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Mark Steyn juxtaposes the demise of the News of The World and the lack of accountability for the debacles in Atlanta Schools and the justice department.
Something rather weird happened in London last week. For some time, The Guardian, a liberal, broadsheet, “respectable” newspaper, has been hammering The News Of The World, a populist, tabloid, low-life newspaper, over its employees’ penchant for “hacking” the phones of Royals and celebrities – Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, for example. This isn’t as forensic as it sounds: Until recently, most British cellphones were sold with the default password set either to 0000 or 1234, and most customers never bothered to change it.
But last Monday, it emerged that The News Of The World had also hacked into the telephone of a missing schoolgirl subsequently found dead, as well as those of family members of the July 7 Tube bombing victims and of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan. Nobody much cares if the Aussie supermodel Elle Macpherson and other denizens of the demimonde get their voice mails intercepted, but dead schoolgirls and soldiers changed the nature of the story, and events moved swiftly. On Thursday, Rupert Murdoch’s son and heir announced the entire newspaper would be closed down. The whole thing. Gone.
Protesters cry out as they demonstrate against the News of the World newspaper outside News International’s headquarters in London, Friday, July 8, 2011. News of the World is accused of hacking into the mobile phones of crime victims, celebrities and politicians. News International announced Thursday that the papers is to cease publication with this Sunday’s issue to be the last.
The News Of The World wasn’t any old fish-wrap. Founded in 1843, it was by the mid-20th century the most-read newspaper in the English-speaking world, …
Jennifer Rubin with background on the debt ceiling talks.
On Saturday afternoon a Capitol Hill source let it be known that “we’re hearing the White House is demanding major, unambiguous tax hikes. To get spending caps and entitlement tweaks, greater economic pain appears to be the White House’s asking price. It is increasingly likely that we aren’t going to see a ‘big’ deal if the White House doesn’t budge. [The]Speaker looks to be holding strong.”
And indeed, early Saturday night, Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) released a statement indicating: “Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes. I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure, based on the cuts identified in the Biden-led negotiations, that still meets our call for spending reforms and cuts greater than the amount of any debt limit increase.” A senior House advisor told me that still left open the potential for a substantial deal with no tax hikes. “The White House says they’ll veto anything that doesn’t get us through 2012. And Boehner still says we’ve gotta cut more than we raise. So $2 trillion? $2.5?” …
Jonathan Tobin thinks the untrustworthy Dems was the biggest kink in the deal.
… since the deal is so complicated, doing it all at once was improbable if not impossible. And that meant that tax reform would have gone last. That meant trusting not only Obama but also House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to do help push it through after everything else was done. Given that the Democrats don’t believe in this vision and have partisan reasons for sabotaging a deal that would prevent them from ranting about evil Republicans throwing grandma over the cliff, the GOP had good reason to be distrustful.
Sooner or later, Congress will have to enact the sort of far reaching entitlement cuts and tax reform that Boehner wanted. It would have been better for the country if it had happened now rather than in the future. But the blame for this delay deserves to be pinned as much, if not more, on untrustworthy Democrats as on hard line Republicans.
Peter Wehner on the dismal jobs report.
The political class has already exhausted the adjectives describing today’s bleak/horrible/awful/God-awful/dismal/terrible/absolutely flat out terrible jobs report. The new data showed, among other things, the unemployment rate increasing to 9.2 percent from 9.1 percent even as the labor force got smaller (by more than a quarter-of-a-million people). That is an amazing and alarming phenomenon, since it demonstrates that unemployment has gone up even as the pool of workers shrinks.
The real unemployment rate increased as well, from 15.8 percent to 16.2 percent. …
Robert Samuelson is on it too.
… It isn’t clear what happened. Standard explanations for the economy’s sluggish first half of 2011 cite three causes: bad weather (flooding in the Midwest); Japan’s earthquake, which depressed auto production by disrupting supply chains; and high oil prices, which sapped consumer buying power. But all this was factored into the June job forecasts.
The question now is whether the meager job creation heralds prolonged stagnation. Many economists have predicted a rebound in the second half of the year: Zandi expects the economy to grow at a 3.5 percent annual rate, up sharply from the estimated 1.9 percent for 2011′s first half; Gault is slightly below that. Both are sticking to their forecasts. They expect the negatives of the first half to reverse: lower gasoline prices will bolster consumer spending; restored supply chains will raise auto production; better weather will permit more construction spending.
But the bleak job market raises the specter of much worse. …
Investor’s Business Daily Editors want to know if now we can call the administration’s economic policy a failure.
With unemployment now at 9.2% and job growth at a standstill, is there anyone not blinded by ideology or rank partisanship who can’t see that Obama’s spend-and-regulate economic plan has been an utter failure?
When Obama was running for office, he likened himself to Ronald Reagan. Not because he liked Reagan’s policies — he despised them — but because he saw Reagan as a transformative figure worthy of emulation.
“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” he said during the campaign. He’s since talked endlessly about the need to “remake” the economy, and “do big things.”
Well, Obama’s been transformative all right. While Reagan rescued a country mired in hopelessness, stagflation and fear, Obama has managed, by reversing Rea-ganomics, to bring it all back again. …
Fred Barnes reacts to the president’s ideas on patent streamlining.
Streamlining our patent process? Yes, that was one of the remedies President Obama offered Friday in response to news the unemployment reached 9.2 percent in June and job growth was pitiful.
It raises once again this question: Does the president have any idea how a free market economy is supposed to work or how to fix it when it’s ailing? The answer, based on Obama’s remarks in recent months, is no and no.
The president said Americans “expect us to act on every single good idea that’s out there.” But he hasn’t acted on any of the ideas that might give the economy more breathing room and less intervention by Washington. But these ideas continue to pile up at his doorstep.
For instance, how about rolling back the wave of regulations his administration has imposed on the economy and job creators? Nope, that idea’s not on his radar. How about delaying the implementation of his health care program that terrifies so many small businessmen? Sorry, that’s off the table. How about serious cuts in spending in areas other than defense? The very idea makes Obama nervous, even as he tries to negotiate an agreement on raising the debt limit. How about having government gobble up a smaller share of GDP, thus leaving the private sector more to work with. Forget it. …