Click on WORD or  PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Walter Williams writes a great essay about what it means for a culture to be civilized.

During the 1940s, my family lived in North Philadelphia’s Richard Allen housing project. Many families didn’t lock doors until late at night, if ever. No one ever thought of installing bars on their windows. Hot, humid summer nights found many people sleeping outside on balconies or lawn chairs. Starting in the ’60s and ’70s, doing the same in some neighborhoods would have been tantamount to committing suicide. Keep in mind that the 1940s and ’50s were a time of gross racial discrimination, high black poverty and few opportunities compared to today. The fact that black neighborhoods were far more civilized at that time should give pause to the excuses of today that blames today’s pathology on poverty and discrimination.

Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.

So what kind of people are the Palestinians? One of their courts just sentenced a citizen to death for the crime of selling land to a Jew. Jonathan Tobin has the story in Contentions.

… All of this ought to highlight a key truth about the Arab-Israeli conflict: though Israel is routinely depicted as a “racist” or “apartheid” state, it is actually the Palestinian nationalist movement that is predicated on hatred and exclusion — not Israel, which protects the political and property rights of its Arab minority.

It will be interesting to see whether the State Department or the White House, both eager to portray the P.A. as a worthy peace-partner and deserving of statehood, will call upon Abbas to pardon or commute the sentence of Brigith. We’ll also be waiting to see whether this outrage is taken up by the United Nations and its various agencies that are usually busy condemning Israel for having the temerity to defend its citizens against terrorism.

Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb posts on the 100 days of BO.

… One thing that is certain: Obama’s answers weren’t nearly as weak as the questions that prompted them. Jeff Zeleny embarrassed himself and his paper when he asked Obama what was the most “enchanted” moment of his first 100 days. I was unable to see whether the question was read out of a My Little Unicorn notepad. Readers of the New York Times may wonder why the Obama administration approved a dramatic reenactment of the 9/11 attacks using real fighter planes and a lifesize 747. They won’t find the answer in tomorrow’s paper, though they’ll be delighted to learn that “the ship of state is an ocean liner; it’s not a speed boat.”

In other words, Obama wants credit for closing Gitmo even though there’s only one less prisoner there than when he was inaugurated and his administration has no good answer for what to do with the rest. Obama wants credit for his handling of the economy even though the economy contracted at a worse than expected 6.1% in the first quarter of this year. Obama wants credit for rejecting the false choice between our security and our ideals even though you only get credit for that if your policies keep the American people safe.

Karl Rove comments on 100 days of outsourcing the presidency.

… What happens in a president’s first 100 days rarely characterizes the arc of the 1,361 that follow. Jimmy Carter had a very good first 100 days. Bill Clinton did not.

Still, a president would rather start well than poorly — and Mr. Obama has a job approval of 63%. That leaves him tied with Mr. Carter, one point ahead of George W. Bush, and behind only Ronald Reagan’s 67%. Four of the past six presidents had approval ratings that ranged between 62% and 67%, a statistically insignificant spread.

Mr. Obama is popular because he is a historic figure, has an attractive personality, has passed key legislation, and receives adoring press coverage.

However, there are cautionary signs. …

… Mr. Obama is a great face for the Democratic Party. He is its best salesman and most persuasive advocate. But he is beginning to leave the impression that he is more concerned with the aesthetics of policy rather than its contents. In the long run, substance and consequences define a presidency more than signing ceremonies and photo-ops. In his first 100 days, Mr. Obama has put the fate of his presidency in the hands of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He may come to regret that decision.

David Goldman, the writer we have known as Spengler, writes for First Things on our evolving society and how its changes might alter the way we approach economics.

Three generations of economists immersed themselves in study of the Great Depression, determined to prevent a recurrence of the awful events of the 1930s. And as our current financial crisis began to unfold in 2008, policymakers did everything that those economists prescribed. Following John Maynard Keynes, President Bush and President Obama each offered a fiscal stimulus. The Federal Reserve maintained confidence in the financial system, increased the money supply, and lowered interest rates. The major industrial nations worked together, rather than at cross purposes as they had in the early 1930s.

In other words, the government tried to do everything right, but everything continues to go wrong. We labored hard and traveled long to avoid a new depression, but one seems to have found us, nonetheless.

So is this something outside the lesson book of the Great Depression? Most officials and economists argue that, until home prices stabilize, necrosis will continue to spread through the assets of the financial system, and consumers will continue to restrict spending. The sources of the present crisis reach into the capillary system of the economy: the most basic decisions and requirements of American households. All the apparatus of financial engineering is helpless beside the simple issue of household decisions about shelter. We are in the most democratic of economic crises, and it stems directly from the character of our people.

Part of the problem in seeing this may be that we are transfixed by the dense technicalities of credit flow, the new varieties of toxic assets, and the endless ­iterations of financial restructuring. Sometimes it helps to look at the world with a kind of simplicity. Think of it this way: Credit markets derive from the cycle of human life. Young people need to borrow capital to start families and businesses; old people need to earn income on the capital they have saved. We invest our retirement savings in the formation of new households. All the armamentarium of modern capital markets boils down to investing in a new generation so that they will provide for us when we are old.

To understand the bleeding in the housing market, then, we need to examine the population of prospective homebuyers whose millions of individual decisions determine whether the economy will recover. Families with children are the fulcrum of the housing market. Because single-parent families tend to be poor, the buying power is concentrated in two-parent families with children.

Now, consider this fact: America’s population has risen from 200 million to 300 million since 1970, while the total number of two-parent families with children is the same today as it was when Richard Nixon took office, at 25 million. In 1973, the United States had 36 million housing units with three or more bedrooms, not many more than the number of two-parent families with children—which means that the supply of family homes was roughly in line with the number of families. By 2005, the number of housing units with three or more bedrooms had doubled to 72 million, though America had the same number of two-parent families with children. …

… Our children are our wealth. Too few of them are seated around America’s common table, and it is their absence that makes us poor. Not only the absolute count of children, to be sure, but also the shrinking proportion of children raised with the moral material advantages of two-parent families diminishes our prospects. The capital markets have reduced the value of homeowners’ equity by $8 trillion and of stocks by $7 trillion. Households with a provider aged 45 to 54 have lost half their net worth between 2004 and 2009, according to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. There are ways to ameliorate the financial crisis, but none of them will replace the lives that should have been part of ­America and now are missed.  …

… The graying of the industrial world creates an inexhaustible supply of savings and demand for assets in which to invest them—which is to say, for young people able to borrow and pay loans with interest. The tragedy is that most of the world’s young people live in countries without capital markets, enforcement of property rights, or reliable governments. Japanese investors will not buy mortgages from Africa or Latin America, or even China. A rich Chinese won’t lend money to a poor Chinese unless, of course, the poor Chinese first moves to the United States. …

… The rest of the world lent the United States vast sums, rising to almost $1 trillion in 2007. As the rest of the world thrust its savings on the United States, interest rates fell and home prices rose. To feed the inexhaustible demand for American assets, Wall Street connived with the ratings agencies to turn the sow’s ear of subprime mortgages into silk purses, in the form of supposedly default-proof securities with high credit ratings. Americans thought themselves charmed and came to expect indefinitely continuing rates of 10 percent annual appreciation of home prices (and correspondingly higher returns to homeowners with a great deal of leverage).

The baby boomers evidently concluded that one day they all would sell their houses to each other at exorbitant prices and retire on the proceeds. The national household savings rate fell to zero by 2007, as Americans came to believe that capital gains on residential real estate would substitute for savings.

After a $15 trillion reduction in asset values, Americans are now saving as much as they can. Of course, if everyone saves and no one spends, the economy shuts down, which is precisely what is happening. The trouble is not that aging baby boomers need to save. The problem is that the families with children who need to spend never were formed in sufficient numbers to sustain growth. …

Debra Saunders wants to know what Pelosi knew and when did she know it.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been pushing for a “truth commission” to investigate the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques like waterboarding – until Republicans started shining the spotlight on Pelosi herself. Now she is not so adamant.

Spokesman Brendan Daly told me that Pelosi wants a truth commission, “but she still realizes the political reality” – as in the opposition of President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The rest of the reality may well be this: Pelosi knew that White House lawyers had sanctioned waterboarding in 2002 – and did not protest. …

Anyone who’ll write a book titled Free Range Kids deserves a lot of space in Pickings. First a Contentions post on the author, Lenore Skenazy.

