Michael Barone has a thoughtful piece on the Iowa caucus in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. He writes in “As Iowa Goes, So Goes Iowa” that the Iowa caucus often doesn’t decide who wins the primary, let alone the general election.

Iowa Republican caucuses have a poor record in choosing their party’s nominees. In the five presidential nominating cycles with active Iowa Republican caucus competition, the Hawkeye State has voted for the eventual Republican nominee only twice—in 1996 for Bob Dole, in 2000 for George W. Bush—and only once was the Iowa winner elected president.

Part of the issue Barone notes is just how few Republicans actually participate.

In a state of three million people, a bare 119,000 Republicans showed up for the caucuses [in 2008]. Some 60% of them identified as evangelical or born-again Christians—a far higher percentage than in any presidential contest in any large non-Southern state that year.

By contrast, in the 2010, over 600,000 Iowa Republicans voted in the general election and more than 200,000 voted in the gubernatorial primary. This year fewer Republicans will vote in the Iowa caucus, despite a deeply unpopular incumbent Democratic party.

Why are so few Republicans showing up to vote in Iowa? Perhaps it’s because the Iowa Republican caucus is for insiders.

In the past, evangelicals have tended to pick the candidate in the presidential primaries, but this year, with at least three evangelical-friendly candidates in the race for president, they’ve split the vote. By unintentionally and effectively limiting their influence, the evangelicals have enabled both the Paul and Romney camps to stage a strong showing. If a George Will forecast “libertarian snow” happens, Ron Paul and his die-hard supporters will win the caucus.

Anecdotally much has been made this year about the number of young people involved with the Republican caucus this year. This is largely attributable to Ron Paul. Ron Paul and more accurately, his acolytes, have been spending time doing retail campaigning in the state’s 99 counties, while a number of the other candidates have ignored Iowa entirely. Governor Terry Branstad has complained as much, but Ron Paul isn’t. Paul’s supporters might even push down the median age of the Republican caucus participant from its near 60-year-old age mark. Even if Paul loses the nomination in 2012, his young supporters will be in politics for years to come.

It remains to be seen whether Iowa will decide who “wins” the caucus, but it may yet decide who “winnows” it.

There is a long 20^th century history of Wall Street protests in America.  After all, Wall Street is the financial center of the country. Today, we’re in a financial crisis so Wall Street (or its financial center equivalent in other cities) is the logical place to protest, right?

Actually, we think it’s a poor second to Lafayette Park across from the White House — where the current crisis was hatched and nurtured.  No, this isn’t an anti Obama screed.  His predecessors (several of them) are far more to blame for the current economic disarray in which we find ourselves, although we think his proposed remedies are anything but remedial.

“Occupy Wall Street” and “Wall Street Greed” are great memes.  They are highly memorable and easily passed on as a rallying cry. Unsurprisingly, President Obama and the left has sought to adopt them.  Of course, the protestors are an outgrowth of the wider sense of entitlement many young people have developed (including quotas disguised under the term “diversity”).  As George Will stated in his column in The Washington Post on October 13, 2011:

“Demands posted in [Occupy Wall Street’s] name include a ‘guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment’; a $20‑an‑hour minimum wage (above the $16.00 entry wage the UAW just negotiated with GM); ending ‘the fossil fuel economy’; ‘open borders’ so ‘anyone can travel anywhere to work and live’; $1 trillion dollars for infrastructure; $1 trillion dollars for ‘ecological restoration’; ‘free college education’, and forgiveness of ‘all debt on the entire planet.”

But abuses by Wall Street are an affect, not the cause of the current economic disarray. As anyone who has read our essays knows, we carry no brief for Wall Street excesses or those of the various Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE’s) that are the real culprits. But Wall Street was simply the vehicle by which the White House, Congress, the Fed and the Washington bureaucracy carried out very ill advised objectives. As is well known by now, the seeds of our current discontent were sowed a quarter century ago when President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).  This legislation and the regulatory policies that it set in motion may have been well intentioned, but as history teaches, roads paved merely with good intentions often lead where no one wants to go.

The government, whether controlled by Republicans or Democrats, has for a quarter century pursued the altruistic but terribly flawed policy that every American should own his or her home.  It seemed a win/win for every politician and every voting homeowner.  How noble.  How naïve.

