Barack Obama’s “Panic Week” has come and gone, but did his White House learn anything from the historic repudiation of his leftist agenda? Putting the question another way, has Obama made the necessary course corrections or is he still refusing to hear the message that America is sending him so loudly and clearly?

Given the Democratic Party’s stunning defeat in Massachusetts, its November losses in New Jersey and Virginia and its increasingly bleak 2010 electoral prospects, one would think Obama has no choice but to follow the route Bill Clinton took to the right sixteen years ago when he stared down similar circumstances. After all, with the exception of passing his so-called “economic stimulus” bill, Obama has been unable to get any major legislation through the U.S. Congress – this despite the presence of a sizeable Democratic majority in the House and (until recently) a filibuster-proof Democratic “super-majority” in the Senate.

Imagine how tough he’ll find the sledding now.

Unfortunately, Obama remains completely tone deaf to the will of the people. In fact, the only thing that has changed in his White House as a result of these repeated electoral setbacks is the way he is pursuing his socialist agenda.

“Hope and change” obviously didn’t work, so now it’s time for some good old-fashioned “smoke and mirrors.”

After picking their jaws up off the floor following Sen.-elect Scott Brown’s shocking victory in Massachusetts – a race in which Obama’s intervention actually moved voters away from Democrat Martha Coakley – the very first thing the White House brain trust did was to “elevate the role” of a professional political operative. In fact, Obama’s “elevation” of former campaign manager David Plouffe signaled right away that any attempt on the part of his administration to recalibrate its political compass would be purely cosmetic in nature.

In fact, just three days after his party’s Massachusetts defeat, Obama was out looking for “low hanging fruit,” or a convenient enemy that all Americans – but particularly independent voters – could join him in opposing. He quickly found that enemy in Wall Street bankers, who are the same “fat cats” who then-Senator Obama supported via the TARP bailout, ironically.

Now boasting that he was “ready for a fight,” Obama proceeded to propose a new tax on these financial institutions – one that a recent Rasmussen Reports poll found was supported (conditionally, at least) by 56% of Americans.

Of course that poll also found that nearly 70% of Americans oppose extending the tax to banks that did not receive bailout money – while 72% believe that bailout recipients like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be required to pay any new tax, as well.

Next up on the agenda for Obama’s crass populist propagandists? Spending.

Because polling has consistently shown that independent voters are leery of government’s unsustainable deficit spending, Obama’s next move was to unveil a so-called “freeze” on budget growth. Unfortunately, his “freeze” only applied to 17% of the budget, and whatever “deficit reduction” it purports to accomplish would be completely consumed by growth in entitlement spending – as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments that taxpayers are forced to pick up as a result of our skyrocketing national debt.

Yet while these two populist stories were being pushed by the White House press office, behind closed doors top Obama administration officials were working harder than ever to resuscitate the very radical policies that spawned all this voter angst and distrust in the first place.

Just four days after Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, for example, Obama’s chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel met with a group of Senators at the White House in an effort to revive “cap and trade,” Obama’s massive energy tax hike. Similarly, Obama has been meeting regularly with Congressional leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in a no-holds-barred effort to ram his socialized medicine proposal through Congress – despite its collapsing public support and weakened legislative position.

Clearly a string of defeats for Obama – including a historic setback in Massachusetts – has done nothing to deter him from his leftward march.

Of course the silver lining is that the more stridently Obama pursues these objectives in the face of mounting public and Congressional opposition, the more strident public and legislative opposition becomes toward him.

From Philly.com

The entrenched City Council member would become an endangered species under a term-limits bill that Councilman W. Wilson Goode Jr. said he will introduce today.

Goode’s bill would limit members to three consecutive four-year terms. Currently, members can seek reelection as many times as they want.

“What this means, in the end,” Goode said, “is creating more opportunities for people to serve.”

If voters approved the measure in November – it requires a change by referendum to the City Charter – current Council members could have up to two more consecutive four-year terms.

Goode said he had considered a proposal to expand terms to six years with a two-term limit. He said he was open to amending the bill after public hearings.

