TigerHawk

Thought experiment: If a Republican administration fired an inspector general watchdog under dodgy circumstances, would the story be confined to the cranky end of the blogosphere?

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.

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The WSJ's web site has an interactive map that shows the percentage of homes that are in a negative equity position, by state. If you believe that the best time to buy is when blood runs in the streets and you have courage and wherewithal, perhaps the map also points toward the next big profits in residential real estate. If, after all, you believe we are setting ourselves up for some whopping inflation, then now might be the right time to buy hard assets with other people's money.

Yeah, I know. That was a very anti-social thing to write. Sorry.

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Iowa's coach Kirk Ferentz assumes the position during Saturday's shut-out of the Minnesota Golden Gophers. The question is, what position?

CWCID

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AP profiles San Jose, California, kindergarten teacher Kinzi Blair to illustrate part of the debate about who should bear the costs of funding health care reform. Blair makes $46,000 per year, but has a "Cadillac" health plan, and her employer pays $11,000 per year of premiums. She has no deductible and a $10 co-pay, with extensive coverage.

So, it turns out that some regular people -- not just rich corporate tools -- have nice health plans, some of which would be potentially subject to new taxes under the House or Senate plans. Under the Senate plan, according to the AP piece, Blair's insurance company would be taxed 40% of the amount of her premium greater than $8,500, or about $1,000. Somehow, this is not construed as a tax on Blair (although it is highly likely that the tax on her benefits will cost her something directly in the long run), because otherwise that would be: a) a new tax on someone making less than $250,000 per year; and b) a new tax on a member of a key Democratic Party constituent, a teacher.

The article quotes a Democratic lawmaker regarding his take on the hoped for "gross-up" effect:

One of the arguments for the Cadillac tax is that companies would spend their money to pay higher wages instead of providing rich benefits. Or so the thinking goes.

"The notion that there will be a corresponding increase in wages? You walk into a teachers' lounge or a break room in a factory and say that, you get laughed out of there. Maybe they'd chase you out of there," says Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn.

Courtney quickly scrambles back on the bus with a quote that would make Willie Sutton proud ("Why do you rob banks?" "Because that's where the money is."):

The House bill includes a 5.4 percent tax on individuals making more than $500,000 and families making more than $1 million. Courtney says that's the fair way to pay for reform.

"This is a slice of American society that has gotten a very good ride over the past 10 years," Courtney said.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate and say that there will not be anywhere near enough $1 million income families to come close to covering even a fraction of the cost of the bills, and that the existing forecasts are static (don't take into consideration the tax planning reaction of such families) and way high. But, hey, why limit it to 5.4% on amounts over $1 million? Why not 6.9%? Why not 9.6%? Why not 20%? To paraphrase Napoleon regarding Vienna, if you're going to kill the goose, kill the goose, and don't worry about any foregone golden eggs. Willie Sutton wouldn't stop at a measly few percent of the cash on hand at a bank.

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The New York Times is suddenly punctilious about publishing documents that might have been obtained illegally, at least if it might hurt the credibility of the climate alartmists. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that on this one Glenn Reynolds is speaking for the entire righty blogosphere: "You know, unless doing so would hurt national security, or something."

Sheesh. Clark Hoyt is going to have to turn some pretty cartwheels to explain this one away. Send him an email at public@nytimes.com and see if he has anything useful to say.

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...be happy you are not British. English feminists are complaining that this Christmas ad for the Marks & Spencer department store is demeaning to women.

As Ad Freak points out, the Brits simply have no idea how demeaning advertising can be...

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The TH Daughter and I went in to New York for hoofing around on a simply beautiful late autumn day. We arrived at Penn Station around 11, and by many stops walked to Dylan's Candy Bar at 60th and Third, where we spent a ridiculous amount of money on a tiny amount of candy. Apparently color-coordinated M&Ms command unusually high gross margins.

From Dylan's we took a cab to the American Apparel store on E. Houston, then walked through SoHo to Chinatown where we took in the sights and partied down with fried dumplings and vegetable fried rice. I took a few pictures along the way. Run your cursor for short descriptions.

