Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Yesterday’s opening items on oil being one of the greenest of fuels get a follow-on today by Robert Samuelson.

… Unless we shut down the economy, we need fossil fuels. More efficient light bulbs, energy-saving appliances, cars with higher gas mileage may all dampen energy use. But offsetting these savings will be more people (391 million vs. 305 million), more households (147 million vs. 113 million), more vehicles (297 million vs. 231 million) and a bigger economy (almost double in size). Although wind, solar and biomass are assumed to grow as much as 10 times faster than overall energy use, they provide only 11 percent of supply in 2035, up from 5 percent in 2008.

There are physical limits on new energy sources, as Robert Bryce shows in his book “Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.” Suppose an inventor “found a way to convert soybeans into jet fuel,” Bryce writes. “Even with that invention, the conversion of all of America’s yearly soybean production into jet fuel would only provide about 20 percent of U.S. jet fuel demand.” Jet fuel, in turn, is about 8 percent of U.S. oil use. Similarly, wind turbines have limited potential; they must be supported by backup generating capacity when there’s no breeze.

The consequences of the BP oil spill come in two parts. The first is familiar: the fire; the deaths; coated birds; polluted wetlands; closed beaches; anxious fishermen. The second is less appreciated: a more muddled energy debate.

Obama has made vilification of oil and the oil industry a rhetorical mainstay. This is intellectually shallow, if politically understandable. …

Mark Steyn outlines the problems associated with an Iranian bomb.

The other day, noting Bret Stephens’s analysis in Commentary as to why Iran cannot be contained, Jonah Goldberg made a very shrewd throwaway aside: “Arguments like this tend to get ignored not because they aren’t persuasive, but because they are,” he said. “The political and psychological costs of accepting the premise are too high. So, denial inevitably triumphs.”

And thus our Iran “policy”: There will be no U.S. military strike. There will be no international sanctions regime. The mullahs will go nuclear, because letting them go nuclear requires least of us — and there will always be scholars and experts ready to justify our inertia as farsighted realpolitik. Hence the rehabilitation of “containment”: That we can do. Iran, says Zbigniew Brzezinski, “may be dangerous, assertive, and duplicitous, but there is nothing in their history to suggest they are suicidal.”

Mr. Brzezinski is a man who has been reliably wrong about everything that matters for decades. His decision to route American support for the Afghan resistance through the malign double act of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki and Pakistan’s ISI has had consequences we live with to this day. He is the master of unrealpolitik, and so naturally his is now the new conventional wisdom: Iran is not “suicidal”; therefore, it can be contained.

Even a non-suicidal Iran is presumably intending to derive some benefit from its nuclear status. Entirely rational leverage would include: controlling the supply of Gulf oil, setting the price, and determining the customers; getting vulnerable emirates such as Kuwait and Qatar to close U.S. military bases; and turning American allies in Europe into de facto members of the non-aligned movement. Whatever deterrent effect it might have on first use or proliferation, there is no reason to believe any “containment” strategy would prevent Iran’s accomplishing its broader strategic goals. …

The threats that Israel is facing are changing and increasing, writes Caroline Glick.

…First, it is a model that can be and in all likelihood will be replicated on air and land and it can be replicated anywhere. Israel can and should expect mobs of suicide protesters marching on Gaza to force Israel to surrender control over its borders. Israel can expect mobs of suicide protesters marching on Israeli embassies and other government installations around the world in an attempt to increase its diplomatic isolation.

In the air, Israel can expect charter flights to take off from airports around the world with a few dozen kamikaze protesters who will force the IAF to shoot them down as they approach Israeli airspace. …

…THE SECOND and far more dangerous implication of Israel’s enemies’ aggressive adoption of suicide protests is that by ensuring violence will be used, they increase the chances of war. …

In Forbes, John Tamny tells us why the Dow has gone from 10,000 to 10,000 in 11 years.

The Dow Jones industrial average first touched 10,000 on March 16, 1999. Eleven years later the Dow remains stuck around the same 10,000 level.

…Market commentators will apply all manner of reasoning and faulty to logic to the stuck nature of stocks, but the answers necessary to explain the past and present are really quite simple: bad policy.

To see why, it’s worth remembering that there’s really no mystery to positive market returns. The inputs necessary are simple, and boil down to four things: when taxes are light, regulation is nonintrusive, trade is free and money values stable, stocks do well. Any diversion from those four inputs leads to market uncertainty and reduced returns, or considering 1966-1982 and 1999 to the present, no gains at all. …

Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe, tells us to listen to the ideologues that Obama appoints to find out the president’s true views.

PRESIDENT BARACK Obama was adamant… “I don’t believe that government can or should run health care.’’

But if Obama is as opposed to a government-ruled health sector as he claims, why has he nominated Dr. Donald Berwick as director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services — far and away the nation’s largest health-insurance programs, at a cost of nearly $1 trillion — a man who openly adores Britain’s socialized health care?

“I am romantic about the National Health Service,’’ Berwick told a British audience in 2008. “I love it.’’ He not only loves the National Health Service, he extols it as “an example for the whole world — an example . . . that the United States needs now.’’

…And he embraces government health care rationing. “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care,’’ he said in a 2009 interview, “the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.’’ This is a view Berwick has held for a long time; more than 10 years ago he wrote that “limited resources require decisions about who will have access to care and the extent of their coverage.’’ … “Here, you choose a harder path,’’ he said in Britain two years ago. “You plan the supply; you aim a bit low; you prefer slightly too little of a technology or a service to too much; then you search for care bottlenecks and try to relieve them.’’…

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

We begin today with a few items that will help us look at the good side of our use of oil. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe is first.

… The explosion of BP’s oil rig in the Gulf has been a calamity in so many ways, above all the loss of 11 human lives. With hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil gushing daily from the crippled wellhead, the environmental impacts have been excruciating. BP is responsible for a dreadful mess, one that will take years and many millions of dollars to clean up.

Awful as the catastrophe has been, however, life without oil would be far, far worse.

Americans consume oil not because they are “addicted’’ to it, but because it enriches their lives, making possible prosperity, comfort, and mobility that would have been all but unimaginable just a few generations ago. Almost by definition, an addiction is something one is healthier without. But oil-based energy improves human health and reduces poverty — it makes life longer, safer, and better. Addictions debase life. Oil improves and expands it.

“Oil may be the single most flexible substance ever discovered,’’ writes the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce in “Power Hungry,’’ a new book on the myths of “green’’ energy. “More than any other substance, oil helped to shrink the world. Indeed, thanks to its high energy density, oil is a nearly perfect fuel for use in all types of vehicles, from boats and planes to cars and motorcycles. Whether measured by weight or by volume, refined oil products provide more energy than practically any other commonly available substance, and they provide it in a form that’s easy to handle, relatively cheap, and relatively clean.’’ If oil didn’t exist, Bryce quips, we’d have to invent it.

Of course there are problems created by oil, as the Deepwater Horizon calamity so heartbreakingly demonstrates . …

Jonah Goldberg is next.

A rolling “dead zone” off the Gulf of Mexico is killing sea life and destroying livelihoods. Recent estimates put the blob at nearly the size of New Jersey.

Alas, I’m not talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As terrible as that catastrophe is, such accidents have occurred in U.S. waters only about once every 40 years (and globally about once every 20 years). I’m talking about the dead zone largely caused by fertilizer runoff from American farms along the Mississippi and Atchafalaya river basins. Such pollutants cause huge algae plumes that result in oxygen starvation in the Gulf’s richest waters, near the delta.

Because the dead zone is an annual occurrence, there’s no media feeding frenzy over it, even though the average annual size of these hypoxic zones has been about 6,600 square miles over the last five years, and they are driven by bipartisan federal agriculture, trade, and energy policies.

Indeed, as Steven Hayward notes in the current Weekly Standard, if policymakers continue to pursue biofuels in response to the current anti-fossil-fuel craze, these dead zones will get a lot bigger every year. A 2008 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that adhering to corn-based ethanol targets will increase the size of the dead zone by as much as 34 percent.

If all of our transport fuel came from biofuel, we would need 30 percent more land than all of the existing food-growing farmland we have today.

Of course, that’s just one of the headaches “independence” from oil and coal would bring. …

And Goldberg expands on his earlier piece.

… Everyone takes as a given that the environment would be better off without oil and coal. And it would be better off if there was a better fuel available. But, not counting nuclear, there isn’t. Not even close (as Ken Green notes earlier on this blog). And … fossil fuels have been an incalculable gift to mankind. Without fossil fuels, we might not have cut the Malthusian knot that was causing us to burn through a wide assortment of “renewable” resources.

Kerosene helped wean America (and everyone else) off our “addiction” to whales. Oil and coal helped end our addiction to wood for, well, everything. Wood was not only a heating fuel, it was instrumental to railroads and all manner of construction. Ronald Bailey has noted that “Railroads, the 19th century’s ‘modern’ form of transportation, consumed nearly 25 percent of all the wood used in America, for both track ties and fuel.” In 1900, New York City alone supported over 120,000 horses who befouled the water and the air in the city, but also required vast amounts of land to supply the hay that fueled them.

Today, more American land is covered by forests—by far—than at the end of the 19th century. By the 1860s, Massachusetts and Connecticut had lost 70 percent of their forests. Today nearly 70 percent of those states are forested again. Vermont was once nearly denuded but now nearly 80 percent of it is covered in trees. …

We followed Jonah’s link to Ken Green who imagines the speech the president should give;

… My fellow Americans, I am sure that we all grieve for the environmental and economic disaster that has befallen the states of the Gulf Coast, particularly already fragile Louisiana. Now, regrettably, they face damages from the worst oil spill in American history. We will do everything we can to help the people of the ravaged coastal states recover from this terrible environmental tragedy.

