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According to Abe Greenwald the freed Lockerbie bomber was twice lucky.
… Megrahi may have been freed twice: first from prison, then from U.K. healthcare. It’s entirely likely that Libyan medical treatment given to a close friend of Muammar Qaddafi could have raised Megrahi out of the 51% survivability ghetto of the United Kingdom. My question is, who’s springing us when America adopts prison-like healthcare?
David Warren discusses the polarization of politics.
…That is why it is interesting to me that Noonan has been writing lately about the egotistical madness of politicians; about their blindness to what is at stake in their actions. She is one of several commentators beginning to discern apocalyptic developments in U.S. politics: the division of America not into supporters of two established political parties, with a common patriotism, but rather into two violently angry and mutually antagonistic camps, with little middle ground, and what there is disappearing.
The writer named David P. Goldman, who often signs himself “Spengler,” is another such “prophetic pundit,” and incidentally another New Yorker. He is superficially as different from Noonan as another person can be, yet he writes of parallel things in parallel ways. Where Noonan looks almost exclusively at American politics and society, “Spengler” is a globalist; with an uncanny understanding of both high finance and high diplomatic strategy. (Read him in Asia Times and First Things websites.) …
…Both see catastrophe coming in the present overreaching of the Obama presidency and the attendant triumphalism that this is spreading through the forces of the Left, internationally. …
Jennifer Rubin comments on the Obami’s poor judgment in foreign policy in the Middle East.
By seizing upon and escalating an issue on which no Israeli government could relent, the Obami have made clear that the “game” here is not compromise or resolution but rather high-pressure tactics directed against the Israeli government. The Obami holler while the PA throws stones. The aim of both is to squeeze the Netanyahu government to the breaking point and shift the focus away from the Palestinians’ inability to enter into any meaningful peace deal … The Palestinians now are certain that they can have both violence and a “peace process” in which the administration can be counted on to browbeat the Israelis into providing more concessions:
Shaath, a former PA foreign minister, said that peaceful protests were now a popular demand to confront Israel’s policies in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
“We need to strengthen and back this option in the face of the Israeli occupation’s policies,” he said. “We can’t return to the negotiations unless Israel halts all settlement construction in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem.”
The results of the Obami’s handiwork once again suggest that “realism” is not the animating rationale behind their Middle East policy. In their animosity toward Israel and obsession with aligning themselves with the Palestinian bargaining position, the Obami have reinforced the Palestinians’ worst tendencies and convinced Israel (not to mention other nervous allies) that this administration is not to be trusted. …
Charles Krauthammer reviews Obama’s sorry record with America’s friends.
… But the Brits, our most venerable, most reliable ally, are the most disoriented. “We British not only speak the same language. We tend to think in the same way. We are more likely than anyone else to provide tea, sympathy and troops,” writes Bruce Anderson in London’s Independent, summarizing with admirable concision the fundamental basis of the U.S.-British special relationship.
Well, said David Manning, a former British ambassador to the United States, to a House of Commons committee reporting on that very relationship: “[Obama] is an American who grew up in Hawaii, whose foreign experience was of Indonesia and who had a Kenyan father. The sentimental reflexes, if you like, are not there.”
I’m not personally inclined to neuropsychiatric diagnoses, but Manning’s guess is as good as anyone’s. How can you explain a policy toward Britain that makes no strategic or moral sense? And even if you can, how do you explain the gratuitous slaps to the Czechs, Poles, Indians and others? Perhaps when an Obama Doctrine is finally worked out, we shall learn whether it was pique, principle or mere carelessness.
More on this in The American Interest as Walter Russell Mead reviews the Obami foreign policy missteps. Although some of his analysis is questionable and his perspective is center-left, Mead agrees that the Obami have left much to be desired.
…None of this has worked particularly well. The EU powers are not exactly leaping to Washington’s support on Afghanistan. A British parliamentary committee has just pronounced the US-UK special relationship over. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva publicly rejected Secretary Clinton’s public request for support for a sanctions resolution at the UN. Turkey is flirting with Iran and hanging out with Russia. For now, at least, the Israelis are resisting Washington’s pressure for a freeze on new construction in Jerusalem.
