Jay Reding.com

Ed Morrissey asks if President Bush has lost his spine when it comes to earmarks. President Bush can easily end most earmarks by simply issuing an Executive Order to executive agencies asking them to refuse to carry them through. Because most earmarks aren’t attached to the text of legislation but to committee reports, they don’t have the force of law. It isn’t the constitutional concerns that’s stopping Bush—after all, he’s a big fan of signing statements which also use the Executive’s authority to interpret directives of Congress.

Bush doesn’t have anything to lose by putting himself on the side of fiscal reform. It’s not as though there’s a huge Republican constituency that loves earmarks—quite the opposite is true. It doesn’t hurt him politically, and would probably help him. If it isn’t policy and it isn’t politics, then why is Bush caving?

My guess is that the GOP leadership is putting pressure on him to keep the gravy train moving—the reformers in Congress are still a minority even with the GOP caucus. And if that’s true, it’s more reason why the GOP badly needs a change in leadership. The GOP cannot be a party of Main Street when it’s bending over backwards to please K Street.

The President needs to send the right message and prevent these wasteful projects from consuming more of the federal budget. It’s good policy and good politics, and to bend over to an increasingly disliked Congress does neither the President nor his party any good.

Sen. Thompson has issued the following statement:

Today I have withdrawn my candidacy for President of the United States. I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort. Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people.

Ed Morrissey takes a look at the cutbacks Mike Huckabee is making post-South Carolina.

The electoral map does not favor Mike Huckabee. He’s never been able to broaden his appeal beyond a plurality of the evangelical vote—and that isn’t enough to win. If he could campaign to the right of John McCain he might have a chance, but he’s already done enough to blow his reputation among conservatives to make that unlikely.

Right now the dynamics of the race favor McCain. The race is starting to boil down to him versus everyone else, and even with Thompson essentially out of the running there isn’t enough consensus among everyone else to blunt McCain’s momentum into Florida and Super Tuesday. Huckabee’s narrow appeal will help him with the South, but it’s not going to help him in Florida, California, New York, or others. Furthermore, Huckabee is not well liked with Arkansas Republicans, which means he could lose his own home state.

Huckabee’s narrow appeal is hurting both his electoral chances and his fundraising, and that means that Huckabee’s momentum is all but gone. This race may yet come down to McCain versus someone else, but that someone else doesn’t seem likely to be Mike Huckabee.

Larry Kudlow has effusive praise for the Fed’s massive rate cut which slashed interest rates this morning.

I’m not so sure. Right now the markets are panicking, and such a massive rate cut reinforces the idea that there’s some major short-term problem on the horizon. We got into this mess because of over-lending, and it’s hard to imagine how over-lending will get us out of it. The markets are correcting, which is what a market should do in this situation. What I’m concerned about is that the Fed has bought into the panic psychology and is trying to get a quick fix in that will make things worse rather than letting the storm pass.

A rate cut and an economic stimulus package are both short-term solutions that will only blunt the effects of an economic downturn. We have a set of policies that are based on trying to calm fears in an election year rather than making the set of structural reforms that would actually solve the underlying problems in the US economy.

There are things that can be done—such as reducing taxes on business assets, fixing depreciation tables and reducing unnecessary regulation. Instead, we’ll get a “stimulus” in the form of a couple hundred dollars in tax rebates that will end up being used to pay down credit cards and the like. Depreciation tables don’t make for good campaign ads, but tax rebates do, even though tax rebates don’t do anything to fix recessions.

The fundamentals of the US economy remain strong, but the Fed keeps sending the wrong signal and is feeding the global panic. Even if an additional shot of liquidity is the right prescription, the Fed’s dramatic rate cut may only make nervous investors even more skittish rather than reassuring them into stopping the fall of global markets.

The teaser trailer for Star Trek is now available in full-HD glory.

It looks like J.J. Abrams (who created a little show called Lost) is setting to take the old Trek formula and give it a well-needed kick in the pants. The retro-futurism of the trailer is a very different direction, but it still fits with the overall vision of the series. It will be very interesting to see if Abrams can not only get fans of the show into theater seats, but bring new fans to the franchise.

Is Mike Huckabee:

For all the talk about South Carolina being the death knell for Thompson, who South Carolina really killed was Huckabee. Huckabee is an insurgent. He has neither the establishment support, nor the money, nor the conservative movement mouthpieces to drag him along.

Huckabee has only the force of his own personality and the media momentum perception. Insurgent candidates like Huckabee need to ride a wave to victory and any wave Huckabee had broke on the shores of South Carolina’s coastline.

Huckabee does have the support of a certain segment of the evangelical vote, but his game of identity politics means he’s already alienated everyone else. Right now the media is fawning over the guy they fawned over in 2000, which leaves Huckabee high and dry. He doesn’t have the support to win and he has little chance of broadening their support.

Had Romney been knocked out in Michigan I think Thompson would have probably won South Carolina on the basis of sealing enough of the conservative vote. There’s still an incredibly small chance that as the race continues Thompson could still pull that off—but that’s contingent on having enough money on hand to remain in the race. Right now the conservative vote is split between Thompson and Romney. If their votes were combined, one or the other would be ahead. If they drop out, it leaves conservatives with a choice of John McCain or Mike Huckabee—which is not the most appetizing choice for many, although McCain would almost certainly be the beneficiary in that case.

In the end, South Carolina spells the death of the Huckabee campaign. If he can’t win there, he can’t win elsewhere, and he needed a win to keep his momentum going. Huckabee’s a talented politician, but he can’t broaden his base beyond his evangelical constituency, and he’s made enough tactical mistakes in recent weeks to take the shine off of his campaign.

Thompson may have been put out by South Carolina, but Huckabee’s second place doesn’t give him much room either. The dynamics of the race are changing, and they’re not changing in a way that’s at all helpful to Mike Huckabee. His narrow appeal and lack of experience have ensured that he can’t broaden his base enough to win, which means that his outsider challenge is likely to fail.

Stephen Bainbridge, another Fred supporter, argues the case for sitting the rest of this one out. He’s right: all the other candidates have flaws, which is why those of us who smartly supported Fred weren’t on their sides. Romney is too plastic to win. Rudy is dead in the water and hasn’t done enough to get social conservatives on his side. Mike Huckabee is dumber than a box of rocks and has gone out of his way to offend fiscal conservatives. That leaves John McCain, who is at best an inconsistent conservative and has offended both wings of the Republican coalition from time to time.

Fred should stay in the race as long as he can. We need a consistent conservative in their to keep the others in line and remind the party what we’re really fighting for. His speech in South Carolina, though clearly one presaging his exit, reminded me of why I supported Fred in the first place. He finally found his campaign style—several months too late to win, but that’s politics. Now, the race is about principle rather than winning.

At the end of the day, we have an obligation based on our deepest principles to ensure that someone like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama does not become President of the United States. We are in a long war against an implacable enemy. The next President will likely shape the Supreme Court by appointing new Justices. We need a Supreme Court that does not rule based on their own social inclinations justified only by the flimsiest constitutional rationales. We need an economy that can compete in the 21st Century, not one that is mired in protectionism, regulation and excessive taxation. We need a government that reflects the moral will of the people, not one that strives to undermine the family—the very mortar that holds this society together.

Sitting out just isn’t an option, and someone like John McCain who is right 82.3% of the time (according to the American Conservative Union) is a better choice than someone who is actively hostile to all our shared principles.