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In a 900 word column Bret Stephens nails the Obama Afghan weakness.

… Wars are contests of wills. If our efforts in Afghanistan have an increasingly ghostly quality—visible to the naked eye but incapable of achieving effects in the physical world—it has more to do with a widespread perception that we just aren’t prepared to do what it takes to win than it does with the particulars of counterinsurgency strategy or its execution. Gen. Petraeus won in Iraq because George W. Bush had his back and the people of Iraq, friend as well as foe, knew it.

By contrast, the fact that we have been unable to secure the small city of Marja, much less take on the larger job of Kandahar, is because nobody—right down to the village folk whom we are so sedulously courting with good deeds and restrictive rules of engagement—believes that Barack Obama believes in his own war. The vacuum in credibility begets the vacuum in power.

On Friday, the New York Times reported that Pakistan is seeking to expand its influence in Afghanistan. “Coupled with their strategic interests,” noted the Times, “the Pakistanis say they have chosen this juncture to open talks with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai because, even before the controversy with Gen. McChrystal, they sensed uncertainty—’a lack of fire in the belly,’ said one Pakistani—within the Obama administration over the Afghan fight.” …

The Streetwise Professor discusses some of the numerous problems with the administration’s end run around the Constitution in order to get their hands on the BP oil spill slush fund.

…Feinberg will, like some imperial vizier, decide which state laws apply and which do not:

Overcoming differences in state laws will be another challenge, and Mr Feinberg’s team is now going through state laws to check for inconsistencies.

Although their initial inspection showed that the laws were “sufficiently similar”, the lawyer is also looking at creative ways to deal with any problems.

In this federal system, there is a demarcation between state law and federal law.  Each state has its own laws, duly passed by its legislature, its own courts for interpreting these laws and making judgments under it, and its own executive, for enforcing them.  …

…Where does Ken Feinberg, and the Obama administration, get the power to turn this system completely on its head?  Under what Constitutional theory does an unaccountable “official” (I use the quotes because the “position” he holds does not appear to have any legal sanction whatsoever) get the power to disregard some state laws to award claims that presumably have a legal basis in these same state laws?  Since when does a majority of state laws trump the laws of the remainder?  I mean, this is an absolutely bizarre legal doctrine. …

In Forbes, John Tamny calls politicians on their hypocrisy.

…Responding to Hayward’s testimony on the oil spill, Congressman Henry Waxman complained to the much maligned CEO that “You’re not taking responsibility, you’re just kicking the can down the road and acting like you have nothing to do with [BP]. I find that irresponsible.” Politicians have never been known for being self aware.

Indeed, for a congressman from either party to suggest someone is kicking the can down the road is quite something. From deficits, to corporate bailouts, to unfunded future liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare, Congress is the unchallenged expert when it comes to irresponsibly kicking problems of its own making down the road. Waxman et al love to hold others responsible for their errors, but when the prudent call them on their own lack of accountability, they simply blame the rich for not handing over even more of their honest earnings to Washington.

Given the limiting nature of the Constitution when it comes to the activities of the federal government, the simple answer to Washington’s situational worship of accountability is that the political class should keep quiet altogether about matters big and small in the private sector. …

In the Financial Times, Clive Crook has an unusual view of the G20 summit results.

…Germany is being called a bad global citizen for tightening fiscal policy despite its external surplus and unstressed borrowing capacity. The criticism is fair. But forget the debilitating implications for Europe and the world: unforced austerity is bad for Germany (though it might be good politics for Angela Merkel). Britain’s new government has a much more serious public debt problem but its fiscal plans – which gave rise to much boasting in Toronto – also look needlessly severe.

Europe as a whole seems intent on one-size-fits-all austerity, despite limping output and very low inflation. Some countries have no choice but to curb their borrowing immediately. All should make a credible commitment to fiscal consolidation in the medium term: deficit hawks are right that if you wait until the bond market hammer comes down, you have waited too long. But with economies still so weak – remember Japan – this should not dictate a universal headlong rush to fiscal retrenchment.

Under these circumstances one could forgive the US for lecturing others on fiscal policy, were it not for the fact that (a) poor US financial regulation and inattentive monetary policy caused the crisis in the first place, and (b) its own fiscal policy is a shambles. President Barack Obama is telling other countries to maintain fiscal stimulus even as his own fades and the US Congress is denying his modest requests for extra spending. For this, Mr Obama himself is mostly to blame.

He and his allies in Congress bungled last year’s stimulus. A big package was needed, and was duly delivered. But its design was poor: too much spending on shovel-ready projects that weren’t; too little in tax cuts. It was seriously oversold, leaving voters sceptical that more stimulus would do any good. Worst of all, with public debt through the roof, the administration has failed to give the smallest sign of its exit strategy. Last week its budget director, Peter Orszag, disclosed his own. He said he was quitting; colleagues said (though he denied) that he was frustrated by White House indecision over medium-term fiscal control.

The complaint after Toronto is that nations are concentrating on their own economies and ignoring global welfare. So far as taxes and spending go, my reaction is: if only. …

In the NY Post, Nicole Gelinas comments on the alarming incentives found in the finance reform bill.

…The compromises hammered out by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and others don’t address their bill’s fatal flaws — starting with the bill’s disastrous effort to end taxpayer bailouts.

The obvious — and correct — way to end Wall Street rescues is to let a failed financial firm go bankrupt. That is, the people who invested in a failed company — including bondholders, people owed money on derivatives and other lenders — should take the losses.

Instead, Congress would “end” bailouts by directing the feds to rescue the creditors to any failed “too big to fail” financial company. Later, the feds would make the failed firm’s competitors pay the cost. …

There are many reasons to be grateful that we don’t live in Europe. In the Daily Mail, UK, Christopher Leake adds another reason to the list. The EU doesn’t like eggs sold in dozen packages. They think weight is better because people are too stupid to figure out small, medium, etc..

…Last night, an FSA spokeswoman said: ‘This proposal would disallow selling by numbers. Retailers would not be allowed to put “Six eggs” on the front of the box. If it was a bag of rolls, it would say “500g” instead of six rolls.

‘It is important that information is provided in a way that is meaningful and beneficial to consumers. This issue is still being considered by EU member states and it will be some time before the regulation is finalised.’

The move could cost retailers millions of pounds because of changes they will have to make to packaging and labelling, as well as the extra burden of weighing each box of food before it is put on sale.

The cost is likely to be passed on to shoppers through higher grocery bills. …

Just when you thought the environmentalists were going to save us from ourselves, Futurity.org reports on dangerous levels of bacteria in reusable grocery bags.

Researchers randomly tested bags carried by shoppers in Tucson, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and found bacteria levels significant enough to cause a wide range of serious health problems and even death.

They are a particular danger for young children, who are especially vulnerable to food-borne illnesses, says Charles Gerba, a University of Arizona professor and coauthor of the study.

The study also found consumers were almost completely unaware of the need to regularly wash their bags. …

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Mark Steyn writes an interesting column on Israel and the Muslim world.

…North Korea sinks a South Korean ship; hundreds of thousands of people die in the Sudan; millions die in the Congo. But 10 men die at the hands of Israeli commandos and it dominates the news day in, day out for weeks, with UN resolutions, international investigations, calls for boycotts, and every Western prime minister and foreign minister expected to rise in parliament and express the outrage of the international community. …

…The “Palestinian question” is a land dispute, but not in the sense of a boundary-line argument between two Ontario farmers. Rather, it represents the coming together of two psychoses. Islam is a one-way street. Once you’re in the Dar al-Islam, that’s it; there’s no checkout desk. They take land, they hold it, forever.

That’s why, in his first post-9/11 message to the troops, Osama droned on about the fall of Andalusia: it’s been half a millennium, but he still hasn’t gotten over it, and so, a couple of years ago, when I was at the Pentagon being shown some of the maps found in al-Qaeda safe houses, “the new caliphate” had Spain and India being re-incorporated within the Muslim world. If that’s how you think, no wonder a tiny little sliver of a Jewish state smack dab in the heart of the Dar al-Islam drives you nuts: to accept Israel’s “right to exist” would be as unthinkable as accepting a re-Christianized Constantinople. …

In the wake of the G20 summit, David Warren ponders leadership.

…This, to me, has been the most puzzling thing, as I have looked at genuine “leaders” in several walks of life. The most impressive were not famous, and did not seek fame. They had the habit of taking on responsibilities, but not the habit of seeking praise. They were recognized, instinctively, in their own circle — a team, with its natural “captain.” Yet often as not, this captain was awkward with a crowd.

I am trying to get at a quality of “charisma” that is almost the opposite of the demagogue quality. For the crowd worships straw men, until they fail and the crowd sets fire to them. It is very rare that we get a Churchill: a man who was extremely impressive both close up, and far away. There are anyway, fortunately, few occasions when they are needed. Too, he was “an exception to prove the rule” — a man larger than his office, because endowed with some self-knowledge, who from his first public statement as prime minister promised the very opposite of magic. …

In the Daily Beast, Charlie Gasparino thinks the finance reform bill won’t address the behaviors that led to the financial meltdown. There’s a quote by Chris Dodd towards the end of the article that sums up the economic stupidity of the legislative branch. But then again, Dodd’s salary and pension are a sure thing, so it doesn’t really affect him if the economy suffers.

…All of which is one reason why banking stocks, which have gotten hammered in recent months, staged a rally on Friday. To be sure, there’s a lot in the proposed legislation that the banks hate. One banking executive said he expected the legislation to carve at least $3 billion in profits from his firm each year. The Volcker Rule, proposed by President Obama’s senior economic adviser Paul Volcker, appeared to make it through the final cut, meaning, we are told, that firms can’t make risky market bets, which means lower profits. Banks will have to raise capital, which also depresses earnings. There will be limits on the firm’s business of selling derivatives to large clients; they will have to create a special unit with its own capital to sell the most complex of these products. Banks like JP Morgan will get hit because the bill will force them to cap, and thus lower, so-called interchange fees, or the fees they charge for credit card transactions. …

…On top of all that, a “Financial Stability Oversight Council” will make sure the banks don’t take the kinds of excessive risks that led to the 2008 meltdown.