As is so often the case when government promotes a central-planning-agenda-driven initiative, sooner or later it winds up distorting the marketplace to the general detriment of the people. That’s why we consume outrageous acreage of arable land growing food to burn for fuel.  Welcome to modernity. That’s why farmers are paid not to grow crops, and that’s why banks were rewarded not to concern themselves with creditworthiness when considering mortgage applications.  Unlike ethanol and farm subsidies, however, increasing the percentage of home ownership in America seemed like a no brainer.  What could be possibly wrong with that?  Well, as it turns out, plenty. It was a very dangerous objective to pursue.  Economic growth produces the household income that enables people to own rather than rent their own homes.  Pushing people into home ownership in the absence of their ability to afford to buy a home is an exercise in very expensive futility.

Sam Zell, one of America’s most astute real estate investors observed in a recent interview that the economy performs best when homeownership, as a percentage of all households, falls with within a range of 62 to 64 percent.

Zell writes:

“The political system encourages a much higher level, without regard to affordability. This time, we took home ownership to 69 percent, which means that people who simply cannot afford houses were able to buy them. Every time we go above that 62 to 64 percent range, there are economic consequences, and this time was no different.

There was also another political element to the residential market collapse. In 2000, Fannie and Freddie carried no subprime loans, and they carried very few subprime loans until the financial steamboat in 2004, whereupon Barney Frank told us to encourage affordable housing and he would protect us from defaults. So, Fannie Mae went from 0 in subprime loans to 40 percent. These political drivers of the financial crisis are overlooked.”

Isn’t it ironic that this is the same Barney Frank who co-authored the Dodd-Frank bill, which now forms the basis of all bank and financial regulation.  Is this a great country or what?

The mischief promulgated by Freddie and Fannie cannot be overstated.  These government-sponsored enterprises take a back seat to no one when it comes to abuse, and, let’s face it, greed. While Wall Street deserves its share of criticism, let’s dwell for a moment on government as an instigator and an enabler at the very center of the housing crisis.

During the Clinton years, the President appointed some of his Administration’s top people to senior executive positions at Fannie Mae. For example, he placed his former budget director, Franklin Raines, into the CEO slot at Fannie Mae. Jamie Gorelick, a Clinton Administration senior lawyer was handed the Vice Chairmanship at Fannie Mae.  Clinton then went on to appoint others to board positions at Fannie.  Executives’ compensation formulas were quickly restructured in order to incentivize them to maximize the number of mortgages Fannie Mae purchased.

Compensation wasn’t the only thing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac restructured. They showed they could work the political system with contributions as effectively as any Wall Street banker. They specifically targeted those who they knew would make strong allies.  Chris Dodd who chaired the Senate Committee with oversight responsibility for Fannie and Freddie’s operations was the largest recipient of the GSE’s largess. Democratic heavyweight, John Kerry was next in the handout recipient line and none other than Democratic Senate newcomer Barack Obama quickly shot up to third place in the campaign piggyback sweepstakes.  On the House side, oversight heavyweight Barney Frank was a regular recipient of the GSEs’ handouts and extolled the virtues of these houses of cards up until the time they came tumbling down.

Given that Fannie’s earnings are a function of the spread between its cost of borrowing (to buy these mortgages) and the fees it receives from the mortgages it purchases, they enjoyed a license to, shall we say, do very well as long as homeowners made their mortgage payments. Fannie Mae was, in effect, living off of the illusion that the government backed it, so its cost of borrowing was rock bottom.

So what drove the GSE’s rush into subprime mortgages? The key, of course, is that the restructured senior executive compensation was based on the profitability of the enterprises (the spread between the GSE’s rock-bottom borrowing costs and the interest paid on the mortgages they held).  So in the ten years from 1994 to 2004, Raines earned $90 million in salary and bonuses.  Gorelick who was appointed by Clinton in 1997 to her post at Fannie Mae (having had no prior financial experience) pocketed, in short order, another $26 million.  All the while, Fannie Mae’s top twenty-one executives averaged $1 million each.

Well, with that kind of juice swirling around, Fannie Mae, which became the single greatest market for so many of the lousy mortgages the banks were writing (pursuant to government policy and pressure) wasn’t above bending an accounting rule here and there.  By the time the SEC finally lowered the boom on Fannie Mae, it had found that they had misstated earnings by about $10.6 billion from 1998 through 2004.  The result was a company (of sorts) whose managers engaged in one questionable maneuver after another, including two transactions with investment banking firm, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that improperly pushed $107 million of Fannie Mae earnings into future years. The aim, the Office of Housing Enterprise Oversight said, was always the same: To shape Fannie Mae’s books, not in response to accepted accounting rules, but in a way that made it appear that the company had reached earnings targets, thus triggering the maximum possible payout for Raines and other top executives.

While the housing crash that triggered the current economic crisis cannot be laid at President Obama’s feet, it is disingenuous of him to try to paint, at every opportunity, President Bush with that odious stain.  Bush, in September 2003, according to the New York Times (yes you read that correctly) pushed for the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade earlier.

