Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Andrew Malcolm posts on the “real good talker’s” SOTU speech.
This wasn’t Barack Obama’s first State of the Union rodeo. He didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. He’s been around the block a few times on Capitol Hill. He knows his way around a teleprompter.
Obama used to be known as a Real Good Talker. He made his initial national bones with a speech.
But the last two — his Inauguration and State of the Union — are tired, boilerplate, bits and pieces of campaign rhetoric cut and pasted into recycled collections of empty phrases that sound swell — until you read them. Obama’s top speechwriter, overpaid at the top White House salary of $172K, recently abandoned ship for even better Hollywood dough.
The bad news is we’ve still got 1,437 days of this guy’s gabbing to endure. The good news: Yesterday it was 1,438.
It was stunning last night to hear and then read among the 6,419 words likely the most colossal collection of yawn-inducing clichés in recent American political history.
It was enough to make you pine for those presidents before Woodrow Wilson (and television/radio) who successfully reported the state of the nation to Congress in writing without some six dozen applause lines. …
James Pethokoukis says the administration lacks an entrepreneurship agenda.
Where does President Obama think economic growth and job creation come from? In his State of the Union speech, he said “the true engine of America’s economic growth” was ”a rising, thriving middle class.” But that’s political rhetoric substituting for economic analysis. Ask most economists, even those working in the Obama White House, and they’ll tell you that innovation-driven productivity is the true engine of prosperity and rising living standards.
And where does Obama think innovation-driven productivity comes from? Judging from his speech, Obama apparently sees government at the prime catalyst and planner – whether its government creating manufacturing hubs or government mandating new rules to spur more energy efficiency or government offering tax credits to spur investment in favored sectors.
And the free enterprise system? Well, entrepreneurs only got a couple of brief shoutouts, once in relation to high-skill immigration. Here’s the other: “Now these initiatives in manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, housing, all these things will help entrepreneurs and small-business owners expand and create new jobs.”
Certainly entrepreneurs could use some help. Consider:
1. Had small business come out of the recession maintaining just the rate of start-ups generated in 2007, according to McKinsey, the US economy would today have almost 2.5 million more jobs than it does.
2. There were fewer new firms formed in 2010 and 2011 than during the Great Recession.
3. The rate of startup jobs during 2010 and 2011, years that were technically in full recovery, were the lowest on record, according to economist Tim Kane of the Hudson Institute.
But Obama only mentioned government as an entrepreneurship enabler, never an obstacle. What would a true pro-entrepreneur agenda look like? The Kaufman Foundation offers several ideas worth considering in its Startup Act for accelerating the growth of startups and young businesses: …
Dana Milbank writes a devastating Bob Menendez column in WaPo titled Bob Menendez; senator of the evening – as in “ladies of the evening.”
Sen. Bob Menendez is embroiled in a prostitution scandal — and it has little if anything to do with sex.
The New Jersey Democrat has for three months been the target of voluminous allegations, all unconfirmed, that he hired prostitutes, one reportedly underage, in the Dominican Republic and other places. Menendez, the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has angrily denied the allegations as they bubbled up into the mainstream media.
But, proving that the political gods do have a sense of humor, the Senate chose this exact moment — as Menendez fights for his political life — to take up two pieces of legislation on human trafficking, including one on child sex trafficking.
“This cuts across party lines, all philosophical lines,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said of his proposal, which is to be voted on Tuesday. “It’s about basic human dignity.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), the legislation’s Democratic co-sponsor, said on the Senate floor Monday that it is “an unacceptable and intolerable fact that sex trafficking is a major source of child exploitation, a major source of damage to our children, and the voices and faces of those children should be before this body.”
The awkward timing of the votes has made matters even more difficult for Menendez, who was slinking about the Capitol on Monday, avoiding reporters and colleagues. The juxtaposition has produced some backroom snickering in the Senate, and Menendez deserves the ridicule — but for reasons unrelated to the claims. Menendez deserves opprobrium, some would argue, because he has acted like a prostitute himself.
There is no evidence that the squat 59-year-old is selling his body, thank heavens. But reporting does suggest that he has been selling his influence and demeaning the body politic. …
Thomas Sowell with a column of random thoughts.
I can’t get excited by the question of whether Senator Robert Menendez had sex with a prostitute in Central America. It is her word against his — and when it comes to a prostitute’s word against a politician’s word, that is too close to call.
If an American citizen went off to join Hitler’s army during World War II, would there have been any question that this alone would make it legal to kill him? Why then is there an uproar about killing an American citizen who has joined terrorist organizations that are at war against the United States today?
