and his elitism, and his arrogance, and his tearing down and bashing of his country and his predecessor’s foreign policies, by greeting Japan’s prime minister with a deep bow in a culturally appropriate way.

This was definitely not “culturally appropriate” and was definitely a breach of protocol.

In Japan bows are culturally appropriate, the rough equivalent of a handshake. However, the depth of the bow is carefully calibrated, reflecting the status and stations of the two parties, and President Obama’s bow is far too deep. Rather than appearing cultural appropriate I suspect that to most Japanese he would merely look clumsy.

I was in the process of collecting a sampler of picture to demonstrate that it was, in fact, a breach of protocol but I quickly found that HotAirPundit had beaten me to it. Browse on over and you can see Vladimir Putin, Manmohan Singh, and other world leaders greeting the emperor appropriately. I’ll contibute this picture:

I believe this represents Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama greeting the emperor, possibly presenting his credentials. Should the president of the United States bow more profoundly than the prime minister of Japan to the Japanese emperor?

My reaction to this is much what it was to other, previous goofs: I think the president is being very poorly served by his advisors. He needs a protocol advisor that he’ll pay attention to and who has the courage to tell him what to do and what not to do in order to avoid looking foolish. In this case he looked foolish.

In the final analysis this is a very minor matter. The Japanese are forgiving people and I have little doubt that they’ll be polite enough to overlook the clumsiness of President Obama’s attempt at cultural sensitivity. I doubt that most Americans really care.

I’m a Democrat but, as I’ve said before, I’m a republican (note the small “r”), too, and it nettles me to see the president of the United States making obeisances to foreign royalty. But it’s not the end of the world and I doubt that it means much more than that President Obama is trying to do the right thing but doesn’t know what the right thing is.

The scuttlebutt that’s coming out now in Washington is that President Obama doesn’t much like the plans for Afghanistan offered by his advisors:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

That stance comes in the midst of forceful reservations about a possible troop buildup from the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, according to a second top administration official.

In strongly worded classified cables to Washington, Eikenberry said he had misgivings about sending in new troops while there are still so many questions about the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Despite his having campaigned for two years on the urgency and necessity of the war in Afghanistan, it’s not difficult to see why President Obama would have misgivings on doubling down there. Victory at a cost and in a timeframe acceptable to the American people is far from assured and may even be impossible. And then there’s domestic criticism along the lines of Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times today:

So if President Obama dispatches another 30,000 or 40,000 troops, on top of the 68,000 already there, that would bring the total annual bill for our military presence there to perhaps $100 billion — or more. And we haven’t even come to the human costs.

As for health care reforms, the 10-year cost suggests an average of $80 billion to $110 billion per year, depending on what the final bill looks like.

Granted, the health care costs will continue indefinitely, while the United States cannot sustain 100,000 troops in Afghanistan for many years. On the other hand, the health care legislation pays for itself, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while the deployment in Afghanistan is unfinanced and will raise our budget deficits and undermine our long-term economic security.

So doesn’t it seem odd to hear hawks say that health reform is fiscally irresponsible, while in the next breath they cheer a larger deployment of troops in Afghanistan?

Meanwhile, lack of health insurance kills about 45,000 Americans a year, according to a Harvard study released in September. So which is the greater danger to our homeland security, the Taliban or our dysfunctional insurance system?

It seems to me that similar criticisms could be made of all of our military spending, our overseas military bases, our foreign aid, of supporting embassies in other countries, and so on. Are those really the alternatives or is it a false choice? Might we withdraw from Afghanistan only to find ourselves spending even more on defense a couple of years down the road?

I think I’ve made my own views pretty clear. I think that there are tactical, strategic, legal, and moral reasons for not simply withdrawing from Afghanistan but, following the lead of Afghanistan authority Rory Stewart, I think that we need to take a longer, more modest, and less military view. I think that we’ll need what Ralph Peters has described as “a compact, lethal force” in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future but I’m skeptical of any large force of ours in Afghanistan whether for counter-terrorism as has been suggested by Vice President Joe Biden or counter-insurgency as Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s plan that’s on the president’s desk now provides.

What will the president do? What should the president do?

Please leave your policy prescriptions in the comments including the strategic objectives, how you’d accomplish them, the relationship between your preferred approach and the strategic objectives, and how you would mitigate the risks of your approach.

