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Many are making the case for the oil spill becoming Obama’s Katrina. Here’s Karl Rove expounding on the subject. It doesn’t seem fair to drop this on the kid president, but we suppose it is a healthy thing when people have growing understanding about the limits of government. Just like it was a good thing when Bill Clinton’s antics lowered respect for the political class.
… Initially, Team Obama wanted to keep this problem away from the president (a natural instinct for any White House). It took Mr. Obama 12 days to show up in the region. Democrats criticized President George W. Bush for waiting four days after Katrina to go to New Orleans.
Now the administration is intent on making it appear he has engaged all along. But this stance is undermined by lack of action. Where has its plan been? And why has the White House been so slow with decisions?
Take the containment strategy of barrier berms. These temporary sand islands block the flow of oil into fragile wetlands and marshes. Berm construction requires approval from the Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Louisiana officials asked permission on May 11. They have yet to hear back. The feds are conducting a review as oil washes ashore.
The federal government was even slower on the question of dispersants, chemicals used to break up the oil and hasten its evaporation from the surface of the water. On May 8, Louisiana sent a letter to BP and the EPA begging BP not to use dispersants below the surface of the water. Subsurface use of dispersants keeps oil slicks from forming. But when it doesn’t come to the surface to evaporate, the oil lingers below, gets into underwater currents, and puts at risk fisheries that supply a third of America’s seafood.
On May 13, EPA overruled the state and permitted BP to use dispersants 4,000 feet below the surface. Then, a week after BP released 55,000 gallons of dispersants below the surface, EPA did an about-face, ordering BP to stop using the dispersant and to “find a less-toxic” one. Louisiana officials found out about this imprecise guidance in the Washington Post. BP refused, EPA backed off, and Louisiana’s concerns about their marine fisheries remain. …
Tunku Varadarajan will have none of Rove’s arguments saying it’s not Obama’s fault. However Tunks does say the president has been running around for years saying the government can fix anything.
… let me note that “shit happens.” And there is no way known to man to predict everything that can go wrong. Milton Friedman (as the sage Henry Manne reminded me in a recent conversation) had a notion that the euro would collapse; but Friedman thought that it would happen not because of any excess or fraud by any one or more countries—he believed the European Central Bank had some possibility of controlling fiscal policy in the E.U. countries—but by the inability of a central bank to adjust to differing monetary needs. He did not foresee the Greek debacle, and no U.S. government seems to have foreseen the Gulf oil spill.
But back to basics: BP did the dastardly deed, of this there is little doubt; and yet Obama is getting pilloried, especially by his own side. James Carville—than whom there is no man on American soil (or even in American coastal waters) more partisan—has lit into his president, saying, “The president doesn’t get down here in the middle of this… I have no idea why they didn’t seize this thing.” (Seize what, fistfuls of oleaginous goo?) Carville went on, bizarrely, to say that Obama “could’ve demanded a plan in anticipation of this”—(my underline, and I want what the Ragin’ Cajun is smoking!) He added, for caustic measure, that “it just looks like he’s not involved in this. Man, you got to get down here and take control of this.”
Proof, at last, that Carville is deranged, but proof also of another thing: Once you set out, as a president or a party, to propagate a message that the government has (or is) the panacea for all ills, then failure to deal with an ill leads to your being hoist with your own panacea-petard. …
Tony Blankley shares his thoughts on some primaries, and on the mood in Washington.
…Democrats look fearfully westward across the Potomac River, wondering how harsh will be the people’s judgment against them for their disgraceful behavior.
Republicans look fearfully inward, wondering whether their own inadequate performances in the preceding decade entitle them to the public trust. (The answers are: to the Democrats, very harsh, and to the Republicans, no, they are not entitled to the trust.) …
Peter Wehner posts on Obama’s remarks about the success in Iraq.
…I’m delighted Obama was wrong in both his analysis and his predictions and that, unlike so many things since he’s been president, in Iraq he has not made the situation he inherited markedly worse. And perhaps at some point, Mr. Obama — who promised that, unlike past presidents he would be quick to admit the errors of his ways — will admit he was profoundly mistaken about the surge. If he had had his way, after all, the Iraq war would have been lost, mass death and genocide would have engulfed that nation by now, and jihadists would have chalked up their most important victory against America.
It’s also worth pointing out, I suppose, that a gracious, classy, and large-spirited president would have tipped his cap to his predecessor, whose political courage and wisdom on the surge has made success in Iraq possible. But that would require Obama to act against his basic character.
Apparently the president is still charming to some people. In the Jerusalem Post, Shmuley Boteach comments on a meeting with Jewish representatives.
…An invitation to the White House is a big deal and can play all kinds of tricks on people’s convictions, which might explain why so many of those who visited emerged with newfound praise for the president even though the administration has changed none of its positions on Israel. The president is still demanding that Jews build no new homes in Ramat Shlomo, a neighborhood that is entirely Jewish. He has yet to repudiate his administration’s position that the Arab-Israeli conflict, and by implication Israeli intransigence, fuels the Taliban and other Arab extremists. And he has yet to apologize to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for the humiliating treatment he dished out in March.