From the NYT:

“Under the Bush Administration plan, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry,

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies.  It would exercise authority over any new lines of business.  And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken.  A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.”

Yes, Wall Street hopped onto the mortgage gravy train and, in the process, mortgaged themselves to the hilt.  When the system crashed under the weight of all the shameful mortgages that were written, the American taxpayer came to the rescue and received a loud raspberry in return.  That’s surely worth a protest.  But all of this is the result of horrid policy, developed, pampered and nurtured in Washington. All things considered, Zuccotti Park in New York isn’t a bad place to protest, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Lafayette Park in Washington.

And to make matters worse for the media, Palin left the motorcycle rally to embark on a bus tour of historical American landmarks in the northeast without giving CBS, NBC, ABC, or CNN any kind of itinerary whatsoever. Now they’re literally chasing her bus down interstate after interstate and highway after highway trying to guess her next stop. They’re crying about how she’s not playing by the rules because she’s not kowtowing to Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, and Keith Olbermann (My bad, I forgot Olbermann doesn’t have a real show any more.)

This just doesn’t compute in their liberal brains. How could someone they’ve so staunchly opposed ever have a chance of holding favor with the American people?

Sadly, even conservative intellectuals like George Will spent Memorial Weekend trying to kick Palin out of the picture. In a Sunday morning appearance on ABC, Will said, in effect, “turn away folks, there’s nothing to see here, Palin isn’t fit for the presidency.” (By the way, he’s said worse in the past. Like in February 2010, when he said: “[Palin] is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose [big].”)

Although I hate to be the one to break it to Mr. Will, he’s missed the point completely.

While he’s offering commentary to snooty viewers on a Sunday morning show few care about, Palin is mixing with the people in a way that assures them she is one of them. She is meeting Americans where they are, hoping “to energize [them concerning] our nation’s founding principles, in order to promote the Fundamental Restoration of America.”

(By the way, did you notice she didn’t bring a teleprompter to the motorcycle rally? Instead, she brought her family, her love of country, and that big tour bus CNN is feverishly chasing even as I type.)

My goal in all this is to point out how wrong the media is when it comes to Palin. Just when they think they’ve got her on the run, it turns out they’re running behind her trying to catch up. And even as intellectuals (on either side of the aisle) right Palin off as unfit for the presidency, the people rally around her, hang on her words, and hope she’ll say she’s running.

Until then, the question that will be asked again and again is, “Can Sarah Palin really defeat Barack Obama?”

The answer to that is a straightforward “you betcha.”

Studies have shown that students in classes with TFA teachers did demonstrably better on math tests than students in non-TFA classrooms.  Many TFA teachers continue beyond their two year commitment.

TFA teachers, by their very nature, are go-getters. Most were excellent university students who could have gone straight into high-paying careers, but chose to spend some of their early years working with American youth. They do what it takes to get the job done.  They’ll stay beyond the final bell.  They essentially toss the collective bargaining agreement out the window.  It’s that type of drive that gives heartburn to union organizers who want the school to operate according to the contract.

Washington Post columnist George Will called Teach For America “a template for transformation.”

Randi Weingarten recently praised TFA in Education Week, saying:

Teach for America has attracted thousands of highly educated, idealistic young people to undertake one of the toughest jobs out there in some of the most challenging environments.…

Educators are all in this together.  One group should not be pitted against another, when our focus must be on the devastating cuts that threaten great harm to a generation of children.

So consider this skunk at the garden party. Leo Casey, vice president the New York City United Federation of Teachers, seems to believe that TFA is somehow bad because too many of the teachers are white. The film clip of his comments comes from EAGtv:

The teaching force in New York City has become steadily whiter under [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg and [former schools Chancellor Joel] Klein and it is connected I think in significant measure to the use of groups like Teach for America which are significantly whiter than the teaching force.

Yes, at the socialist-organized Left Forum, Casey tossed the race card on the table, accusing Teach For America of “whitening” New York City public schools.

Teach For America told EAGtv that its members comprise less than 1% of the teaching force in New York City and about 60% TFA members are white.  Those facts are merely a distraction to Casey in his racial smear campaign.

My child’s teacher could be purple and look like Barney the Dinosaur – if he or she is an effective teacher and  can help my son excel, so be it.  Why are leftists always so focused on race?

Does Randi Weingarten, whose organization oversees UFT, stand by Casey’ sickening comments or repudiate them?  As in the case of the California Federation of Teachers resolution honoring cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, she has remained silent.

It would behoove the unions to work in the best interest of children and make sure the best teacher possible is in front of every child in America, regardless of their skin color.

