Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

David Warren is often hard to categorize. But, he leaves you thinking.

We learned a simple thing this week: that the BP clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico is hampered by the Jones Act. This is a piece of 1920s protectionist legislation, that requires all vessels working in U.S. waters to be American-built, and American-crewed.

So while, for instance, the U.S. Coast Guard can accept such help as three kilometres of containment boom from Canada, they can’t accept, and therefore don’t ask for, the assistance of high-tech European vessels specifically designed for the task in hand.

This is amusing, in a way: a memorable illustration of … the sort of stuff I keep going on about. Which is to say, the law of unintended consequences, which pertains with especial virulence to all acts of government regulation.

Reagan and Thatcher were eloquent on this, but made little progress against entrenched interests. My reader may imagine exactly what entrenched interest keeps the Jones Act in place.A large part of the function of all regulatory bureaucracies is granting exemptions to the moronic rules. This, in turn, creates the conditions for massive corruption, and in the case at hand, the phenomenon of “regulatory capture” — regulators and regulatees working hand-in-glove.

It is the stuff that brilliant Scottish moralist, Adam Smith, warned us against back in 1776. A “symbiotic relationship” tends to evolve, in 100 per cent of cases, between the big businesses that dominate an industry, and the big government that regulates them. They share such common interests as eliminating competition. …

…For another axiom of David Warren Thought is that everyone is conservative, in a field he knows something about. Reciprocally, there is a tendency to sport more and more liberal views, the greater one’s ignorance of a field (and therefore of its constraints). …

Victor Davis Hanson thinks that letting the academics run the country is a bit like letting the inmates run the asylum.

…Money is as despised in the abstract as it is pursued in the concrete. No one has run a business, worked much in dead-end, physical labor, or felt economic disaster when the economy went south. Tragedy instead for those who make it on the academic gravy train is the absence of an automatic pay increase, a refused sabbatical, or a hiring freeze. Academics damn Wal-Mart’s exploitation, but count on part-timers to work for a third of their own salaries for the same work — and thereby subsidize their own aristocratic perks. The PhD is felt the equivalent of a MD or MBA, and so leisured contemplation focuses on why less well spoken doctors and CEOs cruelly and so unfairly make so much more than far smarter professors. …

…The perverse was always preferred to the logical: so a Mao was better than a Churchill, Lincoln was faulted for not possessing 1999-era academic sensitivity, and FDR not WWII saved the economy from further depression. Versailles explains Hitler rather than his own insane hatreds. The Soviet and Chinese nightmares were problematic and based on misunderstandings of Marx rather than natural conclusions from him. The real fear after 9/11 is backlash, not more terrorism. The non-Christian nihilist Timothy McVeigh or the Columbine Satanists are proof of widespread Christian terrorism; the last 50 aborted Islamic terrorist plots are aberrations.

If you wonder how our present administration’s attitudes toward business, commerce, taxes, finance, race, national security and foreign policy now play out, just drop by a local faculty lounge for a few minutes and listen up — America in 2010 will suddenly make sense, and perhaps scare the hell out of you all at once. It all reminds me of the proverbial first-semester college student who returns home at Thanksgiving to his near-broke parents to inform them of all the “new” things he’s learned at university.

Tunku Varadarajan blogs on last night’s speech.

On Tuesday night, we saw the debut of a new oratorical exercise, one that may, in the short term—though, mercifully, without Nancy Pelosi seated in the background—come to rival the State of the Union (SOTU) address. Let us call it the State of the Oil Spill, or SOTOS. …

In the Las Vegas Review-Journal, J.C. Watts lays the cards out on the table.

…Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is one of the most articulate economic conservatives to recently emerge on the national scene. His “Roadmap” strategy — under-reported by the mainstream media — emphasizes that the truly needy need to be taken care of by government but middle-class entitlements must be reduced for the simple reason that there’s no money in the treasury for them. …

…Conservatives have long and rightly argued that governments do not generate wealth. They only distribute it. Jonah Goldberg in National Review writes that the challenge for both liberals and conservatives is simply to define how much distribution is “enough.” Goldberg asks: “What would an acceptable safety net look like? Who would be taken care of by taxpayers and for how long?” Rep. Ryan offers answers to those questions in his brilliant “Roadmap,” but ideologically driven liberals don’t. They simply scoff at conservative caution. Leading liberals maintain there’s no such thing as enough — a position obviously shared by President Barack Obama.

It has been said before, but bears repeating: The 2010 congressional races are shaping up to be the most important elections since The Great Depression. Will the Democrats be allowed to continue controlling the Congress and proceed to expand government, the deficit and the debt? Or will the voters elect a Republican majority pledging to put the brakes on President Obama’s policies and the dismantling of the private enterprise system? (And will Republicans keep their word this time?) …

Steven Hayward adds logical analysis to the MSM hysteria about the oil spill. The reported reason for the dead zone in the Gulf may surprise you.

…A recent study of seven basic ecosystem types, and their most typical perturbations, found that of ecosystems that make a recovery from various catastrophic events (and, it must be noted, not all do), ocean ecosystems disrupted by oil spills were the fastest to recover, often within a span of one to four years. As the New York Times noted in a 1993 story, the Persian Gulf recovered surprisingly faster than anticipated from the 1.2 million ton spill Saddam Hussein engineered in 1991: “The vast amount of oil that Iraqi occupation forces in Kuwait dumped into the Persian Gulf during the 1991 war did little long-term damage, international researchers say.” By contrast, forest lands disrupted by fire or deforestation can take more than 40 years to recover.

Besides increasing our reliance on tankers, there are two other reasons curtailing offshore production in the Gulf may not reduce the ecological risk to the Gulf Coast. First, other nations are unlikely to curtail their own offshore exploration in the Gulf. Cuba is drilling for oil within 100 miles of south Florida; Mexico has extensive drilling operations in the Gulf (and as mentioned above caused the largest single spill in history). Both Venezuela and Brazil are expanding their offshore exploration and production in deep water, and are likely to expand to the Gulf of Mexico if the United States scales back.

Second, while the Deepwater Horizon spill represents an acute short term shock to Gulf waters and the Gulf Coast, the chronic seasonal depletion of oxygen in the Gulf (aka the 8,500 square mile “dead zone” below the Mississippi River Delta) may be aggravated by one of the policy responses that has been suggested in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon: increased ethanol production. …

…A 2008 study published by the National Academy of Sciences observed that “nitrogen leaching from fertilized corn fields to the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River system is a primary cause of the bottom-water hypoxia that develops on the continental shelf of the northern Gulf of Mexico each summer.” The study concluded that our current ethanol production goals will increase dissolved inorganic nitrogen flowing into the Gulf by as much as 34 percent …

For a time, even Margaret Thatcher went over to the warming dark side. Shows what happens when you listen to the “experts.” But, eventually she became a skeptic.

… She voiced precisely the fundamental doubts about the warming scare that have since become familiar to us. Pouring scorn on the “doomsters”, she questioned the main scientific assumptions used to drive the scare, from the conviction that the chief force shaping world climate is CO2, rather than natural factors such as solar activity, to exaggerated claims about rising sea levels. She mocked Al Gore and the futility of “costly and economically damaging” schemes to reduce CO2 emissions. She cited the 2.5C rise in temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period as having had almost entirely beneficial effects. She pointed out that the dangers of a world getting colder are far worse than those of a CO2-enriched world growing warmer. She recognised how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, Left-wing political agenda which posed a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of mankind.

In other words, long before it became fashionable, Lady Thatcher was converted to the view of those who, on both scientific and political grounds, are profoundly sceptical of the climate change ideology. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The Samizdata Blog named after the Soviet dissident press called Samizdat (self-published) has started us off with a string of items about the Three Gorges Dam in China. Beyond the dam problems though, the post shows some remarkable thought about the relative problems and strengths of democracy and the eventual weaknesses of an autocratic regime like China’s. To do that reference is made to Victor Davis Hanson’s sophisticated thinking about the Western way of war.

Here is a report about progress, so to speak, in the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China.

This dam, just as was earlier prophesied, is causing lots of environmental problems, as in real environmental problems, as in: people are finding themselves living in buildings that are collapsing, beside roads that are cracking up, on land that is sliding into the water. We are not talking imaginary rises in sea level here, but real damage to real human habitats. Earthquakes are now happening.

That Telegraph piece links to this Times report, which explains things thus:

“As the water rises, it penetrates fissures and seeps into soil. Then it loosens the slopes that ascend at steep angles on either side of the river. Eventually, rocks, soil and stone give way. The landslides undermine the geology of the area. That, in turn, sets off earth tremors. It may be the world’s biggest case of rising damp.”

The Times report also includes this choice little paragraph, concerning some crumbling building that was hurriedly vacated by government officials and allocated instead to mere people:

‘”What kind of dogshit government moves itself out and moves us into somewhere like this?” one of them complained.’ …

Here’s the piece from Telegraph, UK.

In China, cracks are appearing – in the neighbourhood of the massive Three Gorges Dam, the country’s great prestige project, and also in the Great Internet Firewall of China, enabling the ominous news to leak out. Three years ago stories were already emerging in the Chinese media about landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae further down the river. And less and less effort seems to be made to plug the leaks.

Recent media reports tell of a series of landslips, minor earthquakes and cracks appearing in roads and buildings along the central section of the Yangtse, between the dam and the city of Chongqing. Almost 10,000 “dangerous sites” have been identified, but many of the people living near them cannot be relocated for lack of money. Two years ago thousands of children died in Sichuan Province because their schools were not resistant to the earthquake which hit the area; in the town of Badong near Chongqing children are attending school in buildings which have been recognised as far more vulnerable. What else can they do? The local authorities can’t afford a new one.

