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Foreign Policy magazine points to Western corporations that have sold internet technology to Mid-East tyrants.
Pick a country, any country, touched by the Arab Spring, and chances are that Western technology has been used there to suppress pro-democracy movements. Even though this directly undermines U.S. efforts to promote democracy and Internet freedom in the Middle East and elsewhere, President Barack Obama’s administration has remained oddly silent about it. If the White House won’t act, it’s time for Congress to pick up the slack.
European companies have provided software to security services in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen to monitor email and voice communications. In Bahrain, dissidents were confronted by interrogators with intercepted email messages and were tortured. U.S. surveillance technology was reportedly provided to Egypt (from Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing) and Syria (from the Silicon Valley-based firm NetApp), though both companies deny knowledge of the sales.
The use of Western technologies to censor Internet content is even more widespread. Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, among others, have blocked access to content deemed undesirable by their governments by using U.S.-made SmartFilter products. Syria got hold of Internet-filtering devices from California-based Blue Coat without the company’s knowledge, despite the U.S. trade embargo on Syria. These devices were used to block websites of opposition groups and news about the anti-regime protests. Other countries, including Qatar, Kuwait, and Sudan, use Canadian or European technologies to filter content on a large scale. …
According to Andrew Malcolm, CA voters are beginning to choke on the cost of high-speed rail.
Let’s face it: Our president, the one who had so many outstanding parking tickets when he was just Barack Obama, has rail envy.
Just judging from the number of times he’s mentioned the high-speed rail system of China, which has one party rule so no problem with messy democracy stuff. Or bipartisanship, there being no bi- in Chinese politics, just uni-. Or the wonderfully modern airports that communist China has constructed that we should emulate with Obama’s newest stimulus spending ideas.
Well, it seems many Americans are not as enamored of China’s choo-choos as the president who spent much of his childhood living in Asia. Remember Florida’s new Gov. Rick Scott? He took one look at Obama’s $10 billion high-speedrail program and said, “It’s going to cost way more and we can’t afford it.” Joe Biden made fun of him for not having any vision.
Well, now it’s California’s turn. …
Jonathan Tobin thinks Teddy would have found Obama’s ideas as ignorant as we do.
… The great dilemma facing the nation is not the grinding poverty of 1910, when no safety net was available. It is the enormous debt that has been created by a system of entitlements that will bankrupt the nation. The middle class Obama says he wants to save will be crushed by that debt. But Obama has ridiculed proposals to reform the system and harps instead on raising taxes on the wealthy, a measure that will kill job creation while doing virtually nothing to fix the problem.
Roosevelt’s proposals in 1910 were an attempt to head off the coming of class warfare that he rightly believed would destroy American liberty if the choice before Americans were only that of J.P. Morgan’s worldview or that of leftist radicals. By contrast, Obama’s political agenda consists of precisely the sort of class war rhetoric TR despised. Obama and his cheering section in the mainstream press may think he is channeling the 26th president. But Roosevelt would have had no patience for either his economic strategies or his vision of America’s place in the world.
Mark Steyn thinks the words he used to dismiss Newt in a piece published 13 years ago are just as apt today.
Since Ramesh, Mona, Yuval & Co have got out the tire irons, I figured I might as well pile on. But then a reader from the Cayman Islands reminded me that I’d said pretty much everything I have to say about Newt in November 1998 — in the London Spectator, upon his resignation as speaker. For those Newtroids who huff that I must be in the tank for Mitt (that’s some tank), November 1998 is 13 years ago, when I’m not sure I’d even heard of Mitt Romney.
Anyway, back then, after a brisk trot through his collected Brainstorms-of-the-Week — “The Triangle of American Progress,” “The Four Great Truths,” “The Four Pillars of American Civilization,” “The Five Pillars of the 21st Century,” “The Nine Zones of Creativity,” “The Fourteen Steps to Renewing American Civilization,” The Thirty-Nine Steps to the Five Year Plan of the Six Flags of the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers of the Nine-Inch Nails of Renewing Civilizational Progress for 21st Century America, etc, I concluded:
“The Democrats demonised Newt as an extreme right-wing crazy. They were right — apart from the ‘extreme’ and ‘right-wing’, that is. Most of the above seem more like the burblings of a frustrated self-help guru than blueprints for conservative government. For example, Pillar No. 5 of the ‘Five Pillars of American Civilisation’ is: ‘Total quality management’. Unfortunately for Newt, the person who most needed a self-help manual was him — How to Win Friends and Influence People for a start. After last week’s election, Republicans have now embarked on the time-honoured ritual, well known to British Tories and Labour before them, of bickering over whether they did badly because they were too extreme or because they were too moderate. In Newt’s case, the answer is both. He spent the last year pre-emptively surrendering on anything of legislative consequence, but then, feeling bad at having abandoned another two or three of his ‘Fourteen Steps to Renewing American Civilisation’, he’d go on television and snarl at everybody in sight. . . . For Republicans it was the worst of all worlds: a lily-livered ninny whom everyone thinks is a ferocious right-wing bastard.”
That’s how it would go this time round. We’d wind up with a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and Alvin Tofler who canoodled on the sofa with Nancy Pelosi demanding Big Government climate-change conventional-wisdom punitive liberalism just as the rest of the planet was finally getting off the bandwagon . . . but the media would still insist on dusting off their 1994 “The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas” graphics.
A very thoughtful post from Yuval Levin comparing and contrasting Mitt and Newt.