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John Hawkins: "About himself, the president speaks loudly. For America, he carries a small twig." -- Mark Steyn

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Glenn Reynolds links to this bit from Anthony Dick at the Corner about University of California students protesting cuts in subsidies. The spectacle of generally left-wing students demanding that more wealth be transferred up to them is as amusing -- or irritating, depending on your taste -- now as it always has been.

First and foremost, the protests are about privileged kids demanding subsidies from working people. The UC system will continue to be heavily subsidized by taxpayers, and the students who attend are among the most naturally gifted, with the highest future earning potential, in the country. This is especially true at the system's flagship schools of Berkeley and UCLA, where the protests have been most intense. Narcissism and self-absorption are the norm on college campuses, but it really is pushing the limits to throw such a tantrum at the idea that you will be getting a smaller amount of free money taken out of the paychecks of strapped taxpayers, most of whom could never dream of the advantages and opportunities you enjoy.

Commentary

Of course, it has always been thus, or at least has been since government decided to subsidize higher education with land grants first and then more direct aid, including subsidized student loans and grants for research from which the recipient universities would extract massive "overhead" charges. From a certain cramped point of view, all of these subsidies are transfers from working people to the privileged. This view is "cramped" because it misses the point. We subsidize higher education for essentially social reasons, including to raise the competence of the work force and to support scholarship that could not happen otherwise. That individuals reap a windfall from these subsidies in the form of higher salaries in the future (in the case of students) and professional advancement (in the case of professors) is, in principle, an unintended consequence of the subsidies, not the objective of them.

Unfortunately, we have lost track of this thinking in recent years. Support for universities has taken on the attributes of most pork-barrel spending, so we have money going for all sorts of things for which it is hard, if not impossible, to justify subsidies on any intellectually honest basis. Intercollegiate athletic programs come to mind (much as I enjoy them, I cannot come up with a good reason to subsidize them), and so probably do most professional schools.

Something else, however, has also changed. Higher education, especially elite higher education, drives far more incremental earnings today than it did when we started subsidizing universities in a big way. Rightly or wrongly, a degree from a top school is perceived as the key to the good life. In effect, the unintended benefits of subsidies that flow to students have become far more valuable than they once were. It should not surprise us, therefore, that the recipients of those subsidies are ever more dogged in their defense of them, and that their demands for more, or even the preservation of the status quo, smell so self-interested.

If the value of an elite higher education continues to increase faster than the value of the "average" education, big subsidies for elite universities will increasingly offend norms of distributive justice on both left and right. The academic left will respond as it always does, expiating its guilt by proposing different massive subsidies for the "poor," by which it means a huge proportion of the population, and the right will increasingly attack the subsidies themselves. Both responses dodge the real need to explore anew the social purpose for subsidies for higher education.
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I walked from 42nd and Third to Penn Station this morning, and took a couple of pictures along the way. Bryant Park:

I used this camera, only orange.

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I walked across the campus from the Dinky station this afternoon, and snapped a few pics that some of you, at least, might enjoy.

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Parody this may be, but if it has not actually happened already it will before the health care "reform" bill gets passed...

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Iraqi jihadis really know how to piss off the cheese heads.

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Easily made, easily broken.

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.

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The "Climate Skeptics Party" in Australia has launched a new television campaign that is bound to stir things up down under:

More along the same lines here.

No news on the sources of funding. Regardless, these ads will irritate all the right people.

Meanwhile, Der Spiegel -- a publication heretofore not known for being Big Oil's mouthpiece -- reports that climate scientists are "baffled" -- its word, not mine -- by the recent flattening in global average temperature (emphasis added):

The planet's temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. "At present, however, the warming is taking a break," confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany's best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. "There can be no argument about that," he says. "We have to face that fact."

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

"It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community," says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. "We don't really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point."

Of course, all of the disaster scenarios that justify massive regulation of greenhouse gas depend from the various climate models. If the models do not work in the short run, is there so much as a shred of evidence that they are accurately predicting the climate decades from now?
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Word.

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Harry Reid's health care bill includes a dancing plethora of new taxes, forcing the Obama administration to consider the important distinctions between broken promises, predictions that happen not to come true, and bare-faced lies. Among them is a new federal tax on comestic surgery, not simply the products used therein but the surgeon's fees for the procedure itself. This report from Oppenheimer addresses the various questions around the tax, including its impact on various of the public companies in the field.

Naturally, I have several reactions to the proposed tax.