Like many such megaprojects, the Three Gorges was always driven as much by politics as by economics. …

More of this from the London Times.

The Three Gorges dam was so vast and sweeping a vision that nothing could stand in its way. Not the old cities of the Yangtze valley, storehouses of human toil and treasure for more than a thousand years. Not the lush, low-lying farmlands, nor the villages, nor even the pagodas and temples that graced the riverbanks. The cries of dissenting scientists and the lamentations of more than a million Chinese people forced to leave their ancestral lands counted for nothing.

When the waters rose to 570ft last year, drowning all these things, it marked a triumph for the engineers at the top of the Chinese Communist party. But in the past six months a sinister trail of events has unfolded from the dam all the way up the 410-mile reservoir to the metropolis of Chongqing. It began with strange, small-scale earthquakes recorded by official monitoring stations and reported by the Chinese media. Mysterious cracks split roads and sundered schoolhouses and apartments in newly built towns and villages on the bluffs looking down on the river.

The local government now says that 300,000 people will have to move out in addition to the 1.4m evicted to make way for the dam. More than 50,000 residents have already been relocated owing to seismic problems that were not foreseen when the dam was built, according to the state news agency, Xinhua. …

It gets better, because of a Jonah Goldberg Corner post that was in Pickings September 10, 2009 when Tom Friedman, one of the NY Times’ useful idiots was displaying his enthusiasm for the Chinese way of getting things done.

… So there you have it. If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman’s intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are “drawbacks” to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omelets and broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these “drawbacks” pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America.

I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it’s the argument that idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today). It was the argument made by George Bernard Shaw who yearned for a strong progressive autocracy under a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin (he wasn’t picky in this regard). …

Mark Steyn ponders the two-dimensional president.

…Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that for Barack Obama, governing America is “an interesting sociological experiment”, too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on Earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” But he doesn’t, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job – that it’s really too small for him, and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

And so the Gulf spill was an irritation, but he dutifully went through the motions of flying in to be photographed looking presidentially concerned. As he wearily explained to Matt Lauer, “I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain, talking…” Good grief, what more do you people want? Alas, he’s not a good enough actor to fake it.

…Obama’s postmodern detachment is feeble and parochial. It’s true that he hadn’t seen much of America until he ran for president, but he hadn’t seen much of anywhere else, either. Like most multiculturalists, he’s passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn’t depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world. …

George Will looks at the government encroachment on the economy and how that’s working out.

…Private-sector job creation almost stopped in May. The 41,000 jobs created were dwarfed by the 411,000 temporary and low-wage government jobs needed to administer the census. …

…May’s 41,000 jobs were one-fifth of the April number and substantially fewer than half the number needed to keep pace with the normal growth of the labor force. This is evidence against the theory that a growing government can be counted on to produce prosperity because a government dollar spent has a reliable multiplier effect as it ripples through the economy from which the government took the dollar.

Today’s evidence suggesting sluggish job creation might give pause to a less confident person than Obama. But pauses are not in his repertoire of governance. Instead, yielding to what must be a metabolic urge toward statism, he says the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is yet another reason for yet another explosion of government’s control of economic life. The spill supposedly makes it urgent to adopt a large tax increase in the form of cap-and-trade energy legislation, which also is climate legislation, the primary purpose of which is, or once was, to combat global warming, such as it is. …

Michael Barone reviews Democrat Senator Blanche Lincoln’s battle with unions.

…Union leaders desperately need Congress to pass their card check bill, which would effectively abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections. Card check would allow union thugs, er, organizers to collect signatures on cards of a majority of employees and then, presto, the union would be recognized as bargaining agent, and dues money would come pouring in.

It isn’t now, at least at the rate union leaders would like. Last January the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that union membership in 2009 was at an all-time low since the 1930s. Only 12 percent of wage and salary workers were union members, and the number of union members dropped 771,000 between 2008 and 2009.

And, for the first time in history, more union members (7.9 million) work in the public sector than the private sector (7.4 million). Only 7.2 percent of private sector workers are union members, a huge drop from the peak figure of 28 percent in the mid-1950s. …

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders discusses California’s pension problems.

…Last week, the Libertarian-leaning Reason Foundation released a report that found that California’s unfunded pension liability “translates to roughly $36,000 for each California household.” Author Adam B. Summers called the current system “unsustainable and unaffordable.”

…Schwarzenegger tried to fix the problem. In 2005, he proposed ending state employees’ generous defined-benefit pensions by setting up 401(k)-style plans for new state hires. He collected 400,000 signatures for a special-election ballot measure toward that end.

Did a grateful public rally behind Schwarzenegger? Short answer: No. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Charles Krauthammer comments on ineffective policy and ineffective spin.

In announcing the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on Iran, President Obama stressed not once but twice Iran’s increasing “isolation” from the world. This claim is not surprising considering that after 16 months of an “extended hand” policy, in response to which Iran accelerated its nuclear program — more centrifuges, more enrichment sites, higher enrichment levels — Iranian “isolation” is about the only achievement to which the administration can even plausibly lay claim.

…Really? On Tuesday, one day before the president touted passage of a surpassingly weak U.N. resolution and declared Iran yet more isolated, the leaders of Russia, Turkey and Iran gathered at a security summit in Istanbul “in a display of regional power that appeared to be calculated to test the United States,” as the New York Times put it. I would add: And calculated to demonstrate the hollowness of U.S. claims of Iranian isolation, to flaunt Iran’s growing ties with Russia and quasi-alliance with Turkey, a NATO member no less. …

…Increasing isolation? In the past year alone, Ahmadinejad has been welcomed in Kabul, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Caracas, Brasilia, La Paz, Senegal, Gambia and Uganda. Today, he is in China. …

Peter Wehner adds excellent commentary to Krauthammer’s discussion by bringing up Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s thoughts on Carter’s foreign policy.

…In a wonderful essay in COMMENTARY in February 1981, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in reviewing the failures of the Carter presidency, wrote about the ideas that animated it, including:

The political hostility which the United States encountered around the world, and especially in the Third World, was, very simply, evidence of American aggression or at least of American wrongdoing… If the United States denied itself the means of aggression, it would cease to be aggressive. When it ceased to be aggressive, there would be peace – in the halls of the United Nations no less than in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia.

Moynihan went on to write about the Carter administration’s “fateful avoidance of reality” — “a denial that there is genuine hostility toward the United States in the world and true conflicts of interest between this nation and others – and illusion that a surface reasonableness and civility are the same as true cooperation.” He warned about the “psychological arrogance that lay behind the seeming humility of our new relations with the Third World – it was we who still determined how others behaved.” And Moynihan concluded his essay this way:

With the experience of the last four years, we should at least have learned that foreign policy cannot be conducted under the pretense that we have no enemies in the world – or at any rate none whose enmity we have not merited by our own conduct. For it was this idea more than anything else, perhaps, that led the Carter administration into disaster abroad and overwhelming defeat at home. …

Mark Steyn explains why the left doesn’t support Ayaan Hirsi Ali and rights for Muslim women.

…Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s great cause is women’s liberation. Unfortunately for her, the women she wants to liberate are Muslim, so she gets minimal support and indeed a ton of hostility from Western feminists who have reconciled themselves, consciously or otherwise, to the two-tier sisterhood: when it comes to clitoridectomies, forced marriages, honour killings, etc., multiculturalism trumps feminism. Liberal men are, if anything, even more opposed. She long ago got used to the hectoring TV interviewer, from Avi Lewis on the CBC a while back to Tavis Smiley on PBS just the other day, insisting that say what you like about Islam but everyone knows that Christians are just as backward and violent, if not more so. The media left spends endless hours and most of its interminable awards ceremonies congratulating itself on its courage, on “speaking truth to power,” the bravery of dissent and all the rest, but faced with a pro-gay secular black feminist who actually lives it they frost up in nothing flat. …

…At the age of five, Ayaan was forced to undergo “FGM” (female genital mutilation), or, in the new non-judgmental PC euphemism, “cutting.” When she had her first period, her mother beat her. When she was 22, her father arranged for her to marry a cousin in Canada. While in Germany awaiting the visa for her wedded bliss in Her Majesty’s multicultural utopia, she decided to skip out, and fled to the Netherlands. …

..In a way, the Western left’s hostility to Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes my point for me. In Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman wrote that suicide bombings “produced a philosophical crisis, among everyone around the world who wanted to believe that a rational logic governs the world.” In other words, it has to be about “poverty” or “social justice” because the alternative—that they want to kill us merely because we are the other—undermines the hyper-rationalist’s entire world view. Thus, every pro-gay, pro-feminist, pro-black Western liberal’s determination to blame Ayaan Hirsi Ali for the fact that a large number of benighted thuggish halfwits want to kill her. Deploring what he regards as her simplistic view of Islam, Nicholas Kristof rhapsodizes about its many fine qualities—“There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews.” …

In the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson introduces the rest of the country to the phenomenon in Indiana: Governor Mitch Daniels.

… When Daniels took office, in 2004, the state faced a $200 million deficit and hadn’t balanced its budget in seven years. Four years later, all outstanding debts had been paid off; after four balanced budgets, the state was running a surplus of $1.3 billion, which has cushioned the blows from a steady decline in revenues caused by the recession. “That’s what saved us when the recession hit,” one official said. “If we didn’t have the cash reserves and the debts paid off, we would have been toast.” The state today is spending roughly the same amount that it was when Daniels took office, largely because he resisted the budget increases other states were indulging in the past decade.