The charter change would also allow Council to expand or even eliminate term limits in the future simply by passing an ordinance, without a referendum.

The bill is sure to meet resistance from Goode’s 16 colleagues, 13 of whom are in their third term – or well beyond it.

President Anna C. Verna has been on Council since 1976, Majority Leader Marian B. Tasco since 1988, and Minority Leader Brian J. O’Neill and Councilwoman Joan L. Krajewski since 1980.

Goode is in his third term.

His proposal would not limit a person to three terms. After 12 years, a member could take off a term before coming back and seeking election for three more terms.

Philadelphia has a two-term limit for the mayor’s office. Mayor Frank Rizzo and his supporters tried to change the charter in 1978 to allow him to run for a third term, but voters soundly rejected the move.

As for convincing his colleagues, Goode noted that he had introduced a campaign-finance-reform bill in September 2003 with only one cosponsor, Blondell Reynolds Brown. Three months later, he was able to override a veto by Mayor John F. Street with 12 votes.

Goode said no Council members were aware that he was introducing the bill today. He discussed it only on condition that news of it not be released before this morning.

The bill recognizes “the new independent politics” that brought nonvoters to the polls in 2008, Goode said.

“The issue is simply whether we are representing the people who vote, or who don’t vote, particularly in light of the fact that those people came out to vote for a first-year senator and elected him president of the United States,” Goode said. “That’s the new independent politics.”

Chicago is alone among the nation’s top 10 cities without a term limit of some kind, according to U.S. Term Limits, a nonprofit in Fairfax, Va., that advocates for federal, state, and local term limits.

Support will have to come from the public, said Ray Wotring, spokesman for U.S. Term Limits.

“It’s kind of one of those things – everybody but politicians and lobbyists and special interests,” he said, “love the issue.”

From NorthFulton.com

ROSWELL – In Roswell Mayor Jere Wood’s first term, after unseating 30-year incumbent W.L. “Pug” Mabry, he thought mayoral term limits would be a good idea. The City Council at the time rejected the idea.

At the start of Wood’s fourth term, he reintroduced a resolution again to limit the mayoral terms. This time the council took him up on it at its Jan. 20 council meeting. Since by statute, term limits cannot be retroactive, Wood’s fourth term does not count. Therefore Wood himself could serve until 2026.

“I think that as an institution, we should limit the terms of the mayor. It is very easy to stay in office if you don’t take any positions. Forty-nine percent of the voters [in the last election] said I should move on already,” Wood said.

Wood said he thought term limits would encourage a mayor to have an agenda and pursue it. Conversely, he did not see the need to limit council positions. He said he has seen a steady turnover on council that allows for a mixture of experience and fresh ideas.

Wood had initially asked for a limit of two terms, but some on the council voiced concerns. Councilwoman Nancy Diamond wondered if two terms were enough for a mayor to accomplish an agenda. Orlans said the mayor and council all had term limits already, set by the voter.

“They are the ones who ought to have the say in goes and who stays,” he said.

In the end, the compromise was for three terms.

All members of Roswell’s appointed members of boards and commissions will also be limited to three consecutive terms. The idea again is to bring fresh blood on board with new ideas.

Former members could return after a hiatus, just as a three-term mayor could after sitting out an election.

From Wall Street Journal

Ben Bernanke’s bloody confirmation battle is yet another sign that Congress, and the public more broadly, are looking for change at the nation’s central bank. Congress is playing with many different ideas for how to do that: 1) Fire Mr. Bernanke by denying him a second term (something that’s looking less likely as pledges of ‘yes’ votes from the Senate trickle in); 2) Strip the Fed of its power to regulate banks; 3) Give Congress’s Government Accountability Office the power to audit Fed decisions; 4) Give Congress more say on the governance of regional Fed banks. Each of these ideas has a flaw … GAO audits, for instance, could invite congressional meddling on tough decisions about raising interest rates. Taking regulation away from the Fed isn’t necessarily going to make regulation better.