First, all you plastic surgeons who voted for Barack Obama: Bwahahahaha!

Seriously, you had to know when you voted for the dude that he would target the rate of return of any industry that does not serve an important social purpose according to your average Harvard professor. You thought that oil, electric power, banking, Wall Street, pharmaceuticals and medical devices were all special cases? Fool.

Second, there are a great many customers of plastic surgeons, past and future, in Harry Reid's home state of Nevada. Singling out aesthetic surgery for a special tax seems like a dangerous move for him, but maybe I'm wrong. Do women with breast implants or Botox treatments not vote?

We admit, we're looking forward to the "I have breast implants, and I vote" bumper stickers.

Oh, OK:



Third, this tax will have a significant disparate impact on women, who purchase a disproportionate share [UPDATE: approximately 90% in 2004] of the aesthetic surgery in this country. Or is it OK to tax those women, because they are PNQLU^*, dear? Perhaps the Democrats imagine that these women are Sarah Palin's base, so it will not hurt them to impose this tax. If so, they might do well to consider the many ads placed by aesthetic surgeons in Princeton's local "Town Topics" newspaper.

Fourth, what's the logic behind the policy? Aesthetic surgery is not covered by health insurance, so there cannot be "overutilization" expense that hits the federal health care budget. It is a luxury service, just like a gym membership, tickets to the World Series, an evening of gambling in Vegas, a fine dinner at a top restaurant, or a night at the opera. Other than sheer snobbery, why ought we tax aesthetic surgery to pay for health care any more than any other luxury service? What possible rationale could there be to tax aesthetic surgery (which, if anything, absorbs overhead that would otherwise burden "medically necessary" surgery that the government does pay for) and not these other luxury services?

In the end, the Democratic elite are using the excuse of health care reform to impose their own sense of aesthetics on American life. The proposed tax on aesthetic surgery is but one early example, quite obviously the mere tip of the iceberg, the camel's nose, and the slippery slope all rolled in to one. There is no rationale for the tax related to health care reform per se, only the desire to raise revenue at the expense of a class of people who are unlikely to raise much of a ruckus. Who, after all, will stand up and oppose the tax because they want their breasts enlarged (or, for that matter, reduced), their thighs re-shaped, or their tummy tucked? [UPDATE: Last year, a poll found that 48 percent of women "would be" interested in aesthetic surgery, and another 23 percent "might be." That's a pretty big block of voters, Senator Reid.]

MORE: CoulterLanche! Not had one of those before...

____________________________
*People Not Quite Like Us

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Watch this selection from Eric Holder's Senate testimony on the use of the civilian criminal justice system to try jihadis who kill Americans. Leaving the substantive arguments to Andy McCarthy, who has just been beating the hell out of them over at The Corner for days, how is it possible that Holder was not ready for the Miranda question?

Boggles my mind.

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In the "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" department, the Maersk Alabama was not boarded by pirates:

Somali pirates attacked the Maersk Alabama on Wednesday for the second time in seven months and were thwarted by private guards on board the U.S.-flagged ship who fired off guns and a high-decibel noise device.

Oddly, there is not a consensus that the actions of the Maersk Alabama are a good thing:

Roger Middleton, a piracy expert at the London-based think tank Chatham House, said the international maritime community was still "solidly against" armed guards aboard vessels at sea, but that American ships have taken a different line than the rest of the international community.

"Shipping companies are still pretty much overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of armed guards," Middleton said. "Lots of private security companies employee people who don't have maritime experience. Also, there's the idea that it's the responsibility of states and navies to provide security. I would think it's a step backward if we start privatizing security of the shipping trade."

Isn't there an old saying about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure, or something like that?

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The deal proposed by the UN regarding nuclear fuel has been rejected by Iran:

Iran's foreign minister on Wednesday said his country would not export its enriched uranium for further processing, effectively rejecting the latest U.N. plan aimed at preventing Tehran from building nuclear weapons.

Instead Manochehr Mottaki said Iran would consider a nuclear swap inside Iran as an alternative plan.

The United Nations last month offered a deal to take 70 percent of Iran's low-enriched uranium to reduce its stockpile of material that could be enriched to a higher level, and possibly be used to make nuclear weapons.

