POLITICALPYRO CONTRIBUTORS

Reports early today from inside Russia suggest that a link exist between the Obama Administration and the H1N1 Virus.

It has yet to be confirmed, but sources inside several militant Muslim groups throughout the Middle East and as far west as China have been working together in an effort -proposed by the Muslim faction of the Obama adminastration- to bring about this “World Pandemic Scare and Panic”.

“The ends justify the means,” a person close inside the N1H1 Network Scare said yesterday. “We see this as a way for Obama, and all Muslims… to take control of the US government by Executive Order and forgo the whole legislative process,” The source further added, “If you look at the way they (US) handled 9-11, this risk of a Global Pandemic will have legislators hands in cuffs and Obama’s pen running dry,” -With all the Executive Orders he will sign- “By the end of November.”

There is also that little “bone” that they threw Obama for his compliance. HealthCare and the pending legislation. “If you look at it,” -HealthCare Legislation- “He -Obama- could have had a little piece early or right after he was elected, but he -Obama- wanted it all, so we suggested that he use the H1N1 scare we were working on as the hammer, and told him to wrap it all in one nice bundle.”

Reports throughout the world continue to tell us of thousands of deaths as the virus spreads like wildfire across the continent of Eurasia. But here in the US, the death rate does not match the scare rate and that has many US citizens puzzled. “If you look at it, he -Obama- has already got his toes wet with a couple Executive Orders that deal with managing the control of the outbreak, imagine what he will be able to do once we get things to fevered pitch.”

An unnamed source close to the Obama administration added today, “There is no doubt that we as Americans have a mindset that we can fix the world, no doubt. And now with all our efforts coming to fruition, the administration can now pull out the rubber stamp and make America a socialist country.”

Marion Valentine added…

It could very well be true, anything to further the progress towards Global Socialist Government. Isn’t it strange that Ft. Rucker whose labs develop countermeasures to Biochemical warfare, and develop vaccines was missing several “vials” of an undisclosed virus and 3 days later 20 polo ponies from Mexico at a match in Florida dropped dead… and then a few days later, even though it was not flu season, H1N1 broke out…..hmmmmmm

Hopians have attacked at will the basic foundation of an American society and now the backlash is starting to be felt by the Obama administration and to his loyal subjects.

Obama and his visions of Hope is often portrayed as an apocalyptic and seismic break with our White European ideals and capitalistic history. Yet the truth is that it is the culmination and reification of European (and American) history in the 20th century. The United States connection too colonialism have prepared it for a wide range of phenomena associated with Obamas vision of Hope. This is what I now deem as the Hopian regime of the Obama Empire- from Muslim motivated terrorist murders to racial theories, from white European slave owners to the forcible annexation of Capitalism.

Moreover, a inside look at Obama and his Hopian views can suggest that it was innovated by applying prevailing racial theories (usually reserved only-whites) to the black race itself. It started with attacking those that objected to Obamas inexperience as being closet racists and denouncing religious black leaders - a non-controversial proposition - but then expanded them to include Christianity and all other forms of religion that were in contradiction to the of Hopian laws of socialist freedoms.

Hopian - and Fascism, Socialism - Obama and his ‘third world’ ideologies, adopted enthusiastically in places as diverse as Iowa, New Hampshire, and the Carolinas. It was clear by the middle of Obamas campaign that liberal capitalism, communism, and fascism (and its mutations) were locked in mortal battle of ideologies. Obamas mistake was to delusional believe in the affinity between capitalism and Americanism. But this affinity was a part of our collective DNA as a nation - and this affinity enhanced, in his mind, by Americas distrust of corporatism and by the existence of a imaginary common enemy: Capitalist Corporate Greed.

It is no wonder that the Hopian socialist movement has possessed all the hallmarks of an institutional religion: priesthood, rites, rituals, temples, worship, catechism, mythology and now school room indoctrination. Obama has deemed himself a religious ascetic saint and supreme thought provider.

Obama monastically denies himself common White European Capitalist pleasures (or so he claimed) in order to be able to dedicate himself fully to his calling. Obama is a monstrously inverted Jesus, sacrificing his life and denying himself so that humanity should benefit. By surpassing and suppressing his humanity, Obama has became a distorted contradiction and a version of embodiment of the Second Coming.