Sounds great, right? Well, keep in mind that before there was such a council, there was the SEC, the Federal Reserve, and a bunch of other bureaucratic entities making sure Wall Street risk-taking wasn’t unusual. And guess what? They all failed miserably. And by the way, why should anyone expect some paper-pushers in Washington to prevent something as complicated as the next great financial meltdown when they couldn’t stop Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the details of which were handed to the Securities and Exchange Commission numerous times on a silver platter before his fraud was exposed? …

In the NY Times, Joe Nocera reviews the good news on the oil drilling moratorium being overturned, and the real-world analysis that was involved.

…And Judge Feldman agreed … Concluding that the decision to impose the moratorium was “arbitrary and capricious,” he wrote, “An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country.” …

…Which also leads to a great irony: importing more oil via tankers will actually create more risk, not less. Between the 1970s and the Deepwater Horizon accident, a grand total of 1,800 barrels of oil were lost from rig accidents — an average of 45 barrels a year. That is an astonishing record. Ken Arnold, an expert who consulted with the Interior Department right after the BP spill — and a big critic of the moratorium — told me that much more oil is spilled in tanker accidents annually than from drilling rig accidents.

What’s more, he added: “The oil in those tankers was produced somewhere — somewhere that most likely has less regulation and less oversight than we have. We are not lessening the chance of a spill; we’re just transferring that risk to Nigeria and Brazil. We are not helping the world. We are just saying, ‘Brazil, we prefer to despoil your beaches, but not ours.’ ” …

John Steele Gordon comments on how the current administration remains insulated from reality, making decisions based on politics. We quote the first part of the post, the political decision follows.

To the Obama administration, it seems that it’s the latter. According to Canada’s Financial Post (h/t Instapundit), the administration turned down an offer from the Dutch to send skimmer boats that are far better and more capable than the ones we have because the water they discharge back into the ocean doesn’t meet the regulatory requirement that it be 99.9985 percent pure. Skimmer boats in a disastrous oil spill, in other words, are subject to a rule intended for bilge pumps.

“Why does neither the U.S. government nor the U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil, and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985 percent pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.”

So thanks to a regulation that could have been waived in a second, rather than skim up most of the oil, the Obami chose to leave it all in the ocean. …

The Economist discusses the latest in tuna ranching and tuna farming.

DURING May and June, when the mighty bluefin tuna returns to the Mediterranean to spawn, fishermen arrive from all over the world to catch it (click here to watch a video). In days gone by, the fish were netted and killed on the spot. Now, in high-tech operations involving divers and video cameras, they are transferred from the nets into “farms”—arrays of cages anchored to the sea floor from Spain to Malta, to be fattened up. Then, come October, they are sold to Japanese boats, killed, frozen and shipped to Japan. …

…Things might be better for the bluefin if it were possible to breed them in captivity, as well as raising them there. Though they call it farming, what Mr Azzopardi and his competitors are engaged in is actually more like ranching. Real husbandry nurtures animals from birth to death rather than just fattening up wild-caught individuals. That could bring economic benefits. It would also, some people think, take the pressure off wild stocks. …

In the WSJ, Tom Perrotta reports on the Wimbledon marathon match.

…The longest match in history has mostly left people begging for seconds. As officials decided whether to send Messrs. Isner and Mahut off the court Wednesday, for the second time in two days, the crowd shouted, “We want more!”

Messrs. Isner and Mahut did more than play for days and delete pages and pages of records. They put Wimbledon at the top of the sporting world (even with a certain soccer tournament going on). On Thursday, these two men were no less a story than Queen Elizabeth II, who hadn’t paid a visit here in 33 years. …

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Now the president is in Canada trying to sell his nutty nostrums about borrowing your way to prosperity. Jeremy Warner in Telegraph, UK tells the story.

… President Barack Obama, backed to some extent by Nicolas Sarkozy of France, wants economic stimulus to continue until the global recovery is unambiguously secure. In the opposite corner is Germany’s Angela Merkel, now oddly aligned with Britain’s new political leadership in thinking the time is right for fiscal austerity.

Like much of what Mr Obama says and does these days, the US position is cynically political. With mid-term elections looming and the Democrats down in the polls, the administration hasn’t yet even begun to think about deficit reduction. Obama is much more worried by the possibility of a double-dip recession and the damage this would do to his chances of a second term, than the state of the public finances.

As it happens, the public debt trajectory is rather worse in the US than it is in Europe, yet Obama has adopted an overtly “spend until we are broke” approach in a calculated bid for growth and votes.

Part of the reason he can afford to do this is that the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency of choice. For some reason, international investors still want to hold dollar assets, which for the time being gives the US government an almost limitless capacity to borrow. As we know, not everyone enjoys this luxury.

Mr Obama’s cheerleader-in-chief in arguing the case for continued international deficit spending is the American economist Paul Krugman. This hyperactive Nobel prize winner has achieved almost celebrity status for his extreme neo-Keynesian views. Unfortunately, his frequent polemics on the supposed merits of letting rip public spending long since ceased to be based on objective analysis, and are instead argued as a matter of almost ideological conviction. He’s as much a fundamentalist as the “deficit hawks” he mocks.

As it happens, nobody is asking America to axe and burn with immediate effect, though you might not think this to read Professor Krugman’s ever more hysterical commentaries on the fiscal austerity sweeping Europe. But some sort of a plan for long-term debt reduction, other than blind reliance on growth, might be helpful. …

On Reason’s blog, Tim Cavanaugh reports Paul Krugman is now a fool on two continents.

… Of late, Krugman has had his Irish up at Europeans who are resisting the Obama Administration’s plan to continue spending hundreds of billions on financial stimulus. (Not that he agrees with the administration, which Krugman has been arguing for the last 18 months should be spending trillions, not mere billions, on stimulus.) And in the case of Bundesbank president Axel Weber — whom Krugman called out recently in the daily Handelsblatt for trying to shore up the falling euro at the expense of government job creation — it’s created a backlash. …

Shawn Tully in Fortune says if you want growth – governments should spend and borrow less.

Of all the highlights of Allan Meltzer’s half-century as a distinguished monetarist — advising Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, producing celebrated books on John Maynard Keynes and the history of the Federal Reserve — none proved more memorable than a crisis session at 10 Downing Street in mid-1980.

A group of 346 noted economists had just written a scathing open letter to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, predicting that her tough fiscal policies would “deepen the depression, erode the industrial base, and threaten social stability.” Thatcher wanted to make absolutely certain her unpopular attack on huge deficits and rampant spending, in the face of high unemployment and a weak economy, was the right one.

So Thatcher summoned Meltzer, along with a group of trusted advisors, to explain why the experts were wrong. Even leaders of her own party advised Thatcher to make what they called a ‘U-Turn,’ and enact a big spending program to pull Britain out of recession. “Our job was to explain why lower deficits and spending discipline were the key to recovery,” recalls Meltzer.

Thatcher was regally unamused by arcane jargon. “Being right on the economics wasn’t enough,” intones Meltzer. “She made it clear that our job was to explain it so she could understand it. If we didn’t, she made it clear we were wasting her time. She’d say, ‘You’re not telling me what I need to know.’”

Thatcher stuck with draconian policies, invoking the battle chant “The Lady’s Not for Turning.” She launched Britain on years of balanced budgets, modest spending increases, falling joblessness, and extraordinary economic growth. …

Veronique de Rugy charts the dismal failure of Obama’s stimulus.

… Since the beginning of the recession (roughly January 2008), some 7.9 million jobs were lost in the private sector while 590,000 jobs were gained in the public one.  And since the passage of the stimulus bill (February 2009), over 2.6 million private jobs were lost, but the government workforce grew by 400,000. ..

John Browne on preparing for a post-dollar world.

… In another ominous sign for the dollar, the Financial Times reported Wednesday that after two decades as net sellers of gold, foreign central banks have now become net buyers. What’s more, more than half of central bank officials surveyed by UBS didn’t think the dollar would be the world’s reserve in 2035. Among the predicted replacements were Asian currencies and the euro, but – by far – the favorite was gold. This is supported by Monday’s revelation by the Saudi central bank that it had covertly doubled its gold reserves, just about a year after China made a similar admission. There is no reason to assume these are isolated incidents, or that the covert trade of dollars for gold doesn’t continue. To the contrary, this is compelling evidence that foreign governments are outwardly supporting the status quo while quietly preparing for the dollar’s almost-inevitable devaluation. What people like Paul Krugman believe to be a return to medieval economics may, in fact, be the wave of the future. …

Toby Harnden agrees the firing of McChrystal showed the president’s weakness.

… No one would pretend that the profane, juvenile banter of McChrystal and his aides was clever or appropriate, never mind in the presence of an iconoclastic Rolling Stone reporter. The general, a legendary combat leader who engaged in fire fights in Iraq alongside SAS troopers while in his 50s, deserved to be reprimanded.

Inartful and ill-advised as the words were, however, they also spoke to a justifiable deep frustration within the US military in Afghanistan and contained a degree of truth about Obama’s civilian officials that made the famously thin-skinned President decidedly uncomfortable.

McChrystal and his “Team America” vented about Ambassador Karl Eikenberry betraying them with a leak; portrayed special envoy Richard Holbrooke as an egotist in fear of losing his job; joked about Vice President Joe Biden being a bit of a blowhard; and suggested James Jones, National Security Adviser, was an ineffectual relic of the Cold War.

These are hardly controversial opinions – even within the White House. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff and a man whose salty language would make a sailor blush, probably says worse things about his colleagues to a reporter before breakfast on most days of the week.

Team America, of course, was a bit dismissive of Obama himself and that cannot have gone down well with the self-regarding occupant of the Oval Office. Even more difficult to take must have been the warm words they had for Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, who large numbers of Democrats and even many Republicans now wish had prevailed in 2008. …

Tonight on PBS comes a documentary on the Berlin Wall. WSJ has a review.

… Written and directed by Eric Stange, it begins with vivid images of young Germans celebrating the fall of the Wall juxtaposed with black-and-white footage of armed border guards and deadly failed escapes. “On Nov. 9, 1989, the world changed forever,” narrator Joe Morton says. “The Berlin Wall—the most potent symbol of Communist oppression—fell after 28 years marked by violence and tragedy.” Cut to former East Berliners telling their stories of surveillance and imprisonment by the East German secret police, the Stasi. One is struck by their youth, and by the realization that the Wall, a fixture of the Cold War since August 1961, fell fewer than 21 years ago.

