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Thomas Sowell thinks an Israel that depends on an Obama promise is in trouble.
What are we to make of President Barack Obama’s latest pronouncements about Iran’s movement toward nuclear bombs? His tough talk might have had some influence on Iran a couple of years ago, when he was instead being kinder and gentler with the world’s leading terrorist-sponsoring nation. Now his tough talk may only influence this year’s election — which may be enough for Obama.
The track record of Barack Obama’s pronouncements on a wide range of issues suggests that anything he says is a message written in sand, and easily blown away by the next political winds. Remember the “shovel-ready projects” that would spring into action and jump-start the economy, once the “stimulus” money was available? Obama himself laughed at this idea a year or so later, when it was clear to all that these projects were going nowhere.
Remember how his administration was going to be one with “transparency”? Yet massive spending bills were passed too fast for the Congress itself to have read them. Remember the higher ethics his administration would practice — and yet how his own Secretary of the Treasury was appointed despite his failure to pay his taxes?
If you were an Israeli, how willing would you be to risk your national survival on Obama’s promise to stand by your country? If you were a leader of Iran, what would you make of what Obama said, except that an election year might not be the best time to attack Israel? …
Roger Simon went to AIPAC this year and files his impressions.
Before Sunday morning, I had never seen Barack Obama in person. Of course, I had seen him on television roughly as often as Howdy Doody and Mickey Mouse combined, but the man himself had eluded my eyes.
Not that seeing him with approximately 13,000 other AIPAC attendees and press (not sure exactly how many were there, but most) in the Washington Convention Center constitutes anybody’s version of “up close and personal.” But I am forced to admit — and you can put this down to the power of preconceptions, if you wish — that catching our president in the flesh only confirmed what I had long thought of him from afar.
This is one strange dude — part narcissist, part Chicago ward heeler, part neo-Alinskyite marxist, part talk show host smoothie, part nowhere man. The ideas might be there, traceable back to Ayers, Dohrn, and Reverend Wright, but he has pushed them far away, almost as if he were trying to forget them. They were no longer functional and had to go, but he is left with… what?
It’s hard to tell what he really thinks now because I suspect even he doesn’t know what that is. He is a kind of moving target, not just to us, but to himself. …
Good post from James Pethokoukis on the meaning of economic freedom and the will to prosper.
You think the Great Recession is the biggest economic story of our time? Nope. Not even close. This is:
“A World Bank report shows a broad reduction in extreme poverty — and indicates that the global recession, contrary to economists’ expectations, did not increase poverty in the developing world. … Much of the story was about China, which moved nearly 700 million people out of poverty between 1981 and 2008, with the proportion of its population living in extreme poverty falling to 13 percent from 84 percent during that period. The country’s annual pace of economic growth never dipped below 9 percent, even in 2009, when the world’s economy contracted.”
What happened in China? Well, although there’s a debate over whether or not Deng Xiaoping actually said it, his alleged axiom, “To get rich is glorious” is certainly the message Beijing started sending in 1978. And what people hear and believe matters. Really matters. Economist Deirdre McCloskey on how “bourgeois dignity” created the modern world:
“We need to explain the astonishing enrichment in bourgeois countries from 1800 to the present, such as Norway’s move from $3 a day in 1800 to $137 in 2006. But the explanation cannot be economic. If it were so — trade, investment, incentives — it would have happened earlier, or in other places. Economics determines how the tide of growth expressed itself down this inlet or beside that quay. Good. But the tide itself had “rhetorical” causes. …
What changed were habits of the lip. It’s not a “rise of the bourgeoisie,” but a rise in other people’s opinion of the bourgeoisie that makes for economic growth — as it is now doing in China and India. When people treat the marketeers and inventors as having some dignity and liberty, innovation takes hold. It was so to speak a shift in “constitutional political economy,” as James Buchanan puts the point. People agreed on the meta-rule of letting the economy go where it will. This contrasted with the earlier mentality, still admired on the left, that treats each act of innovation as an occasion to go looking for its victims. Victims there were, but they were greatly outnumbered by winners. It was ideas, not matter, that made the winners, and brought our ancestors from $3 to over $100 a day.”
Nick Schulz explains how the denial of T-Mobile purchase forces more players to play politics.
When the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission weighed the merits of AT&T’s proposed purchase of T-Mobile, they focused almost exclusively on the post-merger competition landscape. As a result, they failed to take into account a key rationale for the proposed deal: T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom (DTE), badly needed to get out of the U.S. market. Why? It concluded it could not compete effectively, and it needed to deploy its capital elsewhere.
Ignoring Deutsche Telekom’s needs, the DOJ and FCC blocked the merger. As a result, an uncompetitive firm is now trapped in a market it wanted to leave.
It didn’t take long, but we are now starting to see some of the unfortunate knock-on effects of the Obama administration’s effort to manage competition in telecommunications.