That uranium would be returned about a year later as refined fuel rods, which would solve the impasse over its nuclear program. Fuel rods cannot be readily turned into weapons-grade material.

Mottaki also took a swipe at the U.S. Secretary of State:

"Diplomacy is not all or nothing. Mrs. Clinton's comments that Iran must accept only this proposal is not diplomatic."

Maybe the term "Smart Diplomacy" does not translate well into Farsi.

In other news, Peyton Manning is a good quarterback, LeBron James can really play basketball, and, late this afternoon, the sun will set in the west.

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Lobbying as metaphor: An argument against the "public option" via pick-up basketball.

Not the single most politically correct video you are going to see this week -- or is it legitimate given the president's own use of basketball on the campaign trail? -- but the point is well-taken.

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...what does Tom Hayden know that we do not?

One man's dream is surely another's nightmare.

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Talk about your inconvenient factoids. How does anybody with two brain cells to rub together, even if he did go to Harvard, think that anywhere on the inside of the earth has a temperature of "several million degrees." And how did Conan not call him on it?

I suppose it is just as well that Gore did not win a Nobel Prize for science.

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The heavy travel continues apace so no promises here, but Edward Luttwak's most recent effort in Foreign Policy is worth your time. He suggests that if the United States wishes to retain its status as the indispensible power (an open question in the age of Obama), it needs to emulate the Byzantine Empire rather than the Roman. Specifically:

I've spent the past two decades poring over these texts to compile a study of Byzantine grand strategy. The United States would do well to heed the following seven lessons if it wishes to remain a great power:

I. Avoid war by every possible means, in all possible circumstances, but always act as if war might start at any time. Train intensively and be ready for battle at all times -- but do not be eager to fight. The highest purpose of combat readiness is to reduce the probability of having to fight.

II. Gather intelligence on the enemy and his mentality, and monitor his actions continuously. Efforts to do so by all possible means might not be very productive, but they are seldom wasted.

III. Campaign vigorously, both offensively and defensively, but avoid battles, especially large-scale battles, except in very favorable circumstances. Don't think like the Romans, who viewed persuasion as just an adjunct to force. Instead, employ force in the smallest possible doses to help persuade the persuadable and harm those not yet amenable to persuasion.

IV. Replace the battle of attrition and occupation of countries with maneuver warfare -- lightning strikes and offensive raids to disrupt enemies, followed by rapid withdrawals. The object is not to destroy your enemies, because they can become tomorrow's allies. A multiplicity of enemies can be less of a threat than just one, so long as they can be persuaded to attack one another.

V. Strive to end wars successfully by recruiting allies to change the balance of power. Diplomacy is even more important during war than peace. Reject, as the Byzantines did, the foolish aphorism that when the guns speak, diplomats fall silent. The most useful allies are those nearest to the enemy, for they know how best to fight his forces.

VI. Subversion is the cheapest path to victory. So cheap, in fact, as compared with the costs and risks of battle, that it must always be attempted, even with the most seemingly irreconcilable enemies. Remember: Even religious fanatics can be bribed, as the Byzantines were some of the first to discover, because zealots can be quite creative in inventing religious justifications for betraying their own cause ("since the ultimate victory of Islam is inevitable anyway …").

VII. When diplomacy and subversion are not enough and fighting is unavoidable, use methods and tactics that exploit enemy weaknesses, avoid consuming combat forces, and patiently whittle down the enemy's strength. This might require much time. But there is no urgency because as soon as one enemy is no more, another will surely take his place. All is constantly changing as rulers and nations rise and fall. Only the empire is eternal -- if, that is, it does not exhaust itself.

Commentary

Recognizing that the Bush administation did not follow this useful advice, the "progressives" now in charge of our foreign policy have evidenced no stomach for the hardball covert ops necessary to go Byzantine on our rivals and enemies. That points to a paradox: If you do not like overt war, then you need to have the stomach for shadow war. If American hawks have been too quick to wage the former, American liberals (since the Carter years) have done everything they can to block, defund, and undermine the latter. This is curious, since nothing is more likely to lead to ill-advised overt war than the inability to win a shadow war. The liberal desire to substitute "diplomacy" for both -- as if diplomacy were its own discipline that operates in a vacuum -- will lead to nothing but the weakening of America.
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It is at least hideous that Christmas ads are already running on television, but this one stands out as the best I've seen so far:

How do you not like that ad?