Pollster Glen Bolger (a founding partner at my wife’s firm) looks at the data in the Virginia governor’s race and concludes that Barack Obama hurt Democrat Creigh Deeds.

At the end of tracking, we added some questions paid for by the Republican National Committee specifically to measure the Obama effect.

[...]

The dominant national issue at that time (and still) is health care. Only 44% of likely voters support the Obama plan, while 50% oppose it. Intensity is strongly against — 29% strongly favor/42% strong oppose. The question was worded:

“As you may have heard, President Obama and the Democrats in Congress are preparing a plan to change the health care system. From what you have heard about this plan, do you favor or oppose Obama and the Democrats’ health care proposal?”

We also asked a message question that was stunning for two reasons. One, it was stunning in its rejection of the notion of the Democratic wave of 2006-08 is any lasting move, and it was stunning for how close it was to the final election margin:

“I’m going to read you two statements, and please tell me which one comes closest to your opinion.

Some/Other people say it is more important to elect a Governor who will help President Barack Obama implement his agenda.

Other/Some people say that it is more important to elect a Governor who will serve as a check and balance to President Barack Obama.”

Voters opted for the check and balance by a 55%-35% margin. Independents (who voted for Obama by one point in 2008 in Virginia) opted for a check and balance by an overwhelming 58%-25% margin. Throughout our tracking, we regularly found open-ended comments from Independent voters saying they wanted to balance the overwhelming power that the Democrats have in Washington. Given the absolute power the Dems have in DC, that is a very strong message for GOPers running in 2010.

We tested the impact of the Obama endorsement — 24% said they were more likely to vote for Deeds, while 32% were less likely. The minus eight increment on that can not be encouraging to the White House.

Finally, we tested a simple agree/disagree: “Creigh Deeds’ policies are too close to the policies of President Barack Obama.” Fully 52% agreed and only 30% disagreed. By intensity, 30% strongly agreed and only 9% strongly disagreed. Revisionists on the left are blaming Deeds for not embracing Obama enough, but Virginia voters did not agree. Among Independents, it was 52% agree/28% disagree.

His bottom line is that Obama’s “policies have put fiscal and economic messages back into play for Republicans.”

Presumably, by 2010, it will be even harder for Democrats to run against George W. Bush or the Republican Congress of 2006.  The degree to which Obama will be an asset or a liability to his party will, of course, depend on intervening events.  If we’re still looking at 10 percent unemployment next November, it’ll almost certainly be the latter.

The loss of a Republican seat in NY-23 under highly unusual circumstances notwithstanding, yesterday was a good day for Republicans. After crushing defeats in successive elections, they won back the Virginia governor’s office in a blowout and knocked off a billionaire incumbent governor in New Jersey despite having their vote split between two candidates.

I would, however, resist the temptation to see these contests as a referendum on Barack Obama’s presidency and the Democratic Party, much less a harbinger for 2010 and beyond.

Glenn Reynolds has an op-e in the NY Post titled “The Obama Magic has Faded.”

All politics is local, they say, and Tuesday’s off-off-year elections certainly had their local angles. Jon Corzine has been a terrible governor even by the undemanding standards of terribly governed New Jersey. Creigh Deeds, though he looked good to Democratic Party recruiters not long ago, turned out to be an undistinguished campaigner, more driven by the concerns of Washington Post editorialists than of Virginia voters. And NY-23 Republican nomineee Dede Scozzafava was a bizarre choice, bizarre enough to inspire a seemingly quixotic third-party run by Doug Hoffman.

But these local angles weren’t enough to keep the Obama administration out of the races. President Obama barnstormed Virginia and New Jersey — and pumped money and Joe Biden into NY-23 in support of Democratic candidate Bill Owens. (One suspects Owens would have preferred more money and less Biden.)

And — until it started looking as if they might lose — the Obama people were suggesting that these races would seal their mandate and encourage congressional wafflers to toe the line on health-care reform. Not so much, as it turns out.

Now, this is right, so far as it goes.  Exit poll analyses by both ABC and CBS show Obama remains personally popular but that people are extremely worried about the economy and the direction of the country.  The reality has set in that Obama’s a politician, not a messiah.  While many retain high hopes, most of the irrational exuberance has faded.  And, clearly, he doesn’t have coattails when he’s not on the ballot.  Then again, neither did Ronald Reagan.   Recall that Republicans lost 27 House seats in 1982.

