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We were going to ignore the ignorant itinerant pastor from Florida cracker country, but Spengler had other ideas as he dubs Pastor Terry Jones an asymmetrical warrior.
…United States President Barack Obama, top US commander in Afghanistan General David Petraeus, the Vatican, and every talking head across the political spectrum screamed in unison until this Florida fringe preacher with a congregation that could meet in a double-wide listened, rather like Dr Seuss’ Horton hearing the Who.
Enlightened opinion prevailed, but at high cost: L’Affaire Jones demonstrated that a madman carrying a match and a copy of the Koran can do more damage to the Muslim world than a busload of suicide bombers. Leftists liked to brag during the Vietnam war that a US$10 hand grenade could destroy a $10 million plane. What’s the dollar value of the damage from a used paperback edition of the Koran, available online for a couple of dollars?
As George Packer wrote on the New Yorker website on September 10, “Reason tries in its patient, level-headed way to explain, to question, to weigh competing claims, but it can hardly make itself heard and soon gives up … One man in Gainesville who represents next to nobody triggers thousands of men around the globe who know next to nothing about it to turn violent, which triggers more violence … it’s so easy to get people to go crazy. If I wanted to, I could probably start another India-Pakistan war all by myself.” Several of the world’s intelligence services doubtless are thinking along the same lines.
Instead of trying to stabilize the Islamic world, suppose – just for the sake of argument – that one or two world powers set out to throw it into chaos. I am not advocating such a strategy, only evaluating its effectiveness.
It is a misperception that America is the main object of Muslim rage. Most Muslim rage is directed against other Muslims. Religious violence perpetrated by Muslims against other Muslims is a routine feature of life in Pakistan, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Of the 1,868 acts of religious violence listed by the Global Terrorism Database, all but a handful were conducted by Muslims on Muslims. America has done its best to suppress such violence. What if America (or Russia, or India, or China) were to incite it?
The Islamic world’s claim on Western attention rests on its propensity to fail. America has spent a trillion dollars and 5,700 lives to prop up notionally pro-American regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention $2 billion a year to Egypt, and several hundred million each to Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, as well as smaller sums to other Muslim countries.
America will continue its efforts to stabilize fractious Islamic lands for the foreseeable future. Obama holds a personal as well as an ideological commitment to foster friendship with the Muslim world, and the Republicans will not admit that they were mistaken to commit so much blood and treasure to nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq. …
Conn Carroll at The Heritage Foundation makes excellent points about the totalitarian dictates of a government bureaucrat.
…Never before in the history of our republican form of government has an administration threatened to extinguish individual firms for merely communicating with their customers. But such are the dictatorial powers Obamacare grants to Secretary Sebelius. There are over 1,000 instances in the more than 2,700 page bill where Congress granted Secretary Sebelius new powers to regulate the health care industry. For example, her power to “determine” what does or does not count as a medical expense alone will decide the fate of many health insurance firms.
Is this the type of government our Founders intended our federal government to become? No. Hillsdale College Associate Professor of Political Science Ronald Pestritto explains:
The Founders understood that there are two fundamental ways in which government can exercise its authority. The first is a system of arbitrary rule, where the government decides how to act on an ad hoc basis, leaving decisions up to the whim of whatever official or officials happen to be in charge; the second way is to implement a system grounded in the rule of law, where legal rules are made in advance and published, binding both government and citizens and allowing the latter to know exactly what they have to do or not to do in order to avoid the coercive authority of the former.
Secretary Sebelius’ Hugo Chavezesque threats against the health insurance industry demonstrate why the fight to repeal Obamacare is also the fight for the soul of our country. Obamacare and the progressive movement represent a fundamental threat to our founding principles. For the left, “progress” means fundamentally transforming America through bureaucratic dictates that will engineer a “better” society by assuring equal outcomes. Through Obamacare, progressives would redistribute wealth through a distant, patronizing welfare state that regulates more and more of the economy, politics and society. The question Americans face is: Are we a country ruled by law or by bureaucrat?
In the Atlantic Blogs, Megan McArdle blogs about the risk of no-money-down, in light of a new Fannie Mae program.
CNBC’s John Carney adds “…The arguments for the program are not really persuasive. Adjustable rate loans are not the primary drivers of defaults–the primary driver is the combination of borrowers who have negative equity and expect that the value of their home will not appreciate soon. This means that no money down home loans are particularly dangerous–regardless of how vigorously lenders counsel homeowners or screen for credit scores.”
