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Christopher Hitchens reviews B.R. Myers new book on North Korea, and the serious danger that the nation presents.
…I have recently donned the bifocals provided by B.R. Myers in his electrifying new book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters…The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent “Constitution,” “ratified” last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian “military first” mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.
These conclusions of his, in a finely argued and brilliantly written book, carry the worrisome implication that the propaganda of the regime may actually mean exactly what it says, which in turn would mean that peace and disarmament negotiations with it are a waste of time—and perhaps a dangerous waste at that. …
…Myers also points out that many of the slogans employed and displayed by the North Korean state are borrowed directly—this really does count as some kind of irony—from the kamikaze ideology of Japanese imperialism. Every child is told every day of the wonderful possibility of death by immolation in the service of the motherland and taught not to fear the idea of war, not even a nuclear one. …
The WSJ editors comment on The Big Spender’s budget.
One rule of budget reporting is to watch what the politicians are spending this year, not the frugality they promise down the road. By that measure, the budget that President Obama released yesterday for fiscal 2011 is one of the greatest spend-while-you-can documents in American history. …
…If this budget is Mr. Obama’s first clear demonstration of his long-term governing priorities, then it’s hard not to conclude that this spending boom is deliberate. It is an effort to put in place programs and spending commitments that will require vast new tax increases and give the political class a claim on far more private American wealth. …
…But the reality is that even these still-high deficits are based on assumptions for growth and revenue gains from record tax increases starting January 1, 2011. And what a list of tax increases it is—no less than $2 trillion worth over the decade. The nearby table lists some of the largest, all of which the Administration and its economists claim to believe will have little or no impact on growth. If they’re wrong, the deficits will be even larger. …
…Even these tax increases won’t be enough to pay for the spending that this Administration is unleashing in its first two remarkable years. On the evidence of this budget, the Massachusetts Senate election never happened.
Obama really is a one-trick President. More government is what he’s forcing on the us, despite public opinion and common sense. Jennifer Rubin comments.
…One marvels at the cognitive dissonance at work. The Obama team declares “jobs” to be the top priority. But job creators are getting a hefty tax hike. The Obama team declares its conviction that the private sector is the engine of recovery. But those who do the most hiring—small business—are getting whacked and money is being sucked out off the private sector and going into the public sector. (As Americans for Tax Reform spells it out, “Taxes are scheduled to rise from 14.8 percent of GDP in 2009 to 19.6 percent by 2020.”)
Nor are all these taxes helping to close the deficit. As Keith Hennessey lays it out, “the president’s own figures show deficits averaging 5.1% of GDP over the next 5 years, and 4.5% of GDP over the next ten years. They further show debt held by the public increasing from 63.6% of GDP this year to 77.2% of GDP ten years from now. I think it’s a safe assumption that CBO’s rescore of the President’s budget will be even worse.” And the reason for this, of course, is that as much as Obama is raising taxes, he’s spending even faster than we can take them in. Hennessey again:
The President is proposing significantly more spending than he proposed last year: 1.8% of GDP more in 2011, and roughly 1 percentage point more each year over time. Spending is and will continue to be way above historic averages. At its lowest point in the next decade federal spending would still be 1.7 percentage points above the 30-year historic average. Over the next decade, President Obama proposes spending be 12% higher as a share of the economy than it has averaged over the past three decades.
This is not a recipe for economic recovery. It is a formula to retard growth, investment, and job creation. It is also, I think, a political fiasco, the exemplification of tax-and-spend policies to which the public is forcefully averse. Once again taxes and fiscal sobriety will top the list of issues in the upcoming elections. You can understand why Democrats expect a brutal political season.
In Investor’s Business Daily, Betsy McCaughey points out that most of Congress is happy to spend more of our money, too.
…Almost no one in Washington, D.C., is calling for spending controls. In the nation’s capitol, the cause célèbre is deficit reduction. Last month, numerous senators from both parties called for a deficit-reduction commission to close the gap between federal spending and tax revenues.
To avoid burdening the next generation, they said, Americans must “pay as they go.” Nothing should be “off the table,” including tax increases, said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. President Obama joined in, announcing in his State of the Union message that if Congress won’t set up a deficit-reduction commission, he will.
