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We like the “in your face” July 4th message from David Harsanyi.
… Why, without cars, the rock-ribbed patriot would no longer be able to drive up to a window and order fried potatoes enveloped in unwholesome amounts of salt (the silent killer!) and a mega-caloric sugary drink to wash it down. How would he transport that 60-inch flat-screen from the gargantuan, air-conditioned box store to his home? Public transit?
I will join all others in offering my profound adoration of virtuous ideals like liberty, justice and equality on this July 4th. But those can often be theoretical discussions. Everyone loves freedom, right? Well, until they see fit to start dictating how their inconsiderate, eco-villain neighbors should start acting.
Cars — not public transit or shared bicycle programs — offer citizens the amazing freedom of movement, the ability to live like kings far from high-density, “transit-rich,” bicycle-friendly urban centers that we’re supposed to admire.
Admit it: America loves cars.
Charles Krauthammer discusses the dishonesty of the government’s response to the Islamic terrorist attacks.
…Indeed, Islamist fundamentalism is not only a risk factor. It is the risk factor, the common denominator linking all the great terror attacks of this century — from 9/11 to Mumbai, from Fort Hood to Times Square, from London to Madrid to Bali. The attackers varied in nationality, education, age, social class, native tongue and race. The one thing that united them was the jihadist vision in whose name they acted.
To deny this undeniable truth leads to further absurdities. Remember the wave of speculation about Hasan’s supposed secondary post-traumatic stress disorder — that he was so deeply affected by the heart-rending stories of his war-traumatized patients that he became radicalized? On the contrary. He was moved not by their suffering but by the suffering they (and the rest of the U.S. military) inflicted on Hasan’s fellow Muslims, in whose name he gunned down 12 American soldiers while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”
With Shahzad, we find the equivalent ridiculous — and exculpating — speculation that perhaps he was driven over the edge by the foreclosure of his home. Good grief. Of course his home went into foreclosure — so would yours if you voluntarily quit your job and stopped house payments to go to Pakistan for jihadist training. As The Post’s Charles Lane pointed out, foreclosure was a result of Shahzad’s radicalism, not the cause. …
Starting with some European leaders’ criticisms of Obama’s spending, Karl Rove discusses the continued government spending and voters’ reaction to it.
…A report on these focus groups issued this week by Resurgent Republic (a group I helped found) showed that both political independents and tea party participants passionately denounced federal spending and deficits, using words like “reckless,” “out of control,” “unnecessary” and “unhelpful.” The evidence suggests that both groups remain deeply skeptical of Mr. Obama’s stimulus package and are unpersuaded by the administration’s arguments in its favor.
The authors of the Resurgent Republic study concluded that both independents and tea party voters believe “nearly unanimously” that reckless government spending, not lack of tax revenues, is responsible for the deficits. This goes to the very heart of the modern Democratic agenda with its guiding philosophy of bigger government and higher taxes.
…It is the president and Congressional allies who refuse to return the $447 billion unspent stimulus dollars and want to use repayments of TARP loans for more spending rather than reducing the deficit. It is the president who gave Fannie and Freddie carte blanche to draw hundreds of billions from the Treasury. It is the Democrats’ profligacy that raised the share of the GDP taken by the federal government to 24% this fiscal year. …
We have more comments from Charles Krauthammer, care of the NRO staff.
On President Obama’s criticism of Republicans for opposing his financial reform legislation:
“The president is showing in his response his style of demonizing and de-legitimizing opponents’ arguments. He pretends that he‘s a professor who deals in a Socratic way, recognizes arguments and deals honestly with them.
This is extremely dishonest. The Republicans, he charged in that speech, are opposing his reform on finance entirely on political grounds. There are obvious arguments that all the claims that the president has made — that it will ensure that we’re not going to have a bailout in the future and all the others — are not true. There are a lot of independent economists who say it’s going to increase the chance of a bailout. …”
Peter Wehner looks at Obama’s comments about the failed stimulus package.
…There is a lot to say in response, starting with the fact that some of these statements are flatly untrue. It is simply not correct that “every economist” who has looked at the stimulus bill says it did its job. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, for example — on the very day Obama claimed universal support among economists for his stimulus package — Allan Meltzer, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, began his op-ed this way: “The administration’ s stimulus program has failed.” There are even Keynesian economists, like Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, who are critical of the Recovery Act [h/t: Ed Morrissey].
But the problem for Obama goes deeper than simply this false claim. The Obama administration itself said that if the Recovery Act passed, unemployment would not exceed 8 percent. In fact, unemployment has exceeded what the Obama administration said would happen were the stimulus bill not passed. President Obama is the one who set the standard — and he’s now rightfully being held to it.
Beyond even that, though, it is interesting to see how much reality has humbled this president. He came into office not only promising to create jobs, restore prosperity, open doors of opportunity, cut health-care costs, and reduce our “mounting debt” but also to end divisions in our politics, transcend partisanship, put an end to the blame game, provide unprecedented transparency, stop the rise of the oceans, and heal the planet. Those were his words, his claims, his commitments. And now he has been reduced to saying: “Things are still tough; they just aren’t as bad as they could have been.” His strongest case in his defense is that unemployment is almost 10 percent — but it’s not 12 or 13 or 15 percent.
Talk about defining success down. …
In the Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery discusses the liberal intelligentsia’s perception of brilliance.
