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Mort Zuckerman shows how radical Obama’s policy is towards Israel.
Thanks to a deadlock engineered by the U.S. government, the Middle East peace process is stalled. President Obama began this stalemate last year when he called for a settlement freeze, and he escalates it now with a major change of American policy regarding Jerusalem.
The president seeks to prohibit Israel from any construction in its capital, in particular in a Jewish suburb of East Jerusalem called Ramat Shlomo. This, despite the fact that all former administrations have unequivocally understood that the area in question would remain part of Israel under any final peace agreement. Objecting to any building in this East Jerusalem neighborhood is tantamount to getting the Israelis to agree to the division of Jerusalem before final status talks with the Palestinians even begin.
From the start of his presidency, Mr. Obama has undermined Israel’s confidence in U.S. support. He uses the same term—”settlements”—to describe massive neighborhoods that are home to tens of thousands of Jews and illegal outposts of a few families. His ambiguous use of this loaded word raises the question for Israelis about whether this administration really understands the issue.
It certainly sends signals to the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority followed the president’s lead and refused to proceed with planned talks until Israel stops all so-called settlement activities, including in East Jerusalem.
President Obama’s attitude toward Jerusalem betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of the city. …
David Harsanyi does a great send-up of the Dems financial regulation package.
… How many voters are aware that the pending Senate reform bill includes a payback to unions in the form of a “proxy access” that would allow labor to manipulate company boards? How many are aware that the bill may give the Treasury Department the right to seize private property and businesses without any significant judicial review?
How many Americans are aware that the reform bill might create a so-called “consumer protection board” that would slather another needless layer of federal red tape on a wide range of businesses — businesses, incidentally, with far less culpability in creating the housing bubble than members of the Senate Banking Committee?
At the same time, the board may also ban private, voluntary arbitration agreements between consumers and financial firms. Why?
How many voters are aware that the Senate reform bill clamps down on “angel investors” — wealthy individuals who invest in startups with few regulatory guidelines. From Google to Facebook, it was angel investors who undertook the initial risk. …
… No crisis is ever wasted. And for those reflexively averse to risk, profit and markets, this is an opportunity like no other.
We need financial reform. What we’re being offered, it seems, is another piece of command-and-control legislation fast-tracked to avoid the midterm elections — and honest discussion.
IBD editors on the Dem’s legislative frenzy.
… But like Thelma and Louise when they knew the jig was up, the Democratic Congress has decided it might as well put the pedal to the metal and go over the precipice with a crash and a bang. Unfortunately, they’ve got an already pummeled economy in the back seat with them.
No one should misinterpret the rearranging of the cap-and-trade and immigration deck chairs on the Democrats’ Titanic. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid want both — bullying industry in the name of saving the planet and buying Hispanic votes with amnesty for illegal aliens. …
Reihan Salam says our economy is not out of the woods yet.
… We are propping up the most rotten sectors of the economy and diverting talent that would otherwise shift into the new interrelated systems that are slowly emerging—and this emergence will prove very slow indeed once the inevitable tax burden required to prop up aging yet politically powerful sectors hits. One can hope, like Gross, that those new commercial infrastructures and industrial ecosystems that propel growth will take shape here at home. They could just as easily emerge in China or India or, for that matter, Canada, a country that has pursued more sustainable fiscal policies.
Mike Dorning of Bloomberg BusinessWeek focused more narrowly on the success of the president’s stimulus package. But it’s hardly surprising that a massive debt-financed stimulus has led to an uptick in economic activity. The question is whether or not it will enhance long-term growth in light of the impact of a heavy public debt burden going forward. Has it moved the economy in the right direction by facilitating the liquidation of bad bets made during the housing boom, a process that might dampen GDP expansion in the short term while enhancing long-term growth? That is an entirely different question. As Jeffrey Sachs has argued, the United States has been engaging in extreme policy swings throughout the Greenspan era, veering from recession to bubble and back again. By running a double-digit budget deficit, we’ve severely limited our options in the face of the next economic crisis, all without making the painful adjustments—to tax rates, to spending, to the bloated financial sector—that would make another crisis less likely.
That’s my case for economic pessimism. I sure hope I’m wrong. But I get the distinct impression that we’re walking into a decade-long buzzsaw.
Clive Crook in the Financial Times on how Obama might salvage his administration after he gets whumped in the November vote.
… Beyond this lies the fundamental question: can Mr Obama reconcile the US to permanently higher public spending and permanently higher taxes? He has yet to come clean about that choice, but voters can see where things are heading. He set out to nudge the country to the left. In the end, this is what nudging the country to the left means.