A stronger case is made by Dan Balz in an “analysis” piece at WaPo titled “Contests serve as warning to Democrats: It’s not 2008 anymore.”

Neither gubernatorial election amounted to a referendum on the president, but the changing shape of the electorates in both states and the shifts among key constituencies revealed cracks in the Obama 2008 coalition and demonstrated that, at this point, Republicans have the more energized constituency heading into next year’s midterm elections.

The most significant change came among independent voters, who solidly backed Democrats in 2006 and 2008 but moved decisively to the Republicans on Tuesday, according to exit polls. In Virginia, independents strongly supported Republican Robert F. McDonnell in his victory over Democrat R. Creigh Deeds, while in New Jersey, they supported Republican Chris Christie in his win over Democratic Gov. Jon S. Corzine.

For months, polls have shown that independents were increasingly disaffected with some of Obama’s domestic policies. They have expressed reservations about the president’s health-care efforts and have shown concerns about the growth in government spending and the federal deficit under his leadership.

Tuesday’s elections provided the first tangible evidence that Republicans can win their support with the right kind of candidates and the right messages. That is an ominous development for Democrats if it continues unabated into next year. But Republicans could squander that opportunity if they demand candidates who are too conservative to appeal to the middle.

This is exactly right.  Independents, by their very nature, are fickle.  When thing are going well, they’ll stick with the party in power and when they’re not, they’ll vote for change.

So, if unemployment is still high and we’re still mired in a mess in Afghanistan a year from now, the Republicans will have an opening to make major gains in the House and Senate.  But they’ll need candidates who won’t alienate independents.

I followed the Virginia race with some interest given that I live in the Commonwealth.  It wasn’t a race about Obama or national issues at all.  Deeds was the surprise winner of the Democratic primary, with the well-financed and well-known Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran killing each other off and leaving Deeds standing.   He was a moderate Democrat with appeal to rural Virginians who had narrowly lost to McConnell four years earlier when the latter got 323 more votes for attorney general.  But when the Washington Post went on attack against McDonnell for an old master’s thesis and some rather unprogressive statements about women and homosexuals, Deeds decided to run a nasty campaign hammering at those points.  It backfired, as McConnell turned the other cheek and came across as a decent, reasonable man.  (As an aside, I should note that Republicans easily won the lieutenant governor and attorney general races in landslides, too. )

In New Jersey, Corzine is personally unpopular and his state is in bad shape.  I posited on last night’s OTB Radio that it was all downhill after the motorcade incident, which was the first time I realized what a jackass Corzine was, but I don’t follow Garden State politics closely enough to know for sure.   At any rate, Chris Christie was perceived as a reasonable alternative even in a Democrat-leaning state.  Corzine’s genius advisers decided their best course was to double down on the jerk factor, campaigning on the theme that Christie was too fat to be governor.  Oddly, it didn’t do the trick.

Regardless, these races demonstrate that Republicans can win — even with all the damage to the brand suffered in recent years — given both an opening and a solid candidate.

A USA Today report that “Nearly a year after he was elected on a pledge to change business-as-usual in Washington, Obama also has taken a cue from his predecessors and appointed fundraisers to coveted ambassadorships” and in fact has done so at “a rate higher than any president in more than four decades” combined with  story in The Hill that lobbyists are being routinely invited to fundraisers has, unsurprisingly, generated quite a bit of discussion in the blogosphere.

In my New Atlanticist post “Professional Ambassadors Needed,” I argue that “The real issue here isn’t corruption or even Obama’s hypocrisy” but rather “the fact that presidents have the discretion to appoint pretty much whomever they please to more than 5000 senior positions in the government, that vast number of which would be far better filled with career professionals.”

It makes good sense for presidents to appoint loyalists to key advisory and policymaking positions.  The Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor, for example, need to be people the new president trusts implicitly.  Ditto undersecretaries and other senior policymakers and, to a lesser extent, senior positions at NSC, independent policymaking boards, and the like.  There are legitimate partisan and ideological differences in the country and it’s perfectly reasonable that the public policy decision-making apparatus of the Executive Branch be staffed by people who largely agree with the elected president and serve at his pleasure.

Conversely, ambassadors and other working-level positions carry out policy rather than making it.   Professional officers of our foreign, intelligence, and military service (uniformed and civilian, in the case of the latter) can be trusted to faithfully and expertly carry out their orders.