No other state in the Midwest—all of them, like Indiana, dependent on a declining manufacturing sector—can match this record. Venture capital investment in Indiana had lagged at $39 million annually in the first years of this decade. By 2009 it was averaging $94 million. Even now the state has continued to add jobs—7 percent of new U.S. employment has been in Indiana this year, a state with 2 percent of the country’s population. For the first time in 40 years more people are moving into the state than leaving it. Indiana earned its first triple-A bond rating from Standard and Poor’s in 2008; the other two major bond rating agencies concurred in April 2010, making it one of only nine states with this distinction, and one of only two in the Midwest. …

…As our dinner wound down—I insisted on paying the bill, he offered to split it—he said he was going to give a commencement address the coming weekend, at Franklin College, south of Indianapolis. It had been inspired partly by the theme of “public service” struck by Obama’s recent commencement addresses, in which the president discouraged the pursuit of mere material gain in favor of nonprofit and government work.

“That strikes me as exactly the wrong message to send to young people,” Daniels said. “He’s got it completely wrong. Government service—nonprofits—all that’s fine and necessary. But the host can only stand so many parasites.” …

In NRO’s Agenda, Reihan Salam recommends Ferguson’s article.

If you haven’t read Andrew Ferguson’s brilliant profile of Mitch Daniels, the highly effective governor of Indiana, you should, and not just for its not inconsiderable entertainment value. Daniels is one of a small handful of public officials who’ve pursued a consistent and coherent conservative program while in office, and he’s found a way to make it broadly appealing. When attacked for demanding that school officials restrain their spending, Daniels worked to raise awareness of the real choices facing school districts.

“In fact, the governor’s office has publicized a “Citizens’ Checklist” that people can take to their local school boards to see if school officials have made every possible economy. Citizens in Vincennes need to take that list and get answers, he said. The list is filled with questions. Have the administrators “eliminated memberships in professional associations and reduced travel expenses”? Have they “sold, leased, or closed underutilized buildings”? Have they “outsourced transportation and custodial services”?”

A debate that had once pitted those who were “for the children” against those who were “against the children” suddenly became a debate about how much should be spent on classroom instruction versus administrative overhead. …

John Lindsay, former New York Mayor in the late 60′s and early 70′s, is receiving renewed MSM interest. In the WSJ, Vincent Cannato presents the irony.

…Lindsay represented a new kind of liberal politics, a top-down coalition of affluent white liberals, young people and minorities that was less attentive to the needs of the working- and middle class. This has come to mark the modern Democratic Party (which Lindsay joined in 1971), but has too often proved to be a weak governing coalition.

Like Mr. Obama, John Lindsay had a messianic quality. He was the shining knight sent to slay the city’s “power brokers.” Sure of the rightness of his policies, Lindsay spoke in moralistic tones. But he could be prickly and thin-skinned and quick to impute base motives to political opponents. Well into his mayoralty, he continued to blame many of his problems on his predecessor.
Lindsay promised an activist government to meet the needs of New Yorkers. That meant more spending, and more taxes to pay the bills—Lindsay created the city income tax and commuter tax. In his second term, the economy slowed and New York lost 250,000 private-sector jobs, but spending continued and the number of city workers swelled. As revenues dried up, short-term borrowing increased. In 1975, the city nearly defaulted on its loans. The dreams of an activist government came crashing down in a mountain of debt. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Michael Barone thinks Rick Santelli’s rant was the “founding document” of the tea party movement.

… How to explain something contrary to the New Deal historians’ teaching that economic distress increases support for big government? Clues can be obtained, I think, by examining what amounts to the founding document of the Tea Party movement, Rick Santelli’s “rant” on the CME trading floor in Chicago, telecast live by CNBC on Feb. 19, 2009.

That was less than one month into the Obama administration. The stimulus package had been jammed through Congress almost entirely by Democratic votes six days before, but the Democrats’ health care and cap-and-trade bills were barely into gestation. Chrysler and General Motors had received temporary bailouts, but their bankruptcies were months in the future.

“The government is promoting bad behavior,” Santelli began. The object of his scorn was the Obama administration’s Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan providing aid to homeowners delinquent on their mortgages.

“This is America!” Santelli declared. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”

Granted, the words are not as elegant as those of Thomas Jefferson or John Adams. But the thought is clear. Santelli was arguing that the people who, in Bill Clinton’s felicitous phrase, “work hard and play by the rules” shouldn’t have to subsidize those who took on debts that they couldn’t repay.

This was both an economic and a moral argument. Economic, because subsidies to the improvident are an unproductive investment. We know now that very many of the beneficiaries of the administration’s mortgage modification programs ended up in foreclosure anyway. Subsidies just prolonged the agony. …

Peter Schiff thinks that the second dip will be worse.

…Increased spending, financed by unprecedented borrowing, will prove to be just as temporary as a US census job (unless, in the name of stimulus, Obama decides to make “people counting” a permanent function of the US government.). When the bills come due, the next leg down will be even more severe than the last.

The swelling ranks of the government payroll, and the shrinking number of private taxpayers footing the bill, will guarantee larger deficits and a weaker economy for years to come. In addition, the artificial spending has prevented a much-needed restructuring from taking place, leaving our economy far less efficient than before the crisis began. …

One reason that we have thus far been spared the full wrath of Washington’s poor decisions is that we are still benefiting from problems abroad, particularly in the eurozone. As sovereign debt issues have temporarily caused a flight to the dollar, our economy has benefited from lower interest rates and restrained consumer prices. …

…Once the euro finally stabilizes against the dollar, I expect commodity prices to resume their rise, especially oil. Normally, the uncertainty created by the disastrous oil spill in the gulf, and the resulting moratorium on deep-water drilling, would have sent crude oil prices skyrocketing. However, fears of a global slowdown, euro weakness, and general risk aversion have held prices in check. As Asia continues its growth and Europe regains its footing, I expect a delayed surge in oil prices, which will put yet another obstacle on the road to US recovery. …

Michael Barone notes in one year the Social Security Trust Fund has gone from $31 billion surplus to just $2 billion. Way to go, Barack. Nice job, Nancy.

In Forbes, David Malpass shows some of the ways the government helps destroy businesses.

…The threat to profit is explicit in Washington’s evolving “economic justice” platform. Small businesses already face a high top marginal tax rate, horrendous tax complexity and layers of new taxes, yet the revenue-extraction process is intensifying. The jump in tax rates planned for the end of the year, the expansion of the Medicare tax and the threat of a value-added tax are just the transparent side of the tax shakedown. Under the surface, intense job-killing fights are being waged over sales taxes (New York is sending auditors statewide to demand more tribute), the taxation of capital gains and dividends (rates will jump), private equity (the government is redefining long-term capital gains into ordinary income) and foreign profits. Hillary Clinton upped the ante with her May 27 speech broadly linking underemployment with undertaxation: “The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues [we face].” …

…While Washington pays lip service to the challenges facing small businesses, it repeatedly chooses its own expansion over results. In effect, government has become a huge silent partner in all businesses, often taking a majority of the profits and forcing many unprofitable business decisions without the risk that it will be fired.

Karl Rove comments on the second term of Jimmy Carter.

…This pattern of being merely present has been apparent almost since the first days of the Obama presidency. He may unveil his mighty teleprompter to help pass what Congress has drafted, but this White House seems strangely disconnected from crafting legislation.

For example, last year’s stimulus was largely drafted by House Appropriations Chairman David Obey of Wisconsin, one of Congress’s most liberal members. As a result, what passed was a wasteful spending bill rather than an economic growth package.

And faced with a growing mountain of debt, Mr. Obama passed the issue off to an ineffectual commission whose report is due after the election. After growing the size of the federal government by a quarter in just over a year, he now says he’d like agencies to try to find 5% cuts in their budgets. …

The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s comments.

On President Obama’s remarks on the passage of U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran:

“…This is an unmistakable message about the fecklessness of the U.S. and the international community (which in and of itself is a fiction anyway). The sanctions are totally watered down by Russia and China to be almost meaningless. To achieve even this, it took 16 months of administration labor . . . producing a mouse.

And last, the three sanctions resolutions that the Bush administration [passed] — without apology and without concessions — were approved unanimously. And this one received 12 of the 15, with opposition by allies Turkey and Brazil and abstention from Lebanon.

So if anything, it is a clear demonstration of a collapse of the international effort — to the extent that it ever existed — under this administration’s policy, as Senator Kyl said, of appeasement and apology. And the president of Iran is exactly right that this is a flea, it’s meaningless. And everybody in the administration, I think, knows that. …”

Jennifer Rubin posts on Mid-East policy.

The inanity of Obama’s Middle East diplomacy was on full display yesterday. Obama has a knack for getting both the macro and the micro wrong.

On the macro, we now are pressuring Israel to relax the Gaza blockade, thereby giving up a grand-slam home run to the team from Hamas — the ones responsible for the Gaza war and the oppression of the Palestinians under its thumb. This, of course, also redounds to the benefit of their state sponsors, the mullahs, who will take a break from whooping it up over the pathetic UN sanctions in order to gloat about this triumph.

Moreover, this also undercuts Obama’s Fatah clients, whom he has worked so strenuously to bolster and shield from blame for their own rejectionism and incitement. As Jonathan pointed out, Obama now has roped Mahmoud Abbas into cheerleading for a Gaza/Hamas diplomatic coup (i.e., relaxation of the blockade) despite the obvious ill effects it will have on Abbas’s standing. As a former U.S. official explains, “Today the whole Arab world, the U.S. and the EU are talking about poor Gazans and the mean blockade, so what choice does he have? Whatever his private view he has to join the chorus.” After all you can’t be more reasonable than Obama and the UN and still retain your standing with the Palestinians. …

Peter Wehner posts on dismal approval ratings.

President Obama’s Gallup approval/disapproval rating is now 44 percent/48 percent, a new low.