Teach For America is having a positive impact on some of America’s worst schools, and gutter attacks by the likes of Leo Casey and the United Federation of Teachers should not be tolerated.

When you think about a highly aggressive cartel teaming up with politicians to pass protectionist laws that kick entrepreneurs out of work, you probably don’t think about interior designers.

But you should.

The American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) represents less than 3 percent of all designers, but its members have designated themselves as spokespeople for the entire industry. ASID has spent over 30 years and millions of dollars lobbying from coast to coast for interior design licensing schemes.  Not surprisingly, the schemes they propose would force all interior designers to have the exact same credentials as required for membership in ASID.

The group has worked relentlessly to enlist state legislatures in its campaign for total industry cartelization. The Institute for Justice has documented these efforts in a study titled “Designing Cartels.”

Florida is ground zero right now in this epic battle.

After 17 years of wasteful and unnecessary government licensing, Florida is considering legislation to unlock economic opportunity for countless would-be entrepreneurs by eliminating needless licensing laws for more than 20 occupations—including interior design.  Not surprisingly, the interior design cartel fighting hard to keep its government-enforced monopoly Florida through a lobbying campaign of misrepresentation, deceit and baseless scare tactics.

The video above, produced by the Institute for Justice, debunks three of the cartel’s key myths:

• Myth #1: Most states regulate interior design
• Myth #2: Unlicensed interior design threatens public safety
• Myth #3: Interior designers will not be able to work without government regulation

In fact, none of these myths are true.  The reality is that Florida is one of only three states that regulate the practice of interior design.  And in 47 states, interior designers are doing just fine without licensing schemes, while consumers enjoy lower prices and more choices.

In Forbes this week, Institute for Justice president Chip Mellor explains that Florida’s regulation of interior designers presents a case study in cartels:

If Americans want to see how to create jobs, they should stop looking to Washington, D.C. for answers and turn their attention southward to Florida. There, as a means of reducing the state’s higher-than-national-average unemployment rate, Gov. Rick Scott has proposed eliminating job-killing licensing requirements in 20 occupations, ranging from auto repair shops to ballroom dance studios and hair braiders.

But businesses that have long benefited from government-enforced cartels in these occupations aren’t giving up without a fight. The most vocal of those seeking to maintain their protected status are interior designers . . . . [T]he designers’ cartel has hired a high-powered lobbyist to wage an aggressive PR campaign to remove interior design from the should-be deregulated industries.

But what about public health and safety?

The cartel claims all sorts of ills will befall Floridians if the state deregulates interior design.  My favorite:

By not allowing interior designers to be specialists and focus on the things they do, what you’re basically doing is contributing to 88,000 deaths every year.

That gem is documented in a St. Petersburg Times news story from Friday.  Not to be outdone, another cartel member featured in the article offers this bizarre assertion:

Do you know the color schemes that affect your salivation, your autonomic nervous system?” she said. “You don’t even have correct seating. And somebody chose that for you.

Apparently, cartel members know all about color schemes that affect human salivation, therefore Florida must preserve its interior design cartel.

In reality, however, the cartel has never produced a single shred of evidence to support those bogus health and safety claims.  A reporter for NBC-TV Austin who covered a similar cartelization battle in Texas, asked a cartel leader if she could give a single actual example of harm coming from the unlicensed practice of interior design.  You have to watch her response, it’s priceless:

Conservative icon George Will has even weighed in on the issue, along with many other reporters and journalists.  In a Washington Post column called Wallpapering With Red Tape, Will writes:

[G]overnment licenses professions to protect the public and ensure quality. It licenses engineers and doctors because if their testable skills are deficient, bridges collapse and patients die. The skills of interior designers are neither similarly measurable nor comparably disastrous when deficient. Perhaps designers could show potential clients a portfolio of their work, and government could trust the potential clients to judge . . . . Thomas Hobbes thought that liberties “depend on the silence of the law.” From lawmakers here, and everywhere else, more silence . . . would be welcome.

The bill that would deregulate 20 occupations in Florida, including interior design, is now before the House now and will soon move to the Senate.  If the passes as is, interior designers and their customers will once again be free from anti-competitive government licensing.  But if it fails, or if the cartel succeeds in removing interior design from the bill, Florida will remain one of just three states in the nation to regulate the practice of interior design—and a golden opportunity to strike a blow for economic liberty will have be lost.

Do you live in Florida?  Is there anything you can do to help make sure that this golden opportunity for economic liberty will not be thwarted by powerful special interests?   For more information on this struggle and the nefarious interior design cartel, visit www.ij.org/interiordesign. Please get involved today.

Join Team IJ on facebook.

