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In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on Dick Cheney’s weekend.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney stormed the beachheads of the liberal US media again Sunday with a fiery performance on ABC’s This Week. He offered a stinging rebuke to current VP Joe Biden’s ludicrous claim that Iraq may end up as one of Barack Obama’s “great achievements”, as well as blistering criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of terrorist suspects. He also launched a strike on Biden’s recent comment that another 9/11 scale attack was “unlikely.” …
…In many respects, Cheney’s vision is the antithesis of that of Barack Obama. In contrast to the current occupant of the White House, Cheney firmly believes the West is engaged in an epic global war against a vicious, Islamist enemy. It is striking for example how the recent 108-page Quadrennial Homeland Security Review omitted the words “Islam”, “Islamic” or “Islamist”, preferring to use the term “violent extremist”, a revealing insight into the Obama administration’s refusal to publicly acknowledge the Islamist nature of the enemy the US is fighting in the form of al-Qaeda and its affiliates.
Dick Cheney is a refreshingly forceful advocate of American exceptionalism, and the idea that the United States is a special country with a unique role to play in shaping history. He also understands the importance of maintaining and strengthening America’s key alliances. …
…Perhaps most strikingly, Dick Cheney, like Ronald Reagan before him and in complete contrast to Barack Obama, views the world in terms of good and evil. For Cheney, engagement with America’s enemies such as Iran and North Korea is a surrender of American global power, and a shameful abdication of responsibility by the world’s only superpower. In this new era of appeasement, Cheney’s outspoken criticism, like that of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, is increasingly striking a chord with an American public that is sharply turning against the Obama administration’s agenda.
Charles Lane, in the WaPo, comments on Senator Evan Bayh’s decision to leave Washington.
Millions of Americans long to tell their bosses “take this job and shove it.” Hardly any have the power and money to do so, especially in these recessionary times. Sen. Evan Bayh (D) of Indiana, however, is the exception. His stunning retirement from the Senate is essentially a loud and emphatic “screw you” to President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. For months now, Bayh has been screaming at the top of his voice that the party needs to reorient toward a more popular, centrist agenda — one that emphasizes jobs and fiscal responsibility over health care and cap and trade. Neither the White House nor the Senate leadership has given him the response he wanted. Their bungling of what should have been a routine bipartisan jobs bill last week seems to have been the last straw.
…Let it never be forgotten that Bayh is a perennial Democratic golden boy, the keynote speaker at the party’s 1996 convention, scion of a political dynasty, proven vote-getter in a red state and, in his own mind, prime presidential timber. For him, then, the question was: even if I win, who needs six more years of dealing with these people, after which I might be 60 years old and trying to pick up the pieces of a damaged political party brand? …
…Bayh’s dramatic vote of no-confidence in his own party’s leadership looks like another Massachusetts-sized political earthquake for the Democrats. Not only does it imperil the president’s short-term hopes of passing health care and other major legislation this year. It also makes it much more likely that the Republicans can pick up Bayh’s Senate seat in normally red Indiana and, with it, control of the Senate itself. If present trends continue, November could turn into a Republican rout.
Let the Obami take note: Abigail Thernstrom, in the Corner, discusses a real post-racial election.
Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu is the next mayor of New Orleans. The city is two-thirds black, and he will be the first white elected to the office since 1970, when his father, Moon Landrieu, won the seat.
The election was a true post-racial moment. Four and a half years after Katrina, black voters decided competence trumped race. The prospect of a white mayor would be “an earth-shaking event,” a politically active black lawyer told a New York Times reporter before the election.
… Nagin’s incompetence persuaded black voters that racial solidarity wouldn’t repair the still-broken city.
About a third of the city’s homes are still empty; the murder rate is among the highest in the nation; and the police department is scandal-plagued. …
In Power Line, Scott Johnson discusses an article by Thomas Cooley and Peter Rupert on the jobs picture.
…Cooley and Rupert comment: “Although job losses slowed in December, there is no evidence of recovery in employment. This will be a continuing drag on the economy and on the fiscal condition of both state and federal governments.”