As a reference point, Obama’s three-day average was 52 percent when Chris Christie beat Jon Corzine in New Jersey and Bob McDonnell destroyed Creigh Deeds in Virginia. And Obama’s approval/disapproval rating on January 20, 2010 — when Republican Scott Brown shocked the political world by winning the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy — Obama’s three-day average (January 19-21) was 49 percent/45 percent (it was 47/47 on January 20). …

Jennifer Rubin also blogs on the problems that come with electing an inexperienced executive.

…There is a reason why the public is upset with Obama. It’s not merely a function of the unrealistic expectation that the president can solve all problems. The president looks fickle, confused, and erratic. Let’s have a drilling ban. No, let’s lift it and make BP pay for all the people we threw out of work! It becomes alarming with each passing day as we see how out of his depth the commander in chief (oh yes, he commands the armed forces too) is.

Harvard Law Review and a crease in the pants don’t signal readiness to be president. The voters have found out the hard way the price of electing someone who thought governing was just like campaigning and who had never run a city, a state, a military unit, or a profit-making firm.

Tunku Varadarajan ponders race and the rise of two Indian conservative politicians in the deep south. It is amazing how Americans have moved on.

Nikki Haley, née Nimrata Randhawa, is almost assured of the Republican nomination for governor of the state of South Carolina. And if she does win her runoff on June 22, she is almost certain to be elected governor in November, which would give rise to the remarkable fact that two deeply conservative Southern states—South Carolina and Louisiana—will be home to governors of Indian descent, one the son of Hindu immigrants, the other the daughter of Sikhs.

What explains the success of Jindal and Haley in their respective states? In posing this question, I hint, of course, at the South’s lingering reputation for racial intolerance; and who can deny that the two states in question have not always been at the forefront of America’s historical striving for racial amity? …

David Harsanyi looks at the tea party folks the left is trying to paint as “nut jobs.”

Any impartial national media type will tell you as much: A bunch of half-baked zealot nutjobs have emerged from the Republican primary field. Folks like Nevada’s Sharron Angle and California’s Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are all throwing around frighteningly out-of-step opinions.

Let’s start with Angle, who believes it would be prudent — get this — to start de-funding the Department of Education. The Department of Education!

You must be aware that the vast majority of Americans were unable to write or use basic arithmetic before the prestigious bureaucracy began operating in 1980. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

David Warren discusses Arthur Laffer’s article featured in Pickings on Wednesday.

…In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, this same Laffer predicts that the American economy will go into tailspin at a predictable date: Jan. 1, 2011. This is the day the Bush tax cuts expire, and U.S. rates return to much more destructive levels.

It’s worse than that for, as Laffer explains, people do have options for earning and declaring income, and every motive is in play to artificially raise this year’s financial results. The statistical drop in economic activity should be memorable; and the psychological effect will compound the damage. …

All this should be obvious, but isn’t. As another WSJ piece showed just this week, there is a direct relation between ability to grasp economic realities and political outlook. According to a Zogby International poll, the further to the left people are (by self-identification), the worse they do in spotting elementary economic relationships between cause and effect. …

Mark Steyn revisits one of his favorite topics.

…There is no precedent in human history for increased prosperity on declining human capital, even before you factor in the added costs of propping up a bunch of other nations facing even worse socio-economic arithmetic. Can mass immigration save you? No. You can never import enough people fast enough: according to Armin Laschet, “Integration Minister” of North Rhine-Westphalia, already 40 per cent of the children in the Fatherland’s cities are ethnically non-German, and thus the future of those cities will be non-German, too. …

…This is the crisis of our times, and the first Western nation to figure out a way around it will have a huge advantage in the decades to come. When Barack Obama started redistributing American wealth, a lot of readers dusted off Mrs. Thatcher’s bon mot: “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” But European social democracy has taken it to the next level: they’ve run out of other people, period.

NY Times reminds us what it is like to have a grown-up with conservative principles in the White House.

WITH a controversial Israeli attack in the news, I have thought back to another controversial Israeli attack, one that took place 29 years ago today: the strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor under construction in Iraq. The daring, risky bombing dealt a fatal blow to Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. I was then President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, after having been his chief foreign policy adviser for several years. …

In the WSJ, Arthur Brooks discusses the temptation of easy jobs and easy money.

…The increasing size of the federal work force is an early indication of what lies ahead. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in the last year the federal government added 86,000 permanent (non-Census) jobs to the rolls. And high-paying jobs at that: The number of federal salaries over $100,000 per year has increased by nearly 50% since the beginning of the recession.

Today, the average federal worker earns 77% more than the average private-sector worker, according to a USA Today analysis of data from the federal Office of Personnel Management. To pay for bigger government, the private sector will bear a heavier tax burden far into the future, suppressing the innovation and entrepreneurship that creates growth and real opportunity, not to mention the revenue that pays for everything else in the first place.

If these trends are not reversed, it is hard to see how our culture of free enterprise will not change. More and more Americans, especially younger Americans, will grow accustomed to a system in which the government pays better wages, offers the best job protection, allows the earliest retirement, and guarantees the most lavish pensions. Against such competition, more and more young, would-be entrepreneurs will inevitably choose the safety and comfort of government employment—and do so with all the drive that is generally thought to be “good enough” for that kind of work. …

David Harsanyi has a surprising opinion on Helen Thomas’ forced resignation.

…Of course, I am not suggesting that Thomas has a birthright to sit in the front row at a White House press conference (a situation that hasn’t made sense for at least three decades), or that anyone has an inalienable right to pontificate about the world for a newspaper chain or anyone else.

And, no, I can’t mourn the loss of Helen Thomas’ detestable opinions. But, at the same time, I can’t help but feel some trepidation about the ease in which some voices — in this case, one voice that is probably more honest than others of similar ideological disposition — can be expelled from the conversation simply for offending.

John Stossel writes about Milton Friedman.

…That’s from Friedman’s PBS TV series “Free to Choose,” which aired 30 years ago and became the basis of his No. 1 bestseller by the same name.

The title says a lot. If we are free to make our own choices, we prosper. That was a new idea to many back then. At the time — when inflation and interest rates were in double digits and unemployment approached 10 percent — people thought a wise government could ensure economic growth, guarantee full employment and eliminate poverty. Friedman explained that the opposite was true, that bigger government had brought us “burdensome taxes, high inflation, a welfare system under which neither those who receive help nor those who pay for it are satisfied. Trying to do good with other people’s money simply has not worked.”

No, it hasn’t. So why, 30 years later, is America doing so much more of it? …

James Capretta discusses more bad news about ObamaCare, and the watchdog organization that has been created to track it.

…The truth is, the more we learn about ObamaCare, the worse it gets.  It’s filled with budgetary gimmicks and flawed assumptions that will bankrupt the U.S. treasury. Its taxes will force deep cuts in employment in the medical device and other industries.  Restaurants and other employers will have strong incentives to avoid hiring workers from low income households in order to lessen the burden from the law’s mandates and penalties.  It will disrupt insurance for millions of Americans who are perfectly happy with the coverage they have today.  And the government’s clumsy cost-cutting efforts will undermine the quality of American medicine.

Most Americans already instinctively understand all of this.  But it’s also clear that the administration and its allies will spend millions trying to persuade them that up is down when it comes to health care. We have launched this web site to set the record straight.  ObamaCareWatch.org pulls together all of the best evidence and analysis about the legislation, as well as relevant news items and commentary, in an accessible and searchable format for anyone to use as they need to.  Our aim is to provide Americans with the facts so that they can hold those who sponsored and passed ObamaCare accountable for what they have done.

In Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler highlights some underhanded dealings by some businesses that cannot compete with Wal-Mart on the up and up.

Today’s WSJ has an interesting and eye-opening article on corporate-funded opposition to proposed Wal-Mart stores disguised as local community activism.  When I saw local busybodies try to stop the opening of a Wal-Mart in Cleveland — a Wal-Mart that did not receive any local subsidies nor require the use of eminent domain — I realized that union groups backed the effort.  What I was not aware of at the time was that grocery stores and large supermarket chains have become substantial funders of anti-Wal-Mart activism.

The article focuses on the activities of the Saint Consulting Group and its founder, P. Michael Saint, and their astroturf efforts  on behalf of SuperValue, Giant and other supermarket chains.

For the typical anti-Wal-Mart assignment, a Saint manager will drop into town using an assumed name to create or take control of local opposition, according to former Saint employees. They flood local politicians with calls, using multiple phones to make it appear that the calls are coming from different people, the former employees say. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

David Warren has interesting thoughts on the oil spill and on the mentality of the governing class.

…In a sense, Obama is hoist on his own petard. The man who blames Bush for everything now finds there are some things presidents cannot do. More deeply, the opposition party that persuades the public government can solve all their problems, discovers once in power there are problems government cannot solve.

Alas, it will take more time than they have to learn the next lesson: that governments which try to solve the insoluble, more or less invariably, make each problem worse.

I like to dwell on the wisdom of our ancestors. It took us millennia to emerge from the primitive notion that a malignant agency must lie behind every unfortunate experience. …

…In so many ways, the trend of post-Christian society today is back to pagan superstitions: to the belief that malice lies behind every misfortune, and to the related idea that various, essentially pagan charms can be used to ward off that to which all flesh is heir. The belief that, for instance, laws can be passed, that change the entire order of nature, is among the most irrational of these. …

Jennifer Rubin has a mind-blowing quote from Juan Williams, along with her usual excellent commentary.

Juan Williams — to the amazement of some of his co-panelists — let it rip on Fox News Sunday. The subject was nominally the Sestak and Romanoff scandals, but Williams found the bigger theme:

“I think the problem here is this is an administration that, as Hillary Clinton famously pointed out, you may not want to have answer the 3:00 a.m. call.

