Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Jennifer Rubin has a short piece on the election tomorrow titled; New Jersey Too!

I spent the weekend in Virginia covering the upcoming election, which is shaping up to be an historic sweep for Republicans. A bit of trivia: keep your eye on the House of Delegates race in the third district, where the Republican challenger in coal country in southwest Virginia is running on cap-and-trade. Democratic handicappers are throwing in the towel on that one. (If that bill weren’t dead before, it will be. At least with the Virginia delegation and other similarly situated lawmakers, the race would turn almost solely on this issue.)

But everywhere I went, the question was the same: what do you hear about New Jersey? This is what happens when a blowout is coming – political observers begin to look for something of interest that isn’t a foregone conclusion.

The last few polls have shown an uptick for Chris Christie and a leveling off in support for Chris Daggett. Then Sunday night, the Democratic Public Policy Polling found Christie leading 47 to 41 percent, with 11 percent for Daggett. The explanation: …

In World Affairs Journal, John McWhorter has a fascinating discussion about the death of languages and the ubiquitousness of English.

…Yet the going idea among linguists and anthropologists is that we must keep as many languages alive as possible, and that the death of each one is another step on a treadmill toward humankind’s cultural oblivion. This accounted for the melancholy tone, for example, of the obituaries for the Eyak language of southern Alaska last year when its last speaker died.

… Linguistic death is proceeding more rapidly even than species attrition. According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem. …

…What makes the potential death of a language all the more emotionally charged is the belief that if a language dies, a cultural worldview will die with it. But this idea is fragile. Certainly language is a key aspect of what distinguishes one group from another. However, a language itself does not correspond to the particulars of a culture but to a faceless process that creates new languages as the result of geographical separation. For example, most Americans pronounce disgusting as “diss-kussting” with a k sound. (Try it—you probably do too.) However, some people say “dizz-gusting”—it’s easier to pronounce the g after a softer sound like z. Imagine a language with the word pronounced as it is spelled (and as it was in Latin): “diss-gusting.” The group speaking the language splits into two groups that go their separate ways. Come back five hundred years later, and one group is pronouncing the word “diss-kussting,” while the other is pronouncing it “dizz-gusting.” After even more time, the word would start shortening, just as we pronounce “let us” as “let’s.” After a thousand years, in one place it would be something like “skussting,” while in the other it might be “zgustin.” After another thousand, perhaps “skusty” and “zguss.” By this time, these are no longer even the same language.

…Notice that this is not about culture, any more than saying “diss-kusting” rather than “diz-gusting” reflects anything about one’s soul. …

… language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation—such as that of the Amish—or brutal segregation. (Jews did not speak Yiddish in order to revel in their diversity but because they lived in an apartheid society.) Crucially, it is black Americans, the Americans whose English is most distinct from that of the mainstream, who are the ones most likely to live separately from whites geographically and spiritually.

The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation—complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it. …

Jonah Goldberg, in the National Review, comments on NEA director Rocco Landesman’s tribute to Obama, in the wake of Sargent’s demise.

…Instead, Landesman embraced a timeless tactic of power politics. He debased himself with incandescently vulgar obsequiousness to his supreme leader. “There is a new president and a new NEA,” he proclaimed. “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.” …

… Lincoln never wrote any books.

In short, Landesman doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But he does know what he’s doing.

What matters to him is not the power of Obama’s writing but the power of the writer. Why else compare a democratically elected president to one of history’s most iconic dictators? That is, unless we are to believe he is a huge fan of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. …

…By demonstrating with brazenly self-abasing ignorance that he is wholly Obama’s man, Landesman is making it clear that the NEA is completely committed to Obamaism. There’s no need for any more of Mr. Sergant’s tacky, Chicago-style pay-to-play. Self-humiliation sends a far more powerful signal. …

In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor points out that a recent UN resolution could be the top of a slippery slope. Or perhaps a tipping point?

…But the real problem is a provision, which the U.S. championed jointly with Egypt, exuding hostility to free expression.

That provision “expresses its concern that incidents of racial and religious intolerance, discrimination and related violence, as well as of negative racial and religious stereotyping continue to rise around the world, and condemns, in this context, any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence, and urges States to take effective measures, consistent with their obligations under international human-rights law, to address and combat such incidents” (emphasis added). …

…It could be read narrowly as a commitment merely to denounce and eschew hate speech. But it could more logically be read broadly as requiring the United States and other nations to punish “hostile” speech about — and perhaps also “negative stereotyping” of — any race or religion. It’s a safe bet, however, that the Islamic nations that are so concerned about criticisms of their religion will not be prosecuting anyone for the rampant “negative racial and ethnic stereotyping” and hate speech in their own countries directed at Jews and sometimes Christians.