It is an aesthetic of decadence and evil (though it was not perceived this way by Obama), carefully orchestrated, and artificial. The Hopian view is about reproduced copies, not about originals. It was about the manipulation of symbols - not about veritable atavism.

In short: The Hopian is about theater, not about life. To enjoy the spectacle (and be subsumed by it), Obamas vision demands the suspension of judgment, depersonalization, and de-realization. The cleansing of American Capitalism is tantamount, in Hopian dramaturgy, to self-annulment. The Hopian is nihilistic not only operationally, or ideologically. Its very language and narratives were nihilistic. The Hopian is conspicuous nihilism - and Obama served as a role model, annihilating Obama the Man, only to re-appear as Obama the Saviour.

Obama used ‘white guilt’ and the systematic repression of blacks as a rebellion call against the “old ways” - against the assimilation culture, the upper classes, the established religions, the Capitalistic system, our leading Superpower status. The Hopians took the Leninist vocabulary and assimilated it effectively. The burgeoning movement, a reaction to narcissistic injuries inflicted upon the narcissistic upbringing of Obama . Obama himself is malignant narcissist, as too was Hitler.

The over abundance and self deprecating over indulgences of Capitalism constituted a perfect, easily identifiable, embodiment of all that was “wrong” with America. We were an old nation, with old ‘White European’ ideals that could be eerily dismissed as evil, they were slothful, they were part of the establishment, they were “decadent”, they were hated on religious and socio-economic grounds, they were different, they were greedy, they were morally superior, they were everywhere, they were defenseless, they were credulous, they were adaptable . They were the perfect hated father figure and parricide was in fashion.

This is precisely the source of the fascination with Obama. He was an inverted human. His unconscious was his conscious. He acted out our most repressed drives, fantasies, and wishes. He provides us with a glimpse of the horrors that lie beneath the veneer, the barbarians at our personal gates, and what it was like before we invented civilization.

Obama forced us all through The Looking Glass and many did not emerge. He is not the devil. He is one of us. He is the banality of evil. Just an ordinary, mentally disturbed, failure, and member of a mentally disturbed and failing political party, who lives in disturbed and failing times. He is the perfect mirror, a channel, and voice, for the very reasons why, more than ever, we as a nation have a reason to recapture those American ideals that set us free as a nation, and to reclaim those those ‘God given’ rights that pour from the very depth of our souls.

When I first read this I kinda sat back and pondered what would I do with ‘Joe’ if I were the Obama Administration… Yep, Under the Obama Speeding Bus of Disaster! Awesome economic piece… makes you wonder who Obama is listening too, or what his real plans are for the US.

The Most Misunderstood Man in America

Joseph Stiglitz predicted the global financial meltdown. So why can’t he get any respect here at home?

By Michael Hirsh | NEWSWEEK
Published Jul 18, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jul 27, 2009

Anya Stiglitz was in the middle of a Pilates class in Central Park on an April morning when her cell phone rang. Glancing down, she saw “202″ pop up—no number attached—and knew it was the White House. An aide to Larry Summers ~ was on the line, looking for her husband, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. Anya said she’d pass on the message to Joe—then went back to work on her abs. No big deal, she thought. People often call her when they want to talk to Joe, because even though he’s spent four decades figuring out how the global economy works, he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of voice mail. “He doesn’t listen to his messages, so if you want to talk to him, keep calling,” Anya says on his cell-phone recording.

Anya figured Summers, Obama’s chief economic adviser, was probably just calling to gripe about Joe’s latest op-ed in The New York Times. Joe Stiglitz and Larry Summers, two towering intellects with egos to match, are not each other’s favorite economist. “They respect each other, but they hate each other like poison,” says Bruce Greenwald, Stiglitz’s friend and academic collaborator at Columbia. (”I’ve got huge admiration for Joe as an economic thinker,” Summers told NEWSWEEK.) Stiglitz had been hammering at Obama’s economic team for its handling of the financial crisis. He wrote that the stimulus program was too small to be effective—a criticism that has since swelled into a chorus, though Obama says he’s not adding more money. Stiglitz also had called the administration’s bailout plan a giveaway to Wall Street, an “ersatz capitalism” that would save the banks’ investors and creditors and screw the taxpayers. “I thought, Larry—he’s just going to yell at Joe,” Anya recalls.