These are guys who have tremendous vision about legislative achievements and specific things like health care, going forward on immigration, those difficult issues for America that America so far has failed to deal with.

But when it comes to the crisis, when it comes to the gulf oil spill, the wars, the recession, they feel as if it’s being imposed upon them, rather than taking the helm. I think that’s what Americans are sensing right here. And I think it’s the source of their problem at the moment. Are you able to handle a crisis in a convincing way that inspires confidence? And so far, the president hasn’t done that. …”

Christopher Hitchens has a different view: he expresses disdain for both Israel and Turkey.

…While we wait for this puncturing of the current balloon of propaganda, we might as well savor the ironies. As well as being the two most intimate allies of the United States in the region, Turkey and Israel possess large and educated populations that want in their way to be part of “the West.” They also both suffer from mediocre and banana-republic-type leaders, who are willing prisoners of clerical extremists in their own second-rate regimes. Turkey cannot be thought of as European until it stops lying about Armenia, gets its invading troops out of Cyprus, and grants full rights to its huge Kurdish population. Israel will never be accepted as a state for Jews, let alone as a Jewish state, until it ceases to govern other people against their will. The flotilla foul-up, pitting former friends against each other, only serves to obscure these unignorable facts.

In the Corner, Jay Nordlinger comments on brave politicians.

By now, you may well have seen Chris Christie giving the teacher’s union what-for. I’m talking about this video. As you know, Christie is governor of New Jersey. And a breath — no, a tornado — of fresh air. All my life, I have waited for a politician to stand up to the teachers’ unions: for their bullying, for their unreason, for their claim to be watching out for “the children” when they are merely benefiting themselves. Politicians are just too frightened of the teachers’ unions, even when they have their number, unquestionably — even when they loathe them. …

In the National Review, Kevin Williamson breaks down the numbers in the Ponzi scheme that the government class has been running.

About that $14 trillion national debt: Get ready to tack some zeroes onto it. Taken alone, the amount of debt issued by the federal government — that $14 trillion figure that shows up on the national ledger — is a terrifying, awesome, hellacious number: Fourteen trillion seconds ago, Greenland was covered by lush and verdant forests, and the Neanderthals had not yet been outwitted and driven into extinction by Homo sapiens sapiens, because we did not yet exist. Big number, 14 trillion, and yet it doesn’t even begin to cover the real indebtedness of American governments at the federal, state, and local levels, because governments don’t count up their liabilities the same way businesses do. …

In the Daily Beast, Charlie Gasparino compares the current recession with the Depression and the failed government policies that prolonged it also.

…I’m not saying we are headed for a replay of the 1930s—read up on the history of economic booms and busts, and you’ll see they’re different in their own way—but there are disturbing similarities: Buried in those wonderful economic numbers, which the president touted on Friday, was the fact that almost all of the job growth was a function of the government’s hire of temporary census workers, rather than businesses beginning to hire again. After a period of improvement, private-sector job creation has almost ceased. Even worse, “the real” unemployment rate (which doesn’t count people looking for jobs) is rising above 17 percent, depending on the survey, which means that more people are simply dropping out of the workforce. Finally, a 9.7 percent unemployment rate is nothing to brag about, particularly when you have the Fed pumping massive amounts of money into the economy with near-zero percent interest-rate policy. …

…His stimulus package was supposed to produce shovel-ready jobs that would repair our infrastructure much like the various public-works programs instituted by Hoover and Roosevelt. But instead of spending the money on building roads and bridges, states have hoarded much of the stimulus cash to keep their own workforces fat and happy. While the construction industry suffers 20 percent unemployment, state and local governments are keeping employment at the DMV just humming along.

It should come as no surprise that unemployment is alarmingly high just about everywhere—except in government and on Wall Street, the recipient of government bailouts, which is yet another reason why investors are getting antsy and stocks are starting to slide. …

In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin gives another example of how taxes hurt the economy and earning potential of citizens.

The lesson that high taxes hurt business and, by definition, the communities in which those businesses reside is one that is proved every day by high-tax states like New York. That this applies not just to the financial industry and other victims of confiscatory fiscal policy but to all sorts of citizens as well is an issue rarely explored in the mainstream press. So it was fascinating to note that in the follow-up coverage to the first boxing match held at Yankee Stadium in 34 years this past weekend…

…Trost went on to state that …We’d love to do [Mayweather-Pacquiao], but I believe both of them are non-residents and the tax could be as much as 13 percent on the purse, where the tax out in Vegas is zero. That’s a big difference.”

…while liberal advocates for higher taxes routinely claim they are doing so to help ordinary New Yorkers, they ought to consider that in making it unattractive for fighters to perform here, they are actually robbing the people from the South Bronx and elsewhere in the city who work in the many jobs created every night Yankee Stadium is open. The failure to bring more such exhibitions to the city illustrates the simple truth that, once again, liberal economics has scored a technical knockout on the economic well-being of working-class New Yorkers.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Mark Steyn has an excellent article on Turkey. We touch here on only a small portion of the information he imparts. It didn’t take long for the world to take the measure of our reckless feckless president.

…Some Western “experts” like to see this as merely a confident, economically buoyant Turkey’s “re-Ottomanization.” But the virulent anti-Semitism emanating from Erdogan’s fief is nothing to do with the old-time caliphate (where, unlike rebellious Arabs, the Jews were loyal or at least quiescent subjects), and all but undistinguishable from the globalized hyper-Islam successfully seeded around the world by Wahhabist money and so enthusiastically embraced by third-generation Euro-Muslims. Since 9/11, many of us have speculated about Muslim reform, in the Arab world and beyond. It’s hard to recall now but just a few years ago there was talk about whether Gen. Musharraf would be Pakistan’s Ataturk. Instead, what we’re witnessing is the most prominent example of Muslim reform being de-reformed, before our very eyes, in nothing flat.

…Is Erdogan wrong in his calculation? Or is he, in his own fashion, only reaching his own conclusions about what Israel, India, the Czech Republic and others are coming to see as “the post-American world”? Well, look at it as if you’re sitting in the presidential palace of some or other Third World basket-case. Iran is going nuclear in full view of the world, and with huge implications for everything, not least the price of oil. Meanwhile, NATO’s only Muslim member has decided it would rather be friends with Iran, Sudan and Syria. And all this in the first decade of the 21st century. So much for stability.

David Warren on the failure of appeasement. Perhaps current generations of Americans and Israelis will witness and learn from the increased violence and unrest that appeasement brings.

…The arguments above should have been made loudly and unambiguously by the U.S. State Department, not left to me. By being aloof when a crucial ally is under attack, the U.S. is actually encouraging Israel’s enemies to pile on.

This is the universal problem with an appeasement policy: why it has a 100 percent failure rate. You do not get peace by encouraging mortal enemies to attack your ally. You get peace by making your support of that ally crystal clear. You do not “win friends and influence nations” by leaving your allies to hang. By broadcasting weakness, confusion, indecision, and incompetence, the Obama administration is quickly squandering the U.S. ability to prevent wars. …

…We need a serious inquiry into the Turkish government’s instigation of this incident. The broader question ought no longer to be whether Turkey should be let into the EU, but whether she should remain in NATO.

Ed Morrissey has more on non-government statistics that reflect the true state of the economy.

…Why did the unemployment rate go down?  People have begun exiting the labor force again (via Jonah Goldberg):

The unemployment rate fell to a seasonally adjusted 9.7% in May from 9.9% in April, according to a separate survey of 60,000 households. Economists were expecting the jobless rate to sink to 9.8%.

The decline wasn’t particularly good news, however, because the drop was due to 322,000 people dropping out of the labor force. While unemployment dropped by 287,000 to 15 million, employment also fell, dipping 35,000 to 139.4 million. …

Mort Zuckerman comments on the economy and jobs. More reason to cut back on government spending, and restrictive taxing and regulation that is preventing economic growth.

…Wherever you look the scene is bleak. Leading economic indicators fell in April – unusual at such an early stage in the up-cycle. Jobless claims were up by 25,000 to 471,000. And up again above expectations in the first three weeks of May – raising the four-week moving average to a level consistent with 100,000, or more, net job losses. For the past several months, claims have been nowhere near the levels of 400,000 and less that in the past were consistent with sustained job creation. We are not enjoying the normal cycle of economic improvement. If we were, employment would already have reached a new high and made up all of the jobs lost, as it did during the previous postwar recessions. This time we remain short of the old peak of employment, by an astounding 8.4m jobs. One in six Americans is either unemployed or underemployed. This is not a normal cycle when compared with a typical recession, which sees no more than 2m to 3m jobs lost.

Wages are falling; wage cuts are spreading as employers continue to curb costs and remain reluctant to hire. And the amount of excess labour continues to increase. … The headline unemployment rate is back up to slightly under 10 per cent, but this covers only people who sought a job in the previous four weeks.

What is the result of an excessive number of people seeking work, with an average of 5.6 people vying for each job opening? Wage deflation. Average hourly pay has not budged since the turn of the year, including one month in which we had a 0.1 per cent decline in average hourly earnings, something that has not happened since April 2003. …

In the WSJ, Arthur Laffer says to brace yourselves for 2011.

…On or about Jan. 1, 2011, federal, state and local tax rates are scheduled to rise quite sharply. President George W. Bush’s tax cuts expire on that date, meaning that the highest federal personal income tax rate will go 39.6% from 35%, the highest federal dividend tax rate pops up to 39.6% from 15%, the capital gains tax rate to 20% from 15%, and the estate tax rate to 55% from zero. Lots and lots of other changes will also occur as a result of the sunset provision in the Bush tax cuts.