But, even in the midst of tragedy, we must acknowledge that we are an energy civilization, some would even say that we are an energy species. Our entire economy, everything we do, from the morning we wake through the hours we sleep, requires a constant flow of energy. Fossil fuels provide the vast majority of the energy we use, and for a very good reason: there are no economically viable, comparably useful alternatives, and there probably won’t be for many decades.

And then, fossil fuel alternatives come with their own environmental problems. Look at corn ethanol, which the previous administration favored. Production of corn ethanol has been environmentally ruinous, causing air pollution, water pollution, wildlife contamination with pesticides, coastal dead zones, and inflated food prices that increased famine around the world. The growing demand for bio-diesel has led to the razing of vast swaths of the world’s rainforest, which is being planted with oil palms. …

We have a picture, courtesy of the NY Times, that is a beautiful illustration of the stupidity of the state.

Speaking of oil, how’s things in the Middle East? Jennifer Rubin notes Obama is polling poorly there.

… All that suck-uppery, all that Israel-bashing, and yet Muslim countries like Obama less. One explanation may be that Obama hasn’t been supporting the aspirations, human rights, and religious freedom of the people of the Muslim world; instead, he’s been courting the despotic rulers of these countries.

And recall too that Obama’s approval in Israel is in the single digits.Obama has failed to endear the U.S. to the countries of the Middle East and, in fact, has alienated all sides. It is what comes from straddling, equivocating, dumping friends, and showing meekness to bullies. It seems that not even joining the thugocracies on the U.N. Human Rights Council has done the trick. So many “smart” diplomats, such putrid results.

Abe Greenwald has some thoughts on the subject.

Jen, forget the fact that Muslim publics don’t like Barack Obama as much as they once did. Consider this: “the new [Pew] poll does show a modest increase over the past year in support for suicide bombing being often or sometimes justifiable, with a rise in Egypt from 15% to 20% and in Jordan from 12% to 20%.” …

… Why did support for suicide bombing go up in the past year? In the U.S., our post-9/11 self-assessment is all about resenting the leader who took us into long and difficult fights. But the war against jihad plays out in Muslim publics as a war of ideas. For the endless jokes about his oratorical shortcomings, Bush articulated the choice with unsurpassed clarity: it’s Islamism v. democracy. What does each one offer? Islamism gives you a zombie doctrine of earthly denial so that you may, in death, triumph over your hopeless life. Under Bush, American democracy put your oppressive leaders on notice and gave you the hope, if not the actual opportunity, to change your hopeless life. Under Obama, democracy bows to your authoritarian king, extends an open hand to the autocrat who beats you over the head, and welcomes with open arms the dictator who tortured you in jail. Obama’s made the choice a no brainer. …

Turning to things domestic, Michael Barone thinks Obama’s thuggery is wearing thin.

Thuggery is unattractive. Ineffective thuggery even more so. Which may be one reason so many Americans have been reacting negatively to the response of Barack Obama and his administration to BP’s Gulf oil spill.

Take Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s remark that he would keep his “boot on the neck” of BP, which brings to mind George Orwell’s definition of totalitarianism as “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Except that Salazar’s boot hasn’t gotten much in the way of results yet.

Or consider Obama’s undoubtedly carefully considered statement to Matt Lauer that he was consulting with experts “so I know whose ass to kick.” Attacking others is a standard campaign tactic when you’re in political trouble, and certainly BP, which appears to have taken unwise shortcuts in the Gulf, is an attractive target.

But you don’t always win arguments that way. The Obama White House gleefully took on Dick Cheney on the issue of terrorist interrogations. It turned out that more Americans agreed with Cheney’s stand, despite his low poll numbers, than Obama’s. …

Mort Zuckerman covers international opinion of the prez.

… The reviews of Obama’s performance have been disappointing. He has seemed uncomfortable in the role of leading other nations, and often seems to suggest there is nothing special about America’s role in the world. The global community was puzzled over the pictures of Obama bowing to some of the world’s leaders and surprised by his gratuitous criticisms of and apologies for America’s foreign policy under the previous administration of George W. Bush. One Middle East authority, Fouad Ajami, pointed out that Obama seems unaware that it is bad form and even a great moral lapse to speak ill of one’s own tribe while in the lands of others.

Even in Britain, for decades our closest ally, the talk in the press—supported by polls—is about the end of the “special relationship” with America. French President Nicolas Sarkozy openly criticized Obama for months, including a direct attack on his policies at the United Nations. Sarkozy cited the need to recognize the real world, not the virtual world, a clear reference to Obama’s speech on nuclear weapons. When the French president is seen as tougher than the American president, you have to know that something is awry. Vladimir Putin of Russia has publicly scorned a number of Obama’s visions. Relations with the Chinese leadership got off to a bad start with the president’s poorly-organized visit to China, where his hosts treated him disdainfully and prevented him from speaking to a national television audience of the Chinese people. The Chinese behavior was unprecedented when compared to visits by other U.S. presidents.

Obama’s policy on Afghanistan—supporting a surge in troops, but setting a date next year when they will begin to withdraw—not only gave a mixed signal, but provided an incentive for the Taliban just to wait us out. The withdrawal part of the policy was meant to satisfy a domestic constituency, but succeeded in upsetting all of our allies in the region. Further anxiety was provoked by Obama’s severe public criticism of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his coterie of family and friends for their lackluster leadership, followed by a reversal of sorts regarding the same leaders. ..

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

We need to spend some time on last week’s speech. Charles Krauthammer first.

Barack Obama doesn’t do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian “I feel your pain,” a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting. It wasn’t until the end of the speech — the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda — that Obama warmed to his task.

Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.

How? By creating a glorious, new, clean green economy. And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around. With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.

But is this not what we’ve been trying to do for decades with ethanol, which remains a monumental boondoggle, economically unviable and environmentally damaging to boot? As with yesterday’s panacea, synfuels, into which Jimmy Carter poured billions.

Notice that Obama no longer talks about Spain, which until recently he repeatedly cited for its visionary subsidies of a blossoming new clean energy industry. That’s because Spain, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is pledged to reverse its disastrously bloated public spending, including radical cuts in subsidies to its uneconomical photovoltaic industry. …

And then the speech is treated to vintage Mark Steyn. He ends like this;

… My colleague Rich Lowry suggested the other day that most people not on the Gulf coast aren’t really that bothered about the spill, and that Obama has allowed himself to be blown off course entirely unnecessarily. There may be some truth to this: For most of America, this is a Potemkin crisis. But what better kind to trip up a Potemkin leader? So the president has now declared war on the great BP spill – Gulf War 3! – and in this epic conflict the Speechgiver-in-Chief will surely be his own unmanned drone:

“I fired off a speech

But the British kept a-spillin’

Twice as many barrels as there was a month ago

I fired off a speech

But the British kept a-spillin’

Up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico…”

Chris Matthews and the other leg-tinglers invented an Obama that doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, they’re stuck with the one that does, and it will be interesting to see whether he’s capable of plugging the leak in his own support. If not, who knows what the tide might wash up?

Memo to Secretary Rodham Clinton: Do you find yourself of a quiet evening with a strange craving for chicken dinners and county fairs in Iowa and New Hampshire, maybe next summer? Need one of those relaunch books to explain why you’re getting back in the game in your country’s hour of need?

“It Takes A Spillage.”

But, would the kid president buck the union bosses? John Fund says no.

In his nationwide address last night on the Gulf crisis, President Obama declared: “We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long it takes.” But at least one congressman isn’t convinced, complaining that Mr. Obama won’t pursue promising solutions if it means bucking his union allies.

Hawaii GOP Rep. Charles Djou, who won his seat in a special election last month, says he’s “disappointed” that Mr. Obama has failed to waive the Jones Act, an antiquated 1920 law mandating that goods shipped between U.S. ports be handled by U.S.-built and -owned ships manned by U.S. crews. Unions fiercely support the law as a means of preserving U.S. jobs. In this case, though, the law might be hindering the recovery of hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast jobs. …

David Harsanyi has speech comments too.

… What about the president’s contention that “we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water”? This is what you might call a meta-truth. Like, for instance, “The sun is dying!” or “The budget will be balanced.”

The oil, coal and natural gas we know exists and haven’t yet drilled for alone would be enough to provide hundreds of years of energy for the nation.

Perhaps it’s a testament to a president who has done more to stimulate belief in free enterprise than any other in 40 years, but 68 percent of Americans, according to a recent Pew poll, believe the nation should expand exploration for coal, gas and oil even after the BP accident.

A larger number of Americans also embrace the idea of clean energy. They embrace balance.

It’s one thing to watch reality battered by environmentalists during good times; it’s quite a different story today. There is no clean energy economy without a severe trade-off that will cost jobs and prosperity.

Now, the president may believe that it’s worthwhile to sacrifice your prosperity on a moral imperative. But let’s not obscure what we’re talking about here.

She wrote speeches for Ronald Maximus, so Peggy Noonan knows something on the subject.

… No reason to join the pile on, but some small points. Two growing weaknesses showed up in small phrases. The president said he had consulted among others “experts in academia” on what to do about the calamity. This while noting, again, that his energy secretary has a Nobel Prize. There is a growing meme that Mr. Obama is too impressed by credentialism, by the meritocracy, by those who hold forth in the faculty lounge, and too strongly identifies with them. He should be more impressed by those with real-world experience. It was the “small people” in the shrimp boats who laid the boom.