But Summers’s aide soon called back, and this time he said it was urgent: could Professor Stiglitz come to Washington for a dinner hosted by the president—that same night? Anya patched him through to Joe’s office at Columbia University~; Stiglitz accepted, and jumped on an early train. He was a little miffed: the other eminent economists attending the dinner, like Princeton’s Alan Blinder and Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff, had been invited the week before. Stiglitz, a former chairman of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, had supported Barack Obama as a candidate as early as 2007. But until that day, four months into the administration, he had heard barely a word from the White House. Even now, when the president was making an effort to hear a range of economic voices, Stiglitz seemed to be an afterthought. (A White House spokesman said only that the president wished to include Stiglitz.)

Such is the lot of Joe Stiglitz. Even in the contentious world of economics, he is considered somewhat prickly. And while he may be a Nobel laureate, in Washington he’s seen as just another economic critic—and not always a welcome one. Few Americans recognize his name, and fewer still would recognize the man, who is short and stocky and bears a faint resemblance to Mel Brooks. Yet Stiglitz’s work is cited by more economists than anyone else’s in the world, according to data compiled by the University of Connecticut. And when he goes abroad—to Europe, Asia, and Latin America—he is received like a superstar, a modern-day oracle. “In Asia they treat him like a god,” says Robert Johnson, a former chief economist for the Senate banking committee who has traveled with him. “People walk up to him on the streets.”

Stiglitz has won fans in China and other emerging G20 nations by arguing that the global economic system is stacked against poor nations, and by standing up to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. He is also the most prominent American economist to propose a long-term solution to the imbalances in capital flows that have wreaked havoc, from the Asian contagion of the late ’90s to the subprime-investment craze. Beijing has more or less endorsed Stiglitz’s idea for a new global reserve system to replace the U.S. dollar as the world currency. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has been influenced by Stiglitz’s work, especially when “he talks about the economics of poor people,” says Fang Xinghai, the head of Shanghai’s financial-services office. But his stature is huge in Europe as well: French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently featured him at a conference on rethinking globalization. And earlier this month, while traveling to Europe and South Africa, Stiglitz received a call from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s office: could he return through London and help the P.M. get ready for the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh?

Stiglitz is perhaps best known for his unrelenting assault on an idea that has dominated the global landscape since Ronald Reagan: that markets work well on their own and governments should stay out of the way. Since the days of Adam Smith, classical economic theory has held that free markets are always efficient, with rare exceptions. Stiglitz is the leader of a school of economics that, for the past 30 years, has developed complex mathematical models to disprove that idea. The subprime-mortgage disaster was almost tailor-made evidence that financial markets often fail without rigorous government supervision, Stiglitz and his allies say. The work that won Stiglitz the Nobel in 2001 showed how “imperfect” information that is unequally shared by participants in a transaction can make markets go haywire, giving unfair advantage to one party. The subprime scandal was all about people who knew a lot—like mortgage lenders and Wall Street derivatives traders—exploiting people who had less information, like global investors who bought up subprime- mortgage-backed securities. As Stiglitz puts it: “Globalization opened up opportunities to find new people to exploit their ignorance. And we found them.”

Stiglitz’s empathy for the little guy—and economically backward nations—comes to him naturally. The son of a schoolteacher and an insurance salesman, he grew up in one of America’s grittiest industrial cities—Gary, Ind.—and was shaped by the social inequalities and labor strife he observed there. Stiglitz remembers realizing as a small boy that something was wrong with our system. The Stiglitzes, like many middle-class families, had an African-American maid. She was from the South and had little education. “I remember thinking, why do we still have people in America who have a sixth-grade education?” he says.