Tax rates have been and will be raised on income earned from off-shore investments. Payroll taxes are already scheduled to rise in 2013 and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will be digging deeper and deeper into middle-income taxpayers. And there’s always the celebrated tax increase on Cadillac health care plans. State and local tax rates are also going up in 2011 as they did in 2010. Tax rate increases next year are everywhere.

Now, if people know tax rates will be higher next year than they are this year, what will those people do this year? They will shift production and income out of next year into this year to the extent possible. As a result, income this year has already been inflated above where it otherwise should be and next year, 2011, income will be lower than it otherwise should be.

Also, the prospect of rising prices, higher interest rates and more regulations next year will further entice demand and supply to be shifted from 2011 into 2010. In my view, this shift of income and demand is a major reason that the economy in 2010 has appeared as strong as it has. When we pass the tax boundary of Jan. 1, 2011, my best guess is that the train goes off the tracks and we get our worst nightmare of a severe “double dip” recession. …

George Will discusses the “emergency” aid to states for education: more pay to government workers while the rest of the economy founders.

…But before Congress is stampeded into spending yet more (borrowed) billions, it should read “The Phony Funding Crisis” in the journal Education Next by James W. Guthrie, a professor at Southern Methodist University, and Arthur Peng, a research associate. They say:

“For the past hundred years, with rare and short exceptions and after controlling for inflation, public schools have had both more money and more employees per student in each succeeding year.” Indeed, public schools have been so insulated from economic downturns that “there have been 11 periods during which GDP declined but mean total real per-pupil revenues still increased.”

…We are witnessing a familiar government dance, the Prosperity-to-Hysteria Two-Step: When revenue grows, governments put in place permanent spending streams; when revenue falls, governments exclaim that any retrenchment, even back to spending levels of a few years ago, is a “catastrophe.” …

In the Washington Examiner, Hugh Hewitt discusses upcoming topics on his radio show, including an interview with Arthur Brooks on his new book. The 70/30 concept of our nation makes a lot of sense. The sensible 70 percent of the country has allowed a takeover by the 30 percent composed of malcontents and people who think they’re superior and thus entitled to run everyone else’s lives

…Brooks’ book is a relatively short, very sharply argued explanation of how the 30 percent in this 70/30 nation of ours has come to control the federal government and many of the largest state governments, and in the process driven us to the point of a national fiscal stroke.

The 30 percent are the statists, the chattering class and their colleagues in academic and government employ, plus the government-dependent and a very large slice of the youth vote. Brooks details who they are and how they intend to grow their grip on the country.

The 70 percent are the rest of us, a mass that is coalescing into a potent political force that will be revealed fully on Nov. 2, 2010.

Brooks makes a compelling moral case for rolling back the vast creep of the 30 percent, whose regulatory and tax policies have spread like the oil slick in the Gulf, inexorably and continually for a very long time, creating enormous damage across the country, but damage that can and must be repaired. …

Pickerhead’s philosophy of running his business is this; if everything looks to be running well, you’ve obviously overlooked something. Robert Samuelson explains human response to success and how this caused BP’s disaster and our financial meltdown.

…Cost-cutting by BP, careless rig operators and lax regulators have all been fingered as plausible culprits in the blowout. President Obama has appointed a commission to investigate the causes, and the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation. There will be extensive analyses. But the stark contrast between the disaster’s magnitude and the previous safety record points to another perverse possibility: The success of deepwater drilling led to failure. It sowed overconfidence. Continuing achievements obscured the dangers.

This pattern applies to other national setbacks. Consider the financial crisis. It was not the inherent complexity of subprime mortgages or collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that caused the crisis. It was the willingness of presumably sophisticated investors to hold these securities while ignoring the complexity and underlying risks. But this behavior was understandable at the time. …

There’s a cycle to our calamities or, at any rate, some of them. Success tends to breed carelessness and complacency. People take more risks because they don’t think they’re taking risks. The regulated and the regulators often react similarly because they’ve shared similar experiences. The financial crisis didn’t occur so much because regulation was absent (many major financial institutions were regulated) but because regulators didn’t grasp the dangers. …

…It is human nature to celebrate success by relaxing. The challenge we face is how to acknowledge this urge without being duped by it.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The federal structure of the U. S. might be our undoing. Robert Barone has a scary post in Minyanville about relative levels of debt between us and say, Greece. An analysis that imputes to Americans all debt; federal, state, and local, puts us in the spendthrift lead.

… All of the public debt was originated by governments and most of the private debt by banks or other financial institutions. In feudal times, serfs owed a significant portion of their toil to their lords. Have times really changed? The lords are now the politicians and “Too Big to Fail” bankers. Many ordinary people are serfs, highly indebted either voluntarily (private debt) or involuntarily (public debt). Looking at debt in this way helps to explain the unholy alliance between Washington and Wall Street (see The Unholy Washington-Wall Street Alliance) and why the “Too Big to Fail” and Washington politicians get richer and richer at the public’s expense.

While US citizens are drowning in debt, the political system appears incapable of reducing it. In fact, the politicians continue to expand it in the erroneous belief that more debt will help. There are only two ways out: years of austerity or currency devaluation/inflation. The political system won’t allow the former. Buy Gold!

Jay Nordlinger has two fascinating Corner posts that start with Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Prize winning agriculturist and end with Andrei Sakharov’s Oslo tribute to the green revolutionists who were just then going out of fashion with the genetic food fascists.

Here are some comments Nordlinger posted from Norman Borlaug:

…“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny [the miserable] these things.”

Can I give you something else? Borlaug was asked what he had to say to advocates of organic farming. He replied,

“God bless you. Use all of the organic matter you want. But don’t deceive the world into believing that we can feed 6.2 billion people with organic matter alone. If we tried to do this, we would plow up all of these marginal lands, cut down much of our forests, and much of that would be productive for just a few years. Without chemical fertilizer, forget it.” …

And here is part of Nordlinger’s post discussing Andrei Sakharov.

…And I have something extraordinary for you. Five years after Borlaug won the peace prize, Andrei Sakharov won it. He was not allowed to travel to collect it, of course. But he wrote a Nobel lecture, delivered by his wife, Yelena Bonner, who happened to be out of the country anyway: She was in Italy, for medical treatment. As you can imagine, Sakharov had a lot to say, about the Soviet Union, human rights, nuclear weapons, and geopolitics. But he also found time for the Green Revolution, and its attackers:

“It is not so very long since men were unfamiliar with artificial fertilizers, mechanized farming, toxic chemicals, and intensive agricultural methods. There are voices calling for a return to more traditional and possibly less dangerous forms of agriculture. But can this be put into practice in a world in which hundreds of millions of people are suffering the pangs of hunger? On the contrary, there is no doubt that we need increasingly intensive methods of farming, and we need to spread modern methods all over the world, including the developing countries.”

Isn’t that something? With all the rest that Sakharov had to think about . . . (For his complete lecture, go here.)

Let me add this, please: Because Sakharov was one of the greatest dissidents, resisters, and human-rights champions of all time — because he was one of the most noble human beings we have ever known — we tend to forget that he was one of the greatest scientists of his age: the Soviet Union’s leading nuclear physicist, the father of its thermonuclear weapons. He sacrificed his scientific career — his privileges, his dachas, his laboratories, all of it — to do what was most right. What a man.

Roger Simon wants you to vote for Helen Thomas’ press credentials to be withdrawn.

…As for myself, I wish I felt I had that luxury. Unfortunately, I don’t. The vitriol is too much, not just from one old lady, but from too many corners of the globe. This is not a time for intellectual parsing, but for action — action against anti-Semitism before we are returned to an era we thought we would never see again.

Toward that end, PJTV has put up a short survey. It asks the question “Should the White House revoke the press credentials of Helen Thomas?” I guess you already know how I voted. If you would like to vote, please go here.

At the close of this post, Marty Peretz reminds us that the president’s first trip abroad was to Turkey. So they knew first what a jerk he is. We should have a law requiring him to stay home.

… But, for the moment—the long moment—the story is Turkey and its prime minister, the more-than-nutsy Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is dragging his country backwards, backwards, backwards. To long before the Ataturk era. Robert L. Pollock has a devastating column, “Erdogan and the Decline of the Turks,” also in this morning’s WSJ.

You may think that “backwards” does not mean the Islamic orbit. But I do. In any case, it means the route away from reason and scientific civilization. The road to darkness, where the Muslim world has been stuck for centuries.

Barack Obama put his trust in Erdogan on his first trip abroad. Two days in Turkey. What a waste.

Mark Steyn comments on recent anti-Semitic events.

In contrast to the general directions of Helen (“Go back to Germany and Poland“) Thomas, the peace-lovers aboard the Mavi Marmara were more specific:

In response to a radio transmission by the Israeli Navy warning the Gaza flotilla that they are approaching a naval blockade, passengers of the Mavi Marmara respond, “Shut up, go back to Auschwitz” and “We’re helping Arabs go against the US, don’t forget 9/11″.

Such amusing conversationalists.

These are not “humanitarian” “peace” “activists”. These are, in any objective sense, a party to the conflict. They’re not trying to bring “peace”, they’re trying to help their side win. That’s their choice, and may the best man win, but the media collusion in presenting them as “humanitarian” “aid” workers is Orwellian – and all the more so in a world in which the Turkish Prime Minister accuses Israel of killing children on the beach and in which the doyenne of the White House press corps no longer recognizes Israel’s “right to exist”. …

We also have Mark Steyn writing about the changing tactics of anti-Semitism.