We see JFK delivering his famed June 1963 Berlin speech: “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.” Fast forward 27 years and Ronald Reagan demands of his Soviet counterpart: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” …

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Today we concentrate on making war. The change in generals responsible for the Afghan conflict has brought this into focus, and many of our favorites have thoughts and comments. We think the change is interesting in two ways. First, it demonstrates, not Obama’s strength, but his weakness. Second, David Petraeus now owns Barack Obama’s presidency.

Today’s last item comes from the Economist and it describes war-making among chimpanzees. You can be appalled by the human condition and our evident propensity for conflict, or you can be encouraged by the thoughts of Robert Ardrey who wrote forty years ago;

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”

Mark Steyn wonders what it would take to get the president engaged.

… He doesn’t seem to know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t care. “It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all,” wrote Richard Cohen in The Washington Post last week. “For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human-rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia.

The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

“This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?”

Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.

And even today Cohen is still giving President Whoisthisguy a pass.

After all, whatever he feels about “China’s appalling human-rights record” or “continued repression in Russia,” Obama is not directly responsible for it. Whereas the U.S. and allied deaths in Afghanistan are happening on his watch – and the border villagers killed by unmanned drones are being killed at his behest. Cohen calls the president “above all, a pragmatist,” but with the best will in the world you can’t stretch the definition of “pragmatism” to mean “lack of interest.”

“The ugly truth,” wrote Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, “is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it.”

Well, that’s certainly ugly, but is it the truth? Afghanistan, you’ll recall, was supposed to be the Democrats’ war, the one they allegedly supported, the one the neocons’ Iraq adventure was an unnecessary distraction from. Granted the Dems’ usual shell game – to avoid looking soft on national security, it helps to be in favor of some war other than the one you’re opposing – Candidate Obama was an especially ripe promoter. In one of the livelier moments of his campaign, he chugged down half a bottle of Geopolitical Viagra and claimed he was hot for invading Pakistan.

Then he found himself in the Oval Office, and the dime-store opportunism was no longer helpful. But, as Friedman puts it, “no one knew how to get out of it.” The “pragmatist” settled for “nuance”: He announced a semisurge plus a date for withdrawal of troops to begin. It’s not “victory,” it’s not “defeat,” but rather a more sophisticated mélange of these two outmoded absolutes: If you need a word, “quagmire” would seem to cover it. …

Victor Davis Hanson noticed Obama’s criticisms of Bush have returned home to roost.

Do you remember candidate Barack Obama offering his hope-and-change platitudes in front of the fake Greek columns during the Democratic convention? Or, earlier, pontificating at the Victory Monument in Berlin?

Why didn’t an old cigar-chomping Democratic pro take him aside and warn him about offending Nemesis? She is the dreaded goddess who brings divine retribution in ironic fashion to overweening arrogance.

Or maybe a friend could have whispered to Senator Obama to tone it down when he was merciless in damning the Bush administration for its supposedly slow response to Hurricane Katrina.

Obama railed that Bush showed “unconscionable ineptitude.” Obama further charged that Bush’s response was “achingly slow,” a result of “passive indifference,” and that his team was rife with “corruption and cronyism.”

Those phrases now apply to Obama himself, as he seems lost amid his own disaster — eerily, in about the same Gulf environs. Adding insult to injury, a recent poll revealed that Louisiana residents thought Bush had done a better job with Katrina than Obama has with BP. …

Can Petraeus do it again? Charles Krauthammer thinks a weak-willed vacilliating president like Obama will create problems. Guess we need a courageous commander in chief like George W. Bush.

… However, two major factors distinguish the Afghan from the Iraqi surge. First is the alarming weakness and ineptness — to say nothing of the corruption — of the Afghan central government. One of the reasons the U.S. offensive in Marja has faltered is that there is no Afghan “government in a box” to provide authority for territory that the U.S. military clears.

In Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, after many mixed signals, eventually showed that he could act as a competent national leader rather than a sectarian one when he attacked Moqtada al-Sadr’s stronghold in Basra, faced down the Mahdi Army in the other major cities in the south and took the fight into Sadr City in Baghdad itself. In Afghanistan, on the other hand, President Hamid Karzai makes public overtures to the Taliban, signaling that he is already hedging his bets.

But beyond indecision in Kabul, there is indecision in Washington. When the president of the United States announces the Afghan surge and, in the very next sentence, announces the date on which a U.S. withdrawal will begin, the Afghans — from president to peasant — take note.

This past Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reiterated that July 2011 is a hard date. And Vice President Biden is adamant that “in July of 2011 you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it.”

Now, Washington sophisticates may interpret this two-step as a mere political feint to Obama’s left — just another case of a president facing a difficult midterm and his own reelection, trying to placate the base. They don’t take this withdrawal date too seriously.

Problem is, Afghans are not quite as sophisticated in interpreting American intraparty maneuvering. …

John Podhoretz agrees Petraeus owns Obama now.

… Now that he has sent Petraeus to take direct charge of the fight in Afghanistan, Obama has tied his own hands. Having successively relieved two commanders in Afghanistan (first Gen. David McKiernan, and now McChrystal), and having given the reins to the signal US general of the last two generations, the president has little choice but to accept the recommendations Petraeus makes to him — and not just about Afghanistan but about Iraq as well.

If Petraeus departs, his own conduct throughout his career and his own carefully chosen words over the past few years ensure it won’t happen because he foolishly cooperated with a reporter. It will happen because Petraeus will have lost the surety that his commander in chief is committed to the victory he wishes to secure for the United States. And that will be the greatest political disaster of all for Obama.

Petraeus is also on the hook, of course. He has to win this thing, and it hasn’t been going well. At least we know the effort is in the best possible hands.

Claudia Rosett has a clear view of what happened.

Rolling Stone’s piece on The Runaway General hit the web, and presto! before the print edition was even on the newsstands, Gen. Stanley McChrystal was ordered back to Washington for a sitdown with President Obama. If only Obama had been as eager to clear time on his calendar for McChrystal back in 2009. That’s when really getting to know the general — the man entrusted with winning the war in Afghanistan — should have been one of the top priorities of the new president.

I’m not suggesting that with earlier close acquaintance Obama might have spotted the seeds of McChrystal’s “enormous mistake” — as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described it at press briefing Tuesday. I’m suggesting that better leadership from Obama himself would have averted this mess altogether. Whatever comes next for McChrystal, the biggest lesson here is one the commander-in-chief himself has yet to master.

It’s this simple: To win this war, America, and its generals, need to be led by someone who really wants to win the war. Someone who believes his country is great, and extraordinary, and deserves to win its wars. Someone who takes a direct and genuine interest in those he sends to the frontlines. Someone who makes a point of really getting to know the general he puts in charge. Someone, in sum, who does what’s needed to inspire loyalty and respect.

Has Obama done that? He put McChrystal in command last summer, and over the following 70 days talked with him exactly once — by videoconference (something it was left to Fox News to discover in late September). He left McChrystal dangling during an agonizingly drawn-out strategy review last fall. He showed strangely little regard for the internal conflicts he set in motion. …

J. E. Dyer argues in Contentions that this is Obama’s war now.

… we shouldn’t exaggerate the signal sent about Obama’s leadership by a personnel shift that was essentially thrust on him by a discipline problem. Unlike other celebrated personnel replacements made by war-time presidents — Lincoln, Truman, the younger Bush — the replacement of McChrystal was not prompted by this president’s strategic concern about the conduct of the war. That is Obama’s great failing; what he owes the armed forces that do his bidding is precisely that strategic concern.

George W. Bush gave Bob Gates, Ryan Crocker, and David Petraeus a level of strategic concern — attention, political investment, diplomatic cover — that enabled them to adopt an executable plan for Iraq and then execute it. What Obama has done, by contrast, is take McChrystal’s original executable plan and, after months of seemingly aimless deliberation, compromise its executability. …

Toby Harnden suggests the president changed commanders when McChrystal impugned the honor of the French.

So now that General Stanley McChrystal’s storied military career has been brutally ended, we get the customary “tick tock” accounts that White House have spoonfed to its press corps. These accounts – surprise, surprise – paint a picture of President Barack Obama as being a leader of Solomonic wisdom and Churchillian decisiveness, a prince among men, a giant among pygmies, a commander-in-chief for all ages.

The New York Times describes the self-serving details eagerly provided by the White House as offering “an insight into the president’s decision-making process under intense stress”.

Intense stress? Sure, being President of the United States is a tough job. But how about the intense stress McChrystal was as he oversaw around-the-clock Special Forces missions to dismantle al-Qaeda in Iraq, including going out on the missions under fire himself? How about the intense stress of running a war in Afghanistan when your commander-in-chief has announced an arbitrary exit date of July 2011 and created a muddled civilian command structure in which everyone is dissing everyone else?

But I digress. The New York Times sagely concludes that the details provided by White House advisers show an Obama who “appears deliberative and open to debate, but in the end, is coldly decisive”. Got that? Obama is deliberative, he listens to everyone but ultimately he is a steely-eyed decider. What a guy. Give him a Medal of Honour. …

Abe Greenwald wonders where all of Obama’s power has gone.

… The big historic health-care victory was nothing more than a procedural high-wire act. Kind of like getting your package to FedEx at 7:55 p.m. on a rainy Friday. Never mind that the package is empty or, worse, that its contents are dangerous. ObamaCare’s popularity sinks with each day’s new frightening analysis.

What people do want are jobs. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that Americans chose “job creation and economic growth” as their top-priority issue for the federal government to address. “The Gulf Coast oil spill and energy” was second. Health care came in at a distant number six, beating last place “social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.”

Like Tom Friedman says, you don’t have to be Machiavelli to see that Obama isn’t competently addressing the most important issues; you just have to be American. In fact, you don’t have to be Machiavelli at all. You just have to be effective. People instruct the president to get mad or get compassionate. But he only needs to get things done. All the “impressive leadership” stuff comes after a leader actually accomplishes something. For now, the new poll does at least partially vindicate Peter Beinart: people are certainly afraid of Barack Obama.

Toby Harnden says Michael Yon gets results.

