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Mark Steyn thinks our profligate ways are going to catch up to us soon.
I was in Australia earlier this month, and there, as elsewhere on my recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the behemoth goes over the cliff, you’re not dragged down with it. It is faintly surreal to be sitting in paneled offices lined by formal portraits listening to eminent persons who assume the collapse of the dominant global power is a fait accompli. “I don’t feel America is quite a First World country anymore,” a robustly pro-American Aussie told me, with a sigh of regret.
Well, what does some rinky-dink ‘roo-infested didgeridoo mill on the other side of the planet know about anything? Fair enough. But Australia was the only major Western nation not to go into recession after 2008. And in the past decade the U.S. dollar has fallen by half against the Oz buck: That’s to say, in 2002, one greenback bought you a buck-ninety Down Under; now it buys you 95 cents. More of that a bit later
I have now returned from Oz to the Emerald City, where everything is built with borrowed green. President Obama has run up more debt in three years than President Bush did in eight, and he plans to run up more still – from ten trillion in 2008 to fifteen-and-a-half trillion now to 20 trillion and beyond. Onward and upward! The president doesn’t see this as a problem, nor do his party, and nor do at least fortysomething percent of the American people. The Democrats’ plan is to have no plan, and their budget is not to budget at all. “We don’t need to bring a budget,” said Harry Reid. Why tie yourself down? “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution,” the Treasury Secretary told House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. “What we do know is we don’t like yours.” …
George Will says the Institute for Justice has filed a compelling amicus brief in the healthcare case.
On Monday the Supreme Court begins three days of oral arguments concerning possible — actually, probable and various — constitutional infirmities in Obamacare. The justices have received many amicus briefs, one of which merits special attention because of the elegant scholarship and logic with which it addresses an issue that has not been as central to the debate as it should be.
Hitherto, most attention has been given to whether Congress, under its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, may coerce individuals into engaging in commerce by buying health insurance. Now the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian public interest law firm, has focused on this fact: The individual mandate is incompatible with centuries of contract law. This is so because a compulsory contract is an oxymoron.
The brief, the primary authors of which are the IJ’s Elizabeth Price Foley and Steve Simpson, says that Obamacare is the first time Congress has used its power to regulate commerce to produce a law “from which there is no escape.” And “coercing commercial transactions” — compelling individuals to sign contracts with insurance companies — “is antithetical to the foundational principle of mutual assent that permeated the common law of contracts at the time of the founding and continues to do so today.” …
Bill Kristol on Etch A Sketch politics.
… A healthy politics realizes that calling an expensive piece of legislation the “Affordable Care Act” doesn’t make it affordable, that promising you can keep your doctor doesn’t mean you’ll be able to, and that calling an Independent Payment Advisory Board independent and advisory doesn’t make it so.
The American public tends to appreciate these realities. Many in the political class—indeed many of our elites, especially those of us who etch and sketch for a living—tend to want to show our cleverness by arguing realities away. Sophistry is the fatal conceit of the political class in our time. For reasons having to do with the very nature of modern liberalism, the left is more expert at sophistry than the right. That’s why Republicans will have difficulty winning an Etch A Sketch election. Obama is the master of transient talk and vanishing promises. The Republican nominee won’t beat him at his own game. But the Republican nominee can elevate our politics and prevail by putting before the public a reality-based choice.
Citigroup report says North America oil fields could become the new Middle East. Telegraph,UK has the story.
Deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, tapping shale deposits for gas and oil and Canada’s oil sands are among the ingredients that could see North America’s production of oil and natural gas liquids almost double to 26.6m barrels a day by 2020, according to a report by analysts at Citigroup.
“The energy sector in the next few decades could drive an extraordinary and timely revitalisation and reindustralisation of the US economy,” the 80-page report said.
The vexed question of America’s future energy needs and how to meet them has dominated the battle for The White House in recent weeks, as the Republican challengers blame President Barack Obama for the recent rise in petrol prices.
Experts say the subject is also gaining political traction among both Republicans and Democrats because the US is at an important crossroads on its future energy policy. 2011 was the first year since 1949 that the country exported more petroleum products than it imported. …
Wither the Nobel? Andrew Roberts reviews Jay Nordlinger’s book on the Prize.
… In an absorbingly well-researched, well-written and thoughtful history of the Peace Prize, the distinguished National Review senior editor and New Criterion writer Jay Nordlinger looks with a critical but not jaundiced eye at the laureates who have been feted in Oslo, Norway, every December since 1901, and has come up with a number of remarkable conclusions. In the course of his deliberations he has thought deeply about what genuinely constitutes peace, and whether several of the laureates have genuinely fulfilled the stipulation in Alfred Nobel’s will that the committee should find “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Al Gore, anybody?
There has been an identifiable trend of anti-Americanism in recent years, or at least anti-Republican Americans. When once it was awarded to Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Charles Dawes, Frank Kellogg and Henry Kissinger, by the 1980s a deep strain of leftist assumptions had taken root. Instead of awarding the Peace Prize to President Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II for their part in the destruction of Soviet Communism, the most vicious system of oppression to besmirch the face of humanity since the Nazis, in 1987 the Nobel Committee apparently told Costa Rican President Oscar Arias that they were giving him the prize as a weapon against Ronald Reagan.
“At one time,” said Yelena Bonner, the widow of the 1975 winner Andrei Sakharov, “the Nobel Peace Prize was the highest moral award of our civilization. But after December 1994, when Yasser Arafat became one of the three new laureates, its ethical value was undermined.” Yet still the world pays lip service to the prize of which Kissinger said: “There is no comparable honor.”
The speeches the winners give are sometimes uplifting. But more often, in Clare Booth Luce’s term, they’re “globaloney.” …
At least the Danish press is not in the tank for Obama. You will enjoy the irreverent look at the president from Danish TV brought to us by the Weekly Standard.
Thomas Buch-Andersen, host of the Danish TV show Detektor, mocked President Obama’s political rhetoric in a recent episode. “Obama used a metaphor from boxing to explain Denmark’s role in the world,” says Buch-Andersen, introducing the segment.
He then roles the tape. “That’s fairly typical of the way that Danes have punched above their weight in international affairs,” President Obama says at a press availability in the Oval Office with Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark.
“It’s nice to be praised,” Buch-Andersen remarks. “We punch harder than our weight class would suggest. But how much should we read into his words? According to Obama, are we doing any better than, say, the Norwegians?”
The TV host again turns to the tape, this time showing President Obama in the Oval Office with Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg. “I’ve said this before, but I want to repeat: Norway punches above its weight,” Obama says. …