…There is a kind of logic about this. As paradoxical as it sounds, Muslims have been far greater beneficiaries of Holocaust guilt than the Jews. In a nutshell, the Holocaust enabled the Islamization of Europe. Without post-war guilt, and the revulsion against nationalism, and the embrace of multiculturalism and mass immigration, the Continent would never have entertained for a moment the construction of mosques from Dublin to Dusseldorf and the accommodation of Muslim sensitivities on everything from British nursing uniforms to Brussels police doughnut consumption during Ramadan. Holocaust guilt is a cornerstone of the Muslim Europe arising before our eyes. The only minority that can’t leverage the Shoah these days is the actual target. …

…when the flotilla hit the fan, a couple of readers wrote to me to ask why the British and European media were always so eager to be led up the garden path. Because, when it comes to Israeli “atrocities,” they want to believe. Because, even in an age of sentimental one-worldism, the Jews remain “the other.” If old-school Euro-Judenhass derived from racism and nationalism, the new Judenhass has advanced under the cover of anti-racism and multiculturalism. The oldest hatred didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt.

In the NY Post, Kirsten Powers discusses the executive branch law-breaking actions.

…Many Beltway talkers are claiming that the president actually has the “right,” as head of the party, to clear the field in primaries. Sorry, the only people with the right to choose a nominee are primary voters. We live in the United States, not some Middle Eastern dictatorship (or, apparently, Chicago).

When I voted for Obama, I voted for him to be president, not for him to use government jobs or perks to drive out qualified challengers in Democratic primaries. …

In the WSJ, Kimberly Strassel writes about another law that was broken by the enthusiastic Obami job recruiters.

…No phrase is more feared in Washington than “quid pro quo,” and Beltway politicians carefully avoid any hint of it. There are winks and nods, yes. But you’d have to be crazy to put something in an email. Crazy, or from Chicago, where it is simply understood that the political machine decides elections and hands out consolation prizes accordingly.

…Yet as Scott Coffina, associate counsel to George W. Bush, has noted, the White House may have blundered into a separate charge.

“The Hatch Act,” writes Mr. Coffina in National Review Online, “makes it illegal for a federal employee to use his official position or authority to interfere with or affect the result of an election.” He notes that among Mr. Bauer’s justifications for the Sestak talk was that Democrats had a “legitimate interest” in avoiding a primary. “Advancing the interests of a political party is not a ‘legitimate’ use of one’s official government position,” says Mr. Coffina, yet Mr. Bauer is on record saying that was the goal. …

Michael Barone offers insights into how Obama’s behavior in office has been a demonstration of Chicago politics, where the ruling class has legalized their larceny.

…Obama could not have risen so far so fast without a profound understanding of the Chicago Way. And he has brought the Chicago Way to the White House.

One prime assumption of the Chicago Way is that there will always be a bounteous private sector that politicians can plunder endlessly. Chicago was America’s boom town from 1860 to 1900, growing from nothing to the center of the nation’s railroad network, the key nexus between farm and factory, the headquarters of great retailers and national trade associations.

…So it’s natural for a Chicago Way president to assume that higher taxes and a hugely expensive health care regime will not make a perceptible dent in the nation’s private sector economy. There will always be plenty to plunder. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The country elected somebody who had done nothing to be our president. How ironic he’s in trouble for something he did nothing to cause. Just how serious is the spill? Popular Mechanics lists the largest oil spills in history. No, the Exxon Valdez which spilled 10.8 million gallons did not make the list. The BP spill doesn’t make the list either. PM also informs us about the long-term damages caused by these spills. In the short-term, when calculating the costs to the Gulf Coast, the spill is devastating. It is entirely possible the livelihoods of millions of people will be wiped out for a couple of years. Long-term though, mother earth is a tough old broad.

In discussing the oil spill, David Broder compares the leadership skills of Obama and Carter.

…Obama keeps popping up in new settings, sounding as if he is in command, and he has refused to be confined to the White House as Carter was by the hostage crisis. His good-guy Coast Guard retired admiral has not melted under the pressure, and the BP execs we’ve seen on TV refuse to play cartoon capitalists, instead conveying the sense that they grieve over the accident.

As a result, this saga, painful as it is, has not yet become the simple demonstration of monumental futility and incompetence that the hostage crisis became for Carter, who let his personal frustration become the nation’s humiliation. When he finally mounted a rescue effort, and the helicopters crashed into each other in the desert before reaching the hostages, it was the final proof that he was cursed in anything he tried to do.

…Nothing is going to help Obama unless and until the engineers come up with a method for shutting down this gusher of pollution. He clearly couldn’t prevent it, and he was slow in signaling its severity. But he owns it now, and until it is over, the man who aspired to be the next John Kennedy or maybe Franklin Roosevelt will have to hope he doesn’t end up as Jimmy Carter.

John Fund has an interesting post on the bigger picture surrounding an Obama speech.

They’re calling it President Obama’s “malaise” speech, a reference to the infamous 1979 address in which President Jimmy Carter gave a downbeat assessment of America’s future. Yesterday, President Obama lamented that for many citizens today, there was a “feeling of not being in control of your own economic future, the sense that the American dream might slowly be slipping away.”

Mr. Obama’s speech at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University drew a sharp rebuke from Alan Meltzer, a leading economist at the school. He issued a statement saying it was the president’s tax and spending policies that were putting the country in peril. Mr. Obama’s “rhetoric was divorced from current reality,” he wrote. …

What was most visibly striking about Mr. Obama’s speech was who wasn’t there for it. … Lame-duck Senator Arlen Specter was there, but no other members of Congress attended — all pleaded other engagements. Joe Sestak, the congressman who defeated Mr. Specter in the Democratic primary last month, stayed in Philadelphia. For a state that Mr. Obama carried with 55% of the vote just a year and a half ago, the absence of prominent Pennsylvania Democrats clearly marked the decline of the president’s political fortunes. …

Charles Krauthammer writes an excellent analysis of Israel’s foreign policy and the abject stupidity of the UN’s responses.

…But as Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, the blockade is not just perfectly rational, it is perfectly legal. Gaza under Hamas is a self-declared enemy of Israel — a declaration backed up by more than 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilian territory. Yet having pledged itself to unceasing belligerency, Hamas claims victimhood when Israel imposes a blockade to prevent Hamas from arming itself with still more rockets.

In World War II, with full international legality, the United States blockaded Germany and Japan. And during the October 1962 missile crisis, we blockaded (“quarantined”) Cuba. Arms-bearing Russian ships headed to Cuba turned back because the Soviets knew that the U.S. Navy would either board them or sink them. Yet Israel is accused of international criminality for doing precisely what John Kennedy did: impose a naval blockade to prevent a hostile state from acquiring lethal weaponry. …

…Land for peace. Remember? Well, during the past decade, Israel gave the land — evacuating South Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. What did it get? An intensification of belligerency, heavy militarization of the enemy side, multiple kidnappings, cross-border attacks and, from Gaza, years of unrelenting rocket attack. …

In Forbes, Reihan Salam looks at historical tensions behind the flotilla propaganda.

…The fact that Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), the Turkish aid organization behind the flotilla, has explicitly aligned itself with Hamas and has ties to global jihad networks was hardly encouraging, not least because Hamas has been receiving weapons transported by sea. Hamas recognizes that Turkish public opinion is crucial to its efforts to undermine Israel’s international legitimacy. After a long and fruitful period of close collaboration between the Israeli and Turkish militaries, Turkey’s AK Party government, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has bolstered his political standing at home by loudly condemning Israel in international forums, and now his government is demanding that the U.S.condemn Israel. What appears to be a simple humanitarian mission was in fact part of a carefully orchestrated campaign designed to divide the NATO alliance and strengthen Hamas’ grip on Gaza. But no evidence will persuade the Turkish public that Israel had every right to enforce its blockade. The country’s political elites have every reason to direct the disaffection and anger of Turks away from themselves and towards Israel, a tactic also embraced by rulers throughout the region. …

Jennifer Rubin comments on continued foreign policy bungling.

Unmitigated chutzpah is the only way to characterize this, which comes via David Ignatius:

The Obama team recognizes that Israel will act in its interests, but it wants Jerusalem to consider U.S. interests, as well. The administration has communicated at a senior level its fear that the Israelis sometimes “care about their equities, but not about ours.”

Has Israel “condemned” the U.S.? Has Israel sought to reorient itself away from the U.S.? Demanded unilateral concessions by the U.S.? Snuggled up to foes of the U.S.? Or snubbed its president repeatedly?

The arrogance is stunning, even for the Obama crowd. …

Jennifer Rubin highlights the difference between the current administration stance on the flotilla propaganda and Marco Rubio’s response.

Contrast Obama’s testiness with Israel over the Jewish state’s temerity to defend itself with the sentiments of Marco Rubio, who writes, “Of course, we should stand with Israel.” It is worth reading Rubio’s comments in full, but this is particularly noteworthy:

As many in the international community use this flotilla incident to predictably rally against Israel, it is important to stand firmly behind our ally. In no way can the U.S. allow a path to be cleared that would enable the United Nations or any international body to discredit and diminish our democratic friend and partner. If Israel’s right to self-defense is undermined by misguided efforts to lift its legal and necessary blockade of Gaza, which serves to stop Hamas from arming itself with deadly weapons, there will be lasting consequences not only for Israel, but also for the U.S. and the entire world.

Make no mistake: while we await all the facts to emerge about this incident, it is clear the sponsors and participants of the Free Gaza Movement’s Flotilla have been thoroughly documented in their support of violent extremism. A far cry from being “humanitarian relief workers,” the activists on board the Mavi Marmara had a cache of bulletproof vests, night vision goggles and gas masks. This was no humanitarian mission.

No equivocation, no hand-wringing, no second-guessing. The un-Obama approach to our ally Israel.

The Obama administration has set the bar so low that we are delighted when it at least withholds judgment. But that is the wrong standard. …

Written just before the flotilla clash, Claudia Rosett gives us background on the Islamist terrorists that control Gaza, and the hypocrisy of the United Nations.