I’m not sure I quite agree with Carney’s assessment. It’s absolutely true that having negative equity is a better predictor of default than things like unemployment. But while many people have interpreted this to mean that negative equity makes you likely to strategically default, it’s not clear to me that that is actually very widespread. It’s just as plausible–perhaps more so–that having negative equity makes you much more vulnerable to negative income shocks, because you can’t sell the house or refinance when something bad happens.
But either way, having negative equity is very, very dangerous. And that’s what a no-money-down borrower has in this market, because prices aren’t rising much, and they need to find thousands of dollars to pay broker commissions and closing costs if they want to sell.
What truly boggles the mind is that the government still thinks that it’s somehow a good idea to help push people with basically no savings into homeownership. Do they want to make sure that a whole new class of financially marginal people can enjoy the benefits of foreclosure?
Steve Malanga is in the WSJ discussing a hopeful trend building against public-sector unions.
…The backlash against public unions has gone beyond heavily unionized states like California and New Jersey. One illustration is the finding of a July 7 national Rasmussen poll: Only 19% of Americans said that they would be willing to pay higher taxes to keep government workers from being laid off. Even in public safety, where Americans are sometimes reluctant to see cutbacks, the poll found only 34% endorsed higher taxes to preserve police and fire jobs.
The electorate may also be turning away from public unions because of their relentless campaigning for higher taxes. … In California, the teachers union has kicked in $500,000 as part of a campaign to rescind business tax breaks to keep jobs in the state. Last year in Michigan, a coalition of unions engineered a campaign called “A Better Michigan Future” that advocated hundreds of millions in new taxes, which the state legislature rejected.
The prospect of ever-higher taxes has Democrats distancing themselves from labor. New York Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo is preaching fiscal prudence and says public pensions are “out of line with economic reality.” In California, old allies of labor like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (who was once a teachers union official) are also inveighing against the cost imposed by public unions. Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski, an attorney who once represented unions, is advocating clamping down on public-sector pay and benefits to fix that state’s budget problems.
Unions are also on the defensive in the culture wars. Later this month the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” about the failings of our public schools, will debut in theaters nationwide. The film is directed by Davis Guggenheim, who earned impeccable liberal credentials as the director of the Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth.” His new documentary, say reviewers who’ve seen it, places a chunk of the blame for the woes of our schools on teachers unions and in particular paints Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, as an opponent of meaningful reform. …
Roger Simon tells us about a new book written by three Republican congressmen who want to make changes.
Campaign books are almost never “high literature,” nor are they usually intended to be. And no one would mistake Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders for de Toqueville’s Democracy in America, but the new book (published tomorrow) by Congressmen Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy is the next best thing to a classic. It is a war cry.
This war cry is not just the predictable excoriation of the failed liberal Democratic policies of Barack Obama, but a striking attack by the three Republican congressmen on their own party for having violated the small government principles upon which they were elected. If the Tea Party movement is looking for leadership, it may be sitting there in plain sight with Cantor, Ryan and McCarthy.
…Of course, these three gentlemen could be accused at this point of being career politicians themselves, but they clearly understand this contradiction, are airing it publicly, and struggling to stay principled.
The bulk of the short book continues with three longish essays, each by one of the authors. They are essentially narratives of their recent experiences in Congress interspersed with their political views. …
In the NRO, Kevin Williamson comments on the young guns.
…Ryan, who has been one of the few sane voices on the debt for some time now, says he expects the new crop of Republicans expected to be sworn in come January to be a rowdy bunch, with little respect for the seniority system or traditional congressional politics. Cantor, too, made it clear that he knows they are in for a long-term fight — no magic-bullet solutions were under consideration. McCarthy was the surprise for me, though — I did not know much about him and was impressed by his command of the data, relating both to politics and policy.
I have been, and remain, skeptical of congressional Republicans’ ability to head off Fiscal Armageddon; the political incentives are all wrong, and it probably will take a major economic crisis to realign those incentives. But I am a little less skeptical today than I was yesterday — maybe 5 percent less. I think there is a non-trivial chance that non-entitlement spending could be scaled back to 2008 levels — not exactly raging austerity, but a start; combined with sane entitlement reform and tax reform, that could get us several steps back from the ledge we’re on. Something good seems to be afoot among Republicans.
Here’s what to worry about: Chances are, the economy is still going to stink in January 2011. It may be worse then than it is today — and it is possible that it will be significantly worse. Ryan is worried about the dollar, and he is right to be. If things get really hideous economically, then there is going to be tremendous political pressure on the GOP to do the dumb thing that Republicans always do: cut the taxes and let the spending grow. That could happen. We can’t let it. …