…Yet Cooley allows that the Obama administration has “created some very large sources of uncertainty that impact small businesses and those who would finance them. By pursuing a huge policy agenda without much success they have created large-scale uncertainty about health care costs, cap-and-trade policies, corporate taxes, taxes on incomes over $250,000 and estate taxes.”
Will new jobs be formed on net with the scheduled tax increases and regulatory overhang? It is odd that so little serious attention has been devoted to the problem of job growth in the private sector except insofar as it can be used as an argument to enlarge the size and scope of the government itself.
We have a hat-trick of Pickings favorites who didn’t like Audi’s green police. Mark Steyn gives an example of what happens when kids are taught community-activist-type nonsense.
…Let’s turn to an item from The Philadelphia Inquirer. A young American with a white-bread name (“Nick George”) and a clean-cut mien returns from Jordan to resume his studies at Pomona College in California, and gets handcuffed and detained for five hours by U.S. Immigration and Philly police. Why? Well, he had Arabic-language flash cards in his pocket. Also, upon his return to the United States, his hair was shorter than on his Pennsylvania driver’s license. “That is an indication sometimes,” explained Lt. Louis Liberati, “that somebody may have gone through a radicalization.” Really? As Nick George’s boomer mom remarked, once upon a time long hair was a sign of radicalization. …
…At any rate, the coiffure set off a Code Red alert, and Nick George found himself being asked: “How do you feel about 9/11?”
According to the Inquirer’s Daniel Rubin, “He said he hemmed and hawed a bit. ‘It’s a complicated question,’ he told me by phone.” However, young Nick ended up telling his captors, “It was bad. I am against it.”
My, that’s big of you.
Take it as read that the bozos at the airport called this one wrong. The problem is not that Nick George, his radical haircut notwithstanding, is a jihadist eager to self-detonate on a transatlantic flight. The problem is that he is an entirely typical American college student – one for whom 9/11 is “a complicated question.” After all, to those reared in an educational system where the late Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” (now back in the bestseller lists) is conventional wisdom, such a view is entirely unexceptional. It’s hardly Nick’s fault that the banal groupthink of every American campus gets you pulled over for secondary screening when you’re returning from Amman. …
Jonah Goldberg takes a turn.
…Some eco-bloggers disliked the ad because it reinforces the association of undemocratic statism and PC bullying with environmentalism. Perhaps that’s why the New York Times dubbed it “misguided.”
…To me, the target demographic is a certain subset of spineless, upscale white men (all the perps in the ad are affluent white guys) who just want to go with the flow. In that sense, the Audi ad has a lot in common with those execrable MasterCard commercials. Targeting the same demographic, those ads depicted hapless fathers being harangued by their children to get with the environmental program. MasterCard’s tagline: “Helping Dad become a better man: Priceless.” …
…It will be interesting to see whether the ad actually sells cars. The premise only works if you take it as a given that this Gorewellian nightmare is inevitable. But the commercials arrive at precisely the moment when that inevitability is unraveling like an old pair of hemp socks. The global-warming industry is imploding from scientific scandals, inconvenient weather, economic anxiety, and surging popular skepticism (according to a Pew Research Center survey released in January, global warming ranks 21st out of 21 in terms of the public’s priorities). …
Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe, sees the serious issue of government encroachment on liberty that is highlighted by the Audi ad.
…On Twitter, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom expressed his approval more concisely: “That ‘green police’ Audi commercial hits home.’’ He would know. Under a composting ordinance Newsom signed last year, throwing orange peels, coffee grounds, or greasy pizza boxes in the trash is now illegal in San Francisco, and carries fines of up to $500 per violation.
There was a time when Americans were thought capable of deciding for themselves what to do with their coffee grounds or whether to carry groceries home in paper or plastic bags. It isn’t only in San Francisco, and it isn’t only when it comes to “green’’ issues, that such mundane or personal choices are being supplanted by government coercion. One thin slice at a time, liberties we used to take for granted are replaced with mandates from above. Rather than leave us free to choose, Big Brother increasingly makes the choice for us: On trans fats. On gambling. On smoking. On bicycle helmets. On health insurance.
