The problem facing international security is that people who believe something will always be stronger and more committed than people who believe nothing — which unfortunately describes the complacent passivity of most Western intellectuals these days.

I take the Burkean and Oakeshottian view that conservatism epistemologically means an abandonment of certainty in practical life, which means a skepticism toward both radical change and toward rigid aversion to all change. Conservatives who never want change or who resist it consistently are not conservatives in this sense. They are reactionaries, hewing to an abstract ideology or theology or simply unthinking temperament where true conservatism would allow itself flexibility. Conservatives who embrace all change regardless or without due caution are obviously not conservative at all. What marks the conservative temperament, rather, is a willingness to change, sometimes radically, but never without a deep sense of  loss. Conservative change has none of the thrill of liberal “progress”. It has a tragic tincture to it, even as the conservative statesman will sometimes go further than any liberal might. Think Disraeli on suffrage, or Lincoln on war, or Burke on American independence, or Reagan on nuclear weapons.

By the end of the Clinton administration, I was content to celebrate the triumph of conservatism as I understood it, and had no desire for other than incremental changes in the economic and social structure of the United States. I saw no need for the estate tax to be abolished, marginal personal-income tax rates further reduced, the government shrunk, pragmatism in constitutional law jettisoned in favor of “originalism,” the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the public sphere expanded. All these became causes embraced by the new conservatism that crested with the reelection of Bush in 2004.

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

Now turn to concern over the potential excesses of liberalism.

“Elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse.”

“Various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.”

In the past several decades, the cost of higher education has climbed at an astounding pace — faster than the Consumer Price Index, faster even than the cost of medical care. Over the past 30 years, the average annual cost of college tuition, fees, and room and board has increased nearly 100 percent, from $7,857 in 1977-78 to $15,665 in 2007-08 (in constant 2006-07 dollars). Median household income, on the other hand, has risen a mere 18 percent over that same period, from about $42,500 to just over $50,000. College costs, in other words, have gone up at more than five times the rate of income.

So how did the cost of a college education become so expensive? Kroll points to access, or the shift from grants to loans in federal funding of higher education. He argues for making college more affordable again by reversing this shift and making more aid available. Huh?!!! He fails to look into what has caused this 100 percent increase in the cost of college tuition, fees, room and board? Therein lies the root of the problem. It was not the inability to pay for more that caused the cost of higher education to skyrocket. In my humble opinion, the responsibility would rest with college trustees, presidents, and maybe even some athletic directors. Blaming the lack of financial aid, or more accurately, the right type of financial aid, misses the big part of the problem.

Resources: “Measuring Up 2008: The National Report Card on Higher Education” by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

So who is this guy. Matt Taibbi says,

 Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington’s deregulation of the Wall Street casino. “It’s all about the regulatory environment,” says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. “These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that.”

Regulatory environment you say? Interesting, does Phil Gramm aware of this?

He offers a unique description of a CDO (collateralized debt obligations) as well:

 A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you’ll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or “tranche.” They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody’s and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating — meaning it has close to zero credit risk.

Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.

“In 2004, a year in which Wal-Mart reported $9.1 billion in profits, the retailer’s California employees collected $86 million in public assistance, according to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley. Other studies have revealed widespread use of publicly funded health care by Wal-Mart employees in numerous states. In 2004, Democratic staffers of the House education and workforce committee calculated that each 200-employee Wal-Mart store costs taxpayers an average of more than $400,000 a year, based on entitlements ranging from energy-assistance grants to Medicaid to food stamps to WIC—the federal program that provides food to low-income women with children.”

And I thought it was welfare queens that were the problem.

In their defense coaches point to the revenue that their programs generate to universities, but as one commenter notes,

“the math used in this article is misleading to the point of being dishonest. Yes, UCONN and BC sports “generate” a lot of cash. But, that is “gross revenue”, to get at the real “income” [or loss] you have to subtract the cost of building those coliseums and palaces that big time programs “require”, the salaries of not only the big time coach, but all the assistants, tutors, PR people, trainers, airfares, hotel bills, etc.”

“Republican senators are on notice,” Scott Wheeler, the executive director of The National Republican Trust PAC said. “If they support the stimulus package, we will make sure every voter in their state knows how they tried to further bankrupt voters in an already bad economy.”

Limiting spending is always a good idea, but playing pure, childish politics during a crisis is another. And where was this fellow and all his friends for the last eight years, or even the last six months  when “their” President was leading the candy land giveaway.

As for the rest of the Republican party, they know the difference between right and wrong. They are continuing to fight the good fight for all Americans - through the time honored traditions of obstruction and fundraising!