It’s halftime during another glorious Big Ten football Saturday in Urbana-Champaign and a celebrated ritual dating back to 1926 begins again.    The Marching Illini band parts with military precision, clearing a path for a lone figure who emerges and struts proudly to the center of the field.  He is barefoot, clad in buckskin and leather tassels, his face painted bright orange and blue, and his head is topped by an impressive mien of eagle feathers.

Chief Illiniwek bows to the throng of admirers then he dances to Native American music.  He skims across the field as he twists and turns. He suddenly leaps in the air, touches his toes in an aerial split and then lands feet together on the turf.  He stands, arms folded in front of him in an ancient pose, as the band belts out the Illinois Fight song “Oske-wow-wow.” There is no mocking here.  No disrespect for the Native Americans whose namesake we at the U of I adopted as our own.

But that scene is just a fading memory now for the Chief is no more.  In fact this college football season marks the sixth year of his banishment from our campus by the NCAA for being a mascot “hostile and abusive” to Native American sensibilities.  (Although his last official performance would not take place until February 2007 at a home basketball game).

How did this come to pass?

Apparently those who took it upon themselves to speak for an Indian nation long vanished found Chief Illinwek’s very existence so traumatizing, so insulting, that they forced the NCAA to coerce my alma mater into killing this 81-year tradition or be banned from hosting any post-season  activities.  So the political correctness tsunami washed over my school, sweeping away a most cherished tradition when it receded.

Forget that the tribes of the Illini Confederacy were wiped out or displaced by the end of eighteenth century by more powerful Native American enemies.  Forget even that the closest living descendents of the confederacy, the Peoria, who were relocated to Oklahoma in the 19^th century apparently never had an issue with the Chief for over seven decades. In 1995, Don Giles, then Chief of the Peoria Tribe, said, “We’re proud that the University of Illinois…is drawing on that background of our having been there. And what more honor could they pay us?” But in 2000 the tribe’s position curiously changed after the new chief, Ron Froman, met with several Native American student groups at the U of I.  Were any of these students descended from the Illini Confederacy?  Not to my knowledge.  One’s direct standing on an issue matters little when there’s a p.c. crusade afoot.

Froman apparently just needed to be told that he was offended, and even  offered this historically dubious viewpoint: “ I don’t think [the Chief’s creation] was to honor us, because, hell, they ran our (butts) out of Illinois.” That his tribe was almost wiped out well before the white men “ran their butts out of the state” matters little when there’s a chance to manufacture synthetic outrage to help the indignation industry churn out its favorite product: identity politics.

Fortunately for the students of Florida State University, their Indian symbol, Chief Osceola, was allowed to live by the NCAA.  Why?  Because (get this now) the Seminole Tribe of Florida, who are still alive and well, found nothing offensive about him! Who could have imagined that?  Apparently  a lot of Indians could that’s who!  According to a 2002 Sports Illustrated poll of 351 Native Americans, 217 living on reservations, 134 living off, eighty-one percent said high school and college teams should not stop using Indian nicknames.

But as George Will (a fellow Illini) wrote about the same subject before the ban: “…

When, in the multiplication of entitlements, did we produce an entitlement for everyone to go through life without being annoyed by anything, even a team’s nickname? If some Irish or Scots were to take offense at Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish or the Fighting Scots of Monmouth College, what rule of morality would require the rest of us to care?”

But so goes our world.  We live in a time in which entire populations have united behind the pledge to our nation’s destruction, indeed our way of life.  This is a moment when we as a country need to raise a generation of tough hombres to face challenges to our very survival unimagined in times before commoditized mass-murder.  Instead we are raising cream puffs.  Cry babies.  Perez Hilton clones for whom almost anything that even hints of irreverence must be squashed.  And worse, we are unleashing a wave of children who are taught to tread lightly and leave no offending footprints should someone, somewhere, with time on their hands and an activist pro bono lawyer at their side, come a-calling.  How can this but stifle healthy debate—the life-blood of a free people.

I may be labeled as racist for even expressing in an open forum these sentiments, but I’ll just call you an anti-German/Irish bigot and be on my way.  Oh, and perhaps I’ll petition to ban any future the airing of “The Godfather” for using the offensive term “Kraut-Mick.”  Too bad if it’s your favorite movie.  I have feelings to consider.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this p.c. wave.  But I don’t think so.  I see it as the demise of this nation should this dialogue-crippling and balkanizing movement continue.  Six years ago it targeted a venerated tradition at an island of learning in a sea of corn and soybeans that was doing no harm to anyone—save those who seek to re-create this country in their own narrow and paradoxically intolerant image.

LONG LIVE THE CHIEF! No offense.