The policy of slapping friends seems not to be working very well; the policy of kissing up to the bad guys has been even less of a success. North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran have blown off the administration’s efforts to put bilateral relationships on a friendlier basis. Not only is President Obama back to Bush’s old policy of trying to get the UN to adopt tougher sanctions on Iran, he’s denouncing human rights crackdowns in Cuba. The biggest success to date, getting a new missile treaty with Russia, is at lot less impressive than it looks. Russia needs to reduce the costs of its nuclear arsenal and wants the prestige that comes from arms talks with the US just like the Soviet Union used to have. I support the treaty and hope it gets ratified, but on the whole it’s more a favor from us to Russia than the other way round. …
…Part of the problem may be that the administration’s dislike of Bush administration policies may extend to countries that cooperated with the last administration. That’s a mistake. Many of the countries who supported the United States in Iraq (especially the ones in Central and Eastern Europe) didn’t do it because they loved war, loved neoconservatism or loved Bush. They did it because they believe that good relations with a strong United States are the foundation of their own security. These countries are potentially President Obama’s good friends as well. Many of them don’t care who the president is or what he wants; they will work with Washington and give it what help they can no matter whether we have a Blue State or Red State leader. It’s more important than one might think to treat these countries with consideration and to bring them along when our policy changes. Countries around the world should know that if you stand by the United States we will stand by you, and our new president won’t blame you for working with our last one. …
John Fund notes some changes at GE and with Michael Steele at the GOP national office.
Michael Steele, the embattled chairman of the Republican National Committee, was plagued with negative media stories long before this week’s revelation that the head of his young donors program had reimbursed a GOP consultant for a nearly $2,000 bill at a Los Angeles lesbian bondage club.
Back in January, Mr. Steele lashed out at his Republican critics on ABC News: “I’m telling them and I’m looking them in the eye and say I’ve had enough of it. If you don’t want me in the job, fire me. But until then, shut up. Get with the program or get out of the way.” The next month, Mr. Steele followed up that salvo by complaining to Washingtonian magazine: “I don’t see stories about the internal operations of the DNC that I see about this operation. Why? Is it because Michael Steele is the chairman, or is it because a black man is chairman?” …
In Forbes, Joel Kotkin says that people are moving to Texas. The most recent article in Pickings featuring Texas was on March 9th. Michael Barone discussed Texas’ low taxes, conservative fiscal policies, and minimalist approach to governing. Makes sense that Texas is one of the states that is weathering the recession better than most.
…According to the most recent Census estimates, the Dallas and Ft. Worth, Texas, region added 146,000 people between 2008 and 2009–the most of any region in the country–a healthy 2.3% increase. …
…According to Moody’s Economy.com, Texas’ big cities are entering economic recovery mode well ahead of almost all the major centers along the East or West Coasts. This represents a continuation of longer-term trends, both before and after the economic crisis. Between 2000 and 2009 New York gained 95,000 jobs while Chicago lost 257,000, Los Angeles over 167,000 and San Francisco some 216,000. Meanwhile, Dallas added nearly 150,000 positions and Houston a hefty 250,000. …
WaPo’s Anne Kornblut slams Obama’s bulls**t. Only she calls it loquacious.
Even by President Obama’s loquacious standards, an answer he gave here on health care Friday was a doozy.
Toward the end of a question-and-answer session with workers at an advanced battery technology manufacturer, a woman named Doris stood to ask the president whether it was a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care” package.
“We are over-taxed as it is,” Doris said bluntly.
Obama started out feisty. “Well, let’s talk about that, because this is an area where there’s been just a whole lot of misinformation, and I’m going to have to work hard over the next several months to clean up a lot of the misapprehensions that people have,” the president said.
He then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze. His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, …
The Economist reports on a surprising turn of events in gene patenting.
…On March 29th a federal district court in New York made a ruling that, taken at face value, turns America’s approach to the patent protection of genes on its head. A coalition led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had challenged the very basis of Myriad’s patents. The nub of the case was this question: “Are isolated human genes and the comparison of their sequences patentable things?”
Until now, the answer had been “Yes”. But Robert Sweet, the presiding judge, disagreed, at least as far as the BRCA genes are concerned. After weighing up Myriad’s arguments, he ruled: “It is concluded that DNA’s existence in an ‘isolated’ form alters neither this fundamental quality of DNA as it exists in the body nor the information it encodes. Therefore, the patents at issues directed to ‘isolated DNA’ containing sequences found in nature are unsustainable as a matter of law and are deemed unpatentable subject matter.” Mr Sweet reasoned that DNA represents the physical embodiment of biological information, and that such biological information is a natural phenomenon. …