Those early experiences in Gary gave Stiglitz a social conscience—as a college student, he attended Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and led him to probe the reasons why markets failed. While studying at MIT, he says he realized that if Smith’s “invisible hand” always guided behavior correctly, the kind of unemployment and poverty he had witnessed in Gary shouldn’t exist. “I was struck by the incongruity between the models that I was taught and the world that I had seen growing up,” Stiglitz said in his Nobel Prize lecture in 2001. In the same speech he declared that the invisible hand “might not exist at all.” The solution, Stiglitz says, is to move beyond ideology and to develop a balance between market-driven economies—which he favors—and government oversight.

Stiglitz has warned for years that pro-market zeal would cause a global financial meltdown very much like the one that gripped the world last year. In the early ’90s, as a member of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, Stiglitz argued (unsuccessfully) against opening up capital flows too rapidly to developing countries, saying those markets weren’t ready to handle “hot money” from Wall Street. Later in the decade, he spoke out (without results) against repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which regulated financial institutions and separated commercial from investment banking. Since at least 1990, Stiglitz has talked about the risks of securitizing mortgages, questioning whether markets and authorities would grow careless “about the importance of screening loan applicants.” Malaysian economist Andrew Sheng says, “I think Stiglitz is the nearest thing there is to Keynes in this crisis.”

That would be John Maynard Keynes, the great 20th-century economist who rocketed to international renown in late 1919 when he published The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In his book, Keynes warned that the draconian penalties imposed on Germany after World War I would lead to political disaster. No one listened. The disaster he predicted turned out to be World War II. Like Stiglitz, Keynes was not a favorite at the White House. Keynes also believed that markets were imperfect: he invented modern macroeconomics—which calls for major government intervention to help ailing economies—in response to the Great Depression. But after meeting Keynes for the first time in 1934, FDR dismissed him as too abstract and intellectual, according to Robert Skidelsky, Keynes’s biographer. Keynes himself fretted that Roosevelt was not spending enough.

To his critics—and there are many—Stiglitz is a self-aggrandizing rock-thrower. Even some of his intellectual allies note that while Stiglitz is often right on the substance of issues, he tends to leap to the conclusion that government can make things better. Harvard economist Rogoff has called him intolerably arrogant—though he added that Stiglitz is a “towering genius.” In a letter to -Stiglitz published in 2002, Rogoff recalled a moment when the two of them were teaching at Princeton and former Fed chairman Paul Volcker’s name came up for tenure. “You turned to me and said, ‘Ken, you used to work for Volcker at the Fed. Tell me, is he really smart?’ I responded something to the effect of ‘Well, he was arguably the greatest Federal Reserve chairman of the 20th century.’ To which you replied, ‘But is he smart like us?’” (Stiglitz says he can’t remember the comment, but adds that he might have been referring to whether Volcker was an abstract thinker.)

Stiglitz’s defenders say one possible explanation for his outsider status in Washington is his ongoing rivalry with Summers. While they are both devotees of Keynes, Summers often has supported deregulation of financial markets—or at least he did before last year—while Stiglitz has made a career of mistrusting markets. Since the early ’90s, when Summers was a senior Treasury official and Stiglitz was on the Council of Economic Advisers, the two have engaged in fierce policy debates. The first fight was over the Clinton admin-is-tration’s efforts to pry open emerging financial markets, such as South Korea’s. Stiglitz argued there wasn’t good evidence that liberalizing poorly regulated Third World markets would make any one more prosperous; Summers wanted them open to U.S. firms.

The differences between them grew bitter in the late 1990s, when Stiglitz was chief economist for the World Bank and took issue with the way Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and Summers, who was then deputy secretary, were handling the Asian “contagion” financial collapse. After World Bank president James Wolfensohn declined to reappoint him in 1999, Stiglitz became convinced that Summers was behind the slight. Summers denies this, and maintains that no rivalry exists between them. Summers’s deputy Jason Furman says that Summers now “talks to [Stiglitz] a lot.” “A lot” is an exaggeration, Stiglitz responds. “We’ve talked one or two times,” he says.