Changing the law on this and drastically cutting back the number of appointed positions (which, practically, would have to be done prospectively, going into effect with Obama’s successor) would greatly improve the efficiency of our government.  Not only would it ensure that these positions are filled by competent professionals rather than enthusiastic amateurs but it would mean that they are filled, period.  We’re nearly a quarter into Obama’s term and a substantial number of these slots remain unfilled.  The process of selecting, vetting, and confirming individuals for such a large number of vacancies is a tremendous drain of resources.

And, yes, I’ve held this view during Republican administrations as well.

Photo credit: Reuters Pictures.

As widely expected, the Powers That Be have declared the recession  over, while cautioning that the economy still has a long way to go.  And, of course, the Obama administration is crediting its stimulus packages for the good news.

It might not feel like it to most voters, but the U.S. economy is growing again after a more than a year of contraction.  The nation’s gross domestic product grew at a seasonally adjusted rate of 3.5 percent for July through September – the first growth since the spring of 2008, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That marks a sort of unofficial end to the recession that has bedeviled President Barack Obama since he took office. Economists credited the growth to consumer spending – up 3.4 percent – fueled in part by government stimulus, such as the popular Cash-for-Clunkers car-buying program.

But Obama economic adviser Christina Romer stopped well short of declaring victory. “The U.S. economy is moving in the right direction. However, this welcome milestone is just another step, and we still have a long road to travel until the economy is fully recovered,” Romer said in a statement.

That’s because more than 15 million Americans remain out of work, and a jobs report is due next week that’s likely to show the nation’s unemployment rate continues to creep upward toward 10 percent. That means the White House and politicians on the Hill will be very careful about declaring the recession over, even if the economy has finally started growing again.

The Obama administration said its analysis found that the $787 billion stimulus program contributed between 3 and 4 percent points to the GDP growth – meaning the nation’s output would have risen little, if at all, in the past quarter without it.

Now, taking credit for good things that happened on their watch is simply what presidents do.  Bush took credit for his recovery, Clinton for his, and Reagan for his.  Naturally, few presidents take the blame for bad times, which they attribute variously to the business cycle, their predecessors, the Congress, or a national malaise.

But it’s rather clear that neither the $787 billion stimulus nor the Cash for Clunkers programs had much to do with the recovery, such as it is.   Aside from the disputed AP report claiming that the administration’s report used some fuzzy math and bizarre calculations, the fact of the matter is that the recession was global and so, too, is the recovery.  Things happening all over the world, generally, are not explainable by small gestures made in a single country — even a hyperpower.

Cash for Clunkers, most agree, simply moved up sales that would have happened later in the year.  That’s not such a bad thing so far as it goes, except that many dealers are still waiting to get paid.  It’s hard, then, to credit money that hasn’t been distributed for stimulating the economy.  But, yes, condensing several months’ sales into a single month does boost the books for that quarter.

Ditto the “stimulus” package, almost all of which has all along been targeted for out years.  Again, very little of that money has been spent and therefore it’s impossible for it to have done much stimulating, aside from whatever psychological impact the government’s “doing something” may have had.  Most of the “stimulus” will presumably be spent well into the recovery, making it more akin to ordinary “pork.”

Again, this isn’t a partisan attack on Obama.  He inherited an economic crisis and is doing what politicians do under the circumstances.  And, yes, I similarly rejected George W. Bush’s claims that his modest tax rebate ended the recession he inherited from Bill Clinton.  For that matter, I didn’t blame Bill Clinton for said recession nor overly credit him for the economic boom that took place over much of his tenure.  He had the good fortune of being in office during the Internet boom and post-Cold War booms and the good sense not to screw it up.   Presidents have some impact on the economy but not nearly as much as we attribute to them.

As to the recovery itself, the administration is right to downplay expectations.  NPR’s Kevin Whitelaw:

“We’re no longer simply on the roller coaster to hell,” says Donald Luskin, the chief investment officer for Trend Macrolytics LLC, an economics consulting firm. “But the idea of returning back to normal growth levels? That will be well into next year.”

[...]

“In a normal recession, the leaves fall off the trees because it’s autumn,” Luskin says. “In this recession, the leaves fell off the trees because there was an enormous forest fire. It’s a little bit of uncharted territory to know how long it will take to come out of that.”

This time, the damage was so severe that companies and consumers alike appear more reticent to return to their old habits. With Americans still adjusting to the tough new economic realities, consumer spending might not recover for quite some time.