Most of all, the president has not reversed his biased policy of apportioning the blame for the lack of movement in the peace process squarely on Israeli settlements rather than decades-old Arab refusal to accept Israel as a permanent and legitimate fact. We have yet to hear the president forcefully condemn the Hamas charter calling for the destruction of the State of Israel or the Palestinian Authority recently naming a public square after Dalal Mughrabi, who led the 1978 Coastal Road terrorist massacre which killed 37 Israelis.
Still, some rabbis seemed quite swayed. Rabbi Aaron Rubinger, for example, who runs a Conservative synagogue in Orlando, said, “Our president is every bit as committed to Israel’s safety and security as any previous administration.” …
Rick Richman gives reasons why Obama won’t be giving a speech to the Israelis. His fourth reason is the showstopper.
…Fourth, even if Obama gave a comparable speech, it would not be believed. His actions — reneging on his pledge of an undivided Jerusalem; failing to honor U.S. understandings regarding settlements; ignoring the commitments in the 2004 Bush letter, given in exchange for the Gaza withdrawal; failing to visit Israel when he visited Turkey, failing again when he visited Egypt, and failing again over the past 12 months; slurring Israel in his Cairo speech; telling U.S. Jewish groups that closeness to Israel had resulted in “no progress” in the peace process; attempting to attend the Durban II conference; awarding a presidential medal to Durban I’s Mary Robinson; granting legitimacy to the anti-Semitic UN Human Rights Council; demanding compliance with Palestinian preconditions for peace negotiations; repeatedly humiliating Israel’s prime minister during his U.S. visits; castigating Israel for planning Jewish homes in the Jewish area of the Jewish capital; endless patience with Iran combined with public impatience with Israel; etc. — represent a record that cannot be corrected merely with a speech, even if it begins with “Let me be clear.” …
In light of the sinking of a South Korean ship, Christopher Hitchens writes about North Korean aggression.
…North Korea is thought to have enough purely conventional weapons to destroy South Korea’s capital, Seoul, which is located very close to the cease-fire line or “border.” It has also built a series of dams, which, if opened or blown, could flood and drown a good part of South Korea. (A recent apparently accidental such flood, on a smallish scale, at least served to remind the South Koreans what the stakes were.) So this is the way we live now: conditioned by the awareness that no North Korean provocation, however egregious, can be confronted, lest it furnish the occasion or pretext for something truly barbarous and insane.
Another version of our complicity with the Dear Leader is to be found with his oppression and starvation of his “own” people. It is felt that we cannot just watch them die, so we send food aid in return for an ever-receding prospect of good behavior in respect of the Dear Leader’s nuclear program. The ratchet effect is all one way: Nuclear tests become ever more flagrant and the emaciation of the North Korean people ever more pitiful. We have unwittingly become members of the guard force that patrols the concentration camp that is the northern half of the peninsula. …
Thomas Sowell explains that discrimination is not the cause of all inequality.
A heartbreaking social statistic is that children on welfare have only about half as many words per day directed at them as the children of working-class families– and less than one-third as many words as children whose parents are professionals. This is especially painful in view of the fact that scientists have found that the actual physical development of the brain is affected by how much interaction young children receive.
…Inequalities have so many sources that this fact undermines the simple dichotomy between believing that some people are innately inferior and believing that discrimination or other social injustices account for economic and social differences. Yet people who are afraid of being considered racists, or believers that the lower classes are born inferior, often buy the notion that only the sins of “society” can explain why some people end up so much better off than others. …
Ed Morrissey doesn’t think that reminding the electorate about Bush will score the Obami any votes.
…Gee, maybe that’s because Obama has had the job himself for those sixteen months, and most people don’t see any improvement in the economy. Instead, they see a runaway Democratic Congress making George Bush look like Ebenezer Scrooge, while noting that terrorist attacks have suddenly started coming to fruition after a year of political correctness run amuck in counterterrorism efforts. National debt is skyrocketing, and Obama’s planned budget deficits dwarf anything seen during the Bush years. …
Peter Wehner has a fascinating post on the drop in crime.
…The New York Times begins its story by saying, “Despite turmoil in the economy and high unemployment, crimes rates fell significantly across the Unites States in 2009.” Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said, “That’s a remarkable decline, given the economic conditions.”
Actually, it’s not all that remarkable. Crime rates, for example, fell significantly during the Great Depression. As David Rubinstein of the University of Illinois has pointed out, if you chart homicide beginning in 1900, its rates began to rise in 1905, continued through the prosperous 20s, and crested in 1933. They began to decline in 1934, as the Great Depression began to deepen. And between 1933 and 1940, the murder rate dropped by nearly 40 percent, while property crimes revealed a similar pattern. One possible explanation is that times of crisis, including economic crisis, create greater social cohesion. …
Sending the kids outside to play may help them do better in school. The Times of India has the story. They want the kids to get down and dirty.
The finding will be presented at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego.
“Mycobacterium vaccae is a natural soil bacterium which people likely ingest or breath in when they spend time in nature,” says Dorothy Matthews of The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, who conducted the research with her colleague Susan Jenks.
Previous research studies on M. vaccae showed that heat-killed bacteria injected into mice stimulated growth of some neurons in the brain that resulted in increased levels of serotonin and decreased anxiety. …