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Christopher Hitchens starts us off on an optimistic note.
This time every summer I begin to suspect myself of going soft and becoming optimistic and sentimental. The mood passes, I need hardly add, but while it is upon me, it amounts to a real thing. On the first weekend of every August, in Palo Alto, Calif., the Japanese community opens the doors of its temple and school in order to invite guests and outsiders to celebrate the Obon Festival.
Ancestor-oriented celebrations are not exactly my thing, but there is a very calm and charming way in which the Japanese use this particular moment in the lunar calendar to remember those who have preceded them and to make the occasion a general fiesta. …
David Harsanyi points out some of the ecological and economic failures of Cash for Clunkers.
…To begin with, building a new car consumes energy. It is estimated that 6.7 tons of carbon are emitted in process. So a driver who participates in the “cash for clunkers” program would need to make up for that wickedness. There around 250 million registered vehicles in the United States. Only a micro-slither of those cars will be traded in — and a slither of that number could be deemed a “clunker” outside the Beltway.
A survey of car dealerships found a relatively small differential in fuel efficiency of cars traded in and those replacing them. A Reuters analysis concluded — even with the extended program in place — cash for clunkers would trim U.S. oil consumption by only a quarter of 1 percent.
As an economic stimulus, the plan is equally impotent. As James Pethokoukis, a columnist at Reuters, succinctly explained, “the program gets much of its juice via stealing car sales from the near future rather than generating additional demand.”
The point of a stimulus should be to create new demand, not to move existing demand around to score political points. Then again, for this administration, economic recovery always takes a back seat to moral recovery. …
Howard Kurtz posts on what appears to be the death of Obamacare plan A.
With the flap over the Cash for Clunkers program, the media-political establishment is questioning whether the president’s health-care plan is a clunker as well.
The opposition — including a very screechy woman who confronted Kathleen Sebelius at a town hall meeting — is asking how the administration can remake one-sixth of the economy if it can’t handle a used-car program. …
Richard A. Epstein has a piece on Cash for Clunkers.
Human interactions take place either by agreement or force. There is no third way. As a general matter, the good libertarian prefers the former to the latter, except of course where force is used in self-defense. We don’t make people buy off their assailants, because we don’t want to invite future aggressors to come out of the woodwork to collect their bounty. Only negative incentives of defensive force keep mischief makers in line.
Every child grasps this principle, with the notable exception of the children in Congress. Or at least those who dreamed up the once ballyhooed cash for clunkers program that cratered within a week of its launch. As usual, this road to hell has been paved with good intentions. But the sad truth remains that we’re no better at getting clunkers off the road than removing lead from books and buttons. Just show Congress a noble social cause, and its innate sense of regulatory overdrive will send it crashing over a cliff. …
Jennifer Rubin has excellent comments on an insightful article from Elliott Abrams on the current US policy towards Israel.
In a must-read critique of the Obama approach to Israel, Elliott Abrams attempts to piece together how we got from the warmest relationship with Israel in recent memory to the most hostile. Yes, part of it is the perceived desire by Obama to affect regime change in Israel. But it’s worse than that:
The deeper problem — and the more complex explanation of bilateral tensions — is that the Obama administration, while claiming to separate itself from the “ideologues” of the Bush administration in favor of a more balanced and realistic Middle East policy, is in fact following a highly ideological policy path. Its ability to cope with, indeed even to see clearly, the realities of life in Israel and the West Bank and the challenge of Iran to the region is compromised by the prism through which it analyzes events. …
…The takeaway here is deeply sobering. Ideologues don’t accept new evidence or recognize that their theories aren’t bearing fruit. Failures are always attributed to a lack of time or effort. We simply have to keep at it, we will be told. That does not bode well for a course correction. They have their worldview, and they are sticking with it. …
And this is the article from Elliott Abrams. Here he discusses the Obama administration’s plan:
…Instead, in keeping with its “yes we can” approach and its boundless ambitions, it has decided to go not only for a final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, but also for comprehensive peace in the region. Mr. Mitchell explained that this “includes Israel and Palestine, Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon and normal relations with all countries in the region. That is President Obama’s personal objective vision and that is what he is asking to achieve. In order to achieve that we have asked all involved to take steps.” The administration (pocketing the economic progress Israel is fostering in the West Bank) decided that Israel’s “step” would be to impose a complete settlement freeze, which would be proffered to the Arabs to elicit “steps” from them.
But Israelis notice that already the Saudis have refused to take any “steps” toward Israel, and other Arab states are apparently offering weak tea: a quiet meeting here, overflight rights there, but nothing approaching normal relations. They also notice that Mr. Mitchell was in Syria last week, smiling warmly at its repressive ruler Bashar Assad and explaining that the administration would start waiving the sanctions on Syria to allow export of “products related to information technology and telecommunication equipment and parts and components related to the safety of civil aviation” and will “process all eligible applications for export licenses as quickly as possible.” While sanctions on certain Syrian individuals were renewed last week, the message to the regime is that better days lie ahead. Of this approach the Syrian dissident Ammar Abdulhamid told the Wall Street Journal, “The regime feels very confident politically now. Damascus feels like it’s getting a lot without giving up anything.” Indeed, no “steps” from Syria appear to be on the horizon, except Mr. Assad’s willingness to come to the negotiating table where he will demand the Golan Heights back but refuse to make the break with Iran and Hezbollah that must be the basis for any serious peace negotiation.