Well, I wouldn’t cross Michael Yon, the intrepid independent war reporter and photographer who has covered the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan with distinction and dogged intensity. For weeks, he was fulminating about two men – Brigadier-General Daniel Menard of the Canadian Army and General Stanley McChrystal.

Then, two things happened. First, Menard was fired. Then, McChrystal was fired.

True, neither was dismissed for reasons directly related to Yon’s reporting …

We have spent our time today on the country’s methods of making war. Would that we could spend our time on other pursuits. However, it is in our genes. The Economist reports this week about the wars of our nearest relative. I allude to the chimpanzee.

PEOPLE are not alone in waging war. Their closest living cousins, chimpanzees, also slaughter their own kind—in brutal attacks that primatologists increasingly view as strategic, co-ordinated assaults rather than random acts of violence. But however tempting it is to see these battles through the lens of human warfare, the motives for chimp-on-chimp violence are poorly understood. In particular, researchers have long debated whether the apes fight for land, or for females.

A report just published in Current Biology may help to settle the question. The study it describes, led by John Mitani, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is the first to offer a detailed picture of organised conflict between chimpanzees. Drawing on a decade of observations in the field, it concludes that, as with human conflict, wars between chimpanzees are fuelled by territorial conquest.

Between 1999 and 2008 Dr Mitani and his colleagues shadowed a group of chimpanzees called the Ngogo, who live in the Kibale national park in Uganda. Most of the time, the Ngogo chimps were anything but model soldiers—squabbling, foraging and lolling about their domain. But on 114 occasions Dr Mitani’s colleague Sylvia Amsler watched large groups of males strike out on silent, single-file patrols to the fringes of their territory.

These forays often turned violent. All but one of the 18 fatal attacks Dr Amsler witnessed occurred during boundary patrols. In each case, males colluded to kill chimps from a neighbouring group. …

More on this from Pickings two and a half years ago.

Pickings from the Webvine

December 20, 2007    http://www.pickerhead.com/?p=627

Robert Ardrey, playwright, screenwriter, wise observer and recorder of discoveries in anthropology and the behavioral sciences, is one of Pickerhead’s favorite authors. A central theme of his books, African Genesis, Territorial Imperative, Hunting Hypothesis, etc., is that the human race has descended from effective killing machines; social predators like wolves or African hunting dogs. Here is some of his prose;

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”

Ardrey thought Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage” is foolishness that has caused much pain; most notably from the ideas of Karl Marx. Ardrey died in 1980, his views scorned by many. According to an article in the Economist, some in the natural sciences are coming around.

… Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the
!Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.

At first, anthropologists were inclined to think this a modern pathology. But it is increasingly looking as if it is the natural state. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University says that chimpanzees and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species. Steven LeBlanc, also of Harvard, says Rousseauian wishful thinking has led academics to overlook evidence of constant violence. …

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John Fund has two articles that inspire hope. In the first, Fund reports on a true post-racial candidate.

Tim Scott, a state legislator from Charleston, S.C., captured 68% of the vote to win a House GOP primary runoff last night. Because the district is overwhelmingly Republican, Mr. Scott is almost guaranteed to win the fall race, becoming the first black Republican elected from the Old Confederacy since the 1890s. …

…Mr. Scott is an American success story. He grew up poor, his parents divorcing when he was age 7. His mother worked 16 hours a day to provide for two children. Mr. Scott was in danger of dropping out of high school when a conservative businessman who ran a Chick-fil-A fast-food restaurant inspired him to keep going. After graduating from college, he went into the insurance business and won election to the state legislature in 2008.

When the local congressional seat opened up this year, he jumped into the race with a conservative platform calling for repeal of ObamaCare and a simplified tax code. His stance won him the support of the Club for Growth, which helped raise $313,000 for his campaign. No doubt you’ll find Mr. Scott featured on many news shows next year as the Republican House Caucus’s new history-making member.

Abigail Thernstrom celebrates Tim Scott’s victory.

… It is often said that southern whites will not vote for black candidates. Wrong. They will not vote for blacks with the far-left message of most of the Congressional Black Caucus. Scott doesn’t fit the mold. Get on his website; his message is that of a solid Republican: “If I can seek opportunity, not security, I want to take the calculated risk to dream and build, to fail and to succeed. I refused to barter incentive for dole.” He describes himself as a “believer in small government” and entrepreneurship, as well as an opponent of Obamacare. “President Obama’s health care bill taxes too much, spends too much, is bad for our health care, and is unconstitutional. Tim Scott will fight against government takeover of health care,” his site reads. …

John Steele Gordon too.

…That a black man could beat the son of the legendary segregationist so badly in a district where the Civil War began — the district where Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861 — is a measure of just how much the South has changed in the last 50 years, and the country’s politics and race relations along with it.

But assuming Scott is elected, he needn’t apply for membership in the Congressional Black Caucus, of course. It’s a measure of how little the left in American politics has changed in the last 50 years that the Black Caucus — devoted to race-based politics and victimology — admits only liberal Democratic members.

Thomas Sowell says that BP’s oil spill slush fund is unconstitutional and sets a bad precedent.

…Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. …

…With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don’t believe in Constitutional government. And, without Constitutional government, freedom cannot endure. There will always be a “crisis”– which, as the president’s chief of staff has said, cannot be allowed to “go to waste” as an opportunity to expand the government’s power. …

Obama’s drilling moratorium was overturned. The WSJ editors wrote an excellent article that delineates the sloppiness of this government power grab.

As legal rebukes go, it’s hard to get more comprehensive than the one federal judge Martin Feldman delivered yesterday in overturning the Obama Administration’s six-month moratorium on deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

In a remarkably pointed 22-page ruling, the judge made clear that even Presidents aren’t allowed to impose an “edict” that isn’t justified by science or safety. …

The collusion of big government and big business frequently benefits both, to the detriment of taxpayers. David Harsanyi ponders the angles on the oil spill slush fund.

…No, it doesn’t matter that Barack Obama was the top recipient of BP’s political action committee and individual bucks over the past 20 years. It is irrelevant that BP was a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership and lobbies for cap-and-trade schemes.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, in fact, the administration’s compensation fund has a little something for BP, as well. “In the end,” the piece states, “one aim of the fund — and a prime reason BP agreed to it — will be to minimize lawsuits against the company.” …

…Surely, the Trial Lawyers Association could enlighten the White House to the benefit and fairness of class-action suits. If the arrangement is broken, or too slow, shouldn’t we have some tort reformed? Is it really “mediation” when the administration and an oil company collude to decide what’s best for the victims? …

Roger Simon thinks that the president would like to call the whole thing off.

…I am not being metaphorical here — I am quite serious. The more I have thought about this, the more I am convinced Barack Obama no longer wishes to be president. The degree that he admits this to himself, I am not sure. But I rather suspect that in the small hours of the morning he fantasizes he were anywhere but 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And who could blame him? By almost any measure, he is doing a terrible job. …

…This is a beaten man, struggling to show he is not, even though everybody knows he is. …

IBD Editors call BS on promises to get rid of federal red tape.

After President Obama’s dramatic BP address to the nation, there was reason to think federal red tape would be cut to save the Gulf Coast. Silly us. Bureaucrats are back at it, halting Louisiana’s sand berms.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Tuesday shut down a critical dredging operation off the Chandelier Islands in the Louisiana Delta. …

Hugh Hewitt may have found the catchphrase of the coming elections. Enough!

…There is a vast, coast-to-coast recognition of “oiiohh” — Obama is in over his head. I have offered the T-shirt to my radio audience, and they are moving quite briskly. The “messiah” has become a punch line.

What could he do to turn it around, I asked John Podhoretz, editor of the newly energized and sparkling Commentary magazine. “Things his ideology will never allow him to do,” John replied, and we went on to talk about extending the Bush tax cuts and standing resolutely beside Israel in the face of serial provocations. …

…If the GOP runs on extending the existing tax rates five years while bringing a massive ax to the federal budget, they will sweep all before them. “Enough!” is the one-word bumper sticker showing up across the country and uniting every candidate from the center to the libertarian right.

“Enough!” is enough of a slogan. Not even the Republicans can screw that up.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders thinks that McChrystal should stay for the sake of the troops.

…In failing to check his subordinates’ derisive talk, McChrystal allowed for a situation that now demands very public apologies. Worse, it could alter the course of Operation Enduring Freedom, as the general put it, “knee-deep in the decisive year.” …

…McChrystal and his inner circle behaved in a manner that was stupid, arrogant and immature. In their thoughtlessness, they let down troops who have made tremendous sacrifices.

A year into the Obama surge and a year before the reputed July 2011 withdrawal deadline, there are some 94,000 U.S. personnel serving in Afghanistan. Their interests must come first. They deserve the best military commander available. …

The Streetwise Professor adds his comments on McChrystal and Afghanistan.

…But regardless of the reasons for the disclosures to a freaking rock magazine (the most damaging of which came from the mouths of the General’s staffers, rather than his own), they give a glimpse of a very disturbing, dysfunctional relationship between the military commanders in the field in Afghanistan, and the entire civilian chain of command, from the Ambassador in Kabul, to the National Security Advisor, to the VP, and to the President himself.  The men in the field apparently have nothing but contempt for Obama and those who work for him.  (Only Hillary comes off well–another reason, as if she needs one, to watch her back.)   Moreover, such backbiting is hardly a harbinger of victory: instead, it is a symptom of a failing military effort.

It is hard to say whether it would be worse if the disdain is warranted, or not.  My sense is, though, that the distrust of the field commanders for the civilian leadership is largely merited.  Obama only talked about Afghanistan during the campaign to demonstrate his tough guy bona fides.  When in office, his reluctance to take charge of the war was palpable.  Instead of leadership, he gave a series of dog ate my homework excuses, played Hamlet, and finally “decided” on a strategy that was fundamentally flawed and doomed to failure.  He has subsequently all but washed his hands of the matter, relegating it to the very bottom of his priority pile; McChrystal’s discouraged and discouraging assessment reported in the article is probably an accurate one. …

McChrystal should have been fired. Turns out the dumb ass voted for Obama. Proof positive he’s a fool. Jennifer Rubin on the flap.