I’d like to nominate Lenore Skenazy as “Heroine of the Day” for her sane approach to child rearing. She is the so-called “worst Mom in America” who agreed to let her 9-year-old son get home on public transportation alone. He successfully rode the subway solo, she wrote a column about it, tons of angry mail and lots of media attention followed and poof a movement was born: Raising kids to be safe but without all the worry. Her book, Free-Range Kids is out today and she’s been hitting the airwaves, including a great interview with Brian Lehrer. One thing she said that is especially significant: “We’ve forgotten how competent our kids are.” …

Then a book WSJ review of her book and one other – both on raising children.

… One effect of parents’ over-involvement in their children’s’ lives has been the demise of those arenas of childhood that were once inviolably the province of children themselves: unsupervised play, neighborhood baseball games and other settings where children first exercised their moral imaginations and were forced to cope independently with their own shortcomings. Parents who lament this turn of events may welcome Lenore Skenazy’s “Free-Range Kids,” which, like Mr. Weissbourd’s book, argues that adults should not always try to protect children from failure.

Ms. Skenazy, a humor columnist, believes we should give “our children the freedom we had without going nuts with worry.” She lampoons safety-obsessed parents who see a threat-filled world, from metal baseball bats and raw cookie dough to Halloween-candy poisoners and kidnappers. She advises turning off the news, avoiding experts and boycotting baby knee pads “and the rest of the kiddie safety-industrial complex.” …

News Biscuit reports Somali pirates are going to wear more traditional clothing.

… International shipping insurers have welcomed the shift to more traditional pirate methods. The response came after Lloyds of London announced it had paid the latest ten million dollar ransom demand for the release of a U.S. registered oil tanker; ‘But the treasure be buried on a desert island in the Spanish Main; ten paces north from dead man’s tree. Yo ho ho!’

Click on WORD or  PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Roger Simon figures out Specter

James Kirchick, New Republic editor, is also tired of BO running down his country. Nov. 5th Pickings expressed the hope electing a black as president would get some of the media and the left to agree the U. S. isn’t such a bad place after all. Instead, the new president has taken over the job of trashing our country.

… When not establishing false premises about the previous administration (the easier to glorify his own) or apologizing for his country, Obama has shown unusual deference to autocrats. At the Summit of the Americas, he calmly sat through a 50-minute anti-American tirade by the communist leader of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, and was disturbingly ebullient in glad-handing Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez. There’s nothing wrong with the president participating in a multilateral summit where criticism, even egregiously unfair criticism, of the U.S. is expressed. But if he can sit and take verbal abuse from Latin American demagogues, then surely speaking a little truth in response to their lies is appropriate.

It was plenty controversial when, years into his ex-presidency, Jimmy Carter publicized his critique of U.S. policy by meeting with hostile governments to conduct freelance diplomacy. In 1994, Carter traveled to North Korea, called its then-dictator, Kim Il Sung, a “vigorous and intelligent” man, and took the Clinton administration by surprise, negotiating a deal empowering Kim to continue his nascent nuclear program. But Carter at least waited until he left the White House before denigrating his country.

The ill effects of Obama’s obsequious behavior will not be immediate. His friendly handshake with Chavez will not suddenly lead to the closing of more opposition radio stations in Venezuela, nor will his bemoaning American arrogance in Europe lead to more Russian aggression tomorrow.

But Obama’s fecklessness emboldens our adversaries and discourages advocates of liberty around the world. …

Thomas Sowell has similar thoughts.

… In his visit to CIA headquarters, President Obama pledged his support to the people working there and said that there would be no prosecutions of CIA agents for prior actions. Then he welshed on that in a matter of hours by leaving the door open for such prosecutions, which the left has been clamoring for, both inside and outside of Congress.

Repercussions extend far beyond issues of the day. It is bad enough that we have a glib and sophomoric narcissist in the White House. What is worse is that whole nations that rely on the United States for their security see how easily our president welshes on his commitments. So do other nations, including those with murderous intentions toward us, our children and grandchildren.

Jennifer Rubin posts on inadvertent admissions in a Tom Friedman column today.

… So to recap: the Bush team kept us safe from an implacable foe by using interrogation methods which the American public approved of and by fighting (often against the admonitions of Friedman and his colleagues) and largely prevailing in Iraq. The latter effort may deal a death blow to Al Qaeda which one supposes made it a very worthwhile endeavor. Well, yes, Friedman awards Obama the prize for “doing [his] best” in a war largely waged by his reviled predecessor – who is rarely praised for doing his best, but we get the point.

It must be some other George W. Bush who was the worst foreign policy president in history – because the 43rd president, by Friedman’s accounting, got some very big things right, despite ferocious odds. (One of President Bush’s librarians might want to clip this one out for the “Bush Legacy Inadvertently Revived By Obama” file.)

Stratfor on the pandemic possibility.

… We are not trying to be alarmist. As stated, we do not really know what these swine flu infections and deaths mean, and as with many other scares, this situation might dissipate in a matter of days. There have been plenty of scares about avian strains of the flu virus breaking through the human-to-human transmission barrier, and so far they have been unfounded. Even the widely hyped outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which spread rapidly from China to a number of other countries in 2002 and 2003, ultimately was contained. Fewer than 800 fatalities from SARS occurred worldwide, with only eight confirmed cases (and zero deaths) in the United States, despite widespread concern that the disease could severely impact the American populace. …

Debra Saunders won’t drink the torture Kool-Aid.

The mantra from the left during the Bush years went something like this: The world is not black and white. Sophisticated minds should seek out different, nuanced opinions.

Now that Barack Obama is president, you can say a farewell to nuance.

The left chants, “torture doesn’t work” – defining waterboarding and sleep deprivation as torture. Obama has a longhand version of that mantra in his rejection of the “false choice between our security and our ideals.”

In Obamaland, somehow there never are difficult choices.

From the presidency that was supposed to promote intellectualism comes the argument that waterboarding is immoral – which is a fair argument to make, until its adds: and it doesn’t work.

But common sense tells you that techniques like sleep deprivation, waterboarding and a forced bland diet work, at least some times. …

Ross Douthat’s inaugural column at NY Times is here. Ross has taken over the position of in-house conservative last occupied by Bill Kristol. Douthat kind of wastes this one arguing Dick Cheney might have been a better candidate for the GOP last fall.

WSJ reports on the combination of beer giants InBev and Anheuser-Busch.

ST. LOUIS — Construction crews arrived at One Busch Place a few months ago and demolished the ornate executive suites at Anheuser-Busch Cos. In their place the workers built a sea of desks, where executives and others now work a few feet apart.

It is just one piece of a sweeping makeover of the iconic American brewer by InBev, the Belgian company that bought Anheuser-Busch last fall. In about six months, InBev has turned a family-led company that spared little expense into one that is focused intently on cost-cutting and profit margins, while rethinking the way it sells beer.

The new owner has cut jobs, revamped the compensation system and dropped perks that had made Anheuser-Busch workers the envy of others in St. Louis. Managers accustomed to flying first class or on company planes now fly coach. Freebies like tickets to St. Louis Cardinals games are suddenly scarce.

Suppliers haven’t been spared the knife. The combined company, Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, has told barley merchants, ad agencies and other vendors that it wants to take up to 120 days to pay bills. The brewer of Budweiser, a company with a rich history of memorable ads, has tossed out some sports deals that were central to marketing at the old Anheuser-Busch.

The changes have been tough for workers to swallow. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The Corner

RE: Arlen Specter   [Mark Hemingway]

I read that he was switching parties, but I was disappointed to learn he’s still a Democrat.

Mark Steyn poses an important question; who regulates the regulators?

… This isn’t an abstract philosophical point, but a very practical one. Fans of big government take it for granted that Barack Obama, Timothy Geithner, Barney Frank, and a couple of other guys can “run” the financial sector better than 8,000 U.S. banks all jostling for elbow room like bacteria in a petri dish. Same with the auto industry, and the insurance industry, and the property market, and health care, and “the global environment.” The skill-set required to run a billion-dollar company is the province of very few individuals. The skill-set required to run a multi-trillion-dollar government is unknown to human history.

John Fund comments on the dem health care strategy.