Of all the things said during the gun control controversy, one of the most disquieting has been the emphasis on “mental health.” If that ends up letting the guesses of shrinks put more murderers back on the street, the public can be in even greater danger after such a “reform.”
However emotionally similar envy and resentment may seem, their consequences are often very different. Envy may spur some people to efforts to lift themselves up, while resentment is more likely to spur efforts to tear others down.
New York’s Mayor Bloomberg wants to restrict the use of pain-killers in hospitals. Is there any subject on which this man does not consider himself an expert? There are, after all, doctors treating individual patients who currently decide how much pain-killer to use. …
Corner Post says the president has discovered Chicago’s gun problem.
It seems that the president has finally noticed that his hometown of Chicago is a hotbed of gun violence. Consequently, the Chicago Tribune records:
“President Barack Obama will visit Chicago on Friday, when he will discuss gun violence as he focuses on his economic message from Tuesday’s State of the Union address, according to the White House.
Obama will “talk about the gun violence that has tragically affected too many families in communities across Chicago and across the country,” a White House official said in a statement.
The president’s visit answers calls from Chicago anti-violence activists that Obama talk about the recent spate of gun violence in the city, several of the activists said.
“This is an important issue,” said Cathy Cohen, founder of the Black Youth Project, which attracted about 45,000 signatures by Sunday night in an online petition that urges Obama to speak up. “We think of this as a victory for all of us.””
It might strike some as peculiar that the president will be visiting a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the country in order to make the case for stricter gun laws. But not everybody. Chicago’s police superintendent appears not to have noticed the laws, nor their effect on his city’s remarkable crime rate. Per Mediaite: …
WSJ Political Diary posts on the German need to salute someone.
It wasn’t the sort of hanky-panky that usually topples politicians. German Education Minister Annette Schavan announced her resignation on Saturday, nine months after she was first accused of plagiarizing portions of her doctoral dissertation and four days after her degree was revoked. Her thesis, written 33 years ago in the philosophy department at HeinrichHeineUniversity in Düsseldorf, had received a 1, the highest possible grade.
Ms. Schavan is a close personal friend of Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the resignation does serious damage to her government’s credibility. Plagiarism also felled Mrs. Merkel’s former defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who resigned in 2011 when his doctoral thesis was shown to contain instances of copying and unquoted sources on more than 90% of its pages.
But the incidents also show the darker consequences of the German obsession with doctorates. The nobility was abolished after the collapse of the Wilhelmine Empire, in 1918. Since then, academic titles have taken the place of aristocratic ones, conferring vast social and professional cachet. Even in nonacademic settings, holders of doctorates are addressed as “Herr Doktor” or “Frau Doktor.” University professors are “Herr Professor Doktor.” The wife of a Ph.D. is often called “Frau Doktor” even if she doesn’t have an advanced degree herself. Multiple doctorates earn you the right to be “Dr. Dr.” …
NY Times says an asteroid can do more damage than obama.
ON Feb. 15, an asteroid designated 2012 DA14 will pass safely within about 17,200 miles of Earth’s surface — closer than the communication satellites that will be broadcasting the news of its arrival. The asteroid is about 150 feet in diameter and has a mass estimated at about 143,000 tons.
Should an object of that size hit Earth, it would cause a blast with the energy equivalent of about 2.4 million tons — or 2.4 megatons — of TNT explosives, more than 180 times the power of the atomic blast that leveled Hiroshima.
It’s almost as if nature is firing a shot across our bow to direct our attention to the vast number of nearby rocky asteroids and a few icy comets that make up what we call the near-Earth object population. We should take the warning seriously.
While no known asteroids or comets represent a worrisome impact threat now, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows more than two dozen asteroids have better than a one in a million chance of smacking into Earth within the next 100 years. That may sound reassuring, but we estimate that less than 10 percent of all near-Earth objects have been discovered. And while we are keeping a vigilant eye out for these objects in the Northern Hemisphere, we are considerably less watchful in the Southern Hemisphere.
It has been only within the last 15 years that astronomers, mostly supported by NASA, have begun discovering the vast number of near-Earth objects. Our findings have led us to the realization that Earth runs its course around the sun in a cosmic shooting gallery — with us as the target. Basketball-size rocky objects enter Earth’s atmosphere daily and Volkswagen-size objects every few months, but they burn up before they hit the ground.
Objects larger than about 100 feet in diameter, the size of a large house, strike Earth with an average interval of a few hundred years. The last one of about this size to hit was on June 30, 1908, in a sparsely populated region of Siberia called Tunguska. The Tunguska blast released about four megatons of energy and leveled millions of trees across 825 square miles. …