Don’t be bamboozled by these sanctimonious calls for deficit reduction. In plain English, it means raising your taxes to keep pace with what politicians are spending. The real danger to our freedom is the level of spending, not whether it’s paid for with taxes now or borrowing. They’ll come after you and your children later. What’s needed is a cap on overall spending.
During the last 18 months, federal spending as a percentage of what the nation produces (gross domestic product) soared to 28% from 20%. Add in state and local government spending, and the result crossed that critical 40% threshold.
The president said in his State of the Union message that the federal government must tighten its belt, just the way American families are doing. But his budget proposal increases federal spending by $85 billion. That is belt-loosening. …
It must be hard when the facts aren’t on your side. Dick Morris corrects the president, and explains how Obama could lower the deficit.
President Obama was disingenuous when he said that the budget deficit he faced “when I walked in the door” of the White House was $1.3 trillion. He went on to say that he only increased it to $1.4 trillion in 2009 and was raising it to $1.6 trillion in 2010.
As Joe Wilson said, “You lie.”
Here are the facts:
In 2008, George W. Bush ran a deficit of $485 billion. By the time the fiscal year started on Oct.1, 2008, it had gone up by another $100 billion due to increased recession-related spending and depressed revenues. So it was $600 billion. That was the real Bush deficit.
But when the fiscal crisis hit, Bush had to pass TARP in the final months of his presidency, which cost $700 billion. Under the federal budget rules, a loan and a grant are treated the same. So the $700 billion pushed the deficit — officially — up to $1.3 trillion. But not really. The $700 billion was a short-term loan, and $500 billion of it has already been repaid.
So what was the real deficit Obama inherited? The $600 billion deficit Bush was running plus the $200 billion of TARP money that probably won’t be repaid (mainly AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). That totals $800 billion. That was the real deficit Obama inherited. …
In the Arizona Republic, Robert Robb also comments on the budget, and Obama’s reflexive spending and blaming.
…Obama likes to depict himself as a deficit victim. He inherited a huge deficit and a deep recession. Not his fault.
Certainly the Republicans during the Bush years were fiscally irresponsible. But within historical bounds. The deficits in Obama’s budget are beyond historical bounds and are his alone.
Even with Bush’s tax cuts, federal revenues in 2007 were at the average as a percentage of GDP, 18.5 percent, going back to 1960. The deficit was just 1.2 percent of GDP, historically on the low side. Accumulated federal debt was 36 percent of GDP.
Then the recession hit. From 2008 to 2009, federal spending increased 18 percent. This was a budget year that straddled the Bush and Obama presidencies. But the spending increase was driven by anti-recession measures, predominately the Bush stimulus and bailouts.
Obama supported these measures. In fact, his complaint about the Bush stimulus was that it was too small.
This raises a question of political ontology: If Obama agreed with Bush, is it still just Bush’s fault? …
In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Gerald Warner reports on the surprising story of a German family recently receiving political asylum in the US.
…Burman said: “We can’t expect every country to follow our constitution. The world might be a better place if it did. However, the rights being violated here are basic human rights that no country has a right to violate.” He observed: “Homeschoolers are a particular social group that the German government is trying to suppress. This family has a well-founded fear of persecution… therefore, they are eligible for asylum…”
…Judge Burman added that the scariest thing about this case was the motivation of the German government. He said that, rather than being concerned with the welfare of the children, it was trying to stamp out parallel societies. Making his court order, the judge voiced concern that, although Germany was a democratic country and an ally, the policy of persecuting homeschoolers was “repellent to everything we believe as Americans”.
That offers a useful insight into how Americans, living in a free country, view the creeping totalitarianism that has engulfed Europe. …
…The mentality is that the state – not parents – is the natural controller and shaper of children’s lives and beliefs. When a schoolgirl can be given an abortion without her parents’ knowledge, we know that, while public utilities may have been privatised, children have been nationalised. The Romeikes who fled from Germany objected to their children being forced to follow a curriculum that they believed was anti-Christian. …
In the Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez blogs about Scott Brown’s interview on a morning radio show.
Boston radio presence Michael Graham shares a morning surprise:
I’m in the middle of some rant or another, and my producer tells me that Scott Brown is on the line. I didn’t have a scheduled interview, but I’m always happy to have him on.
