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Good Corner post from Andrew McCarthy on whether to meddle or not.
As someone who has favored for years a policy of regime change in Iran (see, e.g., here, here, here, here and here), what stuns me about the commentary over the last couple of days is the perception that the regime has done something shocking with this election. The regime isn’t any different today than it was the day before the election, the days before it gave logistical assistance to the 9/11 suicide hijacking teams, the day before it took al-Qaeda in for harboring after the 9/11 attacks, the day before Khobar Towers, or every day of combat in Iraq. Throughout the last 30 years, this revolutionary regime has made war on America while it brutalized its own people. The latter brutalization has ebbed and flowed with circumstances, depending on how threatened (or at least vexed) the regime felt at any given time. …
Mort Zuckerman answers Cairo.
… Now comes President Obama to undermine a commitment made by the United States. To appreciate what is at stake, we have to look at the record. Israel of its own volition withdrew settlers and settlements from Gaza, though this evacuation was not required by the road map. The Bush administration acknowledged in return that settlement construction in the West Bank would be permitted within the existing construction line—not new settlement but building to cope with the growth of families. This understanding was confirmed by senior members of the National Security Council and in letters from the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser. Among other things, the letters said, “In the framework of the agreed principles on settlement activity, we will shortly make an effort to better delineate the settlement construction line in Judea and Samaria.” Former Sharon aide Dov Weisglass wrote recently reaffirming “that the administration recognized Israel’s right under the road map to development from within the existing construction line.”
For years, Israel has relied on these understandings for developments of homes within the guidelines set down, without objection from the U.S. government and without denials when this policy was reported in the New York Times and in the Washington Post.
Repudiating these understandings is an extraordinary breach of the normal behavior of governments and stands in juxtaposition to U.S. demands that the Israeli government adhere to commitments made by its predecessors. …
Krauthammer’s Take has become one of the best features of the net.
… The president is also speaking in code. The Pope [John Paul II] spoke in a code which was implicit and understood support for the forces of freedom.
The code the administration is using is implicit support for this repressive, tyrannical regime.
We watched Gibbs say that what’s going on is vigorous debate. The shooting of eight demonstrators is not debate. The knocking of heads, bloodying of demonstrators by the Revolutionary Guards is not debate. The arbitrary arrest of journalists, political opposition, and students is not debate.
And to call it a debate and to use this neutral and denatured language is disgraceful. …
David Harsanyi asks, “What’s the big hurry?”
Weren’t we promised some methodical and deliberate governance from President Barack Obama? Where is it?
The president claims that we must pass a government-run health insurance program — possibly the most wide-ranging and intricate government undertaking in decades — yesterday or a “ticking time bomb” will explode.
If all this terrifying talk sounds familiar, it might be because the president applies the same fear-infused vocabulary to nearly all his hard-to-defend policy positions. You’ll remember the stimulus plan had to be passed without a second’s delay or we would see 8.7 percent unemployment. We’re almost at 10.
A commonly utilized Obama strawman states that “the cost of inaction” is unacceptable. “Action,” naturally, translates into whatever policy Obama happens to be peddling at the time. …
And Karl Rove says ObamaCare can be stopped.
… Republican efforts will be helped by a recent Congressional Budget Office report that found that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s health-care reform would cost at least $1 trillion over the next 10 years and still leave 36 million Americans uninsured (it may be slightly more once all the details are released). Estimates for the health-care bill that the Senate Finance Committee is drafting with help from the White House are coming in around $1.6 trillion over 10 years.
As the debate now shifts from broad generalities to the specifics of how health-care reform would work and how the government will pay for it, the GOP has an opportunity to stop the nationalization of the health-care industry. The more scrutiny it gets, the less appealing Obama-Care will become. And the more Democrats have to talk about creating a new value-added tax or junk food taxes to pay for it, the more Americans will recoil.