House and Senate negotiators agreed on a five-year budget plan last night that gives Democrats authority to push through a controversial transformation of the nation’s health care system on a simple majority vote in both houses after a total of only 35 hours of debate. Normally, Senate rules require 60 votes and potentially unlimited debate to push ahead on controversial issues.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota said he personally opposed the move, but insisted Democrats need an “insurance policy” to cut off debate and ensure passage of their health care plan. Republican Paul Ryan, a House member from Wisconsin, accused Democrats of conducting “negotiations with a gun in one hand” as they rammed through the rule. …

Charles Krauthammer has figured out the kid’s agenda.

… Obama’s own budget projections show staggering budget deficits going out to 2019. If he knows his social agenda is going to drown us in debt, what’s he up to?

He has an idea. But he dare not speak of it yet. He has only hinted. When asked in his March 24 news conference about the huge debt he’s incurring, Obama spoke vaguely of “additional adjustments” that will be unfolding in future budgets.

Rarely have two more anodyne words carried such import. “Additional adjustments” equals major cuts in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

Social Security is relatively easy. A bipartisan commission (like the 1983 Alan Greenspan commission) recommends some combination of means testing for richer people, increasing the retirement age and a technical change in the inflation measure (indexing benefits to prices instead of wages). The proposal is brought to Congress for a no-amendment up-or-down vote. Done.

The hard part is Medicare and Medicaid. In an aging population, how do you keep them from blowing up the budget? There is only one answer: rationing.

Why do you think the stimulus package pours $1.1 billion into medical “comparative effectiveness research”? It is the perfect setup for rationing. Once you establish what is “best practice” for expensive operations, medical tests and aggressive therapies, you’ve laid the premise for funding some and denying others.

It is estimated that a third to a half of one’s lifetime health costs are consumed in the last six months of life. Accordingly, Britain’s National Health Service can deny treatments it deems not cost-effective — and if you’re old and infirm, the cost-effectiveness of treating you plummets. In Canada, they ration by queuing. You can wait forever for so-called elective procedures like hip replacements. …

Jennifer Rubin pivots off another in a long line of adoring Obama columns from EJ Dionne.

In his column today, E. J. Dionne pens a fawning love letter to the president — praising every aspect of his being. It is however light on evidence to support his amorous assessment. And indeed it is a guide in some respect to the fallacies which hobble the president’s outlook for success.

Dionne contends that the president “loves to engage conservatives.” But he has not done so in any meaningful way. None of their ideas for the stimulus plan were embraced; the president is bent on ramming  home healthcare through the reconciliation process; and he regularly slams conservative policy ideas, no matter how innovative, as “stale” or non-existent. It is an odd form of engagement that governs strictly on party lines. …

Robert Samuelson has complaints about the selling of green policies.

… The selling of the green economy involves much economic make-believe. Environmentalists not only maximize the dangers of global warming — from rising sea levels to advancing tropical diseases — they also minimize the costs of dealing with it. Actually, no one involved in this debate really knows what the consequences or costs might be. All are inferred from models of uncertain reliability. Great schemes of economic and social engineering are proposed on shaky foundations of knowledge. Candor and common sense are in scarce supply.

Even a lib like Albert Hunt thinks BO’s plans will fail because of foolish spending.

George Will adopts a longer perspective to examine the 100 days.

A 19th-century historian called the Middle Ages “a thousand years without a bath.” That oversimplified somewhat, but was interestingly suggestive. So is the summation of Obama’s opening sprint as 100 days without silence.

Ordinary politicians cannot comprehend that it is possible for the public to see and hear too much of them. In this sense, Obama is very ordinary. A few leaders of democracies have understood the importance of being economical with their demands for the public’s attention. Charles de Gaulle believed that remoteness nurtures a mystique that is an essential ingredient of leadership. Ronald Reagan, an actor, knew that the theatrical dimension of politics requires periodic absences of the star from center stage. He spent almost an eighth—a year—of his presidency at his ranch. But when he spoke, people listened. If Obama, constantly flitting here and there, continues to bombard the nation with his presence, he will learn how skillfully Americans wield the basic tool of modern happiness, the TV remote control with its mute button.

Calvin Coolidge, the last president with a proper sense of his office’s constitutional proportions, was known, not coincidentally, as Silent Cal. His reticence expressed an institutional modesty: “It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man.” …

The president is a sophist according to the Real Clear Politics Blog.

… I have heard “there are those who say…” from this President quite a bit in the last three months. I think it’s time he start naming names. Who are these people who hold such backward-looking, unacceptable positions? If they are elected members of the government, shouldn’t the President tell us who they are so we can vote them out? If they are unelected, how is it they have such power?

Or maybe there are no such people, at least not of such relevance they deserve specific mention by the President. Maybe this is just a rhetorical trick designed to make Mr. Obama’s position seem like the only one allowed by common sense. …

Ryan Sager wonders what it takes to fire a teacher.

WHAT does it take to lose your job as a public- school teacher in America?

That’s a question worth asking as state education leaders bat around the idea of appointing a commission to study how school systems award tenure to New York teachers.

One way is to threaten to blow up your school, as a teacher in the Bronx did Friday, reportedly because he was upset about having been disciplined by his principal for assaulting a student.

Another is to be nominated for your state’s Teacher of the Year award — but have less seniority than some other teacher.

Yes, that’s what happened in Hampton, NH, earlier this month. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Melanie Phillips highlights a Bret Stephens question.

In the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens asks a very simple and very obvious question. Observing the fact that while some 6000 Palestinians (many if not most of them terrorists) have been killed by Israeli fire since the beginning of their Second Intifada against Israel compared with between 25,000 and 200,000 Chechen civilians (in a population about one third or one quarter the size of the Palestinians) who have been killed by the Russians during that period, he wonders why the world merely shrugs in indifference at the brutalities in Chechnya while dwelling incessantly and obsessively upon Israel. …

Bill Kristol says we’re throwing to the wolves those who guard us.

“We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history,” President Obama said when he ordered the release of the Justice Department interrogation memos. Actually, no. Not at all. We were attacked on 9/11. We responded to that attack with remarkable restraint in the use of force, respect for civil liberties, and even solicitude for those who might inadvertently be offended, let alone harmed, by our policies. We’ve fought a war on jihadist terror in a civilized, even legalized, way. Those who have been on the front and rear lines of that war–in the military and the intelligence agencies, at the Justice Department and, yes, in the White House–have much to be proud of. The rest of us, who’ve been asked to do little, should be grateful.

The dark and painful chapter we have to fear is rather the one President Obama may be ushering in. This would be a chapter in which politicians preen moralistically as they throw patriotic officials, who helped keep this country safe, to the wolves, and in which national leaders posture politically while endangering the nation’s security. …

Stuart Taylor takes up the subject.

“A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals,” President Obama said on April 16, “and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past.”

But is it really a false choice? It’s certainly tempting to think so. The fashionable assumption that coercive interrogation (up to and including torture) never saved a single life makes it easy to resolve what otherwise would be an agonizing moral quandary.

The same assumption makes it even easier for congressional Democrats, human-rights activists, and George W. Bush-hating avengers to call for prosecuting and imprisoning the former president and his entire national security team, including their lawyers. The charge: approving brutal methods — seen by many as illegal torture — that were also blessed, at least implicitly, by Nancy Pelosi, now the House speaker, and other Intelligence Committee members in and after 2002.

But there is a body of evidence suggesting that brutal interrogation methods may indeed have saved lives, perhaps a great many lives — and that renouncing those methods may someday end up costing many, many more. …

Noemie Emery says let’s have a truth commission.

Some Democrats, from the White House on down, are pushing the idea of a “truth commission,” à la South Africa, to deal with the “harsh measures” used by the Bush administration in interrogating al Qaeda detainees. Good. Let’s have lots of truthtelling. Please bring it on.

Let’s tell the truth about Bush’s conduct of the war on terror, which is that it’s been a success. His ultimate legacy hasn’t been written–Iraq is improved, but not out of danger–but the one thing that can be said without reservation is that the country was kept safe. He delivered on the main charge of his office in time of emergency, in a crisis without guidelines or precedent. Attacks took place in Spain, and in London, in Indonesia and India, but not on American soil, which was the obvious target of choice. Bush couldn’t say this before he left office, for obvious reasons, and after he left, attention switched to the new president. This little fact dropped down the memory hole, but with all this discussion, it will rise to the surface. Let the hearings begin! …

More on the apology tour from Karl Rove.