The news of the day is certainly Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s interview with Rolling Stone magazine and the potential fallout. Fox News reports:

‘The article says that although McChrystal voted for Obama, the two failed to connect from the start. Obama called McChrystal on the carpet last fall for speaking too bluntly about his desire for more troops. “I found that time painful,” McChrystal said in the article, on newsstands Friday. “I was selling an unsellable position.” It quoted an adviser to McChrystal dismissing the early meeting with Obama as a “10-minute photo op.” “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. The boss was pretty disappointed,” the adviser told the magazine.

The article claims McChrystal has seized control of the war “by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.” ‘ …

Written before the McChrystal flap Marc Thiessen details why the Afghan surge is failing.

…What the Obama administration does not seem to appreciate is that the reason its surge is not working, while the surge in Iraq did, is because President Bush refused to set a artificial deadline for withdrawal. So when American commanders on the ground promised Iraqi tribes we would stick with them if they joined us in the fight, their word was credible. Iraqis had confidence that we would see the job through to the end, and not abandon their country to the enemy. Today, Afghans have no such confidence in America. …

…But let us not forget that it was President Obama decided to set an artificial deadline for withdrawal at the same time he announced the surge—effectively announcing our departure before additional American forces had even left for Afghanistan. This decision could prove to be an unmitigated disaster, one which may have doomed the mission in Afghanistan from the start. …

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Minyanville reviews the EU debt crisis and bailout.

The period from March 2009 was the year of wishful thinking. Central banks cut interest rates and governments opened their checkbooks, providing a flood of cheap money that gave the illusion of recovery and a normal functioning economy. By pouring a lot of water into a bucket with a large hole, the world sustained the impression that the receptacle was almost full. As Norman Cousins, an American political journalist, noted: “Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.”

Governments merely transferred the debt from private sector balance sheets onto public balance sheets. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has morphed into a Global Sovereign Crisis (GSC) as sovereign governments now face difficulty in raising money.

Stock markets and asset prices have tumbled. Money markets are exhibiting an anxiety not seen since late 2008/early 2009. The year of wishful thinking has run its course. …
…In April 2010, as the market for Greek debt worsened …after considerable prevarication, the EU proposed a highly conditional euro 30 billion rescue package. …
Markets considered the proposal inadequate and unlikely to avoid a Greek default. Increasingly desperate as circumstances began to rapidly spiral out of control, the EU increased the package in early May 2010 to Euro 110 billion, including a Euro 30 billion contribution from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) who would supervise the package and the implementation of the economic “cure.”

About a week later, continued market skepticism and increasing pressure on Portugal, Spain, and Ireland forced the EU to “go nuclear.” After months of slow and tortured discussions, the EU acted with surprising speed announcing a “stabilization fund” to the value of Euro 750 billion to support eurozone countries, including an IMF contribution of (up to) Euro 250 billion. The actions were designed in no particular order to salvage the EU, the euro and over-indebted eurozone participants by stopping contagion and further spread of the crisis.

… Initially, stock markets rose sharply, especially shares of banks exposed to Greece who would benefit from the rescue. The interest rates on Greek, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish bonds fell sharply. As the announcement over the weekend caught traders unaware, the rally was driven largely by the covering of short positions.

…Wiser commentators mused that if Euro 750 billion wasn’t going to do the trick, then what was? …

In EuroPacific Capital, Neeraj Chaudhary writes about labor strife in China and the changes he sees coming.

…Officials in Beijing know that, in reality, the Chinese workers are not striking against management, as we might expect in the West, but against the ruinous inflation caused by the People’s Bank of China (PBoC). In order to maintain the ‘peg’ of the strengthening yuan to the weakening US dollar, the PBoC has been forced to print new money in lockstep with the Federal Reserve. Since the start of the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve has more than doubled the number of dollars in circulation. This inflation, exported to China via the peg, has resulted in frothy real estate prices in some Chinese markets, as well as consumer prices increasing at a rate of more than 3% per year (and probably much higher, given the propensity for all governments to systematically understate this data). According to the Washington Post, there is widespread “frustration among younger, urbanized workers that their wages have stayed relatively meager even as prices all around them — particularly for housing — have soared.”

With over one billion citizens, the Chinese government cannot afford widespread unrest. They must find a way to nip their labor issues in the bud. The best policy approach would involve yuan revaluation. By reducing the rate of inflation of the Chinese yuan, the purchasing power of the yuan will increase, thereby allowing Chinese workers to better enjoy the fruits of their labor. As living standards rise, worker unrest will subside, and the impetus to strike will vanish. …

Even with Governor Christie’s efforts to balance the budget, New Jersey’s fiscal crisis is far from finished. In the NY Post, Steven Malanga looks at the Garden State’s pensions.

…How bad is the Garden State’s situation? A new study by Joshua D. Rauh, a Northwestern University finance professor, warns that Jersey’s public employee-pension plans could run out of money within a decade.

…Jersey taxpayers find themselves in this pickle because the state’s politicians have been shamefully irresponsible by granting rich public-sector benefits — and then trying to hide the cost with fiscal evasions.

…Rauh thinks the numbers are so ugly that a federal bailout of the worst state pension funds like Jersey’s is inevitable. He says such a bailout, to pass Congress, would need to come with strict reforms — like forcing Jersey to immediately close its current plans to new hires and put all future workers in defined-contribution plans, like private-sector 401(k)s.

Others want the feds to be tougher — to shut down current pension funds completely, and cap the benefits of all current employees the way that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. does when it takes over a failed private pension plan. …

And we hear criticism of Obama from another disillusioned liberal. In the WaPo, Richard Cohen takes shots at conservatives while telling Obama to show more bleeding heart in his liberalism.

It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all. It consists instead of a series of challenges — of problems that need fixing, not wrongs that need to be righted. As Winston Churchill once said of a certain pudding, Obama’s approach to foreign affairs lacks theme. So, it seems, does the man himself.

For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. He treats the Israelis and their various enemies as pests of equal moral standing. The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

…What these people were seeking was not an eruption of anger, not a tantrum and not a full-scale denunciation of an oil company. What they wanted instead was a sign that this catastrophe meant something to Obama, that it was not merely another problem that had crossed his desk — and this time just wouldn’t budge. He showed not the slightest sign in the idiom that really counts in a media age — body language — that he gave a damn. He could see your pain, he could talk about your pain, but he gave no indication that he felt it. …

In the WSJ, Paul Rubin offers an excellent comparison and contrast of Katrina and the oil spill.

…The Coast Guard has played an important role in both disasters. During Katrina, it rescued over 33,000 stranded people and received commendations from the president and Congress. In the current disaster, the Coast Guard has received widespread criticism for forbidding 16 barges from skimming oil because they were not inspected for life preservers. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal tried to get the barges working, but was for a long time unable to convince the Coast Guard to permit them to deploy.

Two days after Katrina’s landfall, Mr. Bush suspended the Jones Act (which restricts the ability of non-American ships to work in U.S. waters) to allow assistance for Katrina victims. During Katrina, over 70 foreign countries pledged emergency assistance. In the current situation, President Barack Obama has not suspended the Jones Act. Many countries such as the Netherlands, which would like to help and have expertise in cleaning oil spills, can offer only limited relief. This is significantly delaying the cleanup.

The Jones Act, which requires American crews, is a favorite of organized labor, a major supporter of Mr. Obama. …

David Brooks has fun revising Faustus and gives us these amazing polling numbers.

By 57 percent to 37 percent, voters in these districts embrace the proposition that “President Obama’s economic policies have run up a record federal deficit while failing to end the recession or slow the record pace of job losses.”

Instead of building faith in government, the events of 2009 and 2010 further undermined it. An absurdly low 6 percent of Americans acknowledge that the stimulus package created jobs, according to a New York Times/CBS survey. …

…Election guru Charlie Cook suspects the G.O.P. will retake the House. N.P.R. polled voters in the 60 most competitive House districts currently held by Democrats. Democrats trail Republicans in those districts, on average, by 5 percentage points. Independent voters in the districts favor Republicans by an average of 18 percentage points.

The McChrystal kerfuffle was lucky for the prez because it overshadowed the moratorium slap administered by a federal judge. Michelle Malkin has the story.

… In a scathing ruling issued Tuesday afternoon, New Orleans–based Feldman overturned the administration’s radical six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling — and he singled out Salazar’s central role in jury-rigging a federal panel’s scientific report to bolster flagrantly politicized conclusions. In a sane world, Salazar’s head would roll. In Obama’s world, he gets immunity.

The suit challenging Obama’s desperately political ban was filed by Louisiana rig company Hornbeck Offshore Services, which sued on behalf of all the “small people” in the industry whose economic survival is at stake. As the plaintiffs’ lawyer argued in court, the overbroad ban promised to be more devastating to Gulf workers than the spill itself. “This is an unprecedented industry-wide shutdown. Never before has the government done this,” attorney Carl Rosenblum said.
Scientists who served on the committee expressed outrage upon discovering earlier this month that Salazar had — unilaterally and without warning — inserted a blanket drilling-ban recommendation into their report. …

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Yesterday’s opening items on oil being one of the greenest of fuels get a follow-on today by Robert Samuelson.

… Unless we shut down the economy, we need fossil fuels. More efficient light bulbs, energy-saving appliances, cars with higher gas mileage may all dampen energy use. But offsetting these savings will be more people (391 million vs. 305 million), more households (147 million vs. 113 million), more vehicles (297 million vs. 231 million) and a bigger economy (almost double in size). Although wind, solar and biomass are assumed to grow as much as 10 times faster than overall energy use, they provide only 11 percent of supply in 2035, up from 5 percent in 2008.

There are physical limits on new energy sources, as Robert Bryce shows in his book “Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.” Suppose an inventor “found a way to convert soybeans into jet fuel,” Bryce writes. “Even with that invention, the conversion of all of America’s yearly soybean production into jet fuel would only provide about 20 percent of U.S. jet fuel demand.” Jet fuel, in turn, is about 8 percent of U.S. oil use. Similarly, wind turbines have limited potential; they must be supported by backup generating capacity when there’s no breeze.

The consequences of the BP oil spill come in two parts. The first is familiar: the fire; the deaths; coated birds; polluted wetlands; closed beaches; anxious fishermen. The second is less appreciated: a more muddled energy debate.

Obama has made vilification of oil and the oil industry a rhetorical mainstay. This is intellectually shallow, if politically understandable. …

Mark Steyn outlines the problems associated with an Iranian bomb.