And when speaking of why proper precautions and safety measures were not in place, the president sternly declared, “I want to know why.” But two months in he should know. And he should be telling us. Such empty sternness is . . . empty.

Throughout the speech the president gestured showily, distractingly, with his hands. Politicians do this now because they’re told by media specialists that it helps them look natural. They don’t look natural, they look like Ann Bancroft gesticulating to Patty Duke in “The Miracle Worker.” …

Another sterling example of the ignorance of government. This from Gateway Pundit.

Against Governor Jindal’s wishes the federal government blocked oil-sucking barges today because they needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board and were having trouble contacting the owners. …

David Warren noticed the idiots in the Coast Guard.

… And as we saw in President Obama’s Tuesday night address, he has every intention to use this largely artificial crisis to leverage energy and environmental legislation that will be vastly more destructive of people’s livelihoods than anything now washing ashore.

For consider: a very large part of the population of the U.S. Gulf states depend directly or indirectly on those (surviving) oil platforms. When the U.S. government shuts them down, for an extended period, out of environmentalist unction, it does vastly more aggregate economic damage — to those human beings — than to the ones who may be minding oyster beds. And the latter would anyway be compensated under existing and long-established tort law.

Indeed, litigation was an issue for down the road. Cleaning up the spill is the issue now; but it is clearly beyond the competence of the Obama administration. They still have not done any of the things the Bush administration did, promptly, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to remove bureaucratic obstacles to the rescue efforts.

They have, to use just one of the more spectacular examples, the Coast Guard grounding a fleet of barges from the state of Louisiana that were sucking up surface oil directly threatening the coast, in order to do leisurely and irrelevant safety checks. They have multiple overlapping environmental agencies, with their multiple overlapping veto powers, putting mountains of paperwork in the way of every other effort. It is “business as usual” for the bureaucracies, two full months after the initial catastrophe. …

Wadayakno? It’s like someone is finally getting some sense. The NY Times reports yesterday states are starting to cut pensions. Doesn’t look like it will hit the Illinois millionaires we posted on in the last Pickings, but it’s a start.

Many states are acknowledging this year that they have promised pensions they cannot afford and are cutting once-sacrosanct benefits, to appease taxpayers and attack budget deficits.

Illinois raised its retirement age to 67, the highest of any state, and capped public pensions at $106,800 a year. Arizona, New York, Missouri and Mississippi will make people work more years to earn pensions. Virginia is requiring employees to pay into the state pension fund for the first time. New Jersey will not give anyone pension credit unless they work at least 32 hours a week.

“We can’t afford to deny reality or delay action any longer,” said Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, adding that his state’s pension cuts, enacted in March, will save some $300 million in the first year alone.

But there is a catch: Nearly all of the cuts so far apply only to workers not yet hired. Though heralded as breakthrough reforms by state officials, the cuts phase in so slowly they are unlikely to save the weakest funds and keep them from running out of money. Some new rules may even hasten the demise of the funds they were meant to protect.

Lawmakers wanted to avoid legal battles or fights with unions, whose members can be influential voters. So they are allowing most public workers across the country to keep building up their pensions at the same rate as ever. The tens of thousands of workers now on Illinois’s payrolls, for instance, will still get to retire at 60 — and some will as young as 55. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Looking at the African states run by bandits, bumpkins, and buffoons, someone has suggested we stop kicking the can down the road and begin a process of de-recognition. A Contentions post leads us to the article in the NY Times.

… Prof. Engelbert believes this is a “radical” idea, though he means that in an approving sense. But it is not radical at all. It is an old-fashioned idea, and I mean that in an approving sense. The classical literature on sovereignty teems with requirements that an entity must fulfill if it is to be described as a state and therefore accorded the privilege of sovereignty. It must control its territory. Its armed forces must obey the laws of war and be under a recognized chain of command. It must not allow its subjects to engage in freelance violence against other states. It must have a regular system of justice. By the late 19th century, it could not practice slavery. And, by the 20th century, it had to allow its citizens — the shift from ‘subject’ to ‘citizen’ is vital — some voice in shaping their own government.

If there is anything radical in Prof. Engelbert’s thought, it is that we should seek again to apply these classical standards in a world that, for most of the past hundred years, has paid them progressively little mind. The descent has been slow but steady — first, the admission of the USSR into the ranks of the recognized states, then the reluctance to kick Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany out of those ranks, and then, finally, the step that most worries Prof. Engelbert: the fact that during decolonization, the “gift of sovereignty was granted from outside rather than earned from within.” I describe this as ‘honorary sovereignty’: sovereignty that is given but is not merited. …

Here is Professor Pierre Engelbert’s elegant, concise thought.

THE World Cup, which began on Friday, is bringing deserved appreciation of South Africa as a nation that transitioned from white minority domination to a vibrant pluralist democracy. Yet its achievements stand largely alone on the continent. Of the 17 African nations that are commemorating their 50th anniversaries of independence this year — the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia will both do so in the coming weeks — few have anything to truly celebrate.

Five decades ago, African independence was worth rejoicing over: these newly created states signaled an end to the violent, humiliating Western domination of the continent, and they were quickly recognized by the international community. Sovereignty gave fledgling elites the shield to protect their weak states against continued colonial subjugation and the policy instruments to promote economic development.

Yet because these countries were recognized by the international community before they even really existed, because the gift of sovereignty was granted from outside rather than earned from within, it came without the benefit of popular accountability, or even a social contract between rulers and citizens.

Buttressed by the legality and impunity that international sovereignty conferred upon their actions, too many of Africa’s politicians and officials twisted the normal activities of a state beyond recognition, transforming mundane tasks like policing, lawmaking and taxation into weapons of extortion. …

In the NY Post, Scott Gottlieb gives some of the leaked details about how government is going to control your healthcare. The guy who said if you liked your plan, you could keep it; he lied.

…The ObamaCare law references the Secretary of Health and Human Services almost 2,200 times and uses the phrase “the secretary shall” more than 725. Each reference requires HHS to set new rules on medical care, giving control to an existing federal office or one of 160 new agencies that the bill created.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (who was once the Kansas state-insurance commissioner) has taken to these tasks with zeal. In some circles, she’s now known as the nation’s “insurance regulator in chief.”

She’s starting off by applying new regs to health plans offered by large employers — even though these costly rules were supposedly only going to apply to plans sold in the state insurance “exchanges” that don’t get created until 2014. This twist is spelled out in an 83-page draft of a new regulation that leaked late last week.

Bottom line: Sebelius means to dictate what your insurance plan must look like almost from day one, no matter how you get your coverage. …

In the Corner, Veronique de Rugy explains a popular government ploy to garner support for more spending it cannot pay for. She gives excellent rebuttals to the government propaganda that opens the post.

President Obama’s recent plea for another $50 billion (here is the letter to congressional leaders) to save the jobs of teachers and firefighters in the states is a great example of the “Washington Monument Syndrome.” This refers to the bureaucratic practice of threatening to close down the most popular and vital programs in response to prospective budget cuts; it gets its name from the U.S. Department of the Interior, which always threatens it will have to close the Washington Monument if its budget is cut. …

Ed Morrissey makes a plea to stop the madness.

…When do people in Minnesota get to stop bailing out California bureaucrats?  Shouldn’t the states themselves start working on making rational judgments about the size and sustainability of their own governments? …

Now, dear reader, you are going to puke. From The New Editor we learn about the pensions Illinois has awarded to the top 100 school administrators.

… The total estimated cost of these pensions is almost $1 billion — at $887,925,790 — for 100 people! …

We went to the list and pulled out the big winner, Neil C. Codell. He is going to retire in 11 years when his annual salary is estimated to be $885,327. His first year’s pension will be $601,978 and 29 years later his annual pension will be $1,360,470. At that time, his cumulative pension will total $26,661,604. His job is Superintendent of Niles Township Community High School District 219. Mind you, he doesn’t have to worry about elementary or middle schools; just high schools. How many high schools, you ask? Two.

Peter Wehner posts on the collision between the president and reality. You see, he is failing in his duties because you haven’t given him more of your money and your freedoms.

…Yet almost 17 months into his presidency, the man who was going to remake this nation, who was going to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless, who was going to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace, who was going to open doors of opportunities to our kids and replace cynicism with hope and stop the rise of the oceans and heal the planet — this man has come up short. None of this has come to pass. It turns out he cannot even, in his own words, “plug the damn hole.” He has not issued waivers that he should, nor has he provided Gulf Coast governors with the requests they need, nor coordinated the clean-up effort that the people of the Louisiana are begging for. He can do nothing, it seems, except blame others. The man whom, we were told, was the next Lincoln and FDR is coming to grips with his own impotence and ineptitude. From Iran to the Gulf of Mexico, from Middle East peace to job creation, from uniting our country to cleansing our politics, Barack Obama is being brought to his knees. …

The presidency is more than just the person who currently holds the position. Thomas Sowell discusses some of the consequences Obama creates for the nation when Obama puts his agenda ahead of historical agreements and friendships.

…Nothing will keep a man or an institution determined to continue on a failing policy course like past success with that policy. Obama’s political success in the 2008 election campaign was a spectacular triumph of creating images and impressions. …

…Obama spoke grandly about “pressing the reset button” on international relations, as if all the international commitments of the past were his to disregard.