… Mr. Obama told the French (the French!) that America “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” toward Europe. In Prague, he said America has “a moral responsibility to act” on arms control because only the U.S. had “used a nuclear weapon.” In London, he said that decisions about the world financial system were no longer made by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy” — as if that were a bad thing. And in Latin America, he said the U.S. had not “pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors” because we “failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas.”

By confessing our nation’s sins, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Mr. Obama has “changed the image of America around the world” and made the U.S. “safer and stronger.” As evidence, Mr. Gibbs pointed to the absence of protesters during the Summit of the Americas this past weekend.

That’s now the test of success? Anti-American protesters are a remarkably unreliable indicator of a president’s wisdom. Ronald Reagan drew hundreds of thousands of protesters by deploying Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe. Those missiles helped win the Cold War. …

WaPo article laughs at the expense cuts.

These tough times call for sacrifice. So the Obama administration has embarked on a belt-tightening plan that sounds, to some veteran federal budget watchers, like fodder for a Jay Leno monologue.

The Education Department will eliminate a Bush-era “education policy attaché” based in Paris — the one in France — whose annual salary, housing allowance and business expenses exceed $630,000. Employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs will forgo their training junkets to hot spots such as Nashville and satisfy themselves with videoconferencing.

The Department of Homeland Security has started buying its supplies in bulk and — to the surprise and delight of bureaucrats — discovered it’s much cheaper that way.

This is not exactly the revolution in government efficiency that President Obama has promised. Nonetheless, he and the agencies trumpeted the changes, staples of any money-conscious organization, this week as examples of how they intend to cut $100 million over the next 90 days to try to trim a budget deficit projected to reach $1.4 trillion next year.

Experts said the cost-cutting measures will do little to restore fiscal responsibility and are at best a symbolic early move. At worst, they said, the savings, which amount to a fraction of 1 percent of Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget, are so obvious and picayune that by making them a major focus of his first Cabinet meeting, the president may have given the impression that he is not serious about controlling spending. …

Jennifer Rubin agrees.

… this is what the Obama team is forced to resort to — silly symbolic efforts because of the trap they find themselves in, or rather, have put themselves in. They have created a massively irresponsible budget that will, over time, eat up more and more of the GDP and strain our ability to finance our debt. And the public, independent voters especially, are very nervous about it. Figuring that the public isn’t paying much attention to the number of zeroes, Obama throws out a number that used to sound like a lot of money — $100M. But the public is perhaps smarter than Obama reckons, and the administration’s critics aren’t playing along with the charade.

The result: everyone got a reminder of just how irresponsible the Obama fiscal policy is. Good thing for whomever thought this up that the news was swamped by the interrogation memo fiasco. Otherwise someone might be in trouble.

Mark Steyn posts on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s anti-tax screed.

To mark his first 100 days the kid scheduled another prime time presser. Linda Chavez thinks maybe the Obamas should have a reality show.

Teleprompter is back.

News Biscuit writes about a dog that took a year off traveling to “find himself.”

… The early signs were that Shandy was making concessions to his principled approach to his gap year. Despite promising to find employment on his travels and immerse himself in new cultures, by late afternoon on the first day he had already made two reverse-charge calls to the Lucases asking for money, and Mr Lucas’s credit card company had reported a suspicious transaction at a tattoo parlour and a hefty bill for room service and ‘extras’ at a mixed 5-star kennels just outside Sidcup.

However, Shandy did finally make it to Asia, and was last reported to be delighted to have found a restaurant in South Korea that had a picture of a dog on the outside. He said he was just going in to ‘check out the scene’.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn on the post-American America.

According to an Earth Day survey, one-third of schoolchildren between the ages of 6 and 11 think the Earth will have been destroyed by the time they grow up. That’s great news, isn’t it? Not for the Earth, I mean, but for “environmental awareness.” Congratulations to Al Gore, the Sierra Club and the eco-propagandists of the public education system in doing such a terrific job of traumatizing America’s moppets. Traditionally, most of the folks you see wandering the streets proclaiming the end of the world is nigh tend to be getting up there in years. It’s quite something to have persuaded millions of first-graders that their best days are behind them.

Call me crazy, but I’ll bet that in 15-20 years the planet will still be here, along with most of the “environment” – your flora and fauna, your polar bears and three-toed tree sloths and whatnot. But geopolitically we’re in for a hell of a ride, and the world we end up with is unlikely to be as congenial as most Americans have gotten used to. …

Mark Steyn Corner posts on confused HomeSec and senile McCain.

Andrew McCarthy writes on BO’s interrogation mess.

… At Politico, Josh Gerstein and Amie Parnes are reporting that Pres. Barack Obama is now backing away from the idea of an inquiry into the Bush-era enhanced-interrogation tactics — at least insofar as such a probe might be conducted by a 9/11 Commission–style panel or Pat Leahy’s proposed “truth commission.” (The Politico reports are here and here; Jen Rubin, who is closely monitoring developments at Contentions, has observations here.) The president, having started a fire by recklessly releasing memos describing interrogation tactics, and then having poured gasoline on the flames by reversing himself on the banana-republic notion of investigating his political rivals, cannot douse the resulting inferno simply by saying, Oh, never mind.

The president is reeling because he sees his legislative agenda going up in smoke. In his inexperience, he reckoned that his base on the Left would somehow be sated by the mere disclosure of Bush-era methods, coupled with vague assurances that a day of reckoning for Bush administration officials might soon be at hand. His Republican opposition, he further figured, would be cowed by his moral preening on “torture.” This, he concluded, would mean smooth sailing ahead for the more pressing business of nationalizing the economy, starting with the health-care industry.

But as George W. Bush might have warned his successor, anti-American ideologues are emboldened, not mollified, by concessions. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the same subject.

… There are two explanations for what happened. One is that the president, without teleprompter and script, messed up — big time — when he blathered on at the press conference with the King of Jordan about the potential for show trials. He was trying to sound sophisticated or thoughtful and instead unleashed the furies. It was a blunder of rather startling proportions.

The other theory is that he changed his mind twice. After shutting the door on Monday he shifted after his CIA visit, trying to mollify the netroot base. He sounded quite sympathetic to the idea of investigations and prosecutions. But when it began to spin out of control he reversed course again and said we’ve had enough. He, in this scenario, is frightfully indecisive and guided by purely political considerations.

We are unlikely to know which it is, but neither paints an impressive picture of our president. …

Krauthammer’s take on the “truth commission.”

Before you can decide whether to have a prosecutor or a commission, you have to know who the players are. The Democrats want to make this a war on the Bush administration.

But there is one inconvenient fact, and it’s stated by none other than Dennis Blair, who’s the Director of National Intelligence under Obama, not under Bush. And he said in writing that the leadership of the CIA repeatedly reported their activities to the executive and to members of congress, and received permission to continue to use the techniques.

Now, he’s a man who’s completely disinterested in this. He does not have a stake in the fight, and that’s what he says. …

Perhaps the kid president can learn how stupid he is by reading Daniel Henninger.

… Hugo Chávez is a tin-pot dictator who has debauched Venezuela’s democracy. Normally in such circumstances, an American president would show reserve. The weirdly ebullient Mr. Obama did not, and that image was the photo seen ’round the world.

In New York this week, I asked a former Eastern European dissident who spent time in prison under the Communists: “If you were sitting in a cell in Cuba, Iran or Syria and saw this photo of a smiling American president shaking hands with a smiling Hugo Chávez, what would you think?”

He said: “I would think that I was losing ground.”

The hopeful way to view the Obama administration’s openings to Chávez, the Castros, Iran and the others would be: This had better work. Because if it doesn’t, a lot of people who’ve spent years working in opposition to these regimes — in hiding or in prison in Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia, Burma, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan — are going to get hammered. …

David Harsanyi comments on the “tortuous debate.”

… If your contention is that the outcome of torture is immaterial — whether it’s one life saved or a thousand lives — you’ve taken a principled stand. I’ve yet to hear a policymaker who opposes “torture” be honest and take accountability for the potential consequences of abandoning harsh interrogation techniques.

I put the word torture in quotation marks only to acknowledge that I — and many of you, I’m sure — do not know exactly how to define it. Most laws offer a thoroughly ambiguous definition, which can cover nearly any unpleasant interrogation.

Any parent can tell you that sleep deprivation is mental torture. Does it rise to the level of a crime? Waterboarding? OK, how about pushing someone against a wall? Scaring a grizzled terrorist with a caterpillar? Such techniques inflict “stress and duress,” for sure, but do they “shock the conscience” (one definition offered for torture)?