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Am I the only one who just noticed the ads for the Reebok "EasyTone" shoe, which allegedly produce "better legs and a better butt with every step"? These are running on my health club TV right now.

I did not know that Reebok had written off the feminist market.

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Paul Kedrosky built up a nice chart of the ratio of unemployed people per job listing, with the sucking chest wound that is Detroit on the right side of the graph. Kedrosky headlined the Detroit number in his post, but take a look at the robust employment market in our nation's capital. Relevant TigerHawk poll question below.

Looking at the ratios of unemployed to job listings in each of Detroit or Washington, which number concerns you more?
	Detroit's: The Motor City was once the heartbeat of America, and its collapse is a national tragedy.
	Washington's: Every job you add in Washington kills at least one other somewhere else in America.
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Release the hounds.

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If you are an investor, director, or employee, beware CEOs who "win" personal business awards.

Compensation, status, and press coverage of managers in the United States follow a highly skewed distribution: a small number of “superstars” enjoy the bulk of the rewards. We evaluate the impact of CEOs achieving superstar status on the performance of their firms, using prestigious business awards to measure shocks to CEO status. We find that award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, both relative to their prior performance and relative to a matched sample of non-winning CEOs.

Ego is expensive. Few successful leaders have any shortage of ego, but you need to pay attention when it starts to get out of hand. CEOs who aggrandize themselves are rarely helping anybody other than themselves.

CEOs who seek "awards" almost always love talking to the press. While that can make sense if your company sells a consumer products, there is rarely a good reason to speak to the press if your customers are other businesses or professionals or otherwise uninterested in you personally. There are, however, plenty of reasons not to talk to the press, including that the media loves nothing more than to tear down its own creations and politically ambitious prosecutors will gain more if they can pin a business crime on an executive with a public image to uphold. Neither is good for the CEO's company. A CEO should therefore spend as little time on television or talking to the general media as humanly possible.
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Amazon.com has generated a helpful page that includes the "top 100 books" of 2009 ranked both by editors and Amazon purchasers who wrote reviews. The differences in the two lists are not surprising, included the prominence of conservative books in the latter.

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Ex-congressman William Jefferson (D-LA) is going to jail for a long time.

A former Louisiana congressman who famously hid $90,000 cash in his freezer was sentenced Friday to 13 years in prison for taking bribes, the longest term ever imposed on a congressman for bribery charges.

William Jefferson, a Democrat who represented parts of New Orleans for nearly 20 years, was convicted in August of taking roughly $500,000 in bribes and seeking millions more in exchange for using his influence to broker business deals in Africa.

Congratulations to AP for not making us play "name that party," and for putting Jefferson's sentence in context further down in the piece, mentioning Duke Cunningham's (R-CA) 8 years, Bob Ney's (R-OH) 2.5 years and Jim Traficant's (D-OH) 7 years.

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Via Tom Kirkendall, "the easiest question for a lawyer to answer."

A bit anti-social, to be sure, but a great exposition of the tension between one's individual interest and the public at large. It is essentially never wise to speak to the police, but if nobody spoke to the police we would be in a world of hurt. Yet that is where we find ourselves, in no small part because of the profound complexity of federal criminal law, which can snare just about any person who makes consequential decisions at any time, no matter how well intended or honorable he or she may be.

Watch it -- it is much better than any TV you are likely to watch this evening -- and wait for the cop who talks in the second half of the video.

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If people on the dole give up more when they go to work than they can possibly earn on the job -- an implicit marginal tax rate of more than 100% -- they will become permanent constituents for the welfare state.

Increasingly, that seems like the plan.

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Click here, then slide the scale underneath the picture. Way cool.

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According to Andy McCarthy (who is a very smart former prosecutor who certainly knows how political the Justice Department can be), there is only one reason to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a civilian court: To allow for the public examination of Bush-era anti-terrorism policies that Attorney General Eric Holder does not have the political courage, or permission, to publicize directly.

Talk amongst yourselves while I fly home.

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How do you spend an extra $210 billion just like that and simultaneously claim you are cutting spending? With a "rule."

Doctors, apparently, are willing to sell the Democrats the rope to hang them by.