In Massachusetts, the Globe reported last week, new regulations will soon require thousands of restaurant workers to undergo state-designed training on handling food allergies … In Pennsylvania, the Reading Eagle notes that it is illegal for volunteers to sell pies or cookies at a charity bake sale unless the treats were “prepared in kitchens inspected and licensed by the state Agriculture Department.’’ In Oregon, an eight-year-old boy was suspended from his public school on Monday because he came to class with a tiny plastic toy gun from his G.I. Joe action figure.
It isn’t to evil dictators with a lust for power that Americans have been slowly surrendering their autonomy. It is to well-intentioned authorities who believe sincerely that our freedoms must be circumscribed for our own good. …
In the WSJ, Kimberley Strassel tells the sordid tale of Pfizer cozying up to big government. Perhaps the pharmaceutical companies took a pragmatic view of the situation and decided to join the enemy since they couldn’t beat them. It is still disappointing to see the lack of principles that were displayed. Fortunately for us, this story has a happy ending. We think.
The sight of ObamaCare on life support has many Democrats disappointed. It could be worse. They could be Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler.
…Fortune 500 execs could stand up for a free market that benefits consumers and shareholders, or hitch their cart to the new Democratic majority. Pfizer’s Mr. Kindler is a case study in the hitch-and-hope mentality—a CEO who became the motivating force behind Big Pharma’s $80 billion “deal” on reform, and industry support of ObamaCare. …
Pfizer also aggressively shifted political giving. … In 2009 Pfizer became the fourth largest federal lobbyist, spending nearly $25 million. The year before it hadn’t even made the top 20.
With these gestures, Mr. Kindler surely believed Democrats would treat his industry gently. The strategy: The industry would pledge $80 billion to reform. In return it would get greater volume and a requirement that people buy brand-name drugs. Democrats would also fight against drug reimportation and forgo price controls. …
…Critics warned the legislation would lead to a government takeover and price controls. They warned Democrats would take the money and double-cross them. None of it fazed the industry, right up until ObamaCare imploded. …
In the NYTimes, David Kirkpatrick and Duff Wilson write about another side of the Big Pharma sellout story. This about the lobbyist Billy Tauzin.
After about two dozen years in Congress, Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana was after bigger game — the giant, 200-pound whitetail deer that run through the area of south Texas that hunters call the Golden Triangle.
So in 2003 Mr. Tauzin, then chairman of the powerful energy and commerce committee, made a deal. Though still on a modest Congressional salary, he paid more than $1 million for a 1,500-acre ranch there. And he invited a dozen friends — mostly executives and lobbyists with interests before his committee — to cover its mortgage by paying him dues as members of a new hunting club. It did business as Cajun Creek L.L.C., based in the Baton Rouge office of a lobbyist who was a member.
Now, seven years later, Mr. Tauzin’s friends say, it is to his Texas ranch that Mr. Tauzin, 66, will retreat, to contemplate the apparent collapse of the grandest in a career of fearless deals — a pact to trade the drug industry’s political support for favorable terms under President Obama’s proposed health care overhaul. …
In the Vancouver Sun, Randy Boswell reports on an interesting hypothesis about Inuit migration.
One of Canada’s top archeologists argues in a new book that the prehistoric ancestors of this country’s 55,000 Inuit probably migrated rapidly from Alaska clear across the Canadian North in just a few years — not gradually over centuries as traditionally assumed — after they learned about a rich supply of iron from a massive meteorite strike on Greenland’s west coast.
The startling theory, tentatively floated two decades ago by Canadian Museum of Civilization curator emeritus Robert McGhee, has been bolstered by recent research indicating a later and faster migration of the ancient Thule Inuit across North America’s polar frontier than previously believed. …
…McGhee believes the Thule Inuit had learned about the valuable metal at the Cape York meteorite field from contact with Canada’s aboriginal Dorset people, who were already using iron and trading it with Norse sailors from southern Greenland and Iceland. …
…He adds that this interpretation of Inuit origins in Canada — as resulting from “commercial motives” and “mercantile exploration” — challenges the prevailing view that ancient native cultures would only migrate to new territories incrementally and in response to environmental pressures, dwindling food supplies or competition from rival peoples.