“We have seen a permanent change in consumer behavior after seeing their retirement savings and home values go down,” says Gus Faucher, the director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Economy.com. “People are going to be more cautious coming out of this recession than they have in previous recessions because of the depth of the downturn.”

“Permanent” is the wrong word here.  Consumer confidence always rebounds.  We’ve had numerous booms and busts since the Great Depression, after all.  But not only was this recession deeper than any in quite some time it was this first major economic crisis in today’s 24/7/365 media climate and therefore the most hyped in history.  It’ll naturally take longer to recover.

And some significant percentage of the 10 percent unemployed — a figure that’s all the more staggering after decades of record employment — will never get their old jobs back.  Most will eventually land somewhere but this is a serious shakeup of the composition of our jobs base, not the standard business cycle.

Photo credit: For Granted

Interesting-if-true fact from Patrick Gavin:  President Obama has already played as many rounds of golf after nine months in office as President George W. Bush did in eight years.

President Barack Obama has only been in office for just over nine months, but he’s already hit the links as much as President Bush did in over two years.

CBS’ Mark Knoller — an unofficial documentarian and statistician of all things White House-related — wrote on his Twitter feed that, “Today – Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24. Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months.”

Interesting but irrelevant.  It’s mildly amusing, I suppose, as a retort to the “Watch this drive!” nonsense and general kvetching about how much time Bush spent on leisure activities that he should have instead been devoting to Iraq/Afghanistan/Katrina.   But two sillies don’t make a smart.

The bottom line is that people need down time in order to be effective.  That’s doubly true of leaders.   While it’s possible to overdo it, I’m perfectly happy to have my presidents golfing, horseback riding, brush clearing, or whatever else it is that allows them to blow off steam and get their minds off the job for a couple hours.

I do, however, wish someone would take Obama shopping for some new pants.  First, the mom jeans and now pleated, baggy chinos?  C’mon!

Mark Liebowitz had a piece for NYT over the weekend titled “Man’s World at White House? No Harm, No Foul, Aides Say.” At first blush, it reads like some feminists are genuinely concerned about a male-dominated culture in the West Wing. After awhile, however, one begins to suspect it’s a PR exercise to make President Obama seem more manly.

President Obama and golf partners, including the White House assistant chef Sam Kass, right, during his vacation in August. Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Does the White House feel like a frat house?

The suspicion flared in recent weeks — and not for the first time — after President Obama was criticized by women’s advocates and liberal bloggers for hosting a high-level basketball game with no female players.

The president, after all, is an unabashed First Guy’s Guy. Since being elected, he has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of college hoops on ESPN, indulged a craving for weekend golf, expressed a preference for adopting a “big rambunctious dog” over a “girlie dog” and hoisted beer in a peacemaking effort.

He presides over a White House rife with fist-bumping young men who call each other “dude” and testosterone-brimming personalities like Rahm Emanuel, the often-profane chief of staff; Lawrence Summers, the brash economic adviser; and Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, who habitually speaks in sports metaphors.

The technical foul over the all-male game has become a nagging concern for a White House that has battled an impression dating to the presidential campaign that Mr. Obama’s closest advisers form a boys’ club and that he is too frequently in the company of only men — not just when playing sports, but also when making big decisions.

Uh huh.

“Women are Obama’s base, and they don’t seem to have enough people who look like the base inside of their own inner circle,” said Dee Dee Myers, a former press secretary in the Clinton administration whose sister, Betsy, served as the Obama campaign’s chief operating officer. Ms. Myers said women have high expectations of the president. “Obama has a personal style that appeals to women,” she said. “He is seen as a consensus builder; he is not a towel snapper and does not tell crude jokes.”

Ooh, so he’s not only a Guy’s Guy, but he’s mature and sensitive, too? Oh, my!

Mr. Obama, in an interview with NBC on Wednesday, called the beef over basketball “bunk,” saying that the players were largely picked from a regular Congressional game and that the list of invitees was reviewed by women on his staff. “I don’t think it sends any kind of message or signal whatsoever,” said the president, who often points out that he is surrounded by strong females at home (where he is the only non-canine male). He added, in the interview, that he had hired women into “some of the most important decision-making positions in this White House.”

OK. He loses a couple of Man Points here for 1) blaming the selection of his basketball team on female staffers and 2) having female staffers pick his basketball team.

