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Ayaan Hirsi Ali takes a macro worldview in discussing the conflicts between Muslim and Western civilizations.
What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as issues of religious tolerance. But that is not their essence. Fundamentally, they are all symptoms of what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington called the “Clash of Civilizations,” particularly the clash between Islam and the West.
Huntington’s argument is worth summarizing briefly for those who now only remember his striking title. The essential building block of the post-Cold War world, he wrote, are seven or eight historical civilizations of which the Western, the Muslim and the Confucian are the most important.
The balance of power among these civilizations, he argued, is shifting. The West is declining in relative power, Islam is exploding demographically, and Asian civilizations—especially China—are economically ascendant. Huntington also said that a civilization-based world order is emerging in which states that share cultural affinities will cooperate with each other and group themselves around the leading states of their civilization. …
Peter Schiff says that Fed policies are going to result in more trouble down the road.
…Like their patrons in the White House and on Capitol Hill, the Fed is totally dedicated to postponing the short-term consequences that would result from breaking America’s addiction to cheap money and easy credit. Compared to this imperative, the long-term economic health of the country barely gets a second thought.
Any moves by the Fed to shrink its balance sheet, thereby withdrawing liquidity from the real estate market, would add significant downward pressure to home prices. Lower house prices would bring on an additional wave of foreclosures, which would then force many previously bailed-out financial institutions back into bankruptcy. (With foreclosure data growing more ominous despite the current stability in house prices, it looks like these institutions are headed back toward bankruptcy even with Fed support.)
To prevent this economic chain-reaction, the Fed will step in with “quantitative easing” as soon as it becomes obvious that the Administration’s stimulus-fueled “recovery” of the past three quarters is fading. The problem is that each round of stimulus, as with each hit of an addictive drug, requires ever larger doses to produce the same result. The more leveraged an economy becomes, the bigger the lever required to move it. So the more the Fed stimulates now, the more it will be forced to stimulate later. The only exit strategy this course allows is an overdose– hyperinflation. …
Craig Pirrong in Streetwise Professor blogs about the market dynamics we are currently seeing.
In today’s WSJ Jerry O’Driscoll summarizes quite well something I was saying at the depths of the crisis in late-’08 and early-’09, and during the debate on the stimulus:
…The declines in home values, investor portfolios and 401(k) plans, and the uncertainties surrounding retirement plans, have all had a big impact. The solution lies in restoring balance sheets. For financial firms, that means raising capital. For consumers and businesses alike, that means saving more of their reduced incomes. …
Yet public policy has focused almost exclusively on stimulating spending without much regard to why spending, especially consumption, has flagged. Until balance sheets (corporate and household) are restored, increased spending cannot be sustained. [This failure to ask "why" is endemic in current policymaking. It's been my pet peeve in the whole debate over changing financial regulation.]
…Uncle Sam stomps on the gas, we stomp on the brakes. All that is produced is a lot of burning rubber and the car doing donuts.
Ed Morrissey comments on the presidential disconnect from reality.
…Incoherence and hair-splitting is nothing new with this President. However, as I noted yesterday, Obama has rarely blundered into such an emotional minefield as … this issue has become (fairly or unfairly), and the media hasn’t had to pay much attention to it. By attempting to once again lecture people on how wrong most of us are on either side of an issue, Obama has exposed himself once again as a person who doesn’t engage well with the American people he seeks to lead.
This goes far beyond the Ground Zero mosque. The same clueless, tone-deaf disconnect at the White House led to the “Recovery Summer” PR campaign, in which Obama and Joe Biden have lectured us about how great things are while all of the evidence points to a significant decline in the economy. While the country demanded a change of economic policy to encourage real growth, the White House and Congress instead insisted on spending nine months to give birth to ObamaCare, a bill so unpopular that six out of ten voters want it repealed. While joblessness continues to deepen, Obama and the Democrats are taking money out of food stamps to fund a bill that will tell taxpayers how to eat.
The problem is not just incoherence, although that’s a part of it. It’s arrogance, and that’s nothing new at all from Barack Obama…
Jennifer Rubin catches Maureen Dowd so mad at the pretend prez, she’s wishing W was back.
… she’s fit to be tied about it — so much so that’s she’s praising George W. Bush for saying nice things about Muslims, championing AIDS prevention in Africa, and making a real effort on immigration reform. (I was not pleased with his excessive genuflecting on the first, but we’ve certainly entered the Twilight Zone of politics when she throws Bush in Obama’s face. Nothing like a woman scorned.) Anyway, she’s not done with the unflattering comparisons. Bill Clinton, at least, “never presented himself as a moral guide to the country,” so it’s all the more painful when Obama “flops around” on the mosque and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. …
We get Ed Morrissey back with more on the left-media missing Bush.