Eugene Volokh of the University of California (Los Angeles) Law School pointed out on his Volokh Conspiracy blog that the reference to “obligations under international human-rights law” could be seen as binding the United States to a provision of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights requiring that hate speech “shall be prohibited by law.” The U.S. has previously rejected that provision.

Added Volokh: “Advocacy of mere hostility — for instance… to radical strains of Islam [or any other religion] — is clearly constitutionally protected here in the U.S.; but the resolution seems to call for its prohibition. [And] if we are constitutionally barred from adhering to it by our domestic Constitution, then [the administration's vote was] implicitly criticizing that Constitution, and committing ourselves to do what we can to change it.” Such a stance could be seen as obliging the executive branch to urge the Supreme Court to overrule decades of First Amendment decisions.

Far-fetched? Not according to the hopes and expectations of many international law scholars. “An international norm against hate speech would supply a basis for prohibiting it, the First Amendment notwithstanding…. In the long run, it may point to the Constitution’s more complete subordination,” Peter Spiro, a professor at Temple University Law School, asserted in a 2003 Stanford Law Review article. …

Toby Harneden posts a piece of Plouffe on Biden, on his blog in the Telegraph, UK.

This is priceless. An extract from Time.com from a new book by David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, on interviewing Joe Biden for the veep slot. One of the best bits is the notion that being a Senator is being a “top dog” – that and his shtick that he didn’t really want the vice-presidential job:

The [first] meeting started with Biden launching into a nearly 20-minute monologue that ranged from the strength of our campaign in Iowa (”I literally wouldn’t have run if I knew the steamroller you guys would put together”); to his evolving views of Obama (”I wasn’t sure about him in the beginning of the campaign, but I am now”); why he didn’t want to be VP (”The last thing I should do is VP; after 36 years of being the top dog, it will be hard to be No. 2?); why he was a good choice (”But I would be a good soldier and could provide real value, domestically and internationally”); and everything else under the sun. Ax and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. It confirmed what we suspected: this dog could not be taught new tricks.

But Obama still chose him.

Brian Palmer has an interesting linguistic piece in Slate. Must be language day.

Former Bosnian leader and accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic did not appear for the start of his trial on Monday in the Dutch city of The Hague. Why do we call it The Hague, rather than just Hague?

Blame the locals. Those who live in The Hague never stopped using an old-fashioned name that described the place according to its medieval use. We get the official name Den Haag from Des Graven Hage, which means “the counts’ hedge” and refers to the fact that Dutch noblemen once used the land for hunting. Many other place names started off as descriptions with definite articles. For example, the city of Bath, England, famous for its purportedly health-supporting natural spring, was referred to as “The Bath” until the 19th century. The town of Devizes, about 20 miles east of Bath, used to be called “The Devizes,” because it once divided the estates of two large landowners. In these cases, the definite articles dropped off when the locals started thinking of their town’s name as more than a mere descriptor. But people in The Hague have stuck with the original phrase—even to the point of using the longer “Counts’ Hedge” title from time to time. …

… Place names change over time, but in general the movement is away from the use of the definite article. Until approximately 50 years ago, Ukraine, whose name is derived from the Proto-Slavic term for a borderland, was almost always referred to as “The Ukraine.” Now, according to the Ukrainian government—and a federal judge who presided over a case in which the U.S. government and a Ukrainian deportee couldn’t even agree on how to refer to the country—the proper name is simply Ukraine. …

… The Bronx is another interesting case. …

In the Times, UK, Jenny Booth reports on a fatal coyote attack.

A teenage folk singer has died after being set upon by two coyotes as she hiked alone in a national park in Nova Scotia.

Taylor Mitchell, 19, a rising star of the Canadian music scene, died in Halifax hospital yesterday after the normally shy animals attacked her as she hiked one of the most scenic trails in Cape Breton Highlands National Park.

Walkers who heard her frantic screams alerted park rangers, who shot one of the coyotes. …

…”Coyotes are normally afraid of humans. This is a very irregular occurrence,” Ms Leger said. …

…”There’s been some reports of aggressive animals, so it’s not unknown,” said Helene Robichaud, the park’s superintendent. “But we certainly never have had anything so dramatic and tragic.” …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn speaks witty truth to the ”rebels” in the Obama administration.

