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Remember a year ago when Israel bombed a site in Syria’s eastern desert? What did happen there? Speculation from Contentions ties off some loose ends.
A Contentions post on Obama’s contradiction of Polish leadership.
Barack Obama’s miscommunication of plans to move ahead with an American missile defense project in Poland, and his subsequent contradiction of Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s statement, are bigger problems than most are readily admitting. John Bolton, characteristically, calls it like he sees it. In the Wall Street Journal, Bolton writes that Russia’s recent vow to place missile assets in Poland was an act of aggression aimed at Obama and at Kaczynski. Obama’s mistake and disavowal leaves a Polish-American partnership looking very foolish, because Obama “should have understood that foreign leaders, both friends and adversaries, are in a state of high tension.” …
Another Contentions post on what we can expect from the new administration.
Come January, when Barack Obama takes the oath of office as our 44th president and the Democrats formally take possession of two-thirds of our government, many people will wonder just what the Obama administration will do. What will be its priorities? What legislation will become most important?
Those who are even slightly familiar with Obama’s record ought to have a firm grasp of what is to come: whatever Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi think is most important to them will be pushed first.
Obama, in his entire political career, has lived by one overarching philosophy: “go along to get along.” He has never once bucked the leadership of his party, never publicly disagreed with those who hold the reins of the Democratic party, never once put principle ahead of partisanship.
And it certainly has not been for lack of opportunity. Obama came up through the ranks of the Chicago Democratic machine, an institution so ripe with corruption and cronyism and back-room deals and whatnot that only Louisiana, with its storied (and broadly ecumenical) legends of rogues and villains and scoundrels, could hope to rival it. …
Charles Krauthammer writes on a “lemon of a bail-out.”
… With almost 5 million workers supported by the auto industry, Democrats are pressing for a federal rescue. But the problems are obvious.
First, the arbitrariness. Where do you stop? Once you’ve gone beyond the financial sector, every struggling industry will make a claim on the federal treasury. What are the grounds for saying yes or no?
The criteria will inevitably be arbitrary and political. The money will flow preferentially to industries with lines to Capitol Hill and the White House. To the companies heavily concentrated in the districts of committee chairmen. To clout. Is this not precisely the kind of lobby-driven policymaking that Obama ran against?
Second is the sheer inefficiency. Saving Detroit means saving it from bankruptcy. As we have seen with the airlines, bankruptcy can allow operations to continue while helping to shed fatally unsupportable obligations. For Detroit, this means release from ruinous wage deals with their astronomical benefits (the hourly cost of a Big Three worker: $73; of an American worker for Toyota: $48), massive pension obligations and unworkable work rules such as “job banks,” a euphemism for paying vast numbers of employees not to work. …
David Brooks, who drank the Obama Kool-Aid, is now surprised Obama wants to appoint a car czar.
Not so long ago, corporate giants with names like PanAm, ITT and Montgomery Ward roamed the earth. They faded and were replaced by new companies with names like Microsoft, Southwest Airlines and Target. The U.S. became famous for this pattern of decay and new growth. Over time, American government built a bigger safety net so workers could survive the vicissitudes of this creative destruction — with unemployment insurance and soon, one hopes, health care security. But the government has generally not interfered in the dynamic process itself, which is the source of the country’s prosperity.
But this, apparently, is about to change. Democrats from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi want to grant immortality to General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. …
… The second part of Obama’s plan is the creation of an auto czar with vague duties. Other smart people have called for such a czar to reorganize the companies and force the companies to fully embrace green technology and other good things.
That would be great, but if Obama was such a fervent believer in the Chinese model of all-powerful technocrats, he should have mentioned it during the campaign. Are we really to believe there exists a czar omniscient, omnipotent and beneficent enough to know how to fix the Big Three? Who is this deity? Are we to believe that political influence will miraculously disappear, that the czar would have absolute power over unions, management, Congress and the White House? Please. …
Speaking to Brooks, Jennifer Rubin indulges in some “I told you so.”
… Perhaps Brooks missed it, but at every turn during the campaign, Obama gave us plenty of warning that he believes “in the Chinese model of all-powerful technocrats.” Government bureaucrats are going to control lots of things in the Obama administration. They are going to decide which size of business must carry health insurance, and the type of insurance they must have. They are going to decide what type of energy is worth subsidizing, and which projects will get billions in taxpayer funding. They are going to tell the whole world the labor standards they must abide by in order to trade with us. And on it goes. It really isn’t quite fair to say we were not warned. Maybe not on this particular item. But Obama’s penchant for having the “deity” of government command and control a great many things was hard to miss during the campaign.