Republican credibility on health care depends on whether the party offers positive alternatives that build on the strengths of American medicine. As long as the choice was between reform and the status quo, the public was likely to go with the reformers. But if the debate is whether to go with costly, unnecessary reforms or with common-sense changes, then Republicans have a chance to appeal to fiscally conservative independents and Democrats and win this one. It is still possible to stop ObamaCare in its tracks. If Republicans can do that, they will win public confidence on an issue that will dominate politics for decades.
Ilya Somin reminds us there is a Supreme Court nominee out there somewhere.
… Indeed, Didden is probably even more telling than the cases Obama had in mind it was considerably easier than most cases in the 5 percent. It was precisely the kind of “pretextual” taking that even the Kelo majority considered to be unconstitutional.The “truly difficult” challenge here was justifying in favor of the government without even allowing the property owners to present their evidence of a pretextual taking before a jury; it would have been relatively easy to defend a decision going the other way. It is revealing that Sotomayor not only got the outcome wrong, but seemed to think it wasn’t even close. If Sotomayor didn’t believe that there was a serious property rights issue even in this extreme case, it is unlikely that she would protect property rights under the Takings Clause in any other situations likely to come before the Supreme Court.
UPDATE: Although less important, in my view, than Didden and Ricci, it’s also worth noting that Sotomayor made another dubious constitutional ruling in Doninger v. Niehof, an important free speech case where she upheld a public school’s decision to punish a student for an internet blog post that she wrote on her own time outside of school grounds. I briefly discussed Doninger in the first part of my LA Times debate with Erwin Chemerinsky. Liberal legal scholars Jonathan Turley and Paul Levinson have been even more critical of Sotomayor’s Doninger opinion than I was.
Since Sotomayor has made no more than a handful of important constitutional rulings in her judicial career, the fact that she got three of them badly wrong must be given great weight in assessing her nomination.
UPDATE #2: While I don’t want to comment extensively on Ricci v. DeStefano, I should perhaps point out that my disagreement with that decision does not rest on the view that affirmative action is categorically unconstitutional. To the contrary, I think it may well be both morally and legally defensible when used to provide genuine compensation for past racial discrimination. Ricci, however, did not involve any such effort at compensatory justice. For reasons elaborated in Jonathan Adler’s posts, Sotomayor’s ruling in the case raises many troubling questions even for people who believe, as I do, that the use of racial classifications for affirmative action is sometimes permissible.
John Derbyshire treats us to some of the public pensions in New York State.
… The two “Click here” links at the bottom of that story put names to the dollars.
• James Hunderfund, an employee of Commack school district, will retire September 1 with a monthly pension of $26,353.75. (Nothing underfunded about his pension plan, ho ho.)
• Richard Brande of Brookhaven-Comsewogue will also be heading for the golf course September 1 with a monthly pension of $24,222.43.
• William Brosnan cleans out his desk at Northport-East Northport July 1, and for the rest of his life will trouser a monthly pension of $19,058.80.
No offense to these guys — well, not much offense — but they are small-town education bureaucrats. Not only will they be getting annual pensions in the quarter-million-dollar range for the rest of their naturals, they are getting these numbers by law. If New York State’s pension-fund managers goof on the investments, or the market craters, we taxpayers have to make up the difference.
It’s not just edbiz either, though of course edbiz exhibits the greatest outrages. (Can’t we please just GET RID OF PUBLIC EDUCATION?) Local-gummint seat-warmers are on the same gravy train.
• Dvorah Balsam of Nassau [County] Health Care Corp., annual pension $191,380.32
• Stanley Klimberg of Long Island Power Authority: $191,380.32.
• Gerald Shaftan, Nassau Health Care Corp. again, $181,457.76. …
A Derbyshire reader puts those in perspective by comments on his navy retirement.
… I read your Corner post on local government pensions. Unbelievable. I work for the Navy, am on the old retirement system that was replaced by a less generous system 25 years ago, and there is no way I can come close to those numbers. At best, I can retire with 80 percent of my pay … after 42 years of service. And the base pay scale isn’t that impressive.
These local and state pensions are absurd. If Obama wants to appoint czars, let him appoint one to control local and state government pay. …
A New Republic blog post tells us what a bullet we dodged when John Edwards flamed out.
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