Valerie Jarrett announced the other day that “we’re going to speak truth to power.”

Who’s Valerie Jarrett? She’s “Senior Adviser” to the president of the United States – i.e., the leader of the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth. You would think the most powerful man in the most powerful nation would find a hard job finding anyone on the planet to “speak truth to power” to. But I suppose if you’re as eager to do so as his Senior Adviser, there’s always somebody out there: The Supreme Leader of Iran. The Prime Minister of Belgium. The Deputy Tourism Minister of the Solomon Islands. But no. The Senior Adviser has selected targets closer to home: “I think that what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power. When we saw all of the distortions in the course of the summer, when people were coming down to town hall meetings and putting up signs that were scaring seniors to death.”

Ah, right. People “putting up signs.” Can’t have that, can we? The most powerful woman in the inner circle of the most powerful man on Earth has decided to speak truth to powerful people standing in the street with handwritten placards saying “THIS GRAN’MA ISN’T SHOVEL READY.” Was it only a week ago that I wrote about this administration’s peculiar need for domestic enemies?

The Senior Adviser seems to have forgotten that she is the power. Admittedly, this is a recurring lapse on the part of the administration. There was Barack Obama only the other day, blaming everything on the president – no, no, silly, not him, the other fellow, the Designated Fall Guy who stepped down as head of state in January to accept the new constitutional position of Blame Czar. Musing on problems in Afghanistan, Obama blamed the “long years of drift” under his predecessor. The new president – OK, newish president – has been Drifter-in-Chief for almost a year but he’s too busy speaking truth to the former power to get on top of the situation. …

Charles Krauthammer explains that in war, strategies are adjusted for unexpected circumstances.

…In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we initially chose the light footprint. For obvious reasons: less risk and fewer losses for our troops, while reducing the intrusiveness of the occupation and thus the chances of creating an anti-foreigner backlash that would fan an insurgency. …

…It was a perfectly reasonable assumption, but it proved wrong. The strategy failed. Not just because the enemy proved highly resilient but because the allegiance of the population turned out to hinge far less on resentment of foreign intrusiveness (in fact the locals came to hate the insurgents — al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan — far more than us) than on physical insecurity, which made them side with the insurgents out of sheer fear. …

…In both places, the deterioration of the military situation was not the result of “drift,” but of considered policies that seemed reasonable, cautious and culturally sensitive at the time but that ultimately turned out to be wrong. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on an article by David Brooks about how Obama’s indecision has been detrimental to the Afghanistan conflict.

As Brooks observes:

“The experts I spoke with describe a vacuum at the heart of the war effort — a determination vacuum. And if these experts do not know the state of President Obama’s resolve, neither do the Afghan villagers. They are now hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws. Nor does President Hamid Karzai know. He’s cutting deals with the Afghan warlords he would need if NATO leaves his country.

Nor do the Pakistanis or the Iranians or the Russians know. They are maintaining ties with the Taliban elements that would represent their interests in the event of a U.S. withdrawal. …”

What is critical is whether we lack a commander in chief who inspires confidence and seems prepared to lead the country to victory. If Obama isn’t convincing Brooks, he’s not going to convince the country, our allies, the military, and especially our enemies. Running a seminar is not leading the nation in war, and the endless seminar has now made it infinitely more difficult to succeed at the latter. The president is seemingly unaware that others are watching his equivocation and making their own calculations, ones that will further complicate our war strategy, if we ever get one.

Peter Wehner also has comments about the Brooks’ article.

As Jennifer has pointed out, David Brooks has penned an interesting column on Afghanistan and President Obama. After interviewing many experts on Afghanistan, he reports:

“Their first concerns are about Obama the man. They know he is intellectually sophisticated. They know he is capable of processing complicated arguments and weighing nuanced evidence. But they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.”

These are of course precisely the qualities that George W. Bush showed during the debate in late 2006 and 2007 about the so-called surge in Iraq. At the time Bush was almost alone in his advocacy. His commending generals, George Casey and John Abizaid, opposed his plan, as did most members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and some members of Bush’s own war cabinet. Virtually the entire Democratic party, most of the foreign-policy establishment, and most of the public had turned hard against the war. They were certain the new counterinsurgency plan could not work and shouldn’t be tried.