The other day, noting Bret Stephens’s analysis in Commentary as to why Iran cannot be contained, Jonah Goldberg made a very shrewd throwaway aside: “Arguments like this tend to get ignored not because they aren’t persuasive, but because they are,” he said. “The political and psychological costs of accepting the premise are too high. So, denial inevitably triumphs.”

And thus our Iran “policy”: There will be no U.S. military strike. There will be no international sanctions regime. The mullahs will go nuclear, because letting them go nuclear requires least of us — and there will always be scholars and experts ready to justify our inertia as farsighted realpolitik. Hence the rehabilitation of “containment”: That we can do. Iran, says Zbigniew Brzezinski, “may be dangerous, assertive, and duplicitous, but there is nothing in their history to suggest they are suicidal.”

Mr. Brzezinski is a man who has been reliably wrong about everything that matters for decades. His decision to route American support for the Afghan resistance through the malign double act of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki and Pakistan’s ISI has had consequences we live with to this day. He is the master of unrealpolitik, and so naturally his is now the new conventional wisdom: Iran is not “suicidal”; therefore, it can be contained.

Even a non-suicidal Iran is presumably intending to derive some benefit from its nuclear status. Entirely rational leverage would include: controlling the supply of Gulf oil, setting the price, and determining the customers; getting vulnerable emirates such as Kuwait and Qatar to close U.S. military bases; and turning American allies in Europe into de facto members of the non-aligned movement. Whatever deterrent effect it might have on first use or proliferation, there is no reason to believe any “containment” strategy would prevent Iran’s accomplishing its broader strategic goals. …

The threats that Israel is facing are changing and increasing, writes Caroline Glick.

…First, it is a model that can be and in all likelihood will be replicated on air and land and it can be replicated anywhere. Israel can and should expect mobs of suicide protesters marching on Gaza to force Israel to surrender control over its borders. Israel can expect mobs of suicide protesters marching on Israeli embassies and other government installations around the world in an attempt to increase its diplomatic isolation.

In the air, Israel can expect charter flights to take off from airports around the world with a few dozen kamikaze protesters who will force the IAF to shoot them down as they approach Israeli airspace. …

…THE SECOND and far more dangerous implication of Israel’s enemies’ aggressive adoption of suicide protests is that by ensuring violence will be used, they increase the chances of war. …

In Forbes, John Tamny tells us why the Dow has gone from 10,000 to 10,000 in 11 years.

The Dow Jones industrial average first touched 10,000 on March 16, 1999. Eleven years later the Dow remains stuck around the same 10,000 level.

…Market commentators will apply all manner of reasoning and faulty to logic to the stuck nature of stocks, but the answers necessary to explain the past and present are really quite simple: bad policy.

To see why, it’s worth remembering that there’s really no mystery to positive market returns. The inputs necessary are simple, and boil down to four things: when taxes are light, regulation is nonintrusive, trade is free and money values stable, stocks do well. Any diversion from those four inputs leads to market uncertainty and reduced returns, or considering 1966-1982 and 1999 to the present, no gains at all. …

Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe, tells us to listen to the ideologues that Obama appoints to find out the president’s true views.

PRESIDENT BARACK Obama was adamant… “I don’t believe that government can or should run health care.’’

But if Obama is as opposed to a government-ruled health sector as he claims, why has he nominated Dr. Donald Berwick as director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services — far and away the nation’s largest health-insurance programs, at a cost of nearly $1 trillion — a man who openly adores Britain’s socialized health care?

“I am romantic about the National Health Service,’’ Berwick told a British audience in 2008. “I love it.’’ He not only loves the National Health Service, he extols it as “an example for the whole world — an example . . . that the United States needs now.’’

…And he embraces government health care rationing. “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care,’’ he said in a 2009 interview, “the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.’’ This is a view Berwick has held for a long time; more than 10 years ago he wrote that “limited resources require decisions about who will have access to care and the extent of their coverage.’’ … “Here, you choose a harder path,’’ he said in Britain two years ago. “You plan the supply; you aim a bit low; you prefer slightly too little of a technology or a service to too much; then you search for care bottlenecks and try to relieve them.’’…

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We begin today with a few items that will help us look at the good side of our use of oil. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe is first.

… The explosion of BP’s oil rig in the Gulf has been a calamity in so many ways, above all the loss of 11 human lives. With hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil gushing daily from the crippled wellhead, the environmental impacts have been excruciating. BP is responsible for a dreadful mess, one that will take years and many millions of dollars to clean up.

Awful as the catastrophe has been, however, life without oil would be far, far worse.

Americans consume oil not because they are “addicted’’ to it, but because it enriches their lives, making possible prosperity, comfort, and mobility that would have been all but unimaginable just a few generations ago. Almost by definition, an addiction is something one is healthier without. But oil-based energy improves human health and reduces poverty — it makes life longer, safer, and better. Addictions debase life. Oil improves and expands it.

“Oil may be the single most flexible substance ever discovered,’’ writes the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce in “Power Hungry,’’ a new book on the myths of “green’’ energy. “More than any other substance, oil helped to shrink the world. Indeed, thanks to its high energy density, oil is a nearly perfect fuel for use in all types of vehicles, from boats and planes to cars and motorcycles. Whether measured by weight or by volume, refined oil products provide more energy than practically any other commonly available substance, and they provide it in a form that’s easy to handle, relatively cheap, and relatively clean.’’ If oil didn’t exist, Bryce quips, we’d have to invent it.

Of course there are problems created by oil, as the Deepwater Horizon calamity so heartbreakingly demonstrates . …

Jonah Goldberg is next.

A rolling “dead zone” off the Gulf of Mexico is killing sea life and destroying livelihoods. Recent estimates put the blob at nearly the size of New Jersey.

Alas, I’m not talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As terrible as that catastrophe is, such accidents have occurred in U.S. waters only about once every 40 years (and globally about once every 20 years). I’m talking about the dead zone largely caused by fertilizer runoff from American farms along the Mississippi and Atchafalaya river basins. Such pollutants cause huge algae plumes that result in oxygen starvation in the Gulf’s richest waters, near the delta.

Because the dead zone is an annual occurrence, there’s no media feeding frenzy over it, even though the average annual size of these hypoxic zones has been about 6,600 square miles over the last five years, and they are driven by bipartisan federal agriculture, trade, and energy policies.

Indeed, as Steven Hayward notes in the current Weekly Standard, if policymakers continue to pursue biofuels in response to the current anti-fossil-fuel craze, these dead zones will get a lot bigger every year. A 2008 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that adhering to corn-based ethanol targets will increase the size of the dead zone by as much as 34 percent.

If all of our transport fuel came from biofuel, we would need 30 percent more land than all of the existing food-growing farmland we have today.

Of course, that’s just one of the headaches “independence” from oil and coal would bring. …

And Goldberg expands on his earlier piece.

… Everyone takes as a given that the environment would be better off without oil and coal. And it would be better off if there was a better fuel available. But, not counting nuclear, there isn’t. Not even close (as Ken Green notes earlier on this blog). And … fossil fuels have been an incalculable gift to mankind. Without fossil fuels, we might not have cut the Malthusian knot that was causing us to burn through a wide assortment of “renewable” resources.

Kerosene helped wean America (and everyone else) off our “addiction” to whales. Oil and coal helped end our addiction to wood for, well, everything. Wood was not only a heating fuel, it was instrumental to railroads and all manner of construction. Ronald Bailey has noted that “Railroads, the 19th century’s ‘modern’ form of transportation, consumed nearly 25 percent of all the wood used in America, for both track ties and fuel.” In 1900, New York City alone supported over 120,000 horses who befouled the water and the air in the city, but also required vast amounts of land to supply the hay that fueled them.

Today, more American land is covered by forests—by far—than at the end of the 19th century. By the 1860s, Massachusetts and Connecticut had lost 70 percent of their forests. Today nearly 70 percent of those states are forested again. Vermont was once nearly denuded but now nearly 80 percent of it is covered in trees. …

We followed Jonah’s link to Ken Green who imagines the speech the president should give;

… My fellow Americans, I am sure that we all grieve for the environmental and economic disaster that has befallen the states of the Gulf Coast, particularly already fragile Louisiana. Now, regrettably, they face damages from the worst oil spill in American history. We will do everything we can to help the people of the ravaged coastal states recover from this terrible environmental tragedy.

But, even in the midst of tragedy, we must acknowledge that we are an energy civilization, some would even say that we are an energy species. Our entire economy, everything we do, from the morning we wake through the hours we sleep, requires a constant flow of energy. Fossil fuels provide the vast majority of the energy we use, and for a very good reason: there are no economically viable, comparably useful alternatives, and there probably won’t be for many decades.

And then, fossil fuel alternatives come with their own environmental problems. Look at corn ethanol, which the previous administration favored. Production of corn ethanol has been environmentally ruinous, causing air pollution, water pollution, wildlife contamination with pesticides, coastal dead zones, and inflated food prices that increased famine around the world. The growing demand for bio-diesel has led to the razing of vast swaths of the world’s rainforest, which is being planted with oil palms. …

We have a picture, courtesy of the NY Times, that is a beautiful illustration of the stupidity of the state.

Speaking of oil, how’s things in the Middle East? Jennifer Rubin notes Obama is polling poorly there.

… All that suck-uppery, all that Israel-bashing, and yet Muslim countries like Obama less. One explanation may be that Obama hasn’t been supporting the aspirations, human rights, and religious freedom of the people of the Muslim world; instead, he’s been courting the despotic rulers of these countries.

And recall too that Obama’s approval in Israel is in the single digits.Obama has failed to endear the U.S. to the countries of the Middle East and, in fact, has alienated all sides. It is what comes from straddling, equivocating, dumping friends, and showing meekness to bullies. It seems that not even joining the thugocracies on the U.N. Human Rights Council has done the trick. So many “smart” diplomats, such putrid results.

Abe Greenwald has some thoughts on the subject.