When President Obama decided to release the “torture memos,” the door was open for a mere debate. When he opened the door for prosecution of lawyers who opined on what constitutes torture — despite encouraging everyone not to spend “time and energy laying blame for the past” — we face something far more important. …

Marty Peretz locates Edward Jay Epstein’s rundown of Steve Rattner’s problems.

… On March 29th 2009, Steven Rattner, President Obama’s new car czar, met with Rick Wagoner, the chairman of General Motors, in Rattner’s new office in the Treasury Department, and in one of the most dramatic confrontations of the Obama administration in its first 100 days told him he would have to resign because he had lost the confidence of the Obama Administration. Wagoner, a 30-year veteran of GM,  fell on his sword. Now, less than a month after disposing of Wagoner, Rattner may confront a similar decision about his own tenure. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

It is hard to look at this new administration with anything approaching equanimity. WSJ Editors write on the flip flop on proceeding against Bush officials in the interrogation debate.

Jan. 4th Pickings started with this;

… Seems like we will have chaos instead, since our new president is a rather unformed immature 46 years old. Is there any guiding thought or idea that lies behind his quest, other than narcissism and change? We are likely to see a president who agrees with the person who last spoke to him. …

Peter Wehner Corner post covers the kid’s course reversal.

Spengler looks at the Susan Boyle phenomenon and sees a metaphor for the West.

… Boyle’s stardom might prompt a closer look at the little Scottish town of Blackburn in West Lothian whence she hails, and, more generally, the state of the formerly industrial towns of Britain’s north. There is life after economic death, but it is not pleasant. Few places in the West are more disheartening. Young people have nothing to look forward to but a weekly Walpurgisnacht.

The local newspapers print thick advertising supplements about clubbing, which seems to be the mainstay of the local economy. On Friday or Saturday night, besotted boys and girls in extreme states of dishabille riot through whole quarters of ruined industrial towns. A good deal of Britain’s working class is unemployable at any price, too lazy to move to London to take the jobs waiting tables or driving buses that bring Spaniards or Frenchmen to the British capital.

A generation of Americans learned the wrong jobs: selling real estate, processing mortgages, and selling cheap imports from China at shopping malls. The cleverest among them got business degrees and learned to trade derivatives. Their services will no longer be required. On paper, it is obvious what America needs to do. Its economy went into free fall because everyone cut back spending at the same time in response to the crash of asset prices. The aging Baby Boomers need to save for their retirement, or retire later, now that their home equity has vanished along with the contents of their 401(k) plans. The only way for everyone to save at the same time without crashing the economy is to export, just as China does.

That works well enough on paper: but what are Americans to export? Not electric cars, it would appear. Warren Buffett isn’t buying General Motors these days, but he did put down over $200 million for a tenth of BYD, China’s contender in the electric-car sweepstakes. China requires nuclear power plants – it will install three a year for the next quarter-century – but America shut down its nuclear industry some time ago. There’s always Caterpillar, but the field of heavy earth-moving and construction equipment now is dominated by Japanese and German engineering, as a quick tour of the diggings for New York’s Second Avenue Subway make clear. America can’t even provide the capital equipment for its own infrastructure projects, let alone for China’s.

That Wall Street frat boys are in trouble is not a controversial statement. Top-of-the-market bubble behavior no longer is encouraged. Not long from now, they will be lucky to find employment getting coffee for a Chinese (or Indian) boss. The bubble accounted for so much of America’s employment down the food chain, though, that many millions of American jobs may vanish. This is particularly painful for prospective pensioners who find themselves in need of employment, for just the sort of jobs that suit older people – part-time retail work, for example, or real estate – are the first to disappear. America might find itself with millions of indigent elderly.

If BYD’s electric car takes the jackpot rather than General Motor’s much-heralded “Volt”, Detroit may never come back, and the American automobile industry may shrink to a skeletal remnant of itself, like Britain’s. A number of American rustbelt cities, including Detroit and Cleveland, have shrunk to less than half of their peak population, but the same might be true for the suburban sprawl of parts of the Sunbelt. …

Dorothy Rabinowitz comments on the apology tour.

The president of the United States has completed another outing abroad in his now standard form: as the un-Bush. At one stop after another — the latest in Latin America, where Hugo Chávez expressed wishes to be his friend — Barack Obama fulfilled his campaign vows to show the nations of the world that a new American leadership stood ready to atone for the transgressions of the old.

All went as expected in these travels, not counting certain unforeseen results of that triumphal European tour. The images of that trip, in which Mr. Obama dazzled ecstatic Europeans with citations of the offenses against international goodwill and humanity committed by the nation he leads, are now firmly imprinted on the minds of Americans. That this is so, and that it is not good news for him, is truth of a kind not quite fathomable to this president and his men. …

Nat Hentoff knows what the congressional black caucus missed during their Cuban vacation.

During their April visit to Cuba, members of the Congressional Black Caucus laid flowers at a Havana memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. Said Fidel Castro (CNN, April 8): “I value the gesture of this legislative group. The aura of Martin Luther King is accompanying them.” After meeting Castro, Congressman Bobby Rush, D-Ill., exclaimed: “This is the dawning of a new day! In my household, he (Castro) is known as the ultimate survivor.”

To others of us who honor King, there is a barely surviving black Cuban disciple of King (and Gandhi) whom the Caucus visitors did not meet because he has been in a Castro brothers’ cage for many years, and was off limits to them. He is Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, and he is among those designated by Amnesty International as “prisoners of conscience” in Cuban gulags.

Another visiting Caucus member, Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, said (New York Post, April 11): “We’ve been led to believe that the Cuban people are not free, and they are repressed by a vicious dictator, and I saw nothing to match what we’ve been told.” A government tour can lead you to believe anything.

Cleaver also said of Raul Castro: “He’s one of the most amazing human beings I’ve ever met.” (New York Post, April 11). The international human rights organizations — which have repeatedly pleaded with the Castros to release the blind physician — also find Biscet amazing in a vitally different sense.

Before he was arrested during Fidel’s 2003 mass crackdown of dissenters (an event infamously known as “Black Spring”) and sentenced to 25 years in prison, Biscet had been put away on occasion for planning to organize small groups in private homes to work nonviolently for democratic rights. …

Jackson Diehl in WaPo surveys the administration’s problems abroad.

New American presidents typically begin by behaving as if most of the world’s problems are the fault of their predecessors — and Barack Obama has been no exception. In his first three months he has quickly taken steps to correct the errors in George W. Bush’s foreign policy, as seen by Democrats. He has collected easy dividends from his base, U.S. allies in Europe and a global following for not being “unilateralist” or war-mongering or scornful of dialogue with enemies.

Now comes the interesting part: when it starts to become evident that Bush did not create rogue states, terrorist movements, Middle Eastern blood feuds or Russian belligerence — and that shake-ups in U.S. diplomacy, however enlightened, might not have much impact on them.

The first wake-up call has come from North Korea …

On Earth Day David Harsanyi says don’t forget to save the humans.

… What’s worse than the EPA grabbing power over CO2? Well, leading Luddite and Congressman Henry Waxman is worse. His proposal sets carbon reduction goals of 20 percent by 2020, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050, and, with cap-and-trade, effectively nationalizes energy production.

This incremental destruction of prosperity is probably going to have to be modified as soon as citizens get a taste of reality. But how could any reasonable or responsible legislator suggest an 83 percent cut in emissions without any practical or wide-scale alternative to replace it, or any plan to pay for it all?

When people are on a crusade, I guess, logic rarely plays a part. …

John Stossel says it is drug prohibition that creates drug violence.

Visiting Mexico last week, President Obama said he will fight drug violence: “I will not pretend that this is Mexico’s responsibility alone. The demand for these drugs inside the United States is keeping these cartels in business”.

I don’t expect politicians to be sticklers for logic, but this is ridiculous. Americans also have a hefty demand for Mexican beer, but there are no “Mexican beer cartels.” When Obama visits France, he doesn’t consult with politicians about “wine violence.” What’s happening on the Mexican border is prohibition-caused violence.

A legal product is produced and traded openly, and is therefore subject to competition and civilizing custom. If two beer distributors have a disagreement or if a liquor retailer fails to pay his wholesaler, the wronged parties can go to court. There’s no need to take matters violently into their own hands. As a result, in legal industries the ability to commit mayhem is not a valued skill.