But if no American commitment can be depended upon beyond a current administration, then any nation that allies itself with us is jeopardizing its own national security, because dangers in the international jungle last longer than 4 years or even 8 years. …

In the Weekly Standard Blog, Gabriel Schoenfeld writes that the possible replacement for AG Holder is more reasonable than the NY Times implies.

…Kris did indeed write a memorandum containing sharp criticisms of the legal arguments put forward by the Bush administration on behalf of the NSA wiretapping. But in the same memo, he readily acknowledged that FISA might itself trespass on the president’s constitutional authority as commander-in-chief. In fact, he allowed that even massive dragnet-style warrantless wiretapping might be legal under some circumstances, offering a ticking time bomb scenario in support of this controversial view:

If the government had probable cause that a terrorist possessed a nuclear bomb somewhere in Georgetown, and was awaiting telephone instructions on how to arm it for detonation, and if FISA were interpreted not to allow surveillance of every telephone in Georgetown in those circumstances, the President’s assertion of Article II power to do so would be quite persuasive and attractive to most judges and probably most citizens. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. …

David Harsanyi reports on another market that the government wants to “help”.

You know what journalism could really use more of? Government participation. Who better, after all, than a gaggle of technocrats and political appointees to guide the industry in matters of entrepreneurship, fairness and coverage?

Thankfully, the good folks at the Federal Trade Commission are all over it, cobbling together a report aimed at saving newspapers called “Potential Policy Recommendation to Support the Reinvention of Journalism.” It’s only the first step in a long-term plan to rescue the Fourth Estate from itself.

As you can imagine, the paper is crammed with groundbreaking ideas: industry bailouts, higher taxes on the stuff you buy to help subsidize the stuff you don’t. …

Streetwise Professor is tired of Obama’s strawman debating technique.

(Consistency) … is the Hobgoblin of little minds, according to Emerson.  And if you want a pitch-perfect illustration of the kind of mind Emerson was disparaging, I present Obama:

“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”

I mean, really.  Does this guy have the slightest clue?

Christopher Hitchens comments on a recent speech given by Prince Charles.

…A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer. To this innate absurdity, Prince Charles manages to bring fatuities that are entirely his own. And, as he paged his way through his dreary wad of babble, there must have been some wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience. I quote from a recent document published by the Islamic Forum of Europe, a group dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate and the imposition of sharia, which has been very active in London mosques and in the infiltration of local political parties. “The primary work” in the establishment of a future Muslim empire, it announces, “is in Europe, because it is this continent, despite all the furore about its achievements, which has a moral and spiritual vacuum.”  …

In the Corner, Robert Costa has an interesting post on golfer Tom Watson.

…Did you know that Tom Watson has his own Corner?

“Watson does keep an old guy’s hours, and maybe that’s his secret. He’s in bed by 8 or 9 and up at 4 or 4:30, when he logs on to his computer and checks the news, catches up on e-mail and writes for his blog, Teeing Off, at tomwatson.com. He thinks about a lot in those early-morning hours, he said, but he does not worry about the one question that people keep asking: when will he hang it up?”

Not too soon, I hope. You’ve got to like a Dittohead whose caddie, no joke, played a big part in helping Joe Sestak topple Arlen Specter. If interested, you can check out Watson’s blog here.

Andy McCarthy posts on soccer in the Corner.

… after all, those hip, progressive sports journalists at ESPN and Sports Illustrated keep telling us this is a Bidenesque big, er, deal. But even after taking in Japan’s thrilling, historic 1-0 victory over Cameroon, Jason Black still doesn’t “get it.”

And, as he relates so well in his Washington Times piece, he approached it with a totally open mind. His conclusion? ”There were a few enjoyable things about watching soccer. No commercials, it looks good in HD and I was able to get some things done around the house since there was no real danger of missing anything.”

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

David Warren is often hard to categorize. But, he leaves you thinking.

We learned a simple thing this week: that the BP clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico is hampered by the Jones Act. This is a piece of 1920s protectionist legislation, that requires all vessels working in U.S. waters to be American-built, and American-crewed.

So while, for instance, the U.S. Coast Guard can accept such help as three kilometres of containment boom from Canada, they can’t accept, and therefore don’t ask for, the assistance of high-tech European vessels specifically designed for the task in hand.

This is amusing, in a way: a memorable illustration of … the sort of stuff I keep going on about. Which is to say, the law of unintended consequences, which pertains with especial virulence to all acts of government regulation.

Reagan and Thatcher were eloquent on this, but made little progress against entrenched interests. My reader may imagine exactly what entrenched interest keeps the Jones Act in place.A large part of the function of all regulatory bureaucracies is granting exemptions to the moronic rules. This, in turn, creates the conditions for massive corruption, and in the case at hand, the phenomenon of “regulatory capture” — regulators and regulatees working hand-in-glove.

It is the stuff that brilliant Scottish moralist, Adam Smith, warned us against back in 1776. A “symbiotic relationship” tends to evolve, in 100 per cent of cases, between the big businesses that dominate an industry, and the big government that regulates them. They share such common interests as eliminating competition. …

…For another axiom of David Warren Thought is that everyone is conservative, in a field he knows something about. Reciprocally, there is a tendency to sport more and more liberal views, the greater one’s ignorance of a field (and therefore of its constraints). …

Victor Davis Hanson thinks that letting the academics run the country is a bit like letting the inmates run the asylum.

…Money is as despised in the abstract as it is pursued in the concrete. No one has run a business, worked much in dead-end, physical labor, or felt economic disaster when the economy went south. Tragedy instead for those who make it on the academic gravy train is the absence of an automatic pay increase, a refused sabbatical, or a hiring freeze. Academics damn Wal-Mart’s exploitation, but count on part-timers to work for a third of their own salaries for the same work — and thereby subsidize their own aristocratic perks. The PhD is felt the equivalent of a MD or MBA, and so leisured contemplation focuses on why less well spoken doctors and CEOs cruelly and so unfairly make so much more than far smarter professors. …

…The perverse was always preferred to the logical: so a Mao was better than a Churchill, Lincoln was faulted for not possessing 1999-era academic sensitivity, and FDR not WWII saved the economy from further depression. Versailles explains Hitler rather than his own insane hatreds. The Soviet and Chinese nightmares were problematic and based on misunderstandings of Marx rather than natural conclusions from him. The real fear after 9/11 is backlash, not more terrorism. The non-Christian nihilist Timothy McVeigh or the Columbine Satanists are proof of widespread Christian terrorism; the last 50 aborted Islamic terrorist plots are aberrations.

If you wonder how our present administration’s attitudes toward business, commerce, taxes, finance, race, national security and foreign policy now play out, just drop by a local faculty lounge for a few minutes and listen up — America in 2010 will suddenly make sense, and perhaps scare the hell out of you all at once. It all reminds me of the proverbial first-semester college student who returns home at Thanksgiving to his near-broke parents to inform them of all the “new” things he’s learned at university.

Tunku Varadarajan blogs on last night’s speech.

On Tuesday night, we saw the debut of a new oratorical exercise, one that may, in the short term—though, mercifully, without Nancy Pelosi seated in the background—come to rival the State of the Union (SOTU) address. Let us call it the State of the Oil Spill, or SOTOS. …

In the Las Vegas Review-Journal, J.C. Watts lays the cards out on the table.

…Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is one of the most articulate economic conservatives to recently emerge on the national scene. His “Roadmap” strategy — under-reported by the mainstream media — emphasizes that the truly needy need to be taken care of by government but middle-class entitlements must be reduced for the simple reason that there’s no money in the treasury for them. …

…Conservatives have long and rightly argued that governments do not generate wealth. They only distribute it. Jonah Goldberg in National Review writes that the challenge for both liberals and conservatives is simply to define how much distribution is “enough.” Goldberg asks: “What would an acceptable safety net look like? Who would be taken care of by taxpayers and for how long?” Rep. Ryan offers answers to those questions in his brilliant “Roadmap,” but ideologically driven liberals don’t. They simply scoff at conservative caution. Leading liberals maintain there’s no such thing as enough — a position obviously shared by President Barack Obama.

It has been said before, but bears repeating: The 2010 congressional races are shaping up to be the most important elections since The Great Depression. Will the Democrats be allowed to continue controlling the Congress and proceed to expand government, the deficit and the debt? Or will the voters elect a Republican majority pledging to put the brakes on President Obama’s policies and the dismantling of the private enterprise system? (And will Republicans keep their word this time?) …

Steven Hayward adds logical analysis to the MSM hysteria about the oil spill. The reported reason for the dead zone in the Gulf may surprise you.

…A recent study of seven basic ecosystem types, and their most typical perturbations, found that of ecosystems that make a recovery from various catastrophic events (and, it must be noted, not all do), ocean ecosystems disrupted by oil spills were the fastest to recover, often within a span of one to four years. As the New York Times noted in a 1993 story, the Persian Gulf recovered surprisingly faster than anticipated from the 1.2 million ton spill Saddam Hussein engineered in 1991: “The vast amount of oil that Iraqi occupation forces in Kuwait dumped into the Persian Gulf during the 1991 war did little long-term damage, international researchers say.” By contrast, forest lands disrupted by fire or deforestation can take more than 40 years to recover.

Besides increasing our reliance on tankers, there are two other reasons curtailing offshore production in the Gulf may not reduce the ecological risk to the Gulf Coast. First, other nations are unlikely to curtail their own offshore exploration in the Gulf. Cuba is drilling for oil within 100 miles of south Florida; Mexico has extensive drilling operations in the Gulf (and as mentioned above caused the largest single spill in history). Both Venezuela and Brazil are expanding their offshore exploration and production in deep water, and are likely to expand to the Gulf of Mexico if the United States scales back.