Mr. Obama is hardly the first commander in chief whose penchant for sports and other guyish stuff (comic books, “Star Trek”) has become part of his presidential persona. The first President George Bush presented himself as a horseshoe-playing, pork-rind-eating Texan. He was followed by the Big Mac-gobbling, cigar-chomping Bill Clinton and the brush-clearing, bike-busting George W. Bush. It worked to good effect, said Mark McKinnon, a media adviser and mountain bike companion of the latter Mr. Bush.

Aside from perhaps the brush-clearing, is there any reason to believe any of this is affect? There’s every reason to believe Bush 41 likes horseshoes and pork rinds and Clinton liked hamburgers and cigars. And all these men were demonstrably avid sportsmen in their day.

As to the merits of the culture clash issue, these passages put it in perspective:

In interviews, five women who work in the White House or advised officials there described the culture with more of a collective eye-roll than any real sense of grievance or discomfort. One junior aide, who like the other women spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about appearing publicly critical, said that the “sports-fan thing at the White House” could become “annoying” and that her relative indifference to athletics could be mildly alienating. And while this is not uncommon in any workplace, sports bonding can afford a point of entree with the boss.

[...]

Recreation is only one source of affinity within a White House culture, people there say. Obama veterans describe a camaraderie forged over a grueling campaign and a merciless nine months at the White House. It is not about gender, they say, but shared experience. “Many of us have known each other for a long time, and we have brother-and-sister kind of relationships,” said Jen Psaki, the deputy press secretary, who works in an office with seven other spokesmen under 35, all “brothers” from the campaign.

[...]

Ms. Dunn said that she recently hosted a baby shower for an administration official and that no men from the office were invited. She is comfortable with that — just as she is fine with never playing basketball with the president. “That is just part of the culture here that I am excluded from,” she said. “And I don’t care.”

Quite right. Women are in very powerful roles in this administration, as they have been in the last several administrations. That’s the direction our culture has taken over the last three decades or so. But it doesn’t mean that men and women aren’t going to still tend to have different interests.

Just once, I’d like to see Obama break out of campaign mode and give an honest answer to silly questions like this. He’s a very good basketball player, especially for a middle aged Harvard Law graduate with a busy schedule. Unless he’s going to invite elite level women’s players (i.e., people good enough for the Olympics or the WNBA) they’re not going to be very good competition. For that matter, aside from pre-pubescent children, who ever heard of co-ed basketball teams?

No worries, though, Obama invited Melody Barnes, his chief domestic policy advisor, to play golf with him Sunday.  Which, naturally, was widely reported.

Taegan Goddard links a Public Policy Polling survey [PDF] showing that President Obama would have beaten the most commonly mentioned Republican hopefuls had the election been held from October 16th to 19th and opened to registered voters.  (I hasten to add, it wasn’t.)

In fact, according to the survey, “Obama leads Mike Huckabee 47-43, Mitt Romney 48-40, Sarah Palin 52-40, and Tim Pawlenty 50-30.”

Considering that Huckabee, Romney, and Pawlenty remain virtual unknowns to most Americans and Obama is the sitting president, I’m not sure this is as depressing news for the GOP as PPP’s Tom Jensen seems to think.  Indeed, Huckabee is actually within the poll’s margin of error!

Look, the 2012 election’s a ridiculously long time from now and it’s pretty silly even talk about it.  Still, as Dave Schuler notes, it’s a Thursday.  Obama’s quite popular and, while his approval is plummeting by historical standards, it’s still pretty good all things considered.  Given our propensity for re-electing sitting presidents, the fact that the economy is bound to be better by mid-2012, and that the Republican Party seems to be in disarray, I’d say Obama is an early favorite to win a second term.  But we’ll have a much better idea in, say, two years.

My strong hunch is that neither Huckabee nor Palin will be the Republican nominee.  The party traditionally nominates the person whose “turn” it is, which would seemingly point to Romney.  But given how sick everyone is with the Washington wing of the GOP, I wouldn’t be shocked if some governor who’s never run before emerges out of nowhere.

In new guidelines announced today, the Obama Administration has decided that it will deferring to the states on enforcing marijuana laws when those states have laws allowing the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors today.

Two Justice Department officials described the policy to the Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state laws.

The policy is a significant departure from the Bush administration, which insisted it would continue to enforce federal anti-pot laws regardless of state codes.

Fourteen states allow some use of marijuana for medical purposes: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

A small step in the right direction, but a step nonetheless.