…Recall that in 2002, trying to stop the violence of Yasser Arafat’s second intifada, former President George W. Bush proposed a “roadmap” for peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In the multilateral haggling that followed, Israel in pursuit of that peace withdrew in 2005 from Gaza–a move that required Israeli authorities to forcibly drag some Jewish residents from their homes. But peace did not follow. In the ensuing Gaza elections in January 2006, Palestinian voters gave a large majority to Hamas. Five months later an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped into Gaza. Today, almost four years later, he has still not been released.

In 2007 Hamas in a bloody coup ousted the remaining parliamentarians of the rival Fatah party and after a spree of murdering fellow Palestinians took complete control of Gaza. During 2008, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, terrorists in Hamas-run Gaza fired 1,750 rockets and 1,528 mortar bombs into southern Israel. This was a gross and deliberate provocation which the United Nations and its constituent members of the so-called international community did nothing effective to stop. In late December 2008 Israel finally launched Operation Cast Lead, sending troops into Gaza for just over three weeks to try to shut down the attacks.

Hamas has not renounced its aim of destroying Israel. On the contrary, Hamas has been receiving military training and smuggled weapons from Iran, where the nuclear-wannabe rulers have openly expressed interest in wiping Israel off the map. In February 2009 Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, who operates out of Damascus, openly praised Iran for helping Hamas fight Israel. …

In the Corner, Daniel Foster explains how the government statistics show increased employment because the government counted short-term jobs with the Census in their “official” numbers.

New jobs numbers released this morning show the economy added 431,000 jobs in may as the unemployment rate fell to from 9.9 to 9.7 percent. But as with all employment reports, the government arithmetic shouldn’t fool you — these are disappointing numbers.

All but 20,000 of the 431,000 jobs added were temporary hires for the U.S. Census, and the dip in unemployment rate is the result of the continued exodus of Americans from the ranks of the job-seeking to the merely jobless — 322,000 in May. By contrast, employment decreased by 35,000 to 139.4 million…

David Harsanyi offers some additional sarcasm on the jobs-for-dropouts affair.

…But let’s pose broader questions regarding the Andrew Romanoff and Ron Sestak affairs: Why is it illegal to offer a position for a favor in the first place? What’s the big deal? Happens all the time. After all, it’s not as if our vast government bureaucracies employ a strict merit-driven hiring process.

If they did, would Ken Salazar be deemed the most capable person in the nation to lead the Department of the Interior? Solar-powered platitudes, empty threats and a cowboy hat can get you so far. What could possibly be the reason for a union-lackey like Hilda Solis running the Department of Labor? Labor in this case means actual jobs, right?

And, sadly, I have more business managing the Transportation Department than Ray LaHood, who believes cars are immoral, planes are unsafe and bicycles hold the key to solving the nation’s congestion. …

Scott Adams In Dilbert’s blog has a funny piece on the value of execution over ideas.

…Evaluating whether an idea is good enough for a movie is a bit like an automobile expert saying a certain brand of car doesn’t taste good. It’s absurd. …

…For example, here’s the world’s worst idea for a movie: Titanic. It did okay at the box office.

…The self-appointed movie critics went on to point out that Office Space was already a movie, so there was no room left in the universe for a Dilbert movie. That’s a bit like saying there’s no point in creating a romantic comedy because someone already did that one. …

… How about a Broadway musical about a bunch of frickin’ cats? Done!

You’d be hard pressed to come up with an idea so bad that it couldn’t succeed with the right execution. And it would be even harder to imagine a great idea that couldn’t fail if the execution were left to morons.

Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.

Don’t miss the cartoons today. They’re awesome.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Our favorite Davids look at the Middle East today.

David Warren starts by giving us more of the picture related to the Israeli raid on the pretend humanitarian mission to Gaza.

…From start to finish this was a violent political stunt, designed to inflict as much harm as possible on Israel’s existential interests. To defend it requires obtuse hypocrisy.

Consider: the embargo on Gaza is not Israel’s alone. Egypt also enforces strict controls on what enters and leaves Gaza, and for the same obvious reason. The territory is controlled by Hamas, and they are trying to import lethal weaponry, from Iran and other rogue sources. But Egypt is conveniently left out of the propaganda picture. …

David Goldman (Spengler) looks at what this incident tells us about Israeli foreign policy and the intentions of the Turkish government.

Israel mishandled the Gaza “humanitarian aid” flotilla through extreme forbearance, and will suffer a marathon of tongue-clicking and hand-wringing by diplomatic hypocrites who know better. The Jewish state lost the propaganda battle the moment the floating time bomb disguised as a humanitarian mission sailed from Turkey. If Israel had denounced the matter as a provocation and withdrawn its ambassador from Turkey, warning that the object of the exercise was to provoke violence and open the way for weapons deliveries to Hamas, the outcome might have been quite different. …

…There is a curious symmetry between Israel’s reluctance to call out the Turks for their sponsorship of the provocation, and the seemingly explicable reluctance of the Israeli military to treat the threat with the seriousness it clearly deserved. The Israeli navy commandos walked into a trap for which they clearly were unprepared. …

…Evidently, Israel has trouble accepting the reality on the ground, just as other governments do. There is not going to be a peace negotiation, but rather a war, and that the war will be terrible and bloody. Israel has lost Turkey as an ally; the United States, for that matter, has lost Turkey as an ally, as the leaders of Ankara compete with the mullahs of Tehran for the leadership of Islamism. …

David Harsanyi makes a number of good points, including turning the tables on the MSM.

…Still, commentators like Alan Colmes opine: “To speak out against this despicable act isn’t to hate Israel, but rather to love it, and peace.”

So why don’t left-wing pundits love Turkey for a while? That nation, after all, not only instigated this event but is home to more than 25 million Kurds living in occupied territories. Kurds who deal with daily human rights abuses: torture, mass disappearances, assaults on their language and culture.

No emergency sessions at the United Nations for them. …

…And no U.S. administration is pressuring Turkey to give Kurds their own state. …

In the Enterprise Blog, Marc Thiessen comments on the job no one wants.

Little noticed before the holiday weekend was this piece in the Washington Post,  where Obama administration officials bemoaned the fact that they can’t find anyone to accept the job of Director of National Intelligence (DNI). After floating the name of General James Clapper, the Obama administration is apparently looking elsewhere because of pressure from Capitol Hill to appoint a civilian. Problem? Apparently no qualified civilian intelligence experts are interested. The Post quotes an intelligence official saying, “Nobody who knows this stuff wants this job.”

Now why is that? Could it be the fact that the Obama administration has effectively declared war on the intelligence community—taking away the tools our intelligence professionals need to protect the country and then blaming them for their failure to anticipate and prevent plots like the Christmas Day and Times Square attacks? …

Theodore Dalrymple discusses how foreign aid can sustain a parasitic government class that has destroyed the economy and the wealth of the population. Below he discusses Julius Nyerere’s socialization of Tanzania.

…But Nyerere knew what to do for them. In 1967, he issued his famous Arusha Declaration, named for the town where he made it, committing Tanzania to socialism and vowing to end the exploitation of man by man that made some people rich and others poor. …So Tanzania nationalized the banks, appropriated commercial farms, took over all major industry, controlled prices, and put all export trade under the control of paragovernmental organizations.

…The predictable result of these efforts at preventing the exploitation of man by man was the collapse of production, pauperizing an already poor country. Tanzania went from being a significant exporter of agricultural produce to being utterly dependent on food imports, even for subsistence, in just a few years. …

…Thanks to foreign aid, a large bureaucracy grew up in Tanzania whose power, influence, and relative prosperity depended on its keeping the economy a genuine zero-sum game. A vicious circle had been created: the more impoverished the country, the greater the need for foreign aid; the greater the foreign aid, the more privileged the elite; the more privileged the elite, the greater the adherence to policies that resulted in poverty. Nyerere himself made the connection between privilege and ruinous policies perfectly clear after the International Monetary Fund suggested that Tanzania float its currency, the Tanzanian shilling, rather than maintain it at a ridiculously overvalued rate. “There would be rioting in the streets, and I would lose everything I have,” Nyerere said. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors remind us of the damage caused by the Clinton administration.

Statism: Like that of termites, the full damage from suit-and-tie radicals manifests years after their “reforms.” Only now, for example, are we seeing the devastation caused by the last Oval Office infestation.

Like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton also campaigned as a moderate. Once elected, however, he surrounded himself with some of the most radical leftists ever appointed to the Cabinet. (Many of them have re-enlisted with this administration.)

Behind the scenes, they worked furiously to undermine the system. And now, decades later, we’re seeing the results. Clinton’s policies — not just his unethical conduct — were recipes for disaster. …

John Stossel jumps into the fray regarding Rand Paul’s remarks on discrimination.

…It wasn’t free markets in the South that perpetuated racism. It was government colluding with private individuals (some in the KKK) to intimidate those who would have integrated.

It was private action that started challenging the racists, and it was succeeding — four years before the Civil Rights Act passed.

Government is a blunt instrument of violence that one day might do something you like but the next day will do something you abhor. Better to leave things to us — people — acting together privately.

Roger Simon posts on Joe McGinniss.

One thing you have to say for Joe McGinnis, he knows how to get himself some publicity for a book on the most over-exposed subject in America – Sarah Palin. Yawn, and triple yawn. …

…I write this, to be clear, as one of those, apparently rare, people who is mostly neutral on Palin. And rather bored with her (as I tend to be with many politicians who are so constantly in our faces, repeating the same ideas over and over). But her pathological enemies like McGinnis make me want to support her. McGinnis is manufacturing Palin supporters on a small level in much the way Obama, in a far larger and more important way, is manufacturing libertarians.