Second, while the Deepwater Horizon spill represents an acute short term shock to Gulf waters and the Gulf Coast, the chronic seasonal depletion of oxygen in the Gulf (aka the 8,500 square mile “dead zone” below the Mississippi River Delta) may be aggravated by one of the policy responses that has been suggested in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon: increased ethanol production. …

…A 2008 study published by the National Academy of Sciences observed that “nitrogen leaching from fertilized corn fields to the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River system is a primary cause of the bottom-water hypoxia that develops on the continental shelf of the northern Gulf of Mexico each summer.” The study concluded that our current ethanol production goals will increase dissolved inorganic nitrogen flowing into the Gulf by as much as 34 percent …

For a time, even Margaret Thatcher went over to the warming dark side. Shows what happens when you listen to the “experts.” But, eventually she became a skeptic.

… She voiced precisely the fundamental doubts about the warming scare that have since become familiar to us. Pouring scorn on the “doomsters”, she questioned the main scientific assumptions used to drive the scare, from the conviction that the chief force shaping world climate is CO2, rather than natural factors such as solar activity, to exaggerated claims about rising sea levels. She mocked Al Gore and the futility of “costly and economically damaging” schemes to reduce CO2 emissions. She cited the 2.5C rise in temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period as having had almost entirely beneficial effects. She pointed out that the dangers of a world getting colder are far worse than those of a CO2-enriched world growing warmer. She recognised how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, Left-wing political agenda which posed a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of mankind.

In other words, long before it became fashionable, Lady Thatcher was converted to the view of those who, on both scientific and political grounds, are profoundly sceptical of the climate change ideology. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The Samizdata Blog named after the Soviet dissident press called Samizdat (self-published) has started us off with a string of items about the Three Gorges Dam in China. Beyond the dam problems though, the post shows some remarkable thought about the relative problems and strengths of democracy and the eventual weaknesses of an autocratic regime like China’s. To do that reference is made to Victor Davis Hanson’s sophisticated thinking about the Western way of war.

Here is a report about progress, so to speak, in the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China.

This dam, just as was earlier prophesied, is causing lots of environmental problems, as in real environmental problems, as in: people are finding themselves living in buildings that are collapsing, beside roads that are cracking up, on land that is sliding into the water. We are not talking imaginary rises in sea level here, but real damage to real human habitats. Earthquakes are now happening.

That Telegraph piece links to this Times report, which explains things thus:

“As the water rises, it penetrates fissures and seeps into soil. Then it loosens the slopes that ascend at steep angles on either side of the river. Eventually, rocks, soil and stone give way. The landslides undermine the geology of the area. That, in turn, sets off earth tremors. It may be the world’s biggest case of rising damp.”

The Times report also includes this choice little paragraph, concerning some crumbling building that was hurriedly vacated by government officials and allocated instead to mere people:

‘”What kind of dogshit government moves itself out and moves us into somewhere like this?” one of them complained.’ …

Here’s the piece from Telegraph, UK.

In China, cracks are appearing – in the neighbourhood of the massive Three Gorges Dam, the country’s great prestige project, and also in the Great Internet Firewall of China, enabling the ominous news to leak out. Three years ago stories were already emerging in the Chinese media about landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae further down the river. And less and less effort seems to be made to plug the leaks.

Recent media reports tell of a series of landslips, minor earthquakes and cracks appearing in roads and buildings along the central section of the Yangtse, between the dam and the city of Chongqing. Almost 10,000 “dangerous sites” have been identified, but many of the people living near them cannot be relocated for lack of money. Two years ago thousands of children died in Sichuan Province because their schools were not resistant to the earthquake which hit the area; in the town of Badong near Chongqing children are attending school in buildings which have been recognised as far more vulnerable. What else can they do? The local authorities can’t afford a new one.

Like many such megaprojects, the Three Gorges was always driven as much by politics as by economics. …

More of this from the London Times.

The Three Gorges dam was so vast and sweeping a vision that nothing could stand in its way. Not the old cities of the Yangtze valley, storehouses of human toil and treasure for more than a thousand years. Not the lush, low-lying farmlands, nor the villages, nor even the pagodas and temples that graced the riverbanks. The cries of dissenting scientists and the lamentations of more than a million Chinese people forced to leave their ancestral lands counted for nothing.

When the waters rose to 570ft last year, drowning all these things, it marked a triumph for the engineers at the top of the Chinese Communist party. But in the past six months a sinister trail of events has unfolded from the dam all the way up the 410-mile reservoir to the metropolis of Chongqing. It began with strange, small-scale earthquakes recorded by official monitoring stations and reported by the Chinese media. Mysterious cracks split roads and sundered schoolhouses and apartments in newly built towns and villages on the bluffs looking down on the river.

The local government now says that 300,000 people will have to move out in addition to the 1.4m evicted to make way for the dam. More than 50,000 residents have already been relocated owing to seismic problems that were not foreseen when the dam was built, according to the state news agency, Xinhua. …

It gets better, because of a Jonah Goldberg Corner post that was in Pickings September 10, 2009 when Tom Friedman, one of the NY Times’ useful idiots was displaying his enthusiasm for the Chinese way of getting things done.

… So there you have it. If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman’s intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are “drawbacks” to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omelets and broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these “drawbacks” pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America.

I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it’s the argument that idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today). It was the argument made by George Bernard Shaw who yearned for a strong progressive autocracy under a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin (he wasn’t picky in this regard). …

Mark Steyn ponders the two-dimensional president.

…Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that for Barack Obama, governing America is “an interesting sociological experiment”, too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on Earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” But he doesn’t, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job – that it’s really too small for him, and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

And so the Gulf spill was an irritation, but he dutifully went through the motions of flying in to be photographed looking presidentially concerned. As he wearily explained to Matt Lauer, “I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain, talking…” Good grief, what more do you people want? Alas, he’s not a good enough actor to fake it.

…Obama’s postmodern detachment is feeble and parochial. It’s true that he hadn’t seen much of America until he ran for president, but he hadn’t seen much of anywhere else, either. Like most multiculturalists, he’s passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn’t depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world. …

George Will looks at the government encroachment on the economy and how that’s working out.

…Private-sector job creation almost stopped in May. The 41,000 jobs created were dwarfed by the 411,000 temporary and low-wage government jobs needed to administer the census. …

…May’s 41,000 jobs were one-fifth of the April number and substantially fewer than half the number needed to keep pace with the normal growth of the labor force. This is evidence against the theory that a growing government can be counted on to produce prosperity because a government dollar spent has a reliable multiplier effect as it ripples through the economy from which the government took the dollar.

Today’s evidence suggesting sluggish job creation might give pause to a less confident person than Obama. But pauses are not in his repertoire of governance. Instead, yielding to what must be a metabolic urge toward statism, he says the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is yet another reason for yet another explosion of government’s control of economic life. The spill supposedly makes it urgent to adopt a large tax increase in the form of cap-and-trade energy legislation, which also is climate legislation, the primary purpose of which is, or once was, to combat global warming, such as it is. …

Michael Barone reviews Democrat Senator Blanche Lincoln’s battle with unions.

…Union leaders desperately need Congress to pass their card check bill, which would effectively abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections. Card check would allow union thugs, er, organizers to collect signatures on cards of a majority of employees and then, presto, the union would be recognized as bargaining agent, and dues money would come pouring in.

It isn’t now, at least at the rate union leaders would like. Last January the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that union membership in 2009 was at an all-time low since the 1930s. Only 12 percent of wage and salary workers were union members, and the number of union members dropped 771,000 between 2008 and 2009.

And, for the first time in history, more union members (7.9 million) work in the public sector than the private sector (7.4 million). Only 7.2 percent of private sector workers are union members, a huge drop from the peak figure of 28 percent in the mid-1950s. …

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders discusses California’s pension problems.

…Last week, the Libertarian-leaning Reason Foundation released a report that found that California’s unfunded pension liability “translates to roughly $36,000 for each California household.” Author Adam B. Summers called the current system “unsustainable and unaffordable.”

…Schwarzenegger tried to fix the problem. In 2005, he proposed ending state employees’ generous defined-benefit pensions by setting up 401(k)-style plans for new state hires. He collected 400,000 signatures for a special-election ballot measure toward that end.

Did a grateful public rally behind Schwarzenegger? Short answer: No. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Charles Krauthammer comments on ineffective policy and ineffective spin.

In announcing the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on Iran, President Obama stressed not once but twice Iran’s increasing “isolation” from the world. This claim is not surprising considering that after 16 months of an “extended hand” policy, in response to which Iran accelerated its nuclear program — more centrifuges, more enrichment sites, higher enrichment levels — Iranian “isolation” is about the only achievement to which the administration can even plausibly lay claim.

…Really? On Tuesday, one day before the president touted passage of a surpassingly weak U.N. resolution and declared Iran yet more isolated, the leaders of Russia, Turkey and Iran gathered at a security summit in Istanbul “in a display of regional power that appeared to be calculated to test the United States,” as the New York Times put it. I would add: And calculated to demonstrate the hollowness of U.S. claims of Iranian isolation, to flaunt Iran’s growing ties with Russia and quasi-alliance with Turkey, a NATO member no less. …

…Increasing isolation? In the past year alone, Ahmadinejad has been welcomed in Kabul, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Caracas, Brasilia, La Paz, Senegal, Gambia and Uganda. Today, he is in China. …

Peter Wehner adds excellent commentary to Krauthammer’s discussion by bringing up Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s thoughts on Carter’s foreign policy.