So I put him on the air and I quickly realize that he wasn’t expecting to be interviewed. So what was he doing on my phone?
It turns out that Sen-elect Brown had taken time out of his insanely busy schedule to call my producer about a fundraiser for the Fisher House Boston that he and his daughter participated in a few weeks ago. One of the donors who was supposed to get one of Ayla’s CDs as a thank-you gift for donating to Fisher House hadn’t gotten his. So Sen.-Elect Brown called in to follow up on that one CD.
One CD for some guy Scott Brown will probably never meet. …
…In other words, he’s the same guy that spend months driving his pick-up across the Commonwealth. That’s the political power behind Scott Brown.
John Stossel gives another reason to reduce the government. Politicians are so used to stealing from us that they apparently don’t remember it’s wrong.
…When the CEO said that opening his factory wouldn’t have been possible without the Obama administration, he may have known something we didn’t. Last month, Obama announced a new set of tax credits for so-called green companies. One window company was on the list: Serious Materials. This must be one very special company.
But wait, it gets even more interesting.
On my Fox Business Network show on “crony capitalism”, I displayed a picture of administration officials and so-called “energy leaders” taken at the U.S. Department of Energy. Standing front and center was Cathy Zoi, who oversees $16.8 billion in stimulus funds, much of it for weatherization programs that benefit Serious.
The interesting twist is that Zoi happens to be the wife of Robin Roy, who happens to be vice president of “policy” at Serious Windows. …
…On its website, Serious Materials says it did not get a taxpayer subsidy. But that’s just playing with terms. What it got was a tax credit, an opportunity that its competitors did not get: to keep money it would have paid in taxes. Let’s not be misled. Government is as manipulative with selective tax credits as it is with cash subsidies. It would be more efficient to cut taxes across the board. Why should there be favoritism?
Because politicians like it. Big, complicated government gives them opportunities to do favors for their friends.
In the Telegraph, UK, Christopher Booker discusses IPCC corruption.
…Dr North next uncovered “Amazongate”. The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.
The blatant bias of each of its four reports has been pointed out by scientists – notably the rewriting of key passages in its 1995 report after the contributing scientists had approved the final text. This provoked a magisterial blast from Professor Frederick Seitz, a former president of the US National Academy of Sciences, who wrote that in all his 60 years as a scientist he had never seen “a more disturbing corruption” of the scientific process, and that if the IPCC was “incapable of following its most basic procedures”, it was best it should be “abandoned”. …
…It is noticeable how many of those now calling for Dr Pachauri’s resignation, led by Professor Andrew Weaver, a senior IPCC insider, are passionate global warming believers. Fearing that Pachauri damages their cause, they want him thrown overboard in the hope of saving the IPCC itself. But it is not just Pachauri who has been holed below the waterline. So has the entire IPCC process. And beyond that – and despite the pleading of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and the BBC that none of this detracts from the evidence for man-made global warming – so has the warmist cause itself. Bereft of scientific or moral authority, the most expensive show the world has ever seen may soon be nearing its end.
In the Corner, Iain Murray blogs about the awaited end of the globalony conspiracy. It’s not over until the funding is pulled.
…Walter Russell Mead pronounces that “the global warming movement as we know it is dead.” He concludes:
The death of global warming (the movement, not the phenomenon) has some important political and cultural consequences in the United States that I’ll be blogging on down the road. Basically, Sarah Palin 1, Al Gore zip. The global warming meltdown confirms all the populist suspicions out there about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked ’science’ to impose cockamamie social mandates on the long-suffering American people, backed by a mainstream media that is totally in the tank.
…And the upshot of all this is that even President Obama now recognizes that cap-and-trade is dead, as summarized over at Talking Points Memo:
The remarks represent the first time the President has acknowledged that the Senate may not be willing to adopt a cap and trade system: the central feature of the climate change initiative that Obama ran on during the 2008 campaign. …
…This leaves the EPA and its sledgehammer (see Marlo Lewis’s assessment of the proposed regulations here and here) as the only hope left for the global warming alarmists. Given that many people assume that the EPA introduced its unwieldy rule in an attempt to pressure the Senate to act to prevent the EPA rule from taking effect, one has to wonder how much political capital will be put behind the EPA’s regulation now