On the other hand, dealers in a prohibited product operate in the black market. Upstanding businesspeople stay away, relinquishing the trade to those without moral scruples. Black-market operators can’t resolve disputes in court, so being good at using force provides a competitive advantage.

Politicians gave us prohibition and created the conditions in which violence pays. …

HuffPo reports on bonuses for NY Times execs.

… On Tuesday, the Times disclosed a $74 million first quarter loss, 221 times larger than the $335,000 loss in the first quarter of 2008.

According to the New York Times proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, corporate president and CEO Janet L. Robinson received a total compensation package valued at $5.58 million in 2008, up well over a million from the $4.14 million she received in 2007, and the $4.4 million she received in 2006. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The Supreme Court hears an important argument today. The Thernstroms, Abby and Steve, give us the background.

The Supreme Court is almost the only place in American society where the “frank” debates on issues of race that Attorney General Eric Holder recently called for actually take place. Justices with lifetime tenure feel free to explore — camouflaged as legal argument — the conflicting moral visions that still prevent resolution of America’s most important, complex and divisive domestic issue.

That debate is likely to be very much in evidence today when the Court hears argument in Ricci v. DeStefano. The issue in Ricci was simply stated by Judge José Cabranes, dissenting from a cursory, unenlightening opinion by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. “At its core,” he wrote, “this case presents a straight-forward question: May a municipal employer disregard the results of a qualifying examination, which was carefully constructed to ensure race-neutrality, on the ground that the results of that examination yielded too many qualified applicants of one race and not enough of another?” …

If you’re a hammer, all problems look like nails. That said, Richard Epstein’s National Review essay on the legal causes of the financial crisis is an interesting and important part of the picture. It is typically Epstein, in that he makes the complicated quite clear.

The current financial meltdown has exposed the myth that our nation’s sophisticated, multilayered scheme of government regulation immunizes us from systemic failure. We are realizing that shocks, from both home and abroad, will exact their toll. What is less commonly appreciated is that the very political institutions on which we depend count as a structural cause of much of our current distress. In many cases, the root of our problems lies in the legal restrictions that block the movement of prices and wages in financial markets. It is just this sort of folly that has embroiled the Obama administration in testy disputes with bankers who are desperate to return their TARP money. These banks cannot afford to bleed talent to foreign and start-up companies that operate (for the moment at least) free of Obama’s egalitarian compensation-control shackles.

That said, at least some portion of the current malaise comes from a more prosaic source: We don’t honor the straightforward moral imperative that promises must be kept. Our modern crisis has been brewing since the Supreme Court started inexorably casting aside protection for property and contract in an effort to cope with economic tumults from Roosevelt’s 1930s through Reagan’s 1980s. On this score, our flawed constitutional framework suffers from two related mistakes, both of which are endorsed by acclamation today. The first is the notion that the government may be permitted to disrupt financial transactions between private parties in ways that frustrate the unambiguous expectations of the parties. The second is the idea that the government need not honor its own promises in dealing with private individuals.

These two propositions are stated at a level of abstraction that is likely to draw yawns of indifference from anxious policy wonks who fixate on the latest twists in the fortunes of AIG or Citibank. But these dramatic financial struggles play out against a background of weak contract and property rights — a system that drives political operatives into high gear in times of economic stress.

The legal stability of private agreements offers one powerful bulwark against these mischievous government activities. Once people know that courts will enforce their agreements as made, they have no incentive to beg for government favors to improve their contractual positions. One avenue of political intrigue is closed down. …

Writing for Pajamas Media, Jennifer Rubin says the kid is so Jimmy Carter.

Get out the bell bottoms and the lava lamps. We are going back to the 1970s.  This is not a new fashion craze. It is the new economic and international reality. The good news for Republicans: after the 1970s came Ronald Reagan.

On the domestic front we have at least temporarily given up emphasis on free markets and economic expansion. Instead, we are back to expanding government and running up a frightful tab. The debt is piling up, the Fed has the printing press going and the Chinese rightfully concerned we will inflate away our obligations.

On energy, regulatory schemes to increase energy prices and thereby decrease energy usage are now in fashion. We aren’t yet rationing gas by the last digit of car license plates, but cap-and-trade legislation and the pronouncement that carbon dioxide is a threat to the planet have a common goal: restrict carbon output and industrial activity.

Meanwhile, unemployment is edging higher and higher. Forty-six states have seen joblessness increase, the national rate is 8.5%, and more states will be joining those with double digit unemployment in the months ahead. …

John Tierney has advice for people who want to save the earth; “Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet.”

When the first Earth Day took place in 1970, American environmentalists had good reason to feel guilty. The nation’s affluence and advanced technology seemed so obviously bad for the planet that they were featured in a famous equation developed by the ecologist Paul Ehrlich and the physicist John P. Holdren, who is now President Obama’s science adviser.

Their equation was I=PAT, which means that environmental impact is equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied by technology. Protecting the planet seemed to require fewer people, less wealth and simpler technology — the same sort of social transformation and energy revolution that will be advocated at many Earth Day rallies on Wednesday.

But among researchers who analyze environmental data, a lot has changed since the 1970s. With the benefit of their hindsight and improved equations, I’ll make a couple of predictions:

1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because…

2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run. …

Lewis Black has some words for the Earth Day pimps. “Kids Know a Bucket of Sh*t When They See One.”

NY Times financials worsen. Yahoo News has the story. We say, “Yahoo!”

The New York Times Co. fell into a deeper financial hole during the first quarter as the newspaper publisher’s advertising revenue plunged 27 percent in an industrywide slump that is reshaping the print media. Its shares dived after the results were released Tuesday.

The owner of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune and 15 other daily newspapers lost $74.5 million, or 52 cents per share, in the opening three months of the year. That compared with a loss of $335,000 at the same time last year, which was break-even on a per-share basis.

The results in the most recent quarter included charges totaling 18 cents per share to cover the costs of jettisoning employees and other one-time accounting measures.

Even with those charges stripped out, the loss was much worse than analysts expected. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had predicted the New York-based company would lose 4 cents per share.

Revenue for the period dropped 19 percent to $609 million — about $22 million below the average analyst estimate. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Peter Wehner figures out the Obama Doctrine.

Jay Nordlinger, Mark Steyn and Charles Krauthammer react to BO’s narcissism. Krauthammer;

… The most telling moment, however, was when Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, delivered a 53-minute excoriating attack on the United States. And Obama’s response was “I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for the things that occurred when I was three months old.”

Does the narcissism of this man know no bounds? This is not about him. It is about his country. This is something that occurred under John Kennedy — the Bay of Pigs is what he is referring to. And what he is saying is that it’s OK that he attacked John Kennedy, as long as it wasn’t me. …

Jennifer Rubin posts on the first cabinet meeting.

… This is noteworthy not only because it took nearly a hundred days to convene the cabinet but because it suggests the “What tea parties?” feigned ignorance by the Obama spin-machine is flimsy camouflage for growing concerns that the unwashed rabble may be on to something. Really, why now, out of the blue, find some tiny cost cutting measures? The president could, after all, have made the stimulus plan $100M less expensive or the $3.6 trillion budget a smidgen less irresponsible. …

Heritage Foundation graph shows how puny $100 million looks against the budget.

The Teleprompter posts on the trip to the CIA

Daily Beast on BO’s coming environmental disaster.

Okay, I get it. Carbon dioxide is bad. It’s a pollutant. Thus, based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed finding on greenhouse gases, everyone is now a polluter.

This includes me. I’ve been polluting since July 19, 1960, and damn it, I’m going to keep polluting until they pull the nostrils from my cold dead body. And don’t even think about trying to cut the pollutants emitted by our family’s hyperactive bird dog, Biscuit. She’s a big time exhaler, particularly when the weather gets hot.

Pardon my sarcasm, but the EPA’s plan to equate carbon dioxide, the substance that we emit every minute of every day of our lives, with pollution—a term I equate with noxious substances like benzene, dioxin, and PCBs—seems like something out of a bad science fiction novel. …

Kimberley Strassel with another government created unintended consequence.

This is the tale of how a supposedly innocuous federal subsidy to encourage “alternative energy” has, in a few short years, ballooned into a huge taxpayer liability and a potential trade dispute, even as it has distorted markets and led to greater fossil-fuel use. Think of it as a harbinger of the unintended consequences that will accompany the Obama energy revolution.

