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Jennifer Rubin reacts to a VP comment.
At the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy gathering this morning, Vice President Biden unintentionally said something insightful. It was, however, very unfavorable to his boss.
In declaring that “all politics is personal,” Biden got to the nub of what the AIPAC members in the room and the larger pro-Israel community is worried about: No matter what Biden (or for that matter President Obama) says, Obama’s own relationship with the prime minister is so contemptuous, and his instincts reveal a fair amount of animus toward the elected government of Israel, that one wonders about the importance of all those words. And in choosing Chuck Hagel to run the Defense Department, the president selected someone personally antagonistic toward Israel, showing how little concerned about that relationship the president is. In other words, if all politics is personal, the Jewish State is in real trouble.
Biden’s admonition is also relevant to Obama’s conduct on domestic policy. Former New York Times editor Bill Keller writes:
“For weeks he has been playing the game political scientists call “Fireman First.” That’s when scaremongering politicians threaten to cut the most essential services. …
Peter Wehner on what we learned in the sequester fight.
… To summarize, then: The president has spoken in the harshest possible terms about an idea he and his White House originated and signed into law. He has used apocalyptic language leading up to the sequestration–and then, as the sequestration cuts began, lectured us that “this is not going to be an apocalypse” as “some people have said.” And Mr. Obama has warned about the devastating nature of the cuts even as he has opposed efforts to make the cuts less devastating.
That’s quite a hat trick.
Will the president pay a political price for this fairly remarkable (and empirically demonstrable) record of dishonesty, inconsistency, and hypocrisy, to say nothing of inflicting unnecessary pain on the country he was elected to serve? I would think so, but I really don’t know.
What I do know is that the sequestration fight has once again shown us that Barack Obama has a defective public character and a post-modern attitude toward truth. He simply makes things up as he goes along. It looks to me that there are few things he will not do, and fewer things he will not say, in order to undermine his opponents and advance his progressive cause. That is something that is deeply injurious to American politics and America itself.
And how about this from the Corner on Monday.
On MSNBC this afternoon, Tom Brokaw surprisingly declared that he thought “Speaker Boehner is right” in blaming the implementation of the sequester on the president and the Democratic Senate. He also criticized the president for his lack of leadership: “The president, by my lights, spent entirely too much time the last two weeks campaigning, in effect, out around the country, lining up that Saturday Night Live parody.” Brokaw suggested that “he ought to have been maybe at Camp David with Boehner and members of his team” and Democratic representatives.
Michael Barone wonders if we are stuck in a low-growth economy. We are as long as we have this president.
Low growth may be here to stay.” That’s the dispiriting headline on one of Megan McArdle’s latest blogposts. Most Americans grew up in a country in which economic growth averaged nearly 4%. Now it seems like we’re stuck in an era—or at least a half-decade—in which growth has averaged 2%. That may not sound like much difference. But it is. Thanks to compound interest, 2% annual growth produces something like 19% growth over a decade, while 4% annual growth produces 48% growth over a decade. With 4% growth most people experience earnings increases over time and few people experience earnings decreases. With 2% growth lots of people experience earnings decreases and many fewer experience earnings increases—which tend to be smaller.
McArdle makes reference to Tyler Cowen’s e-book (now available in dead tree form) The Great Stagnation, which argues that we haven’t been having much in the way of productivity-increasing technological developments lately. And she paints a picture of the consequences for public policy if the new normal turns out to be the new normal—and it’s not a pretty one.
Just as in our larger body politic, as corruption increases, the academy has become less free. Bruce Thornton of the Hoover Institution writes on the death of free speech on college campuses.
Thanks to unconstitutional university speech codes, students are losing their intellectual edge.
The value of the university once lay in its providing a nurturing space for what English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold called “the free play of the mind upon all subjects,” which would foster the “instinct prompting [the mind] to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and everything of the kind.”
Critical to these enterprises is the notion of academic freedom––the ability to study, teach, and talk about subjects, no matter how controversial, without fear of retribution or censorship. For only by discussing openly a wide range of subjects can the liberally educated mind “make the best prevail,” as Arnold put it, and turn “a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”
Those days are long gone in American universities today, as Greg Lukianoff’s Unlearning Liberty, a dismal catalogue of campus censorship and enforced conformity, documents. On American campuses, “differences of opinion are not viewed as opportunities to learn or to think through ideas,” Lukianoff writes. “Dissent is regarded as a nuisance at best, and sometimes as an outright threat.” His lively book is at once a relentless exposure of the intellectual intolerance institutionalized in higher education, and a passionate defense of the value of free thought and expression.
Lukianoff is an attorney, self-proclaimed “liberal-leaning atheist,” and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which for more than a decade has exposed unconstitutional campus speech codes and defended those who have fallen afoul of them. Despite those efforts, higher education’s assault on the First Amendment right to speech continues to subvert the goal of liberal education, drying up Arnold’s “stream of fresh and free thought” and reinforcing, rather than challenging, the “stock notions and habits” of progressive orthodoxy. …
Illustrative of yet another failure by college administrators, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says student debt has tripled since 2004.
Total student debt has nearly tripled over the past eight years, according to a new report from the New York Federal Reserve.
The number of borrowers and the average balance per person have grown, along with the number of borrowers past due on student loan payments, the report found.
Total student debt stands at $966 billion as of the fourth quarter of 2012, the N.Y. Fed said in press materials, with a 70% increase in both the number of borrowers and the average balance per person. The overall number of borrowers past due on student loan payments has grown from under 10% in 2004 to 17% in 2012.
Fewer people with student loans are buying homes, according to data in the report. Of borrowers ages 25 to 30 who are taking out new mortgages, the percentage of those with student debt has fallen by half, from nearly 9% in 2005 to just above 4% in 2012.
“The higher burden of student loans and higher delinquencies may affect borrowers’ access to other types of credit and the performance of other debt,” the fed report concluded. …
Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.
Conan: A toilet flooded the lobby where the Oscars were being held. So, the show won an Oscar for “Best Portrayal of a Carnival Cruise.”
Fallon: The online college the University of Phoenix could lose its license because of questionable billing policies. Which makes sense when you find out they got their accounting degree from the University of Phoenix.
Conan: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has now officially reversed his opposition to ObamaCare. Of course, safety regulations require that whenever Chris Christie reverses himself, he must go “BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!”
Expanding the humor section, Dilbert makes a stock market call.
Small investors are piling into the stock market with an enthusiasm we haven’t seen in years. That’s never a good sign. Meanwhile, many financial experts with their charts and graphs say there is no doubt – none whatsoever – that we’re heading toward a “correction” that will be a big one. But of course we have plenty of other experts with their own charts and graphs saying the stock market is still a good bet.
Remind me why anyone trusts financial experts?
What you need is a cartoonist to tell you how to invest. My prediction is that there will be a correction of 20% or more sometime in 2013. That will be followed by a jerky climb for the next several months back to wherever the stock was before the fall. …
… The 20% estimate is based on the fact that 20 is a big round number and more likely to happen than 30%. I don’t like to over-think these things.
My reasoning is that the people at the highest levels of finance are brilliant people who chose a profession with the credibility of astrology. And they know it. Then they sell their advice to people who don’t know it. So that’s your cast of characters.
Now consider that the characters – who are literally geniuses in many cases – have an immense financial motive, opportunity, and a near-zero risk of getting caught. How do you think that plays out?We can only give a guess of the odds that the market is being manipulated. So I ask myself: How often does the fox leave the hen house because he feels that taking an egg would be wrong?
If you have a different answer from mine, I applaud your faith in human nature. …