He has his work cut out. Democrats mock the Tea Party movement, but this is a mistake. The preferences it expresses are widely held. According to one recent poll, more Americans agree with the Tea Party movement on taxes and spending than with Mr Obama. Among independent voters, support for those positions is even stronger. A large part of the country sees the Democratic party as fundamentally at odds with its idea of good government.
Must it therefore end badly for Mr Obama? Not necessarily. Opinion can shift – if it does not, the president can. Suppose the Democrats are crushed in November. Mr Obama would be forced to moderate his policies, like Bill Clinton after the rout of 1994. Healthcare reform would stand as his historic achievement; then, focused on 2012, he could turn fiscal conservative and govern with the grain of the country. Economic recovery might do the rest.
Mr Obama would have allowed voters to tame his own party – a task he shirked. Democrats get thumped in 2010; he wins in 2012. As seen from the White House, not such a bad result.
George Will reminds us of one of America’s sins, the WWII internment of Japanese Americans.
Hearing about a shortage of farm laborers in California, the couple who would become Susumu Ito’s parents moved from Hiroshima to become sharecroppers near Stockton. Thus began a saga that recently brought Ito, 91, to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where he and 119 former comrades in arms were honored, during the annual Days of Remembrance, as liberators of Nazi concentration camps. While his Japanese American Army unit was succoring survivors of Dachau, near Munich, his parents and two sisters were interned in a camp in Arkansas. …
Ross Douthat covers the South Park Muhammad episode.
Two months before 9/11, Comedy Central aired an episode of “South Park” entitled “Super Best Friends,” in which the cartoon show’s foul-mouthed urchins sought assistance from an unusual team of superheroes. These particular superfriends were all religious figures: Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Mormonism’s Joseph Smith, Taoism’s Lao-tse — and the Prophet Muhammad, depicted with a turban and a 5 o’clock shadow, and introduced as “the Muslim prophet with the powers of flame.”
That was a more permissive time. You can’t portray Muhammad on American television anymore, as South Park’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, discovered in 2006, when they tried to parody the Danish cartoon controversy — in which unflattering caricatures of the prophet prompted worldwide riots — by scripting another animated appearance for Muhammad. The episode aired, but the cameo itself was blacked out, replaced by an announcement that Comedy Central had refused to show an image of the prophet.
For Parker and Stone, the obvious next step was to make fun of the fact that you can’t broadcast an image of Muhammad. Two weeks ago, “South Park” brought back the “super best friends,” but this time Muhammad never showed his face. He “appeared” from inside a U-Haul trailer, and then from inside a mascot’s costume. …
The city of San Francisco has 27,000 employees. One third make more than $100,000 per year. The story from the Chronicle.
More than 1 in 3 of San Francisco’s nearly 27,000 city workers earned $100,000 or more last year – a number that has been growing steadily for the past decade.
The number of city workers paid at least $100,000 in base salary totaled 6,449 last year. When such extras as overtime are included, the number jumped to 9,487 workers, nearly eight times the number from a decade ago. And that calculation doesn’t include the cost of often-generous city benefits such as health care and pensions.
The pay data obtained by The Chronicle show that many of the high earners bolstered their base pay with overtime and “other pay,” a category that includes payouts for unused vacation days and extra money for working late-night shifts.
Leading 2009′s $100,000 Club was the Police Department’s Charles Keohane, a deputy chief who retired midyear.
His total payout was $516,118, …
A trip to New York is not complete without perusing the offerings at sidewalk booksellers. The Economist had a piece on the most popular offerings at these stands.
High in the Stephen A. Schwarzman building at the New York Public Library–a sprawling Beaux-Arts pile on Fifth Avenue—is a series of murals that tell the story of the recorded word. Painted by Edward Laning and unveiled in 1940, the four panels begin with Moses carrying the tablets down Mount Sinai and end with Ottmar Mergenthaler inventing the lino-type machine in 1884. But one scene is notably absent. Nowhere in Laning’s paintings is there anyone selling a book on a street corner.
Sidewalk booksellers are an essential part of New York street culture, the intellectual wing of an alfresco economy that includes coffee carts, peanut roasters and break-dancing buskers. In a number of locations across the city, determined men—and the odd woman—endure the periodic atrocities of the climate and set up trestle tables laden with secondhand books.
Arriving in New York from Britain to study for a master’s, I spent a lot of time hanging around these stalls and soon saw the same titles cropping up time and time again—in particular literary American fiction by writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. And so last autumn I set out to discover the most common title on secondhand bookstalls in New York, as a way to gauge literary tastes and trends. …