So what happens if, in January, the Democratic Congress passes, and President Obama signs, an auto bailout? This would show downright economic ignorance on Obama’s part, revealing the new President to be either less bright or less courageous than the pundits assured us he was. We will see if the scales fall from their eyes. But make no mistake: they were warned that this is exactly the sort of thing Obama would favor.
David Harsanyi always knew the government would screw up.
… What is one to make of Democrats enlisting the genius who helped bring about the Freddie and Fannie mess, Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and a Michigan senator, Carl M. Levin, to craft the Detroit bailout legislation? It’s a shame Jack Abramoff is too busy to chip in with his thoughts.
Though Congress already has approved $25 billion in loans to prop up a defective auto industry, one wonders if anyone in Washington has asked if this near- corpse is worth saving in its present form. If it is, surely other corporations and investors will excavate the facets of the business that work.
Yet, if you happen to listen to backers of a car bailout, you may be led to believe that the Tahoe is a pillar of American life. “It is critical that the nation understand this isn’t just a Michigan problem, that one in 10 jobs in the country are impacted by the auto industry,” Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm recently proclaimed in an interview.
We’re still going to buy cars, Madame Governor, but perhaps we will buy them from companies that have the temerity to say “no” to unions and crushing legacy costs associated with them. These corporations may not even be headquartered in Michigan. …
The Economist doesn’t like the idea either.
… Bailing out Detroit would be a bad use of public money. It would be bad in principle, because it would be an open invitation to companies everywhere to apply for aid to survive the recession. Banks qualify for help because the entire economy depends upon their services. They are vulnerable to sudden collapses in confidence that can spread to other banks that are perfectly solvent. A good car company does not face the same threat. And although Detroit employs a network of suppliers, which would suffer if production shuts down, nothing would sap a recovery and job-creating enterprise like locking up badly used resources in poorly performing companies. …
Michael Barone puts a human face or two in his doubts about bailing Detroit.
… As one born and raised in Detroit and its suburbs, who once lived next door to Big Three factory workers and later went to school with the children of Big Three executives, I have mixed feelings about this proposal. My native Michigan is ailing, with the highest unemployment in the nation, plummeting housing values and cascading foreclosures. Its economy, despite the efforts of two previous governors — Democrat Jim Blanchard and Republican John Engler — is dangerously dependent on what used to be called the Big Three and are now called the Detroit Three.
The bankruptcy of one or more of them would deeply impact the personal lives and dash the seemingly reasonable expectations of those who, directly or indirectly, have depended on them. I can’t help but think of these people when the issue is raised.
And yet the implications of a bailout are frightening. The Detroit Three were unprofitable well before the current financial crisis hit, and GM is reportedly hemorrhaging $1 billion a month. The huge cost of lavish employee and retiree health care benefits, negotiated with the United Auto Workers (UAW), makes it impossible for the companies to sell for a profit anything but the big cars and SUVs that, after gas prices hit $4 a gallon last spring, almost no one wants to buy. …
Shorts from National Review.
WSJ piece on doctor’s use of placebos.
About one in two American doctors say they prescribe placebos to their patients, and more than two-thirds believe it permissible to do so, according to a new study from the National Institutes of Health. Surveys of physicians in other countries, including Israel, Denmark and the U.K., have found similar results. These revelations, published last month in the prestigious BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, seem disquieting, even unethical. After all, when doctors prescribe a medication, we trust them to dispense the real thing.
In their coverage of the new study, the media portrayed placebo use as commonplace — “For Many Doctors, Placebos Are an Answer” said the Washington Post — and even a guilty indulgence: “Many MDs Admit, Privately, Giving Patients Placebos,” as the Star-Ledger put it. It would be no surprise if most people concluded that arrogant, impatient doctors were cheating them or pushing their concerns aside. In this light, the placebo story was simply further evidence that the cherished doctor-patient relationship is becoming a relic of the past.
But before we rush to judgment about placebos and the physicians who use them, let us examine what doctors actually mean when they say they occasionally use placebos and why so many of them find these pseudomedications valuable. …