What an odd pair of front runners Republicans appear to have ended up with. Not the usual conservative vs. moderate pairing, but two quite unusual political figures with remarkably similar policy and political profiles but remarkably different temperaments and dispositions.
Let me say first: I used to work for Newt Gingrich. In the last year of his speakership, I was a “staff assistant” in his congressional office. I was 21 when I started there. No offense to anyone reading this who is now a staff assistant on the Hill, but that’s a very junior job—or at least it certainly was in my case: some policy research, some note-taking in meetings, some answering of phones, and the like. I didn’t spend all that much time with Gingrich (when I did, he was always very nice to me and to other junior staffers), and I don’t pretend to have learned much about him that you wouldn’t have learned from just following politics. So I offer my views as an observer of politics, not as any kind of expert on Gingrich.
What stands out about Romney and Gingrich, to me, is that they have in common a very unusual profile for a Republican politician. Both of them are fundamentally moderates: Very wonky Rockefeller Republicans who moved to the right over time as their party moved right and maybe as events persuaded them to move right, and they both still very much exhibit the technocratic countenance of the Rockefeller Republican—a program for every problem. Conservative humility about human nature and about the potential of technical solutions is not readily discernible in either one.
They’re also essentially in the same place politically—I can’t think of a single major issue on which Gingrich is more conservative than Romney, and with the possible exception of immigration (and perhaps Medicare reform, as I mention here, though it’s hard to be sure) I can’t think of one where Romney is more conservative. Substantively, their views are largely indistinguishable from one another. They’re part of a very broad consensus on policy among Republicans this year, which is one of the underreported stories of the year and is frankly in many ways a testament to Paul Ryan, who really defined the Republican agenda with his budget. The House Republican budget caused both Romney and Gingrich to take significantly more conservative positions on entitlement reform in particular than either one would otherwise have taken. …
Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor calls our attention to a nifty beat down of the insufferable Bill Keller.
My colleague, economist and historian of Russia Paul Gregory, delivers a beatdown on former NYT editor Bill Keller for Keller’s attempt to define who is a real economist and who is a crank. And I mean beatdown: make sure no children are present when you read it.
Keller’s views on economics are a pitch-perfect display of the insular Pauline-Kael-I-don’t-know-anybody-who-voted-for-Nixon worldview so characteristic of the Upper West Side. Sadly, although Keller is not an economist and wouldn’t know good economics if it bit him where he sits (his head, apparently), he is joined in his narrowmindedness by Krugman and David Warsh, who have taken it upon themselves to read Hayek out of the respectable economics canon. I can guarantee you, by the way, that Krugman has no prayer of being remembered and cited 40-75 years after the publication of his most important scholarly works, as Hayek is. Eat your heart out, Paul–teh Krugman, not Gregory.
The Keller-Krugman-Warsh effort to define respectable economics as “people who agree with Keller-Krugman-Warsh” is actually kind of pathetic and defensive. It also brings to mind the frantic efforts of the climate clerisy to discredit and stifle contrary voices. These efforts actually betray a rather acute insecurity. An insecurity that is quite warranted, by the way, as Paul Gregory brutally points out.
And here is Paul Gregory’s piece from Forbes.
… Keller is particularly incensed that “shouting economists” claim that the Obama stimulus created no new jobs (He should say no net new jobs). After all, Keller tells us that a Pulitzer prize winning fact-checking service and the “still trustworthy” CBO prove that the stimulus “created or saved a couple of million jobs.” Case closed, but no, the rascally Republicans “just went on repeating the claim.”
Keller’s irritation sent me to the CBO study to check for myself. Table 2 told me all I need to know. The CBO simply attached to the different categories of stimulus spending low and high multipliers “based on past experience.” (A multiplier is the dollar increase in GDP for every dollar of stimulus spending.) Once the CBO plugged in positive multipliers, the positive effects on jobs was assured. The CBO “proof” therefore depended on its “assumptions,” not on any real facts. Most people appear to believe not the CBO but their “lying eyes” (to use Groucho’s term) when they see their jobs disappear.
I am not the first to notice this little trick, as Keller’s economics tutors would know. Stanford’s John Taylor concluded the CBO estimates are “wrong because they assume ‘multipliers’ for temporary one-time payments or tax changes far in excess of the basic “permanent income” or “life cycle” models (which we teach in Economics 1).” Nor do “they do not take account of the negative growth effects of expected future permanent increases in tax rates.” Keller’s tutors also failed to brief him on Harvard’s Robert Barro, who finds near-zero multipliers in his research. I guess distinguished economists like Taylor and Barro are poor practitioners of “mainstream economic science.”
Keller is particularly incensed that House Speaker John Boehner published a list of 132 economists who endorse Republican spending cuts, tax cuts and deregulation that “will do more to boost private-sector job growth in America in both the near-term and long-term than the ‘stimulus’ spending approach favored by President Obama.”
Keller finds this outrage easy to discredit. The signers (myself included) are “academics from off-the-beaten-path colleges,” bloggers, and economists from “devoutly libertarian think tanks.” As one of Keller’s “lesser economists,” I should enjoy my “moment of fame as witnesses on behalf of dubious claims.” Although distinguished economists from top ten departments are among the 132 signers, the Ivy Leagues are indeed underrepresented, and we regular folks should know who really counts in elite circles. …
Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.
Fallon: Obama had three New York City fundraisers for his reelection campaign the other night. Seriously? How about holding a fundraiser to raise money for the United States?
Conan: A new study debunks the idea that men think about sex every seven seconds. The study says men only think about sex once every 50 minutes. It was conducted during a taping of The View.