Joseph Ashby argues that something fishy is being ignored in the matter of Rush Limbaugh’s failed bid to buy the Rams.

NFL Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith served as counsel to Attorney General Eric Holder and was a member of Barack Obama’s transition team.

[...]

Despite the fact that Smith’s opposition was based on Limbaugh’s political commentary, the report failed to mention that Smith’s political connections (including those to whom he donated thousands of dollars) have a vested interest in Limbaugh’s discrediting.

[...]

Smith’s gross conflict of interest and apparent political targeting of Obama’s top foe is a huge story. Unfortunately the media appears too blinded by their prejudice of Limbaugh to report on it.

To summarize, we know that a former Obama official and political ally–who was chosen by the NFLPA specifically for his political clout and connections to the highest rungs of power in government–directly attacked Limbaugh for the radio-talker’s political commentary.

Historically politicians have been prone to vindictive and petty behavior, but never in American history has someone had so much power to pummel his political opponents as President Obama. With control over banks, insurance companies, car companies, media (sports media included) and unions (like the NFL players union), Obama tentacles seem to penetrate into nearly every corner of the nation.

Glenn Reynolds, from whom I got the link, doesn’t directly comment but does pass on this from a reader email: “BTW this is a big, big deal, and something Nixon ( or maybe Gene Talmadge or George Wallace in his heyday.) would have done. The difference is the press wouldn’t have played along then. Not because it was wrong. The press could care less about that ( Go look up Walter Duranty), but because Nixon wasn’t a Democrat. It’s all about power with the press…their power. You get in between them and it, heaven help you.”

Now, unlike Glenn, I am not a lawyer (or, as they say on the Internets, “IANAL”).  But I fail to see a problem here.

For the sake of argument, let’s concoct an outlandish conspiracy totally unsupported by facts:

Attorney General Holder personally called Smith and says:  “Hey, Rush Limbaugh has placed a bid to become a minority owner of the Rams.  He’s been a real thorn in our sides.  Do whatever you can to screw him over and paint him as a racist.  I’ll send over some fake quotes that I saw on Wikipedia which will help!’

Smith:  “Yes, sir, boss!   I’ll also call up Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.  They’ll help for free, since Limbaugh makes fun of them all the time.”

At this point, the story unfolds as we’ve seen it.

(Again, this is a completely made-up scenario.  It strikes me as far more plausible that Smith and Holder — both African American liberal Democrats — came to dislike Limbaugh independently and needed no coordination whatsoever. Ockham’s Razor and all that.)

Would any laws have been broken?  Would Smith or Holder be in violation of any professional codes?  Would Smith be in any violation of his fidiciary duties as NFLPA head? None that I can see.  Limbaugh’s a controversial figure believed by a not inconsiderable number of people to be racist.   It’s quite likely, then, that some number of NFLPA members were antsy about Limbaugh as an owner.

Further, Smith is an attorney.  Like many in his profession, he’s had numerous clients.  Does having had a client in the past that might have some tangential interest in a matter being worked on for a current client usually require some sort of formal disclosure?   I’m unaware of such a requirement but, again, IANAL.

In this morning’s Washington Post Prince Turki al-Faisal of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, former director general of their intelligence service and also their former ambassador to the United States offers President Obama some advice on how to proceed in Afghanistan with which I find I am in almost complete agreement. His advice consists of six action items:

• There is no viable opposition to Karzai in Afghanistan. He is a fact. Deal with it.
• Concentrate on fighting foreign terrorists and build bridges with the Taliban.
• Fix the Durand Line.
• Meet with the security and intelligence departments of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, China, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to devise ways of eliminating Al Qaeda’s leadership. Nobody has more on the line than the Saudis in that battle and Russia and China are at greater risk than we are from them.
• Exert influence to induce Pakistan and India to resolve the matter of Kashmir.
• Use measures similar to those used in Turkey (in which the U. S. bought the entire crop directly from farmers, something I’ve been suggesting, and allowed them to plant alternative crops).

Read the whole thing. I’m hoping that John Burgess will weigh in on this. John, are you there?

One of the coolest things about the internet, in my opinion, is the way that it opens up markets for goods that might not be economically viable locally, but are economically viable when every business in the world has a global reach. This has opened us up to a vast array of goods and services that simply weren’t economically viable before.

That said, I think that even on the Internet, the market for this flag can’t be big enough to be economically viable:

(link via John Scalzi)