Back in 2005, Congress passed a highway bill. In its wisdom, it created a subsidy that gave some entities a 50-cents-a-gallon tax credit for blending “alternative” fuels with traditional fossil fuels. The law restricted which businesses could apply and limited the credit to use of fuel in motor vehicles.

Not long after, some members of Congress got to wondering if they couldn’t tweak this credit in a way that would benefit specific home-state industries. In 2007, Congress expanded the types of alternative fuels that counted for the credit, while also allowing “non-mobile” entities to apply. This meant that Alaskan fish-processing facilities, for instance, which run their boilers off fish oil, might now also claim the credit.

What Congress apparently didn’t consider was every other industry that might qualify. Turns out the paper industry has long used something called the “kraft” process to make paper. One byproduct is a sludge called “black liquor,” which the industry has used for decades to fuel its plants. Black liquor is cost-effective, makes plants nearly self-sufficient, and, most importantly (at least for this story), definitely falls under Congress’s definition of an “alternative fuel.” …

And a WSJ Op-Ed reports on ethanol flops in Iowa.

In September, ethanol giant VeraSun Energy opened a refinery on the outskirts of this eastern Iowa (Dyersville) community. Among the largest biofuels facilities in the country, the Dyersville plant could process 39 million bushels of corn and produce 110 million gallons of ethanol annually. VeraSun boasted the plant could run 24 hours a day, seven days a week to meet the demand for home-grown energy.

But the only thing happening 24-7 at the Dyersville plant these days is nothing at all. Its doors are shut and corn deliveries are turned away. Touring the facility recently, I saw dozens of rail cars sitting idle. They’ve been there through the long, bleak winter. Two months after Dyersville opened, VeraSun filed for bankruptcy, closing many of its 14 plants and laying off hundreds of employees. VeraSun lost $476 million in the third quarter last year.

A town of 4,000, Dyersville is best known as the location of the 1989 film “Field of Dreams.” In the film, a voice urges Kevin Costner to create a baseball diamond in a cornfield and the ghosts of baseball past emerge from the ether to play ball. Audiences suspended disbelief as they were charmed by a story that blurred the lines between fantasy and reality.

That’s pretty much the story of ethanol. …

The Australian reports Antarctic ice is expanding. And the sea level rising scare? Never mind.

… East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week’s meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades”.

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

“Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally,” Dr Allison said. …

Shorts from National Review.

… Last year, Obama indicated a willingness to approach school choice with an open mind: “Let’s see if the experiment works,” he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. On April 3, Obama’s Department of Education released new findings on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which grants vouchers to about 1,700 low-income students in Washington. The reading scores of participants improved compared with those of their peers. Moreover, parents reported a high degree of satisfaction with their children’s schools. This evidence suggests strongly that school choice works — or at least that the D.C. experiment did, and ought to continue. Yet congressional Democrats have voted to eliminate funding for the program following the 2009–10 academic year, and Obama went along with them when he signed the omnibus budget bill. In a just world, none of these characters would be able to speak in public about the nation’s poor and vulnerable again. …

Borowitz reports on Susan Boyle.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

John Fund on the kid’s photo-op  with Hugo.

… And what about his treatment of his own people? Mr. Chavez has been locking up most of the leaders of whatever political opposition he still faces, including the mayor of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. Save for a brief reference that political prisoners would be included on any list of topics brought up in future diplomatic talks with the Chavez regime, Mr. Obama was silent on the issue of human rights in both Venezuela and Cuba. It almost makes one yearn for the days of Jimmy Carter. Mr. Carter also practiced a policy of naiveté in foreign affairs, but at least he never forgot that human rights had to be kept front and center in dealings with overseas adversaries.

Mark Steyn Corner post on regulatory despotism.

… The proper response of free men to the trivial but degrading impositions of the state is to answer as Pierre Lemieux did. But it requires a kind of 24/7 tenacity few can muster – and the machinery of bureaucracy barely pauses to scoff: In an age of mass communication and computer records, the screen blips for the merest nano-second, and your gun rights disappear. The remorseless, incremental annexation of “individual existence” by technologically all-pervasive micro-regulation  is a profound threat to free peoples. But do we have the will to resist it?

London Times Op-Ed claims “green jobs” will become the next “sub-prime.”

When everybody seems to have the same big idea, you just know it can only mean trouble. Remember sub-prime mortgages? Now universally excoriated as the spawn of the devil, the proximate cause of the credit crunch and all that followed, a few years back “sub-prime” was everyone’s darling. Financiers loved it because it generated sumptuously high-yielding debt instruments; governments, because it promised to make even the poor into proud property owners.

Now business lobbyists and governments on both sides of the Atlantic have got a new big idea. They call it “green jobs”. Leading the pack is, as you might expect, Barack Obama. The president recently defended a vast package of subsidies for renewable energy on the grounds that it would “create millions of additional jobs and entire new industries”. …

Jennifer Rubin wonders why the kid’s administration has declared war on job creators.

… One wonders where the administration and Congress think jobs come from and what burdens can be placed on employers already struggling. They seem to operate in a fantasyworld in which burden after burden can be loaded onto the backs of businesses, no international competition exists, and no loss of U.S. jobs results. If the Obama team would really like to “save” some jobs they’d call for a time out in the rush to enact job-killing legislation.

And J. G. Thayer says the feds have become a bunch of thugs.

… President Obama’s  hand-picked Car Czar, Steven Rattner has chosen the plan to “save” Chrysler. Chrysler will be sold off, and Ratner has narrowed down the list of buyers to precisely one: Fiat. And to help entice Fiat to make the deal, some of Chrysler’s biggest creditors will write off billions of debt.

Why would Chrysler and its banking creditors buy into this deal? Because they accepted federal bailout money. The Golden Rule prevails — that is, “Them with the gold makes the rules.” Chrysler took federal funds, so it has to sell itself to whomever the government says. And the banks took federal funds, so they have to write off whatever debts the government says.

Pollster Kellyanne Conway comments on BO’s numbers.

“His numbers are still high.” “People like him.” “The President has the strong support of a majority of Americans.” These observations are common throughout the blogosphere and within the punditocracy to describe the current standing of President Obama. Trouble is, they rely upon a very thin and limited measurement: presidential approval ratings.

Most polls currently have President Obama’s “approval ratings” around 60%. That is not surprising, and likely will remain there or increase in the coming weeks. He’s likeable. Much of his campaign was built on his personal appeal. Plenty of the nearly 70 million people who voted for him are not about to second-guess their own judgment just five months later. Most Americans want the president — whoever he is — to do well, since they view (rightly or wrongly) a nexus between his success or failure and that of the nation.

But adulation abroad and a perception of charm and charisma at home is not a mandate for the type of sweeping transformations to the domestic economy and foreign policy currently on the table. After all, Candidate Obama ran on “change we can believe in,” not “revolution you must pay for.” …

George Will writes on the policy of treating Russia like it’s a real country.

… Putin — ignore the human Potemkin village (Dmitry Medvedev) who currently occupies the presidential office — must be amazed and amused that America’s president wants to treat Russia as a great power. Obama should instead study pertinent demographic trends.

Nicholas Eberstadt’s essay “Drunken Nation” in the current World Affairs quarterly notes that Russia is experiencing “a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation.” Previous episodes of depopulation — 1917-23, 1933-34, 1941-46 — were the results of civil war, Stalin’s war on the “kulaks” and collectivization of agriculture, and World War II, respectively. But today’s depopulation is occurring in normal — for Russia — social and political circumstances. Normal conditions include a subreplacement fertility rate, sharply declining enrollment rates for primary school pupils, perhaps more than 7 percent of children abandoned by their parents to orphanages or government care or life as “street children.” Furthermore, “mind-numbing, stupefying binge drinking of hard spirits” — including poisonously impure home brews — “is an accepted norm in Russia and greatly increases the danger of fatal injury through falls, traffic accidents, violent confrontations, homicide, suicide, and so on.” Male life expectancy is lower under Putin than it was a half-century ago under Khrushchev. …

Debra Saunders thinks the left coast is out to lunch on offshore drilling.

Last Wednesday, conservatives held coast-to-coast “TEA parties” designed to send the message to Washington and state governments that the partiers feel “taxed enough already.” The exercise struck me as more than a little out of touch with the political realities of President Obama’s America. The next day, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar held a public hearing in San Francisco on a Bush administration proposal to sell federal leases to drill for oil and gas off the California coast. The hearing became the Left Coast equivalent of the right-wing TEA party.