Deutsche Telekom is evaluating operations elsewhere around the globe as a result of the blocked deal. Recent press reports have the company looking to exit the UK market in an effort to raise much needed cash. According to one news account, “The former German phone monopoly had planned to use the proceeds [from the sale of T-Mobile to AT&T] to cut debt by 13 billion euros … Deutsche Telekom also needs funds to upgrade fiber and wireless networks in Germany and other European markets.”
Instead of Deustsche Telekom shareholders being free to allocate capital as they see fit, American regulators have forced them to prop up a wounded subsidiary, needlessly penalizing DTE shareholders.
Not only that, but Deutsche Telekom’s experience in the U.S. is a warning to other large companies to think twice before taking big risks in the American market, a consequence that will ultimately hurt U.S. consumers.
Unable to compete effectively in the U.S. private market, T-Mobile now has no choice but to compete in America’s political market. And this is where new troubles begin for American consumers. …
Hugh Hewitt writes a prequel for an 2012 election book for The Corner.
… “No one realized it at the time, but the paces Rick Santorum put Mitt Romney through in March planted the seeds of the president-elect’s sweeping win Tuesday night. Even as Newt Gingrich had forced Romney to raise his rhetorical and debating game earlier in the cycle, Rick Santorum’s late winter surge pushed Romney to create the organizations and mine the data in Michigan and Ohio that helped deliver those crucial states on Tuesday night.
“‘It felt like Hell at the time,’ a jubilant Matt Rhoades mused on Wednesday morning after a late night of celebrations over a landslide most observers thought impossible even weeks ago, ‘but what we learned then, the people we turned out, the volunteer and donor base we developed, well, it made all the difference in the swing states.’”
“’We couldn’t have created a better primary map for building a general election campaign, even though none of us would have picked that particular training regime,’ Rhoades added.”
“The unrelenting hostility of ‘Obama’s hand puppets in the MSM,’ as one Romney senior advisor put it, helped push Team Romney into an aggressiveness that might never have surfaced had the president-elect not been pushed from Iowa forward, and even a despondent David Axelrod had to admit last night that his plan to bleed Romney in the spring had, in fact, backfired.” …
Peter Schiff says there are reasons for Warren Buffet to knock gold.
… In the early stages of the financial crisis, when I was writing and promoting my first book Crash Proof to warn private investors about trouble ahead, Buffett was accumulating shares in companies such as Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and General Electric. I knew these companies were insolvent, so I wouldn’t touch them with gardening gloves on. When the credit markets seized up, Buffett worked behind the scenes and in public to make sure each of his pet companies were bailed out. This was not by coincidence. Buffett actually stated in September 2008 that he would not have invested in Goldman Sachs if not for the implicit guarantee of federal assistance. As a result, he profited at the expense of taxpayers at the very time when they were losing their savings in the markets. Meanwhile, many “in the know” politicians bought Berkshire stock during the height of the crisis, making a profit from their votes, and giving them incentive to revere Buffett all the more. Buffett once said if that if the government didn’t bailout failed companies, he would be “having my Thanksgiving dinner at McDonald’s instead of having a big dinner at my daughter’s.” Seems like there were two bloated turkeys at that meal.
If Buffett were a true capitalist, he would be in favor of gold. He has noted that the value of the dollar has fallen 86% since he took over Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 and even said in his latest shareholder letter that investors are “right to be fearful of paper money.” But he continues to harp on gold. It seems the only unit of account Mr. Buffett approves are shares of his own company!
The adoption of an independent measure of value like gold presents two problems to Buffett. First, it would reduce the nominal returns of his dollar-based investing strategy. Second, it would restrict Washington’s ability to goose the financial system in his favor. …
According to Jon Entine at AEI, even the NY Times is coming to see the value of fracking for natural gas.
There are new twists in the ever-entertaining shale gas saga. The New York Times, which turned obscure Cornell University marine ecologist Robert Howarth into an anti-fracking rock star on the way to getting hammered by its own public editor—I take some of the credit—for its biased reporting on the subject, is finally getting on the science bandwagon.
Last April, the Times ran two articles in a week promoting Howarth’s claim that shale gas generates more greenhouse gas emissions than the production and use of coal. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of this paper, which ricocheted through the media echo chamber and was even debated in the British parliament.
What the Times didn’t report then, and until now has been systematically ignored, is that almost every independent researcher—at the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Energy Department, and numerous independent university teams, including a Carnegie Mellon study partly financed by the Sierra Club—has slammed Howarth’s conclusions. Within the field, Howarth is considered an activist, not an independent scientist. Many commentators, including independent lefty columnist Joe Nocera, think the gas is too valuable to be left in the ground, as the hard Left is urging.
Maybe a little fresh air is finally leaking into the Times’ insular chambers. …