Jen, forget the fact that Muslim publics don’t like Barack Obama as much as they once did. Consider this: “the new [Pew] poll does show a modest increase over the past year in support for suicide bombing being often or sometimes justifiable, with a rise in Egypt from 15% to 20% and in Jordan from 12% to 20%.” …

… Why did support for suicide bombing go up in the past year? In the U.S., our post-9/11 self-assessment is all about resenting the leader who took us into long and difficult fights. But the war against jihad plays out in Muslim publics as a war of ideas. For the endless jokes about his oratorical shortcomings, Bush articulated the choice with unsurpassed clarity: it’s Islamism v. democracy. What does each one offer? Islamism gives you a zombie doctrine of earthly denial so that you may, in death, triumph over your hopeless life. Under Bush, American democracy put your oppressive leaders on notice and gave you the hope, if not the actual opportunity, to change your hopeless life. Under Obama, democracy bows to your authoritarian king, extends an open hand to the autocrat who beats you over the head, and welcomes with open arms the dictator who tortured you in jail. Obama’s made the choice a no brainer. …

Turning to things domestic, Michael Barone thinks Obama’s thuggery is wearing thin.

Thuggery is unattractive. Ineffective thuggery even more so. Which may be one reason so many Americans have been reacting negatively to the response of Barack Obama and his administration to BP’s Gulf oil spill.

Take Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s remark that he would keep his “boot on the neck” of BP, which brings to mind George Orwell’s definition of totalitarianism as “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Except that Salazar’s boot hasn’t gotten much in the way of results yet.

Or consider Obama’s undoubtedly carefully considered statement to Matt Lauer that he was consulting with experts “so I know whose ass to kick.” Attacking others is a standard campaign tactic when you’re in political trouble, and certainly BP, which appears to have taken unwise shortcuts in the Gulf, is an attractive target.

But you don’t always win arguments that way. The Obama White House gleefully took on Dick Cheney on the issue of terrorist interrogations. It turned out that more Americans agreed with Cheney’s stand, despite his low poll numbers, than Obama’s. …

Mort Zuckerman covers international opinion of the prez.

… The reviews of Obama’s performance have been disappointing. He has seemed uncomfortable in the role of leading other nations, and often seems to suggest there is nothing special about America’s role in the world. The global community was puzzled over the pictures of Obama bowing to some of the world’s leaders and surprised by his gratuitous criticisms of and apologies for America’s foreign policy under the previous administration of George W. Bush. One Middle East authority, Fouad Ajami, pointed out that Obama seems unaware that it is bad form and even a great moral lapse to speak ill of one’s own tribe while in the lands of others.

Even in Britain, for decades our closest ally, the talk in the press—supported by polls—is about the end of the “special relationship” with America. French President Nicolas Sarkozy openly criticized Obama for months, including a direct attack on his policies at the United Nations. Sarkozy cited the need to recognize the real world, not the virtual world, a clear reference to Obama’s speech on nuclear weapons. When the French president is seen as tougher than the American president, you have to know that something is awry. Vladimir Putin of Russia has publicly scorned a number of Obama’s visions. Relations with the Chinese leadership got off to a bad start with the president’s poorly-organized visit to China, where his hosts treated him disdainfully and prevented him from speaking to a national television audience of the Chinese people. The Chinese behavior was unprecedented when compared to visits by other U.S. presidents.

Obama’s policy on Afghanistan—supporting a surge in troops, but setting a date next year when they will begin to withdraw—not only gave a mixed signal, but provided an incentive for the Taliban just to wait us out. The withdrawal part of the policy was meant to satisfy a domestic constituency, but succeeded in upsetting all of our allies in the region. Further anxiety was provoked by Obama’s severe public criticism of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his coterie of family and friends for their lackluster leadership, followed by a reversal of sorts regarding the same leaders. ..

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We need to spend some time on last week’s speech. Charles Krauthammer first.

Barack Obama doesn’t do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian “I feel your pain,” a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting. It wasn’t until the end of the speech — the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda — that Obama warmed to his task.

Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.

How? By creating a glorious, new, clean green economy. And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around. With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.

But is this not what we’ve been trying to do for decades with ethanol, which remains a monumental boondoggle, economically unviable and environmentally damaging to boot? As with yesterday’s panacea, synfuels, into which Jimmy Carter poured billions.

Notice that Obama no longer talks about Spain, which until recently he repeatedly cited for its visionary subsidies of a blossoming new clean energy industry. That’s because Spain, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is pledged to reverse its disastrously bloated public spending, including radical cuts in subsidies to its uneconomical photovoltaic industry. …

And then the speech is treated to vintage Mark Steyn. He ends like this;

… My colleague Rich Lowry suggested the other day that most people not on the Gulf coast aren’t really that bothered about the spill, and that Obama has allowed himself to be blown off course entirely unnecessarily. There may be some truth to this: For most of America, this is a Potemkin crisis. But what better kind to trip up a Potemkin leader? So the president has now declared war on the great BP spill – Gulf War 3! – and in this epic conflict the Speechgiver-in-Chief will surely be his own unmanned drone:

“I fired off a speech

But the British kept a-spillin’

Twice as many barrels as there was a month ago

I fired off a speech

But the British kept a-spillin’

Up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico…”

Chris Matthews and the other leg-tinglers invented an Obama that doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, they’re stuck with the one that does, and it will be interesting to see whether he’s capable of plugging the leak in his own support. If not, who knows what the tide might wash up?

Memo to Secretary Rodham Clinton: Do you find yourself of a quiet evening with a strange craving for chicken dinners and county fairs in Iowa and New Hampshire, maybe next summer? Need one of those relaunch books to explain why you’re getting back in the game in your country’s hour of need?

“It Takes A Spillage.”

But, would the kid president buck the union bosses? John Fund says no.

In his nationwide address last night on the Gulf crisis, President Obama declared: “We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long it takes.” But at least one congressman isn’t convinced, complaining that Mr. Obama won’t pursue promising solutions if it means bucking his union allies.

Hawaii GOP Rep. Charles Djou, who won his seat in a special election last month, says he’s “disappointed” that Mr. Obama has failed to waive the Jones Act, an antiquated 1920 law mandating that goods shipped between U.S. ports be handled by U.S.-built and -owned ships manned by U.S. crews. Unions fiercely support the law as a means of preserving U.S. jobs. In this case, though, the law might be hindering the recovery of hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast jobs. …

David Harsanyi has speech comments too.

… What about the president’s contention that “we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water”? This is what you might call a meta-truth. Like, for instance, “The sun is dying!” or “The budget will be balanced.”

The oil, coal and natural gas we know exists and haven’t yet drilled for alone would be enough to provide hundreds of years of energy for the nation.

Perhaps it’s a testament to a president who has done more to stimulate belief in free enterprise than any other in 40 years, but 68 percent of Americans, according to a recent Pew poll, believe the nation should expand exploration for coal, gas and oil even after the BP accident.

A larger number of Americans also embrace the idea of clean energy. They embrace balance.

It’s one thing to watch reality battered by environmentalists during good times; it’s quite a different story today. There is no clean energy economy without a severe trade-off that will cost jobs and prosperity.

Now, the president may believe that it’s worthwhile to sacrifice your prosperity on a moral imperative. But let’s not obscure what we’re talking about here.

She wrote speeches for Ronald Maximus, so Peggy Noonan knows something on the subject.

… No reason to join the pile on, but some small points. Two growing weaknesses showed up in small phrases. The president said he had consulted among others “experts in academia” on what to do about the calamity. This while noting, again, that his energy secretary has a Nobel Prize. There is a growing meme that Mr. Obama is too impressed by credentialism, by the meritocracy, by those who hold forth in the faculty lounge, and too strongly identifies with them. He should be more impressed by those with real-world experience. It was the “small people” in the shrimp boats who laid the boom.

And when speaking of why proper precautions and safety measures were not in place, the president sternly declared, “I want to know why.” But two months in he should know. And he should be telling us. Such empty sternness is . . . empty.

Throughout the speech the president gestured showily, distractingly, with his hands. Politicians do this now because they’re told by media specialists that it helps them look natural. They don’t look natural, they look like Ann Bancroft gesticulating to Patty Duke in “The Miracle Worker.” …

Another sterling example of the ignorance of government. This from Gateway Pundit.

Against Governor Jindal’s wishes the federal government blocked oil-sucking barges today because they needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board and were having trouble contacting the owners. …

David Warren noticed the idiots in the Coast Guard.

… And as we saw in President Obama’s Tuesday night address, he has every intention to use this largely artificial crisis to leverage energy and environmental legislation that will be vastly more destructive of people’s livelihoods than anything now washing ashore.

For consider: a very large part of the population of the U.S. Gulf states depend directly or indirectly on those (surviving) oil platforms. When the U.S. government shuts them down, for an extended period, out of environmentalist unction, it does vastly more aggregate economic damage — to those human beings — than to the ones who may be minding oyster beds. And the latter would anyway be compensated under existing and long-established tort law.

Indeed, litigation was an issue for down the road. Cleaning up the spill is the issue now; but it is clearly beyond the competence of the Obama administration. They still have not done any of the things the Bush administration did, promptly, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to remove bureaucratic obstacles to the rescue efforts.

They have, to use just one of the more spectacular examples, the Coast Guard grounding a fleet of barges from the state of Louisiana that were sucking up surface oil directly threatening the coast, in order to do leisurely and irrelevant safety checks. They have multiple overlapping environmental agencies, with their multiple overlapping veto powers, putting mountains of paperwork in the way of every other effort. It is “business as usual” for the bureaucracies, two full months after the initial catastrophe. …

Wadayakno? It’s like someone is finally getting some sense. The NY Times reports yesterday states are starting to cut pensions. Doesn’t look like it will hit the Illinois millionaires we posted on in the last Pickings, but it’s a start.

Many states are acknowledging this year that they have promised pensions they cannot afford and are cutting once-sacrosanct benefits, to appease taxpayers and attack budget deficits.

Illinois raised its retirement age to 67, the highest of any state, and capped public pensions at $106,800 a year. Arizona, New York, Missouri and Mississippi will make people work more years to earn pensions. Virginia is requiring employees to pay into the state pension fund for the first time. New Jersey will not give anyone pension credit unless they work at least 32 hours a week.

“We can’t afford to deny reality or delay action any longer,” said Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, adding that his state’s pension cuts, enacted in March, will save some $300 million in the first year alone.