…In a wonderful essay in COMMENTARY in February 1981, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in reviewing the failures of the Carter presidency, wrote about the ideas that animated it, including:

The political hostility which the United States encountered around the world, and especially in the Third World, was, very simply, evidence of American aggression or at least of American wrongdoing… If the United States denied itself the means of aggression, it would cease to be aggressive. When it ceased to be aggressive, there would be peace – in the halls of the United Nations no less than in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia.

Moynihan went on to write about the Carter administration’s “fateful avoidance of reality” — “a denial that there is genuine hostility toward the United States in the world and true conflicts of interest between this nation and others – and illusion that a surface reasonableness and civility are the same as true cooperation.” He warned about the “psychological arrogance that lay behind the seeming humility of our new relations with the Third World – it was we who still determined how others behaved.” And Moynihan concluded his essay this way:

With the experience of the last four years, we should at least have learned that foreign policy cannot be conducted under the pretense that we have no enemies in the world – or at any rate none whose enmity we have not merited by our own conduct. For it was this idea more than anything else, perhaps, that led the Carter administration into disaster abroad and overwhelming defeat at home. …

Mark Steyn explains why the left doesn’t support Ayaan Hirsi Ali and rights for Muslim women.

…Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s great cause is women’s liberation. Unfortunately for her, the women she wants to liberate are Muslim, so she gets minimal support and indeed a ton of hostility from Western feminists who have reconciled themselves, consciously or otherwise, to the two-tier sisterhood: when it comes to clitoridectomies, forced marriages, honour killings, etc., multiculturalism trumps feminism. Liberal men are, if anything, even more opposed. She long ago got used to the hectoring TV interviewer, from Avi Lewis on the CBC a while back to Tavis Smiley on PBS just the other day, insisting that say what you like about Islam but everyone knows that Christians are just as backward and violent, if not more so. The media left spends endless hours and most of its interminable awards ceremonies congratulating itself on its courage, on “speaking truth to power,” the bravery of dissent and all the rest, but faced with a pro-gay secular black feminist who actually lives it they frost up in nothing flat. …

…At the age of five, Ayaan was forced to undergo “FGM” (female genital mutilation), or, in the new non-judgmental PC euphemism, “cutting.” When she had her first period, her mother beat her. When she was 22, her father arranged for her to marry a cousin in Canada. While in Germany awaiting the visa for her wedded bliss in Her Majesty’s multicultural utopia, she decided to skip out, and fled to the Netherlands. …

..In a way, the Western left’s hostility to Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes my point for me. In Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman wrote that suicide bombings “produced a philosophical crisis, among everyone around the world who wanted to believe that a rational logic governs the world.” In other words, it has to be about “poverty” or “social justice” because the alternative—that they want to kill us merely because we are the other—undermines the hyper-rationalist’s entire world view. Thus, every pro-gay, pro-feminist, pro-black Western liberal’s determination to blame Ayaan Hirsi Ali for the fact that a large number of benighted thuggish halfwits want to kill her. Deploring what he regards as her simplistic view of Islam, Nicholas Kristof rhapsodizes about its many fine qualities—“There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews.” …

In the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson introduces the rest of the country to the phenomenon in Indiana: Governor Mitch Daniels.

… When Daniels took office, in 2004, the state faced a $200 million deficit and hadn’t balanced its budget in seven years. Four years later, all outstanding debts had been paid off; after four balanced budgets, the state was running a surplus of $1.3 billion, which has cushioned the blows from a steady decline in revenues caused by the recession. “That’s what saved us when the recession hit,” one official said. “If we didn’t have the cash reserves and the debts paid off, we would have been toast.” The state today is spending roughly the same amount that it was when Daniels took office, largely because he resisted the budget increases other states were indulging in the past decade.

No other state in the Midwest—all of them, like Indiana, dependent on a declining manufacturing sector—can match this record. Venture capital investment in Indiana had lagged at $39 million annually in the first years of this decade. By 2009 it was averaging $94 million. Even now the state has continued to add jobs—7 percent of new U.S. employment has been in Indiana this year, a state with 2 percent of the country’s population. For the first time in 40 years more people are moving into the state than leaving it. Indiana earned its first triple-A bond rating from Standard and Poor’s in 2008; the other two major bond rating agencies concurred in April 2010, making it one of only nine states with this distinction, and one of only two in the Midwest. …

…As our dinner wound down—I insisted on paying the bill, he offered to split it—he said he was going to give a commencement address the coming weekend, at Franklin College, south of Indianapolis. It had been inspired partly by the theme of “public service” struck by Obama’s recent commencement addresses, in which the president discouraged the pursuit of mere material gain in favor of nonprofit and government work.

“That strikes me as exactly the wrong message to send to young people,” Daniels said. “He’s got it completely wrong. Government service—nonprofits—all that’s fine and necessary. But the host can only stand so many parasites.” …

In NRO’s Agenda, Reihan Salam recommends Ferguson’s article.

If you haven’t read Andrew Ferguson’s brilliant profile of Mitch Daniels, the highly effective governor of Indiana, you should, and not just for its not inconsiderable entertainment value. Daniels is one of a small handful of public officials who’ve pursued a consistent and coherent conservative program while in office, and he’s found a way to make it broadly appealing. When attacked for demanding that school officials restrain their spending, Daniels worked to raise awareness of the real choices facing school districts.

“In fact, the governor’s office has publicized a “Citizens’ Checklist” that people can take to their local school boards to see if school officials have made every possible economy. Citizens in Vincennes need to take that list and get answers, he said. The list is filled with questions. Have the administrators “eliminated memberships in professional associations and reduced travel expenses”? Have they “sold, leased, or closed underutilized buildings”? Have they “outsourced transportation and custodial services”?”

A debate that had once pitted those who were “for the children” against those who were “against the children” suddenly became a debate about how much should be spent on classroom instruction versus administrative overhead. …

John Lindsay, former New York Mayor in the late 60′s and early 70′s, is receiving renewed MSM interest. In the WSJ, Vincent Cannato presents the irony.

…Lindsay represented a new kind of liberal politics, a top-down coalition of affluent white liberals, young people and minorities that was less attentive to the needs of the working- and middle class. This has come to mark the modern Democratic Party (which Lindsay joined in 1971), but has too often proved to be a weak governing coalition.

Like Mr. Obama, John Lindsay had a messianic quality. He was the shining knight sent to slay the city’s “power brokers.” Sure of the rightness of his policies, Lindsay spoke in moralistic tones. But he could be prickly and thin-skinned and quick to impute base motives to political opponents. Well into his mayoralty, he continued to blame many of his problems on his predecessor.
Lindsay promised an activist government to meet the needs of New Yorkers. That meant more spending, and more taxes to pay the bills—Lindsay created the city income tax and commuter tax. In his second term, the economy slowed and New York lost 250,000 private-sector jobs, but spending continued and the number of city workers swelled. As revenues dried up, short-term borrowing increased. In 1975, the city nearly defaulted on its loans. The dreams of an activist government came crashing down in a mountain of debt. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Michael Barone thinks Rick Santelli’s rant was the “founding document” of the tea party movement.

… How to explain something contrary to the New Deal historians’ teaching that economic distress increases support for big government? Clues can be obtained, I think, by examining what amounts to the founding document of the Tea Party movement, Rick Santelli’s “rant” on the CME trading floor in Chicago, telecast live by CNBC on Feb. 19, 2009.

That was less than one month into the Obama administration. The stimulus package had been jammed through Congress almost entirely by Democratic votes six days before, but the Democrats’ health care and cap-and-trade bills were barely into gestation. Chrysler and General Motors had received temporary bailouts, but their bankruptcies were months in the future.

“The government is promoting bad behavior,” Santelli began. The object of his scorn was the Obama administration’s Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan providing aid to homeowners delinquent on their mortgages.

“This is America!” Santelli declared. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”

Granted, the words are not as elegant as those of Thomas Jefferson or John Adams. But the thought is clear. Santelli was arguing that the people who, in Bill Clinton’s felicitous phrase, “work hard and play by the rules” shouldn’t have to subsidize those who took on debts that they couldn’t repay.

This was both an economic and a moral argument. Economic, because subsidies to the improvident are an unproductive investment. We know now that very many of the beneficiaries of the administration’s mortgage modification programs ended up in foreclosure anyway. Subsidies just prolonged the agony. …

Peter Schiff thinks that the second dip will be worse.

…Increased spending, financed by unprecedented borrowing, will prove to be just as temporary as a US census job (unless, in the name of stimulus, Obama decides to make “people counting” a permanent function of the US government.). When the bills come due, the next leg down will be even more severe than the last.

The swelling ranks of the government payroll, and the shrinking number of private taxpayers footing the bill, will guarantee larger deficits and a weaker economy for years to come. In addition, the artificial spending has prevented a much-needed restructuring from taking place, leaving our economy far less efficient than before the crisis began. …

One reason that we have thus far been spared the full wrath of Washington’s poor decisions is that we are still benefiting from problems abroad, particularly in the eurozone. As sovereign debt issues have temporarily caused a flight to the dollar, our economy has benefited from lower interest rates and restrained consumer prices. …

…Once the euro finally stabilizes against the dollar, I expect commodity prices to resume their rise, especially oil. Normally, the uncertainty created by the disastrous oil spill in the gulf, and the resulting moratorium on deep-water drilling, would have sent crude oil prices skyrocketing. However, fears of a global slowdown, euro weakness, and general risk aversion have held prices in check. As Asia continues its growth and Europe regains its footing, I expect a delayed surge in oil prices, which will put yet another obstacle on the road to US recovery. …

Michael Barone notes in one year the Social Security Trust Fund has gone from $31 billion surplus to just $2 billion. Way to go, Barack. Nice job, Nancy.