Despite opposition as fierce and sustained as one can imagine (and far worse than anything President Obama is now experiencing), Bush and a small handful of others — the most important of whom were General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker -– persisted. They displayed raw determination. … And they were proved right. In other words, the qualities Bush displayed in wartime are now the qualities Brooks and others (including me) are hoping Obama possesses. …

Jennifer Rubin picks up an astonishing statistic from the Washington Post.

This sobering report comes from the Washington Post:

“More than 1,000 American troops have been wounded in battle over the past three months in Afghanistan, accounting for one-fourth of all those injured in combat since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. The dramatic increase has filled military hospitals with more amputees and other seriously injured service members and comes as October marks the deadliest month for American troops in Afghanistan.”

How many were killed or lost a limb, I wonder, while the president dithered and delayed implementing the recommendations of his hand-picked general? It is not an inconsequential question. The president acts as though there were no downside to the lethargic pace of his decision-making. …

…What’s a few more weeks? Or months? Well, we know there is indeed a price to allowing our current approach to languish. There is a very real cost to delaying implementation of the new plan that is the best available to achieve victory as quickly as possible. The enemy is emboldened. More civilians die. The political and security situation in Pakistan worsens. And more brave Americans are asked to sacrifice themselves while Obama considers and reconsiders whether there isn’t any way to shave some money off the tab and reduce the number of troops his commanders say are needed. …

David Harsanyi discusses the latest incarnation of the health care bill.

The King James version of the Bible runs more than 600 pages and is crammed with celestial regulations. Newton’s Principia Mathematica distilled many of the rules of physics in a mere 974 pages.

Neither have anything on Nancy Pelosi’s new fiendishly entertaining health-care opus, which tops 1,900 pages. …

…The word “shall” — as in “must” or “required to” — appears over 3,000 times. The word, alas, is never preceded by the patriotic phrase “mind our own freaking business.” Not once. …

Toby Harnden, at the Telegraph, UK, blogs about Valerie Jarrett’s interview with CNN.

…In the middle of all this patent nonsense, Jarrett blurted out the truly bizarre notion that “what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power”. Poor plucky little Barack Obama, United States commander-in-chief and leader of the Free World taking on Goliath. They may still act as if the election campaign is still on but it might be a good idea for Jarrett and Co to reflect that they are power.

As David Zurawik notes: “such a phrase from our collective past that has real resonance because it was once loaded with such integrity, moral authority and wisdom when first uttered, is cheapened when used in such a blatantly and inappropriate political context”. …

…It was such a train wreck of an interview for Jarrett that I’d hazard a guess we might be seeing a little less of her on our screens. Remember, she was the person that Team Obama favoured as the new appointed (i.e. unelected) Senator for Illinois. That was, of course, because she would have been the very best person for the job and nothing to do with the fact that she a long-time Obama family friend.

Burton Folsom, history prof at Hillsdale College blogs on The Corner about how cutting back taxes and government have spurred economic recoveries before.

…Many have compared the current economic crisis to the Great Depression, and it is useful to study FDR’s statistics on recovery to understand the problem with relying on short-term data. Unemployment, for example, was 21.4 percent in May 1934 and dropped to 13.2 percent by May 1937. That impressed many pundits and voters. But in May 1939, unemployment was back up to 20.7 percent. Why? FDR had raised taxes, introduced a new corporate tax, enacted a minimum-wage law, and granted unions unprecedented federal support to organize during the late 1930s. When those government interventions took hold, the economic recovery was thwarted. In fact, capital goods in May 1937 had almost returned to 1929 levels, but in May 1939 capital goods stood at a mere 59 percent of 1929 levels.

The key issue here is economic philosophy. FDR believed that massive intervention (followed by high taxes) would lead to economic recovery. Obama has a similar belief. They are wrong, and thus any short-term recovery we see during 2009 and 2010 is likely to be ephemeral. By contrast, Ronald Reagan and Calvin Coolidge believed that cutting tax rates and reducing federal intervention was the recipe for economic recovery, and both saw economic recoveries during the first terms of their presidencies. Economic growth during the 1920s and 1980s was, in fact, spectacular. When people are unshackled and allowed to be free, they can accomplish much. When that belief takes hold again in the United States, we will likely see a serious recovery.

In Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff explains that government incentives are creating borrowing and spending where corrections are still needed.

The GDP numbers out yesterday, which showed economic growth at 3.5% in the third quarter, brought a deafening chorus from public and private economists who all agreed that the recession is officially over. With such a strong report, they are happy to tell us that not only has the Fat Lady finished her aria, but she has left the building and is sipping champagne in the bath. As usual, it falls on me to rain on the parade.