But there is a catch: Nearly all of the cuts so far apply only to workers not yet hired. Though heralded as breakthrough reforms by state officials, the cuts phase in so slowly they are unlikely to save the weakest funds and keep them from running out of money. Some new rules may even hasten the demise of the funds they were meant to protect.

Lawmakers wanted to avoid legal battles or fights with unions, whose members can be influential voters. So they are allowing most public workers across the country to keep building up their pensions at the same rate as ever. The tens of thousands of workers now on Illinois’s payrolls, for instance, will still get to retire at 60 — and some will as young as 55. …

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Looking at the African states run by bandits, bumpkins, and buffoons, someone has suggested we stop kicking the can down the road and begin a process of de-recognition. A Contentions post leads us to the article in the NY Times.

… Prof. Engelbert believes this is a “radical” idea, though he means that in an approving sense. But it is not radical at all. It is an old-fashioned idea, and I mean that in an approving sense. The classical literature on sovereignty teems with requirements that an entity must fulfill if it is to be described as a state and therefore accorded the privilege of sovereignty. It must control its territory. Its armed forces must obey the laws of war and be under a recognized chain of command. It must not allow its subjects to engage in freelance violence against other states. It must have a regular system of justice. By the late 19th century, it could not practice slavery. And, by the 20th century, it had to allow its citizens — the shift from ‘subject’ to ‘citizen’ is vital — some voice in shaping their own government.

If there is anything radical in Prof. Engelbert’s thought, it is that we should seek again to apply these classical standards in a world that, for most of the past hundred years, has paid them progressively little mind. The descent has been slow but steady — first, the admission of the USSR into the ranks of the recognized states, then the reluctance to kick Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany out of those ranks, and then, finally, the step that most worries Prof. Engelbert: the fact that during decolonization, the “gift of sovereignty was granted from outside rather than earned from within.” I describe this as ‘honorary sovereignty’: sovereignty that is given but is not merited. …

Here is Professor Pierre Engelbert’s elegant, concise thought.

THE World Cup, which began on Friday, is bringing deserved appreciation of South Africa as a nation that transitioned from white minority domination to a vibrant pluralist democracy. Yet its achievements stand largely alone on the continent. Of the 17 African nations that are commemorating their 50th anniversaries of independence this year — the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia will both do so in the coming weeks — few have anything to truly celebrate.

Five decades ago, African independence was worth rejoicing over: these newly created states signaled an end to the violent, humiliating Western domination of the continent, and they were quickly recognized by the international community. Sovereignty gave fledgling elites the shield to protect their weak states against continued colonial subjugation and the policy instruments to promote economic development.

Yet because these countries were recognized by the international community before they even really existed, because the gift of sovereignty was granted from outside rather than earned from within, it came without the benefit of popular accountability, or even a social contract between rulers and citizens.

Buttressed by the legality and impunity that international sovereignty conferred upon their actions, too many of Africa’s politicians and officials twisted the normal activities of a state beyond recognition, transforming mundane tasks like policing, lawmaking and taxation into weapons of extortion. …

In the NY Post, Scott Gottlieb gives some of the leaked details about how government is going to control your healthcare. The guy who said if you liked your plan, you could keep it; he lied.

…The ObamaCare law references the Secretary of Health and Human Services almost 2,200 times and uses the phrase “the secretary shall” more than 725. Each reference requires HHS to set new rules on medical care, giving control to an existing federal office or one of 160 new agencies that the bill created.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (who was once the Kansas state-insurance commissioner) has taken to these tasks with zeal. In some circles, she’s now known as the nation’s “insurance regulator in chief.”

She’s starting off by applying new regs to health plans offered by large employers — even though these costly rules were supposedly only going to apply to plans sold in the state insurance “exchanges” that don’t get created until 2014. This twist is spelled out in an 83-page draft of a new regulation that leaked late last week.

Bottom line: Sebelius means to dictate what your insurance plan must look like almost from day one, no matter how you get your coverage. …

In the Corner, Veronique de Rugy explains a popular government ploy to garner support for more spending it cannot pay for. She gives excellent rebuttals to the government propaganda that opens the post.

President Obama’s recent plea for another $50 billion (here is the letter to congressional leaders) to save the jobs of teachers and firefighters in the states is a great example of the “Washington Monument Syndrome.” This refers to the bureaucratic practice of threatening to close down the most popular and vital programs in response to prospective budget cuts; it gets its name from the U.S. Department of the Interior, which always threatens it will have to close the Washington Monument if its budget is cut. …

Ed Morrissey makes a plea to stop the madness.

…When do people in Minnesota get to stop bailing out California bureaucrats?  Shouldn’t the states themselves start working on making rational judgments about the size and sustainability of their own governments? …

Now, dear reader, you are going to puke. From The New Editor we learn about the pensions Illinois has awarded to the top 100 school administrators.

… The total estimated cost of these pensions is almost $1 billion — at $887,925,790 — for 100 people! …

We went to the list and pulled out the big winner, Neil C. Codell. He is going to retire in 11 years when his annual salary is estimated to be $885,327. His first year’s pension will be $601,978 and 29 years later his annual pension will be $1,360,470. At that time, his cumulative pension will total $26,661,604. His job is Superintendent of Niles Township Community High School District 219. Mind you, he doesn’t have to worry about elementary or middle schools; just high schools. How many high schools, you ask? Two.

Peter Wehner posts on the collision between the president and reality. You see, he is failing in his duties because you haven’t given him more of your money and your freedoms.

…Yet almost 17 months into his presidency, the man who was going to remake this nation, who was going to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless, who was going to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace, who was going to open doors of opportunities to our kids and replace cynicism with hope and stop the rise of the oceans and heal the planet — this man has come up short. None of this has come to pass. It turns out he cannot even, in his own words, “plug the damn hole.” He has not issued waivers that he should, nor has he provided Gulf Coast governors with the requests they need, nor coordinated the clean-up effort that the people of the Louisiana are begging for. He can do nothing, it seems, except blame others. The man whom, we were told, was the next Lincoln and FDR is coming to grips with his own impotence and ineptitude. From Iran to the Gulf of Mexico, from Middle East peace to job creation, from uniting our country to cleansing our politics, Barack Obama is being brought to his knees. …

The presidency is more than just the person who currently holds the position. Thomas Sowell discusses some of the consequences Obama creates for the nation when Obama puts his agenda ahead of historical agreements and friendships.

…Nothing will keep a man or an institution determined to continue on a failing policy course like past success with that policy. Obama’s political success in the 2008 election campaign was a spectacular triumph of creating images and impressions. …

…Obama spoke grandly about “pressing the reset button” on international relations, as if all the international commitments of the past were his to disregard.

But if no American commitment can be depended upon beyond a current administration, then any nation that allies itself with us is jeopardizing its own national security, because dangers in the international jungle last longer than 4 years or even 8 years. …

In the Weekly Standard Blog, Gabriel Schoenfeld writes that the possible replacement for AG Holder is more reasonable than the NY Times implies.

…Kris did indeed write a memorandum containing sharp criticisms of the legal arguments put forward by the Bush administration on behalf of the NSA wiretapping. But in the same memo, he readily acknowledged that FISA might itself trespass on the president’s constitutional authority as commander-in-chief. In fact, he allowed that even massive dragnet-style warrantless wiretapping might be legal under some circumstances, offering a ticking time bomb scenario in support of this controversial view:

If the government had probable cause that a terrorist possessed a nuclear bomb somewhere in Georgetown, and was awaiting telephone instructions on how to arm it for detonation, and if FISA were interpreted not to allow surveillance of every telephone in Georgetown in those circumstances, the President’s assertion of Article II power to do so would be quite persuasive and attractive to most judges and probably most citizens. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. …

David Harsanyi reports on another market that the government wants to “help”.

You know what journalism could really use more of? Government participation. Who better, after all, than a gaggle of technocrats and political appointees to guide the industry in matters of entrepreneurship, fairness and coverage?

Thankfully, the good folks at the Federal Trade Commission are all over it, cobbling together a report aimed at saving newspapers called “Potential Policy Recommendation to Support the Reinvention of Journalism.” It’s only the first step in a long-term plan to rescue the Fourth Estate from itself.

As you can imagine, the paper is crammed with groundbreaking ideas: industry bailouts, higher taxes on the stuff you buy to help subsidize the stuff you don’t. …

Streetwise Professor is tired of Obama’s strawman debating technique.

(Consistency) … is the Hobgoblin of little minds, according to Emerson.  And if you want a pitch-perfect illustration of the kind of mind Emerson was disparaging, I present Obama:

“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”

I mean, really.  Does this guy have the slightest clue?

Christopher Hitchens comments on a recent speech given by Prince Charles.

…A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer. To this innate absurdity, Prince Charles manages to bring fatuities that are entirely his own. And, as he paged his way through his dreary wad of babble, there must have been some wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience. I quote from a recent document published by the Islamic Forum of Europe, a group dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate and the imposition of sharia, which has been very active in London mosques and in the infiltration of local political parties. “The primary work” in the establishment of a future Muslim empire, it announces, “is in Europe, because it is this continent, despite all the furore about its achievements, which has a moral and spiritual vacuum.”  …

In the Corner, Robert Costa has an interesting post on golfer Tom Watson.

…Did you know that Tom Watson has his own Corner?

“Watson does keep an old guy’s hours, and maybe that’s his secret. He’s in bed by 8 or 9 and up at 4 or 4:30, when he logs on to his computer and checks the news, catches up on e-mail and writes for his blog, Teeing Off, at tomwatson.com. He thinks about a lot in those early-morning hours, he said, but he does not worry about the one question that people keep asking: when will he hang it up?”

Not too soon, I hope. You’ve got to like a Dittohead whose caddie, no joke, played a big part in helping Joe Sestak topple Arlen Specter. If interested, you can check out Watson’s blog here.

Andy McCarthy posts on soccer in the Corner.

… after all, those hip, progressive sports journalists at ESPN and Sports Illustrated keep telling us this is a Bidenesque big, er, deal. But even after taking in Japan’s thrilling, historic 1-0 victory over Cameroon, Jason Black still doesn’t “get it.”

And, as he relates so well in his Washington Times piece, he approached it with a totally open mind. His conclusion? ”There were a few enjoyable things about watching soccer. No commercials, it looks good in HD and I was able to get some things done around the house since there was no real danger of missing anything.”