In Forbes, David Malpass shows some of the ways the government helps destroy businesses.

…The threat to profit is explicit in Washington’s evolving “economic justice” platform. Small businesses already face a high top marginal tax rate, horrendous tax complexity and layers of new taxes, yet the revenue-extraction process is intensifying. The jump in tax rates planned for the end of the year, the expansion of the Medicare tax and the threat of a value-added tax are just the transparent side of the tax shakedown. Under the surface, intense job-killing fights are being waged over sales taxes (New York is sending auditors statewide to demand more tribute), the taxation of capital gains and dividends (rates will jump), private equity (the government is redefining long-term capital gains into ordinary income) and foreign profits. Hillary Clinton upped the ante with her May 27 speech broadly linking underemployment with undertaxation: “The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues [we face].” …

…While Washington pays lip service to the challenges facing small businesses, it repeatedly chooses its own expansion over results. In effect, government has become a huge silent partner in all businesses, often taking a majority of the profits and forcing many unprofitable business decisions without the risk that it will be fired.

Karl Rove comments on the second term of Jimmy Carter.

…This pattern of being merely present has been apparent almost since the first days of the Obama presidency. He may unveil his mighty teleprompter to help pass what Congress has drafted, but this White House seems strangely disconnected from crafting legislation.

For example, last year’s stimulus was largely drafted by House Appropriations Chairman David Obey of Wisconsin, one of Congress’s most liberal members. As a result, what passed was a wasteful spending bill rather than an economic growth package.

And faced with a growing mountain of debt, Mr. Obama passed the issue off to an ineffectual commission whose report is due after the election. After growing the size of the federal government by a quarter in just over a year, he now says he’d like agencies to try to find 5% cuts in their budgets. …

The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s comments.

On President Obama’s remarks on the passage of U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran:

“…This is an unmistakable message about the fecklessness of the U.S. and the international community (which in and of itself is a fiction anyway). The sanctions are totally watered down by Russia and China to be almost meaningless. To achieve even this, it took 16 months of administration labor . . . producing a mouse.

And last, the three sanctions resolutions that the Bush administration [passed] — without apology and without concessions — were approved unanimously. And this one received 12 of the 15, with opposition by allies Turkey and Brazil and abstention from Lebanon.

So if anything, it is a clear demonstration of a collapse of the international effort — to the extent that it ever existed — under this administration’s policy, as Senator Kyl said, of appeasement and apology. And the president of Iran is exactly right that this is a flea, it’s meaningless. And everybody in the administration, I think, knows that. …”

Jennifer Rubin posts on Mid-East policy.

The inanity of Obama’s Middle East diplomacy was on full display yesterday. Obama has a knack for getting both the macro and the micro wrong.

On the macro, we now are pressuring Israel to relax the Gaza blockade, thereby giving up a grand-slam home run to the team from Hamas — the ones responsible for the Gaza war and the oppression of the Palestinians under its thumb. This, of course, also redounds to the benefit of their state sponsors, the mullahs, who will take a break from whooping it up over the pathetic UN sanctions in order to gloat about this triumph.

Moreover, this also undercuts Obama’s Fatah clients, whom he has worked so strenuously to bolster and shield from blame for their own rejectionism and incitement. As Jonathan pointed out, Obama now has roped Mahmoud Abbas into cheerleading for a Gaza/Hamas diplomatic coup (i.e., relaxation of the blockade) despite the obvious ill effects it will have on Abbas’s standing. As a former U.S. official explains, “Today the whole Arab world, the U.S. and the EU are talking about poor Gazans and the mean blockade, so what choice does he have? Whatever his private view he has to join the chorus.” After all you can’t be more reasonable than Obama and the UN and still retain your standing with the Palestinians. …

Peter Wehner posts on dismal approval ratings.

President Obama’s Gallup approval/disapproval rating is now 44 percent/48 percent, a new low.

As a reference point, Obama’s three-day average was 52 percent when Chris Christie beat Jon Corzine in New Jersey and Bob McDonnell destroyed Creigh Deeds in Virginia. And Obama’s approval/disapproval rating on January 20, 2010 — when Republican Scott Brown shocked the political world by winning the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy — Obama’s three-day average (January 19-21) was 49 percent/45 percent (it was 47/47 on January 20). …

Jennifer Rubin also blogs on the problems that come with electing an inexperienced executive.

…There is a reason why the public is upset with Obama. It’s not merely a function of the unrealistic expectation that the president can solve all problems. The president looks fickle, confused, and erratic. Let’s have a drilling ban. No, let’s lift it and make BP pay for all the people we threw out of work! It becomes alarming with each passing day as we see how out of his depth the commander in chief (oh yes, he commands the armed forces too) is.

Harvard Law Review and a crease in the pants don’t signal readiness to be president. The voters have found out the hard way the price of electing someone who thought governing was just like campaigning and who had never run a city, a state, a military unit, or a profit-making firm.

Tunku Varadarajan ponders race and the rise of two Indian conservative politicians in the deep south. It is amazing how Americans have moved on.

Nikki Haley, née Nimrata Randhawa, is almost assured of the Republican nomination for governor of the state of South Carolina. And if she does win her runoff on June 22, she is almost certain to be elected governor in November, which would give rise to the remarkable fact that two deeply conservative Southern states—South Carolina and Louisiana—will be home to governors of Indian descent, one the son of Hindu immigrants, the other the daughter of Sikhs.

What explains the success of Jindal and Haley in their respective states? In posing this question, I hint, of course, at the South’s lingering reputation for racial intolerance; and who can deny that the two states in question have not always been at the forefront of America’s historical striving for racial amity? …

David Harsanyi looks at the tea party folks the left is trying to paint as “nut jobs.”

Any impartial national media type will tell you as much: A bunch of half-baked zealot nutjobs have emerged from the Republican primary field. Folks like Nevada’s Sharron Angle and California’s Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are all throwing around frighteningly out-of-step opinions.

Let’s start with Angle, who believes it would be prudent — get this — to start de-funding the Department of Education. The Department of Education!

You must be aware that the vast majority of Americans were unable to write or use basic arithmetic before the prestigious bureaucracy began operating in 1980. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

David Warren discusses Arthur Laffer’s article featured in Pickings on Wednesday.

…In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, this same Laffer predicts that the American economy will go into tailspin at a predictable date: Jan. 1, 2011. This is the day the Bush tax cuts expire, and U.S. rates return to much more destructive levels.

It’s worse than that for, as Laffer explains, people do have options for earning and declaring income, and every motive is in play to artificially raise this year’s financial results. The statistical drop in economic activity should be memorable; and the psychological effect will compound the damage. …

All this should be obvious, but isn’t. As another WSJ piece showed just this week, there is a direct relation between ability to grasp economic realities and political outlook. According to a Zogby International poll, the further to the left people are (by self-identification), the worse they do in spotting elementary economic relationships between cause and effect. …

Mark Steyn revisits one of his favorite topics.

…There is no precedent in human history for increased prosperity on declining human capital, even before you factor in the added costs of propping up a bunch of other nations facing even worse socio-economic arithmetic. Can mass immigration save you? No. You can never import enough people fast enough: according to Armin Laschet, “Integration Minister” of North Rhine-Westphalia, already 40 per cent of the children in the Fatherland’s cities are ethnically non-German, and thus the future of those cities will be non-German, too. …

…This is the crisis of our times, and the first Western nation to figure out a way around it will have a huge advantage in the decades to come. When Barack Obama started redistributing American wealth, a lot of readers dusted off Mrs. Thatcher’s bon mot: “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” But European social democracy has taken it to the next level: they’ve run out of other people, period.

NY Times reminds us what it is like to have a grown-up with conservative principles in the White House.

WITH a controversial Israeli attack in the news, I have thought back to another controversial Israeli attack, one that took place 29 years ago today: the strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor under construction in Iraq. The daring, risky bombing dealt a fatal blow to Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. I was then President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, after having been his chief foreign policy adviser for several years. …

In the WSJ, Arthur Brooks discusses the temptation of easy jobs and easy money.

…The increasing size of the federal work force is an early indication of what lies ahead. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in the last year the federal government added 86,000 permanent (non-Census) jobs to the rolls. And high-paying jobs at that: The number of federal salaries over $100,000 per year has increased by nearly 50% since the beginning of the recession.

Today, the average federal worker earns 77% more than the average private-sector worker, according to a USA Today analysis of data from the federal Office of Personnel Management. To pay for bigger government, the private sector will bear a heavier tax burden far into the future, suppressing the innovation and entrepreneurship that creates growth and real opportunity, not to mention the revenue that pays for everything else in the first place.

If these trends are not reversed, it is hard to see how our culture of free enterprise will not change. More and more Americans, especially younger Americans, will grow accustomed to a system in which the government pays better wages, offers the best job protection, allows the earliest retirement, and guarantees the most lavish pensions. Against such competition, more and more young, would-be entrepreneurs will inevitably choose the safety and comfort of government employment—and do so with all the drive that is generally thought to be “good enough” for that kind of work. …

David Harsanyi has a surprising opinion on Helen Thomas’ forced resignation.