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An unusually harsh column from the WaPo's Dana Milbank:

It sounds tailor-made for a GOP ad:

Unemployment hits 9.4 percent. President Obama flies to France.

Joblessness reaches 9.7 percent. Obama jets off to Denmark.

The rate of those out of work soars to 10.2 percent. Obama packs his bags for Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea.

Faced with the worst domestic economy in decades, the president has responded -- by setting a record for foreign travel. An Asian swing that began Thursday will bring his total this year to 20 countries in eight trips, according to CBS News's Mark Knoller, official statistician of the White House press corps.

That easily bests the previous record-holder, George H.W. Bush, who hit 14 countries in his first year. By the time he returns next week, Obama will have spent more than 12 percent of his presidency overseas -- and he still has another trip or two in the works for this year.

[Lots of stuff about how popular Obama is among foreigners, how the Republicans have not attacked Obama for his globe-trotting because it would remind people how unpopular George W. Bush was overseas, and how the foreign media has sucked up to him.]

As he prepared to leave the White House on Thursday morning, Obama first stopped to address the cameras in the Diplomatic Reception Room. "Before departing for Asia this morning, I'd like to make a brief statement about the economy," he said, assuring Americans that he'll "be meeting with leaders abroad to discuss a strategy for growth" and to make sure "Asian and Pacific markets are open to our exports."


Nineteen minutes later, Marine One and the peripatetic president were airborne again.

Four hours after that, Obama was safely over Canada when his Treasury Department announced another record monthly budget deficit.

Ouch.
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While I am not normally a fan of dirty tricks in politics, this one makes me think better of Barack Obama.

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Sitting as I am among the homeless in the Starbucks on Clay Street across from the "Pyramid" in San Francisco, deep thoughts are a bit thin on the ground this morning (except, maybe, that the city by the bay ought to rethink its handling of the homeless, but there I go again). Time, therefore, for a tab dump!

The WSJ has a great front page story this morning (open to non-subscribers) about a big surge in the American tradition of "tinkering," the invention of physical products rather than software or services. A whole new generation of inexpensive computer-driven fabrication machines has made it possible for kids to engineer new bike parts in their dorm rooms (to pick one example). It is the most optimistic story I've read in days, and if you are romantic about American entrepreneurialism, which I most certainly am, it will put you in a good mood all morning.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, priced in gold, since 1900. If you are made of brass, maybe it is time to short gold and buy stocks! You could end up with the next trade of the century...

French women are getting fatter. Is your reaction schadenfreude, or despair? Having something of a thing for French women, I choose despair.

If you thought October was really, really, cold and wet, you were on to something.

Gotta scramble. More later.

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This, I think, is a curious public relations strategy (bold emphasis added):

President Obama and his war council plan today to review four basic strategy options for Afghanistan that could increase the number of U.S. troops there by as many as 40,000 or fewer than 10,000.

The White House insisted Tuesday that Obama has not decided how many additional troops to send or how he will deploy them, though the White House has narrowed the options to those outlined by his national security team, the Pentagon and Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and allied commander in Afghanistan.

The White House has in fact been insisting for weeks that Barack Obama has not yet decided what to do about Afghanistan. What might once have been judicious deliberation is looking increasingly like analysis paralysis. The question is, why does the White House publicity operation believe that the failure to decide -- or, if you want to be charitable, the delay in making a decision -- is something to be "insisted" upon?

I suspect that some of the reason is that the current administration is led and dominated by lawyers. Lawyers, as a matter of professional impulse, respect deliberation per se, and regard the process for reaching a decision to be as if not more important than the substance. To a lawyer, if a decision is not made for the right reason then it is a bad decision even if everything works out for the best in the end. We learn this in law school, and the argument is made in American courtrooms every hour of every day.

The lawyer's high regard for process and analytical rigor is quite different from the cognitive style of most executives, such as business and military leaders. Analysis certainly informs executive function, but decision-makers integrate it with more ineffable considerations, including the messaging value inherent in actually making a decision. Leaders understand that most people (but generally not lawyers!) want to be led, and that leadership consists in no small part of being seen to make decisions efficiently and quickly. Barack Obama's White House does not seem to get that. If the administration keeps "insisting" that Obama has not decided on things, people are going to start wishing for a "Decider."
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I'm not a huge fan of capital punishment, but in this case it is about freaking time.

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