Here’s a proposal that hasn’t come up, but maybe ought to be on the table: Term limits for Fed chairmen. Two terms, eight years, and then you step down to a governor’s job, which gets 14 years, or leave.

It has the merit of addressing a problem that may actually have helped to cause the crisis. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan ran the Fed for nineteen years. Critics make the argument that the Fed became complacent during the latter years of his reign, keeping interest rates too low for too long, treating banks with light-touch regulation and underestimating building risks in the financial system. Because the economy seemed to do so well for so long, it became harder over time to second-guess the approach championed by Mr. Greeenspan. One example: Edward Gramlich, the late former Fed governor, tried to raise alarms about subprime mortgages, but he got nowhere.

If the Fed chairman were subjected to a limit of two terms it could help ensure that one person or set of views wouldn’t come to dominate the central bank again. It would be a simple move that voters would understand and populists would likely appreciate. It’s hard to see how it would threaten the Fed’s cherished independence – if anything it would insulate the Fed from political meddling because a chairman would know that there would be no point to pleasing political masters because the job runs out after eight years. The presidency of the European Central Bank runs for eight years – and that seems to be working well.

It fits in with the more consensus-driven approach that Mr. Bernanke has built over four years. On a personal level, if he gets another four years on the job, it’s hard to imagine him wanting even more after that.

“It would accomplish the goal of giving the public a greater sense of oversight without creating undue political influence,” says Simon Gilchrist, a Boston University economist and specialist on central banking. “It would also have the benefit of forcing the Fed to be more articulate about its specific goals and policies,” he said, because it would de-emphasize the power of single chairman.

Marvin Goodfriend, former director of research at the Richmond Fed official who is now a professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, is less enthusiastic. “Imposing term limits on a central bank chairman is not necessary or sufficient to produce effective monetary policy independence,” he says.

From The CATO Institute

The Brookings Institution will release a new school choice policy guide on February 2nd, and from the sound of it, children, parents, taxpayers, and the authors themselves should be concerned.  The guide will provide:

a series of practical and novel recommendations for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including national chartering of virtual education providers; expanding the types of information collected on school performance; providing incentives for low-performing school districts to increase choice and competition; and creating independent school choice portals to aid parents in choosing between schools.

The goals these recommendations are meant to achieve are entirely laudable, but there are three reasons for serious concern:

1)  The Constitution delegates to the federal government no power to provide or regulate education services, except in the execution of its explicitly enumerated powers. So the Supreme Court can ensure that state education programs abide by the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, but Congress cannot “charter virtual education providers.” Of course the federal government has been transgressing the limits on its education powers for more than half a century, but no one who supports the rule of law can condone that transgression, much less its expansion.

2)  From a regulatory standpoint, Washington is the worst level of government at which to implement an education program. National education programs impose a single set of rules on every participating provider in the country. Get those rules wrong — either up front or down the road — and you not only hobble the effectiveness of every single provider, but you eliminate the possibility of comparing outcomes between providers operating under different sets of rules. In essence you lose the ability to distinguish between different “treatments” — to determine what helps and what is harmful to the service’s overall success.

3)  We have ample evidence about the quality of education programs implemented by the federal government. For example, after 45 years and $166 billion, Head Start has just been proven entirely ineffective. (See also the NCLB paper linked to in “1)”, above). Once again, this problem is exacerbated by the all-encompassing nature of federal programs. Get them wrong and you get them wrong for every participating student, everywhere in the country. With variation in programs among states, by contrast, we not only have the ability to compare the merits of alternative approaches, we have powerful incentives for states to get their programs right. Just as tax competition drives businesses from one state or nation to another, so, too, can education policy competition. States with better policies will attract businesses and more mobile residents from states with worse ones, eventually compelling the inferior policy states to redress their errors.  We’re just beginning to see the prospects for this now, as school choice programs proliferate and grow at the state level, and introducing national programs that might well interfere with this process would be a disastrous mistake.

I hope that school choice advocates, including those who have contributed to the forthcoming Brookings report, will weigh these concerns.