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Nile Gardiner reacts to Kremlin Obama love.
The White House should be thoroughly embarrassed by this endorsement from the leader of one of America’s biggest strategic adversaries, the head of an increasingly dangerous, aggressive and authoritarian regime with an appalling human rights record. It is a particularly telling moment for a US administration that has spent a great deal of its time engaging many of America’s enemies and appeasing hostile powers while treating traditional allies such as Great Britain and Israel with thinly veiled contempt.
Medvedev’s adoring praise is a damning indictment of President Obama’s weak-kneed approach at a time when US leadership is being increasingly challenged from the Middle East to the Near Abroad. When the Kremlin clearly has a soft spot for the leader of the free world, you know something is monumentally rotten at the heart of American foreign policy.
Jonathan Tobin writes on the latest hit piece on Clarence Thomas from the NY Times.
When it comes to media coverage of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the rules have always been very different from that of other judicial figures. Sunday’s front page feature in the Sunday New York Times about Thomas and his various associations with rich people is the sort of thing that one simply cannot imagine being written or published about anyone else on the high court.
The piece is a 2,800-word insinuation about ethical violations that are never spelled out. Reporter Mike McIntire was sent out on a fishing expedition looking for juicy material about this liberal bête noire and clearly came up empty. But instead of spiking the story, the Times (whose new editor Jill Abramson’s career was made via slanders of Thomas) printed it anyway.
The worst allegation in the piece is that Thomas may have helped persuade a wealthy donor to contribute to the building of a museum about the culture of poor Gullah-speaking African-Americans along the Georgia coast where the jurist grew up. …
More on this from Ann Althouse.
“But of course, the New York Times piece isn’t really about ethics. It’s battlespace preparation for the Supreme Court’s healthcare vote. The problem for the Times is that Thomas doesn’t care what the New York Times thinks. Which means this is more about preparing a narrative of failure for ObamaCare — It was struck down by evil corrupt conservative judges. I think they’re going to be kept quite busy constructing failure narratives over the next couple of years.”
And a comment on the Althouse site has this. . .
… I read the NYT piece this morning early, while still groggy, and went back for a second, slow pass to see what I was missing. Which was nothing. The Times can be slow to act on egregious matters (maybe John Edwards is a good example) that are right beneath their noses, but they will strive mightily to produce a hint of a whiff of an infraction, especially if it regards someone they simply despise.
So I say to the Times: Die you egg sucking pigs!
Some straight energy talk from Ezra Levant in the Toronto Sun.
An OPEC billionaire has publicly said what everyone long suspected, but just hadn’t heard out loud before: Saudi Arabia doesn’t want the world to develop unconventional sources of oil, like Canada’s oilsands.
Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the world’s 26th richest man, worth more than $19 billion, told CNN he’s worried if oil prices stay around $100 a barrel, the West will look for other sources of oil and Saudi Arabia would lose its dominant position.
“We don’t want the West to go and find alternatives,” he said, “because, clearly, the higher the price of oil goes, the more they have incentives to go and find alternatives.” Give the sheik full marks for honesty. Saudi Arabia has the West just where they want us. They don’t want us getting any big ideas that would reduce our dependence on his dictatorship, and terrorist states like Iran.
It’s like when the head of Russia’s state-controlled natural gas company, Gazprom, denounced new technologies to produce shale gas, saying he was worried about the safety of “American housewives.” No, Gazprom executives and Vladimir Putin are not concerned about human rights and environmentalism in Russia, let alone the West. They’re concerned about competition that would free America and Europe from reliance on Putin’s natural gas. …
So, how come the blue states suck at educating their kids? The more parsimonious red states are doing better according to - Newsweek! Walter Russell Mead has the story.
When it come to excellence in education, red states rule — at least according to a panel of experts assembled by Tina Brown’s Newsweek. Using a set of indicators ranging from graduation rate to college admissions and SAT scores, the panel reviewed data from high schools all over the country to find the best public schools in the country.
The results make depressing reading for the teacher unions: the very best public high schools in the country are heavily concentrated in red states.
Three of the nation’s ten best public high schools are in Texas — the no-income tax, right-to-work state that blue model defenders like to characterize as America at its worst. Florida, another no-income tax, right-to-work state long misgoverned by the evil and rapacious Bush dynasty, has two of the top ten schools.
Newsweek isn’t alone with these shocking results. Another top public school list, compiled by the Washington Post, was issued in May. Texas and Florida rank number one and number two on that list’s top ten as well. …
A columnist for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel celebrates events in Wisconsin.
So the state’s deficit is fixed, its finances are honest for the first time in about a decade, public services are trimmed but not decimated and no taxpayers were skinned to make it happen. All in all, it’s been a good week for Wisconsin, especially its hard-pressed, middle-class taxpayers.
And, if I might get political, the first six months of the Age of Walker have left conservatism in a surprisingly solid condition in Wisconsin.
You might not know that from the theatrics in Madison – the fringe of tents, the bucket-drummers in the rotunda, the activists telling Progressive magazine it’s time to make the state “ungovernable.”
But that all is precisely theatrics, a show, a tale. The reality is that in our purple battleground of a state, conservative ideas now hold the high ground. Let us count the signs: …
City Journal looks for the perfect GOP candidate.
Having dodged the Trump bullet, the Republican Party is still searching for a candidate who can win. This early in the race, of course, it’s usually hard to spot a winner. How many people would have bet in 2007 that an inexperienced African-American senator could become president? Yet in 2012, it’s clear what a Republican candidate needs to win: he or she must harness the support of the Tea Party without alienating independent voters. Without the enthusiasm of the Tea Party, the candidate cannot energize the Republican base. Without the support of independents, the candidate cannot win a majority in the general election. The midterm elections demonstrated this principle: candidates who could straddle the two groups won, while candidates who couldn’t lost.
The good news is that this isn’t an impossible task. …
And John Tamny says the Media can’t save Barack from the economy he created.
With the Obama economy limping along thanks in part to the Administration’s policies in favor of extreme dollar weakness, there’s growing speculation as to his re-election chances in 2012. Will a difficult economic situation that includes high levels of unemployment make Obama a one-term president? History says no given the power of incumbency.
Added to that, another popular narrative of late points to an Obama victory owing to the supposed economic illiteracy of the electorate, along with a media that will provide our weakened president with positive media coverage no matter the state of the economy. Of course the problem with this bit of theorizing is that Americans aren’t stupid, and after that, past elections suggest that those same Americans tend to tune out the media.
Ronald Reagan’s two terms in office tell the tale here. As USA Today media reporter Peter Johnson has put it, “Over the course of his campaigns and eight years in office, Ronald Reagan’s press peaked and fell but was always negative. … In his re-election bid in 1984, 91 percent of his coverage was negative.” …
Amity Shlaes with what we might expect from the economy.
Is our economy headed back into a recession? A look at a past double-dip, the recessions of 1980 and of 1981-1982, suggests we are due. That double-dip also suggests the Federal Reserve should raise interest rates earlier and faster than you might think.
In fact, the 1980s experience points to something horrible: We need a recession to get a true recovery. …