…Of course, I am not suggesting that Thomas has a birthright to sit in the front row at a White House press conference (a situation that hasn’t made sense for at least three decades), or that anyone has an inalienable right to pontificate about the world for a newspaper chain or anyone else.

And, no, I can’t mourn the loss of Helen Thomas’ detestable opinions. But, at the same time, I can’t help but feel some trepidation about the ease in which some voices — in this case, one voice that is probably more honest than others of similar ideological disposition — can be expelled from the conversation simply for offending.

John Stossel writes about Milton Friedman.

…That’s from Friedman’s PBS TV series “Free to Choose,” which aired 30 years ago and became the basis of his No. 1 bestseller by the same name.

The title says a lot. If we are free to make our own choices, we prosper. That was a new idea to many back then. At the time — when inflation and interest rates were in double digits and unemployment approached 10 percent — people thought a wise government could ensure economic growth, guarantee full employment and eliminate poverty. Friedman explained that the opposite was true, that bigger government had brought us “burdensome taxes, high inflation, a welfare system under which neither those who receive help nor those who pay for it are satisfied. Trying to do good with other people’s money simply has not worked.”

No, it hasn’t. So why, 30 years later, is America doing so much more of it? …

James Capretta discusses more bad news about ObamaCare, and the watchdog organization that has been created to track it.

…The truth is, the more we learn about ObamaCare, the worse it gets.  It’s filled with budgetary gimmicks and flawed assumptions that will bankrupt the U.S. treasury. Its taxes will force deep cuts in employment in the medical device and other industries.  Restaurants and other employers will have strong incentives to avoid hiring workers from low income households in order to lessen the burden from the law’s mandates and penalties.  It will disrupt insurance for millions of Americans who are perfectly happy with the coverage they have today.  And the government’s clumsy cost-cutting efforts will undermine the quality of American medicine.

Most Americans already instinctively understand all of this.  But it’s also clear that the administration and its allies will spend millions trying to persuade them that up is down when it comes to health care. We have launched this web site to set the record straight.  ObamaCareWatch.org pulls together all of the best evidence and analysis about the legislation, as well as relevant news items and commentary, in an accessible and searchable format for anyone to use as they need to.  Our aim is to provide Americans with the facts so that they can hold those who sponsored and passed ObamaCare accountable for what they have done.

In Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler highlights some underhanded dealings by some businesses that cannot compete with Wal-Mart on the up and up.

Today’s WSJ has an interesting and eye-opening article on corporate-funded opposition to proposed Wal-Mart stores disguised as local community activism.  When I saw local busybodies try to stop the opening of a Wal-Mart in Cleveland — a Wal-Mart that did not receive any local subsidies nor require the use of eminent domain — I realized that union groups backed the effort.  What I was not aware of at the time was that grocery stores and large supermarket chains have become substantial funders of anti-Wal-Mart activism.

The article focuses on the activities of the Saint Consulting Group and its founder, P. Michael Saint, and their astroturf efforts  on behalf of SuperValue, Giant and other supermarket chains.

For the typical anti-Wal-Mart assignment, a Saint manager will drop into town using an assumed name to create or take control of local opposition, according to former Saint employees. They flood local politicians with calls, using multiple phones to make it appear that the calls are coming from different people, the former employees say. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

David Warren has interesting thoughts on the oil spill and on the mentality of the governing class.

…In a sense, Obama is hoist on his own petard. The man who blames Bush for everything now finds there are some things presidents cannot do. More deeply, the opposition party that persuades the public government can solve all their problems, discovers once in power there are problems government cannot solve.

Alas, it will take more time than they have to learn the next lesson: that governments which try to solve the insoluble, more or less invariably, make each problem worse.

I like to dwell on the wisdom of our ancestors. It took us millennia to emerge from the primitive notion that a malignant agency must lie behind every unfortunate experience. …

…In so many ways, the trend of post-Christian society today is back to pagan superstitions: to the belief that malice lies behind every misfortune, and to the related idea that various, essentially pagan charms can be used to ward off that to which all flesh is heir. The belief that, for instance, laws can be passed, that change the entire order of nature, is among the most irrational of these. …

Jennifer Rubin has a mind-blowing quote from Juan Williams, along with her usual excellent commentary.

Juan Williams — to the amazement of some of his co-panelists — let it rip on Fox News Sunday. The subject was nominally the Sestak and Romanoff scandals, but Williams found the bigger theme:

“I think the problem here is this is an administration that, as Hillary Clinton famously pointed out, you may not want to have answer the 3:00 a.m. call.

These are guys who have tremendous vision about legislative achievements and specific things like health care, going forward on immigration, those difficult issues for America that America so far has failed to deal with.

But when it comes to the crisis, when it comes to the gulf oil spill, the wars, the recession, they feel as if it’s being imposed upon them, rather than taking the helm. I think that’s what Americans are sensing right here. And I think it’s the source of their problem at the moment. Are you able to handle a crisis in a convincing way that inspires confidence? And so far, the president hasn’t done that. …”

Christopher Hitchens has a different view: he expresses disdain for both Israel and Turkey.

…While we wait for this puncturing of the current balloon of propaganda, we might as well savor the ironies. As well as being the two most intimate allies of the United States in the region, Turkey and Israel possess large and educated populations that want in their way to be part of “the West.” They also both suffer from mediocre and banana-republic-type leaders, who are willing prisoners of clerical extremists in their own second-rate regimes. Turkey cannot be thought of as European until it stops lying about Armenia, gets its invading troops out of Cyprus, and grants full rights to its huge Kurdish population. Israel will never be accepted as a state for Jews, let alone as a Jewish state, until it ceases to govern other people against their will. The flotilla foul-up, pitting former friends against each other, only serves to obscure these unignorable facts.

In the Corner, Jay Nordlinger comments on brave politicians.

By now, you may well have seen Chris Christie giving the teacher’s union what-for. I’m talking about this video. As you know, Christie is governor of New Jersey. And a breath — no, a tornado — of fresh air. All my life, I have waited for a politician to stand up to the teachers’ unions: for their bullying, for their unreason, for their claim to be watching out for “the children” when they are merely benefiting themselves. Politicians are just too frightened of the teachers’ unions, even when they have their number, unquestionably — even when they loathe them. …

In the National Review, Kevin Williamson breaks down the numbers in the Ponzi scheme that the government class has been running.

About that $14 trillion national debt: Get ready to tack some zeroes onto it. Taken alone, the amount of debt issued by the federal government — that $14 trillion figure that shows up on the national ledger — is a terrifying, awesome, hellacious number: Fourteen trillion seconds ago, Greenland was covered by lush and verdant forests, and the Neanderthals had not yet been outwitted and driven into extinction by Homo sapiens sapiens, because we did not yet exist. Big number, 14 trillion, and yet it doesn’t even begin to cover the real indebtedness of American governments at the federal, state, and local levels, because governments don’t count up their liabilities the same way businesses do. …

In the Daily Beast, Charlie Gasparino compares the current recession with the Depression and the failed government policies that prolonged it also.

…I’m not saying we are headed for a replay of the 1930s—read up on the history of economic booms and busts, and you’ll see they’re different in their own way—but there are disturbing similarities: Buried in those wonderful economic numbers, which the president touted on Friday, was the fact that almost all of the job growth was a function of the government’s hire of temporary census workers, rather than businesses beginning to hire again. After a period of improvement, private-sector job creation has almost ceased. Even worse, “the real” unemployment rate (which doesn’t count people looking for jobs) is rising above 17 percent, depending on the survey, which means that more people are simply dropping out of the workforce. Finally, a 9.7 percent unemployment rate is nothing to brag about, particularly when you have the Fed pumping massive amounts of money into the economy with near-zero percent interest-rate policy. …

…His stimulus package was supposed to produce shovel-ready jobs that would repair our infrastructure much like the various public-works programs instituted by Hoover and Roosevelt. But instead of spending the money on building roads and bridges, states have hoarded much of the stimulus cash to keep their own workforces fat and happy. While the construction industry suffers 20 percent unemployment, state and local governments are keeping employment at the DMV just humming along.

It should come as no surprise that unemployment is alarmingly high just about everywhere—except in government and on Wall Street, the recipient of government bailouts, which is yet another reason why investors are getting antsy and stocks are starting to slide. …

In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin gives another example of how taxes hurt the economy and earning potential of citizens.

The lesson that high taxes hurt business and, by definition, the communities in which those businesses reside is one that is proved every day by high-tax states like New York. That this applies not just to the financial industry and other victims of confiscatory fiscal policy but to all sorts of citizens as well is an issue rarely explored in the mainstream press. So it was fascinating to note that in the follow-up coverage to the first boxing match held at Yankee Stadium in 34 years this past weekend…

…Trost went on to state that …We’d love to do [Mayweather-Pacquiao], but I believe both of them are non-residents and the tax could be as much as 13 percent on the purse, where the tax out in Vegas is zero. That’s a big difference.”

…while liberal advocates for higher taxes routinely claim they are doing so to help ordinary New Yorkers, they ought to consider that in making it unattractive for fighters to perform here, they are actually robbing the people from the South Bronx and elsewhere in the city who work in the many jobs created every night Yankee Stadium is open. The failure to bring more such exhibitions to the city illustrates the simple truth that, once again, liberal economics has scored a technical knockout on the economic well-being of working-class New Yorkers.