Even the giddiest commentators admit that the upside GDP surprise resulted almost entirely from government interventions. But, by pushing up public and private debt, expanding government, deepening trade deficits, and pushing down savings rates, these interventions have succeeded only in putting our economy back on an unsustainable path of borrowing and spending. Accordingly, they have prevented the rebalancing necessary for long-term health. …

… In the end, this stimulus, just like prior doses, will only worsen the condition it is meant to cure. When it wears off, the resulting recession will be even bigger than the one that everyone assumes has just ended. Until the impulse to fight recessions with government stimulus is quashed, genuine economic growth will never return. A string of ever-worsening recessions will eventually lead to what will be the next Great (Inflationary) Depression. But for now, enjoy the bubbly.

David Warren dissects an article in which the journalist incorrectly blamed global warming for an environmental issue.

…Let me give an example of this, from a recent reading of a big feature article that appeared a couple of months ago in the Guardian Weekly. It was a plausible-looking piece (first warning!) — provided the reader knew nothing whatever about the topic. It reported, correctly, that the Nile Delta is being gradually inundated by the destructive salt waters of the Mediterranean Sea, at terrible cost to the agriculture on which tens of millions of Egyptians depend for their basic foods.

But the writer attributes the whole thing to rising sea levels, and thus global warming. And this is nonsense. The Mediterranean has been rising but only on an incremental scale undetectable except over centuries — as all the world’s sea level since the last Ice Age (and at that, not consistently, and apparently not at the moment).

The explanation is instead the High Aswan Dam. For millennia that delta had been accreting from the accumulation of silt washed down the Nile from mountains in Ethiopia and other sources far, far away — rising in the annual inundation which was once the basis for all Egyptian agriculture. Against this, at the mouth of the Nile, the inroads of the sea; but the deposit of silt was greater. Most of this silt is now impounded behind that huge dam, hundreds of miles inland, and has been for decades now. The dam itself is gradually silting over, but the delta lands are no longer being replenished. Hence, the unmitigated inroads of the sea. …

In Slate, Daniel Gross feeds the newspaper pessimists a dose of reality.

Recent data provided newspaper lovers with fodder for despair and newspaper haters with fodder for glee. As Reuters reported, citing Audit Bureau of Circulations figures, “Average weekday circulation at 379 daily newspapers fell 10.6 percent to about 30.4 million copies for the six months that ended on Sept. 30, 2009 from the same period last year.” “Those numbers take my breath away,” said Josh Marshall. “A ten percent decline year over year is the rate of a mode of distribution going out of existence.” Kevin Drum of Mother Jones reaffirmed his view that newspapers would be gone by 2025. Megan McArdle of the Atlantic declared, “I think we’re witnessing the end of the newspaper business, full stop, not the end of the newspaper business as we know it.”

Chillax, people.

…First of all, there’s nothing ipso facto shocking about a decline in patronage of 10 percent in six months. Many political blogs and cable news shows have seen their audiences fall by much more than 10 percent since the feverish fall of 2008. And advertising at plenty of online publications has fallen by a similar amount. In case anybody has forgotten, we’ve had a deep, long recession, a huge spike in unemployment, and a credit crunch. Consumers have cut back sharply on all sorts of expenditures. There are plenty of members of what I call the 40 percent club: businesses, many tethered to finance and credit, that have seen sales plummet by nearly one-half. These include automobiles, homes, luxury apparel, and diamonds. Many other components of consumer discretionary spending—hotels, restaurants, air travel—have fallen off significantly. Do we draw a line from trends over the last few years and declare that in 15 years there will be only a handful of hotels? I’m not sure why we would expect consumption of a purely discretionary item that costs a few hundred dollars per year not to fall in the type of macroeconomic climate we’ve had.
Especially when you consider that rather than discounting the product, many newspapers (and magazines) have been jacking up prices aggressively. … they’re planning for survival by slashing costs sharply, trying to boost online advertising, and, here’s the clincher, making people pay more for the product. … When you raise the price of a product, you’re likely to lose a portion of your customer base. And while no newspaper likes to shed readers, some of the shrinkage in circulation is by design. If raising subscription costs by 11 percent causes 10 percent of customers to flee, a newspaper will find that its circulation revenues are stable while it saves a lot of money by manufacturing a smaller number of newspapers. …