How badly did Barack Obama fumble the mosque controversy last weekend? No fewer than three media columnists now want Obama rescued by George W. Bush. Byron York reports on the desperate pleas: …
Jeff Jacoby looks at the current 14th Amendment debate from an historical perspective, and ends with these thoughts.
…After all, if the Citizenship Clause no longer protected babies born to illegal immigrants — an estimated 8 percent of all US births — the principal result would be to enlarge the illegal population. “Revoking birthright citizenship,’’ writes Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, “would turn hundreds of thousands of infants into ‘criminals’ — arriving, not across a border, but crying in a hospital.’’ Why would anyone who purports to be concerned about citizenship and the rule of law even suggest something so unjust?
The 14th Amendment says nothing about parents. It does not make citizenship contingent on ancestry, bloodlines, or political favor. The immigration debates may churn, but about this much the Constitution is unequivocal: Anyone born in America is an American. Our nation has been enriched — not “overrun’’ — because of birthright citizenship. The 19th-century nativists who feared otherwise were wrong. Their intellectual heirs today are, too.
John Stossel thinks we need to privatize Social Security.
…No can say the future will be like the past, but we know what the future of the government’s scheme holds: postponed retirement and/or reduced benefits and/or crushing taxes and (most likely, I think) a near-worthless dollar because politicians will print money to “keep” their deceitful pension promises.
Privatization is better. Everything that works well — everything that brings innovation and prosperity — comes from the private sector. Obama is irresponsible to campaign against that.
There’s no ideal fix. But our best hope is separation of economy and government.
In the WSJ, Alex Epstein reminds us that we have had a moratorium on oil drilling before. Remember the GOP disaster that was Richard Nixon?
Which former president does Barack Obama most resemble? When it comes to handling oil spills, the answer is Richard Nixon. Like our current president, Nixon too presided over a major offshore oil blowout—the three million gallon Santa Barbara spill of 1969. And, like Mr. Obama, Nixon responded by whipping up anti-oil sentiment and passing a sweeping moratorium on drilling. …
…For Americans, this meant scarcer, more expensive oil. For American companies, it meant the inability to adapt to any disruptions in the oil market, such as the embargo. And to make matters far worse, Nixon blamed rising gasoline prices on oil companies and ordered extended, market-mangling price controls that prevented demand from adjusting to supply, thus creating shortages. …
…It is hard today to remember how bad the energy crisis was. Imagine getting up two hours earlier to wait in line for gasoline, inching forward in a line of cars, hoping that the fuel doesn’t run out by the time you get to the front of the line—or when you next come back (on one of your government-assigned rationing days, of course). Imagine the chronic feeling that the days of abundant, affordable energy—and the ability to travel where you want, when you want—were over. …
We have more good NRO Shorts. Here are two:
Son Jong Nam was a good, loyal North Korean: For ten years, he served in the “presidential security service.” But then something happened: His wife was accused of remarking on the famine that had spread throughout the land. Eight months pregnant, she was seized by the police. They kicked her in the stomach until the baby died. Son fled with his family to China. His wife died. He found Christianity, and began to evangelize among his fellow North Korean defectors. The Chinese caught him doing this and sent him back to North Korea: where he was tortured almost to death. Released, he sneaked back across the Chinese border, to see his daughter, who had been left in the care of a missionary. He decided to return to North Korea, seeing it as his duty to spread the Word there. He was caught with Bibles: and charged with spying for the United States and South Korea. He was sentenced to public execution by firing squad. But his brother, in South Korea, launched an international campaign to save him. According to a news report, the campaign apparently led the North Koreans “to switch to a less public method: torture.” The brother observed, “There are many ways to kill people in North Korea.” Son Jong Nam was at last tortured to death, age 50. A great man. An evil regime.
We’d like to congratulate Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) for getting so completely under the skin of Princeton professor Paul Krugman, who recently used his New York Times column to call Ryan a “charlatan” and his deficit-reduction plan a “fraud” that had been “drenched in flimflam sauce.” Krugman did not present any new criticisms of Ryan’s plan; he merely repeated the claim that, according to one group of experts, the tax side of it wouldn’t raise enough revenue to eliminate the deficit. Ryan simply responded that experts oftentimes disagree when estimating the effects of policy changes far into the future, and that he would be amenable to tweaking his tax plan to keep revenues at their historical average as a percentage of GDP — this would be sufficient to balance the budget under his plan. Krugman’s real problem with Ryan’s plan, of course, is that he thinks Americans have historically paid too little in taxes, and the budget should be balanced through tax hikes rather than spending cuts. Many of us have made the opposite case, but few have done it so effectively as to elicit such a hilariously self-defeating response from such an influential proponent of higher taxes.