None of this appears to have diminished the administration’s zeal, for bilateral relations with everyone take a back seat once the goal of comprehensive peace is put on the table. The only important thing about a nation’s policies becomes whether it appears to play ball with the big peace effort. The Syrian dictatorship is viciously repressive, houses terrorist groups and happily assists jihadis through Damascus International Airport on their way to Iraq to fight U.S. and Coalition forces, but any concerns we might have are counterbalanced by the desire to get Mr. Assad to buy in to new negotiations with Israel….
David P. Goldman discusses Rahm Emanuel’s view of the Israel-Palestinian peace process.
…Why is Emanuel, the son of an Israeli pediatrician who served in the Irgun (the illegal pre-state underground), bashing Israel over settlements? The answer is simple, and well documented by the Israeli newspaper feature. His views have remained frozen in time since he arranged the 1993 handshake inthe White House Rose Garden between then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat, like those of Oslo Accord negotiator Yossi Beilin. He still believes with religious fervor in the old peace process, while events have convinced the vast majority of Israelis that it is a dreadful idea. Ha’aretz reports,
When he was president Clinton’s adviser, Emanuel orchestrated the handshaking ceremony between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. It is even said that after Rabin’s assassination, it was he who suggested to Clinton that he include the expression “Shalom, haver” (Goodbye, friend) in his eulogy to Rabin. But in spite of the disappointments of the intifada and his criticism of the Palestinians and the Arab states, which he called on to impose “pressure” on the Palestinians – he has not forgotten the September 13, 1993, ceremony at the White House, which moved him profoundly.
He was one of the only two Jews in Congress who agreed to support the Geneva Initiative, in 2003….…After hundreds of death by terrorism and the Palestinian refusal to accept Ehud Barak’s peace offer as brokered by then President Clinton in 1998, the Israeli public repudiated Beilin’s ideological fanaticism. Not so American Jews, whose left-wing sympathies and sentimental attachment to secular universalism come cheap, like the poor man’s whitefish. Israelis pay for the experiments of leftist leaders in blood, and American liberals like Rahm Emanuel respond: “Believe me, it’s worth it.”…
Stuart Taylor has again essayed on the problems with the Sotomayor nomination. We’ve been running long, so we have a Jennifer Rubin post on Taylor’s piece. There is a link you can follow if you wish.
One of the more troubling aspects of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court is the degree to which her testimony attempted to conceal or misrepresent her own record. On the topic of Ricci alone, she repeated again and again two falsehoods. First, she insisted that she had not deprived plaintiffs of their day in court because they had filed for an en banc review. Not so. She is taking credit for the sua sponte action by her colleague Judge Cabranes, who dug the case out and insisted that the full circuit consider the matter. Second, she argued that her decision was determined by Second Circuit precedent. Wrong again.
Stuart Taylor takes us through the applicable case law. He explains: …
John Stossel gives us the bottom line on Obamacare.
…With the collapse of the socialist countries, we ought to understand that bureaucrats cannot competently set prices. When they pay too little, costs are covertly shifted to others, or services dry up. When they pay too much, scarce resources are diverted from other important uses and people must go without needed goods. Only markets can assure that people have reasonable access to resources according to each individual’s priorities.
Assume Medicare reimbursements are cut. When retirees begin to feel the effects, AARP will scream bloody murder. The elderly vote in large numbers, and their powerful lobbyists will be listened to.
The government will then give up that strategy and turn to what the Reagan administration called “revenue enhancement”: higher taxes on the “rich.” When that fails, because there aren’t enough rich to soak, the politicians will soak the middle class. When that fails, they will turn to more borrowing. The Fed will print more money, and we’ll have more inflation. Everyone will be poorer. …
Congress can’t stop spending our money, blogs Ed Morrissey.
Remember when Congress erupted in outrage over the arrival in Washington DC of the CEOs of the three major American automakers in private jets? The bumbling public relations of the Big Three gave elected officials an opportunity to indulge in populist spleen-venting at rich fat cats and their greed. Public pressure pushed the automakers to dump their private fleets of corporate jets and focus belt-tightening in the executive suites as well as on the manufacturing floor. …
…Last year, lawmakers excoriated the CEOs of the Big Three automakers for traveling to Washington, D.C., by private jet to attend a hearing about a possible bailout of their companies.
But apparently Congress is not philosophically averse to private air travel: At the end of July, the House approved nearly $200 million for the Air Force to buy three elite Gulfstream jets for ferrying top government officials and Members of Congress.
The Air Force had asked for one Gulfstream 550 jet (price tag: about $65 million) as part of an ongoing upgrade of its passenger air service.
But the House Appropriations Committee, at its own initiative, added to the 2010 Defense appropriations bill another $132 million for two more airplanes and specified that they be assigned to the D.C.-area units that carry Members of Congress, military brass and top government officials. …