Despite the Obama team’s occasional efforts to reach out to him, Stiglitz remains deeply unhappy about the administration’s approach to the financial crisis. Rather than breaking up or restructuring the big banks that failed, “the Obama administration has actually expanded the notion of ‘too big to fail,’ ” he says. In a veiled poke at his dubious standing in Washington, Stiglitz adds: “In Britain there is a more open discussion of these issues.” A senior White House official, responding to this critique, says that the Obama administration is most often criticized these days for intervening too much in the economy, not too little.

In other respects, Obama is embracing some of Stiglitz’s views, suggests Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget—and a former Stiglitz protégé (he worked for Stiglitz during the Clinton administration). One example: Obama’s new idea for reforming health care by creating a government-run program to compete with private-sector insurers. “There is an intellectual paradigm in health care that says you should move to purely private markets,” says Orszag. “Joe’s perspective would suggest major difficulties [with that]. That led to the thought that we need a mix: there is an important government role.”

Today, settled as a professor at Columbia, Stiglitz occasionally finds himself welcomed in the nation’s capital, though usually at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, to testify before Congress. While he had no great desire to go back into government, friends say he was deeply disappointed when an offer didn’t come from Obama last fall. Not surprisingly, Stiglitz believes his old rival was behind it, though Summers denies this. As for the invitation to dinner at the White House, there were a few theories kicked around the spacious Stiglitz household on Manhattan’s Upper West Side as to why it came at the last minute: one was that Obama, in an interview posted online that week by The New York Times, had cited Stiglitz as one of the critics he listens to, so it would have seemed strange if he hadn’t been invited to the dinner. While Stiglitz was flattered by the discussion over a dinner of roast beef and Michelle Obama’s homegrown lettuce, he can’t stop himself from complaining that an occasional meal with dissidents is not the best way for the president to formulate policy. “Some of the most difficult debates and judgments can’t really be hammered out in an hour-and-a-half meeting covering lots of topics,” he says. Stiglitz may a prophet without much honor in Washington, but he seems to be determined to keep the prophecies coming.

They say… Whats good for the goose, is good for its gander… or if you like, If you can’t beat them join them.

As they blame Bush, ‘W’, GW… Which ever you prefer, for everything that is wrong with the world, I thought a bit of turn about, tongue and cheek was way over due. Hence the reason for the title of this post. Now, lets get to the meat.

Congress Needs to Beware of Growing Populist Anger

By Norman J. Ornstein | Roll Call
Wednesday, June 10, 2009

One of the main reasons why the Democratic Party lost control of the House in 1994 was that House Democrats responded too late to growing public dissatisfaction with their actions. The 111th Congress, though very active in its passage of legislation, needs to pay attention to the current rise in populist sentiment in the electorate. In order to effectively curb these feelings, Congress should implement reforms to increase transparency in government.

Why did the Democrats lose the House in 1994 after 40 years of rule?

One can make a case that the early stumbles of the Clinton White House, including the excruciating delay in enacting an economic plan along with the failure to get health care through, created a backlash against ineffective one-party government. One can make a case that former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s (R-Ga.) long-term plan to nationalize the Congressional elections, culminating in the “Contract with America,” finally provided a coherent and attractive alternative. But a critical element in the public backlash against the status quo in Congress was the populist anger at the elitism and corruption that the public saw engulfing Washington, D.C.

The first eruption of that populist anger came in 1989, with a pay raise for federal officials that had been endorsed by outgoing President Ronald Reagan, incoming President George H. W. Bush and all Democratic and Republican Congressional leaders from Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas) to the aforementioned Gingrich. But that broad bipartisan support meant nothing to average voters struggling with a sluggish economy and stagnant wages.

remember vividly going to board the train at Union Station to attend the House Democrats’ retreat at the Greenbrier resort–the location itself was a public relations nightmare akin to auto executives flying private jets to D.C. to beg for public money. We had to run a gauntlet of angry protesters holding signs and hurling epithets.

The leadership needs to avoid any sense that it is protecting Members because of their personal ties to them.

That was followed in 1992 by the House Bank brouhaha, revealed by Roll Call, which showed that a slew of House Members had overdrawn their accounts at the House Bank. It did not matter that the “bank” was not a bank in the traditional sense, but a repository for Members’ paychecks until they could be deposited in other accounts, and that the only money in the bank was from the lawmakers themselves; the story created a firestorm emphasizing that Members of Congress played by a different set of rules than the rest of us, exempt from the constraints or fines that we face. Many superb lawmakers lost their next elections (or retired prematurely) as a direct consequence.