The only difference is that the overwhelmingly anti-drilling crowd was in la-la land on the realities of oil instead of taxes. Every one of the elected officials who spoke were anti-drilling Democrats. Every one seemed out of touch with the realities of the need to increase domestic oil production.

America’s in a tough recession: It’s in no position to turn down good-paying jobs and tax revenue, not to mention a way to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. Here’s a sobering statistic: U.S. imported oil use grew from 24 percent in 1970 to 70 percent last year. …

Julie Gunrock in NRO writes about left coast veggie snobs.

In an interview shortly after the groundbreaking, Alice Waters — the organic-food world’s most active and least humorous spokesperson — commented on the new White House vegetable garden: “The most important thing that Michelle Obama did was to say that food comes from the land. . . . People have not known that. They think it comes from the grocery store.”

Oh, really — is that what people think? To whom, exactly, is Ms. Waters referring? Is she referring to the millions of people living in the grain-belt states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri — states one cannot drive across without spending hours staring at corn and soybean fields? The millions living along the Pacific Northwest coast and Alaska who are supported by the fishing industry? The fishermen of Gloucester, Mass.? Maybe she is talking about people living in Wisconsin — where dairy farms and cow pastures are as ubiquitous as art galleries in New York. Or perhaps she is referring to the thousands of people like me, who — in the suburbs of an East Coast metropolis — just throw a few Lowe’s-purchased plants in the ground, and hope for some rain to support a small backyard garden. Yes, Ms. Waters, even these “people” know that the grocery store doesn’t spontaneously produce food. …

Christopher Buckley says enough with the torture sanctimony.

… It is, yes, good that the U.S.A. is not doing this anymore, but let’s not get too sanctimonious about how awful it was that we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure god-awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they had gotten their mitts on one. And let us move on. There is pressing business. (Are you listening, ACLU? Hel-lo?)

The operative question becomes: What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that could prevent another 9/11? We may have moved on. They, assuredly, have not. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Interesting shorts from John Fund. One on Irish documentary film-makers taking on the global warming folks. Another on the tea party preparations.

… The film reminds us that environmentalists have been wrong in the past, as when they convinced the world to ban the pesticide DDT, costing the lives of countless malaria victims. The ban was finally reversed by the World Health Organization only after decades of debate. The two Irish filmmakers argue that if Al Gore’s advice to radically reduce carbon emissions is followed, it would condemn to poverty two billion people in the world who have yet to turn on their first light switch. …

… The protestors at tea parties so far are just getting used to the modern tactics of media-savvy demonstrations. Jenny Beth Martin, a conservative activist organizing the Atlanta rally, admits that “conservatives aren’t known for their protest abilities” and that the first event she attended featured many people “in business suits and umbrellas.”

But organizers and participants have since become more imaginative. At one recent rally a protestor sported an armband that read “POOP — Prisoners of Obama’s Policies.” Another held a sign that read “Let Them Eat Pork!”

Looking at video of several of the recent protests, I’m reminded how similar they were to the protests that fueled Proposition 13 in California and Proposition 2 1/2 in Massachusetts some 30 years ago. Those demonstrations led to real, earthshaking political consequences. Some guy named Ronald Reagan said they ignited a “prairie-fire of protest” that created a backlash against the big-government policies of Jimmy Carter and helped the Gipper himself become president in 1980.

The pseudonymous Spengler is outed …  by  Spengler.

… The 300 or so essays that I have published in this space since 1999 all proceeded from the theme formulated by Rosenzweig: the mortality of nations and its causes, Western secularism, Asian anomie, and unadaptable Islam.

Why raise these issues under a pseudonym? There is a simple answer, and a less simple one. To inform a culture that it is going to die does not necessarily win friends, and what I needed to say would be hurtful to many readers. I needed to tell the Europeans that their post-national, secular dystopia was a death-trap whence no-one would get out alive.

I needed to tell the Muslims that nothing would alleviate the unbearable sense of humiliation and loss that globalization inflicted on a civilization that once had pretensions to world dominance. I needed to tell Asians that materialism leads only to despair. And I needed to tell the Americans that their smugness would be their undoing.

In this world of accelerated mortality, in which the prospect of national extinction hung visibly over most of the peoples of the world, Jew-hatred was stripped of its mask, and revealed as the jealousy of the merely undead toward living Israel. And it was not hard to show that the remnants of the tribal world lurking under the cover of Islam were not living, but only undead, incapable of withstanding the onslaught of modernity, throwing a tantrum against their inevitable end.

I have been an equal-opportunity offender, with no natural constituency. My academic training, strewn over two doctoral programs, was in music theory and German, as well as economics. I have published a number of peer-reviewed papers on philosophy, music and mathematics in the Renaissance. But I came to believe that there are things even more important than the high art of the West and its most characteristic endeavor, classical music, the passion and consolation of my youth. Western classical music expresses goal-oriented motion, a teleology, as it were – but where did humankind learn of teleology? I no longer quite belonged with my friends and colleagues, the artists.

G K Chesterton said that if you don’t believe in God, you’ll believe in anything, and I was living proof of that as a young man, wandering in the fever-swamps of left-wing politics. I found my way thanks to the first Ronald Reagan administration. The righting of America after it nearly capsized during the dark years of Jimmy Carter was a defining experience for me. I owe much to several mentors, starting with Dr Norman A. Bailey, special assistant to President Reagan and director of plans at the National Security Council from 1981-1984. My political education began in his lair at the old Executive Office Building in 1981, when he explained to me that the US would destroy the Soviet Empire by the end of the 1980s. I thought him a dangerous lunatic, and immediately signed on. …

Mark Steyn takes a look at the tea parties and the media reaction.

… The American media, having run their own business into the ground, are certainly qualified to run everybody else’s into the same abyss. Which is why they’ve decided that hundreds of thousands of citizens protesting taxes and out-of-control spending and government vaporization of Americans’ wealth and their children’s future is no story. Nothing to see here. As Nancy Pelosi says, it’s AstroTurf – fake grass-roots, not the real thing.

Besides, what are these whiners so uptight about? CNN’s Susan Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was here:

“Because,” said the Tea Partier, “I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right …”

But Roesgen had heard enough: “What does this have to do with your taxes? Do you realize that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?”

Had the Tea Party animal been as angry as these Angry White Men are supposed to be, he’d have said, “Oh, push off, you condescending tick. Taxes are a liberty issue. I don’t want a $400 ‘credit’ for agreeing to live my life in government-approved ways.” Had he been of a more literary bent, he might have adapted Sir Thomas More’s line from “A Man For All Seasons”: “Why, Susan, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for a $400 tax credit?” …

… Doing the job the Boston Globe won’t do, Glenn Reynolds, the Internet’s Instapundit, has been posting many photographs of tea parties. For a movement of mean, angry old white men, there seem to be a lot of hot-looking young chicks among them. Perhaps they’re just kinky gerontophiliacs. Or perhaps they understand that their generation will be the principal victim of this grotesque government profligacy. Like the original tea party, it is, in the end, about freedom. Live Tea or die!

Charles Krauthammer takes on BO’s “New Foundation.”

… Obama could not explain how — when the near-term stimulative spending is over and his ambitious domestic priorities kick in, promising sustained prosperity and deficit reduction — the deficits at the end of the coming decade are rising, not falling. The Congressional Budget Office has deficits increasing in the last seven years of the decade from an already unsustainable $672 billion annually to $1.2 trillion by 2019.

This is the sand on which the new foundation is constructed. Obama has the magic to make words mean almost anything. Numbers are more resistant to his charms.

For some strange reason George Will writes a column dissing denim. Ed Morrissey has fun with it.

… Did I miss a memo?  Have we solved all of the world’s problems?  This doesn’t even make for an interesting blog post, let alone a nationally-syndicated column from an erudite political commentator.  This is a Seinfeldian “What’s up with all the denim?” piece of elitist fluff.

I’d say Will needs to get out of the DC cocktail circuit more and meet the people whose motives he pretends to comprehend.  This isn’t a proletarian pose.  People don’t wear denim as an affectation to seem indifferent to sartorial splendor.  They wear jeans because they’re (a) mostly inexpensive in comparison to other sportswear choices, (b) remarkably durable, and (c) resistant to the whims of fashion.  They match almost every kind of shirt or blouse, and they work in almost every kind of weather. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF