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Max Boot has kudos for the administration for their response to the crazy man in North Korea.
Give credit where it’s due: the Obama administration deserves praise for pursuing a hardline policy against North Korea–in fact a harder line than the Bush administration policy, at least in Bush’s second term.
In 2008, recall, the Bush administration–thanks to the misguided efforts of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and negotiator Chris Hill–announced an accord to lift some economic sanctions on North Korea and remove it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in return for unbelievable, and quickly abandoned, promises from Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear program. This was widely seen as a bid–similar to the ill-advised Annapolis conference she convened in an attempt to achieve a breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations–by Rice to land herself a Nobel Prize, or at least rack up some notable achievement, before she left office.
Perhaps, then, it’s a good thing that Obama already got his Nobel because he doesn’t seem to feel compelled to engage in pointless outreach with North Korea. Instead, he continues to ratchet up sanctions and has even managed to get Chinese support at the United Nations for the latest round of sanctions. The fact that the North Korean regime is threatening in retaliation to erase the Korean War armistice and launch a preemptive nuclear attack on the U.S. is a sign that it is feeling the pressure.
The North Korean threats should not be taken lightly–as the sinking of a South Korean ship by a North Korean submarine in 2010 demonstrated, the North is capable of lashing out in unpredictable and deadly ways. But nor should the North’s threats deter its neighbors from continuing to increase the pressure on this criminal regime.
At the end of the day, third-generation dictator Kim Jong-un is not suicidal: He knows that launching an attack on the United States or a major assault on South Korea will result in the end of his regime. Nuclear weapons or not, North Korea’s antiquated military could not long survive a South Korean-American military offensive. Like his father and grandfather, Kim is only trying to gain concessions from the West by threatening us.
Obama deserves credit for hanging tough in the face of these continued North Korean provocations.
Victor Davis Hanson on how to weaken an economy. Seems like here the administration is doing a good job too.
It is not easy to ruin the American economy; doing nothing usually means it repairs itself and soon is healthier than before a recession.
But don’t despair: there are plenty of ways to slow down even an inherently strong economy. History offers plenty of examples. But as more contemporary models, take your pick of successfully ruined economies — the Venezuelan, the Cuban, the North Korean, the Greek, the Italian, the Portuguese, or pretty much any from Mediterranean Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. There are certain commonalities about why and how they fail. Let’s review some of them.
Government
The state can never be too big. Ensure that it is unaccountable and intrusive, in constant need of more money and more targets to regulate. The more government, the more people are shielded from the capital-creating, free-market system. Think the DMV or TSA, not Apple. The point is for an employee to spend each labor hour with less oversight, while regulating or hampering profit-making, rather than competing with like kind to create material wealth. Regulatory bodies are a two-fer: the more federal, union employees, the more regulations to hamper the private sector. The more federal mandates, like new health-care requirements and financial reporting, the less employers profit and the fewer employees they can hire. Washington should be a growth city, absolutely immune from the downturn elsewhere, a sort of huge and growing octopus head with decaying tentacles. State jobs should be redefined as something partisan — whose expansion is noble and helps the helpless, and whose contraction is evil and the design of a bitter and aging white private-sector class.
On the other end of the equation, ensuring 50 million on food stamps, putting over 80,000 a month on Social Security disability insurance, and extending unemployment insurance to tens of millions all remind the jobless that life is not too bad (thanks to the government), and certainly a lot better than working at a “low-paid” job that equates to giving up federal support. To paraphrase Paul Krugman, the more and the longer the jobless receive, the less likely they are to take chances looking for a job. That too might be again a good thing if you wish to slow down the economy. In general, even Arnold Toynbee, a man of the Left, acknowledged that the greedy drive of the scrambling private sector was not as pernicious to civilizations as the collective ennui produced by vast cadres of lethargic and unaccountable public “servants” doing supposedly noble work.
The Law
To ensure capriciousness and unpredictability for both suspect employers and investors, make the law malleable, even unpredictable from day to day, in the style of an Argentina or Venezuela. Redefine the law as what is deemed socially useful. For federally subsidized bankrupt auto companies, creditors should be paid back on the basis not of contractual law, but of nobility — why borrow to give a rich man a return on his superfluous investment, when a retired auto worker might have to pay a higher health care premium? Boeing wants to open a non-union plant in South Carolina? Have the NLRB try to stop it (and illegally staff the NLRB with recess appointments). Illegal aliens? They are neither illegal nor aliens, as federal immigration law is itself a capricious construct. Does the Senate really have to present a budget? Do presidents need to meet budget deadlines? …
Power Line with a good illustration of the regulations for just the beginnings of obamacare.
The then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (and may she remain forever a former Speaker) took a lot of ridicule during the debate over the passage of Obamacare when she said that we’d have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. I thought the critics had this all wrong. It was, in fact, the most intelligent thing she ever said, albeit unintentionally. What counts is, as Machiavelli put it, the “effectual truth” of the matter. And the effectual truth of modern American government is that Congress no longer enacts laws in the meaningful sense of the word. Instead, they pass wish lists, and delegate the actual lawmaking to unelected administrators
Simple test: if Congress passes a statute–even one that is 1,600 pages long like Obamacare, but the law can’t go into effect as written, it is not really a law at all. The simple proof is the photo here that Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office has released, showing the 20,000-plus pages of regulations issued so far for the implementation of Obamacare. ”Regulation” is just a multi-syllabic word for “law,” after all. The point is, administrators–the slightly nicer term for “bureaucrats”–now govern us much more than our elected lawmakers do. One almost wonders why we have elections at all. (Actually, many bureaucrats actually do wonder this.)
Of course, it remains to be seen whether Obamacare can survive the incomprehensible deadweight this tower of paperwork represents. And this is only for one recent “law.” A similar tower of regulations is being produced right now for the other legislative monstrosity from Obamaland, Dodd-Frank.
Thomas Sowell reminds us of the racism of many intellectuals.
… Some races were considered to be so genetically inferior that eugenics was proposed to reduce their reproduction, and Francis Galton urged “the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”
It was not a bunch of fringe cranks who said things like this. Many held Ph.D.s from the leading universities, taught at the leading universities and were internationally renowned.
Presidents of StanfordUniversity and of MIT were among the many academic advocates of theories of racial inferiority — applied mostly to people from Eastern and Southern Europe, since it was just blithely assumed in passing that blacks were inferior.
This was not a left-right issue. The leading crusaders for theories of genetic superiority and inferiority were iconic figures on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic.
John Maynard Keynes helped create the Cambridge Eugenics Society. Fabian socialist intellectuals H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were among many other leftist supporters of eugenics.
It was much the same story on this side of the Atlantic. President Woodrow Wilson, like many other Progressives, was solidly behind notions of racial superiority and inferiority. He showed the movie “Birth of a Nation,” glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House, and invited various dignitaries to view it with him. …
Corner Post on the president’s latest lie.
In an interview yesterday with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, President Obama suggested that he might make an effort to restore tours of the White House — which his administration had canceled in response to sequester cuts — on a limited basis. He emphasized that the decision had come from the Secret Service, but he said he would ask them to consider finding a way to “accommodate school groups” who “may have traveled here with some bake sales.” The exchange is below.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: One more question about the spending cuts. You’ve been takin’ a lotta heat for this cancellation of the White House tours. They get– the Secret Service says it’s costs about $74,000 a week. Was canceling them really necessary?
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: You know, I have to say this was not– a decision that went up to the White House. But th– what the Secret Service explained to us was that they’re gonna have to furlough some folks. …
Jammie Wearing Fool follows up on the lie.
The next time this tool takes responsibility will be the first. Then the media will hail it as historic! For all the buck-passing from this schmuck, this may be the most pathetic bit yet. It’s your sequester and you live in the White House, but you have nothing to do with childishly cutting off tours to punish people?
President Obama said his administration was looking at ways to resume White House tours for school groups.
“This was not a decision that went up to the White House,” noted Obama in an ABC News interview aired on Wednesday, saying the directive came from the Secret Service.
Looking for ways to resume tours? OK, how about announcing tours will resume and apologize for being a dick? Would that be asking too much?
“What I’m asking them is: are there ways for example for us to accommodate school groups who may have traveled here with some bake sales. Can we make sure that kids potentially can still come to tour,” Obama added.
Yes, you can make sure. You’re the president, for crying out loud. Walk out today and announce tours will resume. How f___ing difficult is this?
White House press secretary Jay Carney said the decision to suspend tours was “very unfortunate,” but laid the blame on Congress for failing to reach an accord to prevent the automatic spending cuts.
Funny, but I haven’t seen any stories about tours of Congress being cut off, so how is Congress responsible for Obama’s temper tantrum that’s so badly blown up in his face?