…”Obama, for all his brilliance, has no real, felt understanding of management structures,” says Tina Brown, describing the failure to handle the oil disaster, without explaining what, beyond talking, Obama has been brilliant at. He can talk up a storm (though of late this has faltered), but so far his shimmering intellect has led him to think that aggressors can be tamed by making concessions; that he should expand the welfare state just as it is proving unworkable (and very unpopular with the American people)…
…No one advances the more likely conclusion: That Obama seems so much like their idea of brilliance that they assume it of him without too much evidence; or that their perception of brilliance — often no more than a verbal facility — isn’t much use in the world. …
…Nor are degrees from the very best places. Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln had next to no formal schooling, a failed haberdasher from flyover country saved West Europe from Josef Stalin, and one of the two most important presidents of the 20th century was an “amiable dunce” from Eureka College and Hollywood. …
Tunku Varadarajan didn’t think much of the president’s speech on immigration.
…Predictably, he came out against an “amnesty” for illegal immigrants in this country, estimated at 11 million people. The president is a smart man and knows political suicide when he sees it. Equally predictably, he said that deportation of these people was not an option, such a course being “logistically impossible and wildly expensive.” Besides, “it would tear at the fabric of our society” and “disrupt our economy.” So, what do we do? We must “navigate” between the two poles of mass amnesty and mass deportation. Don’t you see? …
In Contentions, Jonathan Tobin takes a different view of the president’s position and his speech.
…It is an unfortunate fact that many on the right have boxed themselves in on immigration to the point where any position on it other than a call for a draconian crackdown on illegals and mass deportation (which Obama rightly claims is unrealistic) is considered akin to amnesty. While the president attempted to pose somewhat disingenuously as the man between two extremes, by offering those here illegally a path to citizenship (preceded by paying a fine, waiting in line behind those who have applied via the legal apparatus, and learning English), he is unlikely to get much support from many conservatives or moderates from either party. That’s a shame, since Obama’s proposals, like those of Bush before him, constitute nothing more than recognition of reality in terms of both law enforcement and the undeniable demand that exists here for low-wage foreign workers. While neither this Congress nor its successor is likely to pass such a bill, that does not mean that it shouldn’t. …
John Stossel looks at several factors that make America great.
…We know that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but Edison failed much more often than he succeeded. He had hundreds of failures. He was fired by the telegraph office, and lost money on a cement company and an iron business. Henry Ford’s first company failed completely. Dr. Seuss’ first book was rejected by 27 publishers. Oprah was fired from her first job as a reporter. A TV station called her unfit for television.
“There’s something in the American temperament that says, ‘Gosh, I lost seven times but that’s OK,’” D’Souza says. “And I think that that’s a resiliency of the American spirit.” …
The Economist reports on an interesting new hypothesis about differences in IQ across countries.
HUMAN intelligence is puzzling. It is higher, on average, in some places than in others. And it seems to have been rising in recent decades. Why these two things should be true is controversial. This week, though, a group of researchers at the University of New Mexico propose the same explanation for both: the effect of infectious disease. If they are right, it suggests that the control of such diseases is crucial to a country’s development in a way that had not been appreciated before. Places that harbour a lot of parasites and pathogens not only suffer the debilitating effects of disease on their workforces, but also have their human capital eroded, child by child, from birth.
Christopher Eppig and his colleagues make their suggestion in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. They note that the brains of newly born children require 87% of those children’s metabolic energy. In five-year-olds the figure is still 44% and even in adults the brain—a mere 2% of the body’s weight—consumes about a quarter of the body’s energy. Any competition for this energy is likely to damage the brain’s development, and parasites and pathogens compete for it in several ways. Some feed on the host’s tissue directly, or hijack its molecular machinery to reproduce. Some, particularly those that live in the gut, stop their host absorbing food. And all provoke the host’s immune system into activity, which diverts resources from other things. …
Pickerhead has long been amused by the bien pensants love of soccer, the sport of the sport of the world’s joe six-packs. In American.com, Marc Thiessen agrees.
…The world is crazy for soccer, but most Americans don’t give a hoot about the sport. Why? Many years ago, my former White House colleague Bill McGurn pointed out to me the real reason soccer hasn’t caught on in the good old U.S.A. It’s simple, really: Soccer is a socialist sport.
Think about it. Soccer is the only sport in the world where you cannot use the one tool that distinguishes man from beast: opposable thumbs. “No hands” is a rule only a European statist could love. (In fact, with the web of high taxes and regulations that tie the hands of European entrepreneurs, “no hands” kind of describes their economic theories as well.) …
…At the youth level, soccer teams don’t even keep score and everyone gets a participation trophy. Can you say, “From each according to his ability…”? (The fact that they do keep score later on is the only thing that prevents soccer from being a Communist sport.)
Capitalist sports are exciting—people often hit each other, sometimes even score. Soccer fans are excited by an egalitarian 0-0 tie. When soccer powerhouses Brazil and Portugal met recently at the World Cup, they played for 90 minutes—and combined got just eight shots on net (and zero goals). Contrast this with the most exciting sports moment last week, which came not at the World Cup, but at Wimbledon, when American John Isner won in a fifth-set victory that went 70-68. Yes, even tennis is more exciting than soccer. Like an overcast day in East Berlin, soccer is … boring. …