The next train wreck was predictable. For some good reasons related to separation of powers issues, Congress exempted itself from regulation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and other executive agencies. But to the public (and to the minority party), this was another clear case of an imperial, insulated, pampered and arrogant Congress applying onerous laws to others while exempting itself.

Throughout 1993 and 1994, I went regularly to the leaders in the House importuning them to act to solve this problem. The answer was easy: create an independent office within the legislative branch to enforce the laws where applicable to Congress, avoiding separation of powers issues. Tom Mann and I worked with Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Dick Swett (D-N.H.) to come up with a bill creating an Office of Compliance. Early passage would signal a Congress ahead of the curve, moving to reform itself.

But the leaders did not think it was that big a deal and waited until the last days of the 103rd Congress to pass the bill–too late to avoid the surge in anger or to defend the indefensible, and they went into the 1994 election looking like they acted only after getting caught red-handed.

I raise all this history because it is déjà vu all over again. The populist anger is back, and not just in the United States–the reaction in Britain to parliamentary expense abuses is directly reminiscent of the reaction to the House Bank. So far, it has not been directed at Congress, in part because the 111th Congress has been so remarkably productive, in part because of the popularity of President Barack Obama, in part because of the ineptitude of the minority party leadership. But one can see the train wreck coming.

Some of the seeds go back to former Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.), preceded by Jack Abramoff and former Reps. Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.), Tom DeLay (R-Texas), Bob Ney (R-Ohio), Jim Traficant (D-Ohio), et al. Of course, some of the cases contributed mightily to the Republican loss of Congress after 12 years of rule, but all underscored a continuing public sense that Congress was more concerned with feathering its own nest than with the problems facing average Americans in their everyday lives.

Throw in Illinois’ former Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) and Sen. Roland Burris (D), a case getting more and more putrid. Add the Congressional bailouts of banks and their executives and the auto industry, amplified especially by the American International Group bonuses. The scapegoats now are AIG and auto and bank executives, but that can switch in an instant to politicians.

Now throw in the PMA Group and Reps. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.). The Murtha case, of course, goes well beyond PMA, to include throwing sensitive national security-related earmarks with abandon to companies in his district that were inept or corrupt and to rewarding or punishing companies that used the right lobbying firm or did the right business with Murtha’s relatives. Include also executive officials in the Defense Department and elsewhere giving no-bid contracts to companies with ties to Murtha and his family members to curry favor with the powerful lawmaker. I can’t sort out from this vantage point what is illegal or not, but it all stinks to high heaven.

Simply asking whether the ethics committee is investigating the issue is not enough. I hope the committee is acting, and I believe that the leadership of the panel, under Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and ranking member Jo Bonner (R-Ala.), is finally functional. I also am truly encouraged by the start of the new Office of Congressional Ethics, also with top-flight leadership.

But if Congress wants to avoid the kind of public anger that engulfed the political process in 1994 and 2006, it needs to go much further. The leadership needs to avoid any sense that it is protecting Members because of their personal ties to them. And Congress needs to enact further reforms to make the earmarking and contracting process work better.

The House might start with Rep. Jeff Flake’s (R-Ariz.) idea to delink earmarks from campaign contributions. My own idea to create independent commissions to rank needs and projects in Congressional districts akin to Senators’ judicial selection panels would help. And addressing the issue of contracting–which is what Cunningham did, getting bribes in return for steering sensitive defense and intelligence contracts to the corrupt companies offering the bribes–is critical for reform.

Every contract issued by the federal government needs to be put online before the contract takes effect, with a special scrutiny for every no-bid contract. There must be guidelines for making sure the process is above-board and sanctions for those who award contracts that do not meet the guidelines.

The current Democratic Congress is comparatively well-regarded by the public for its performance. Democrats are certainly in no immediate danger of losing their majority or even losing many seats in 2010. But public opinion is fragile here, and it would not take much to ignite that populist outrage. Acting now is smart politics–and very good policy.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI.