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More on Maggie. This time from Janet Daley in Telegraph, UK.
Everybody has his own candidate for the most important legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s time in office. Was it the reform of trade union power, the rescue of the economy from apparently terminal decline, or the release of industry from state ownership? Well, no, actually. I would make the case that while all of those things were tumultuous in their significance, they could all (God help us) be reversed. Some future government that was sufficiently benighted might legislate to remove the right of trade union members to vote on strike action. It might even seize the levers of economic activity and return vast areas of commercial life to the state.
But it would be humanly impossible to overturn the revolution in social attitudes that she brought about. And by social attitudes I mean, of course, attitudes to class. It is very difficult to explain to people under the age of 40 what this change has meant. The best way to encapsulate it is with a startling quote from the estimable Sir Jonathan Miller that has risen over this past week – like a grotesque apparition from the historic past – to remind us of what we once were like. The good doctor (as he then was) said that he hated Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) for her “odious gentility and sentimental, saccharine patriotism, catering to the worst elements of commuter idiocy”.
The greatest and most irreversible testimony to Thatcherism is that no one in public life (perhaps no one in his right mind) would today utter a statement of such shameless snobbery – such egregious, unvarnished hatred for that vast swath of the population who are now the object of every political leader’s admiration. …
Charles Krauthammer celebrates the return to a normal budget process.
Well, at least we’re starting to get the procedure right. Washington has rediscovered the beauty of the boring. It’s called “regular order,” using the normal, routine, constitutional process to arrive at, for example, a budget.
Normal had disappeared during the Obama years. Republicans duly submitted annual budgets, which the president then used for target practice, most famously demagoguing Paul Ryan’s 2011 budget as un-American. Meanwhile, the Democratic-controlled Senate simply stopped producing budgets for four years. And the ones the White House put out were so preposterous that, for example, the 2011 version was rejected by the Senate 97 to 0.
What little progress that was made came by way of crisis backroom deals orchestrated by Gangs of This or That. One gave us a sequester that everyone purports to deplore. Another gave us the naked tax hike of the “fiscal cliff.” And none produced a written record of actual, written offers that could serve as the basis for serious, open negotiations.
Ad hoc, person-to-person negotiations generally require a high level of trust. The great virtue of regular order is that procedure can substitute for trust. And now we see its first fruit: Each side has finally had to show its cards.
Now the bad news. The cards laid down by the White House are quite unimpressive. The 2014 budget is tax-and-spend as usual. The actual deficit reduction over a decade is a minuscule $0.6 trillion — out of a total spending of $46.5 trillion. And every penny of this tiny reduction comes from tax hikes. Nothing from spending cuts, which all end up getting spent elsewhere. …
David Harsanyi writes about the myth of the president’s centrism.
Barack Obama’s quest for a “balanced approach” is the lifeblood of his political success — and also its biggest myth. Witness the coverage of the purportedly centrist president’s 2014 budget proposal.
“Obama sends Congress $3.77T spending plan, riles both sides,” says one prominent headline; “President Obama’s risky ‘goodwill’ gambit,” begins another fairy tale. “Obama Budget Is Meant to Draw GOP to the Table,” claims The New York Times.
Nearly every story stresses that the budget has drawn critics from both the left and the right. Obama, you see, is so moderate he’s willing to wrangle with the socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders from Vermont (and his petition signed by a couple of million folks who wouldn’t know the difference between a “chained consumer price index” and a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich) and Republicans. So, balance.
President Obama’s budget would spend $160 billion more in 2014 than the Congressional Budget Office’s base line had even imagined. No tax reform. No genuine entitlement reform. His 10-year, $1.8 trillion “deficit reduction plan” is predicated on doing away with $1.2 trillion in sequester cuts and making it up by taxing us directly or allowing tax hikes to pass through various industries. It is a massive zero-sum fallacy masquerading as a budget. …
WSJ’s Political Diary reminds us why Tom Perez should be filibustered.
The Senate will consider Department of Justice civil-rights chief Thomas Perez’s nomination for labor secretary later this month, and questions are starting to mount. Among them is why Mr. Perez used his personal email account for federal business, in contravention of the Federal Records Act—and evaded House investigators’ questions about the matter.
Mr. Perez was the driving force behind a quid pro quo that last year saw the City of St. Paul, Minnesota withdraw a Supreme Court case, Magner v. Gallagher, in exchange for the feds not joining two False Claims Act cases against the city. Mr. Perez benefited personally from this trade because he was using a loose interpretation of antidiscrimination law to extract millions of dollars in settlements from banks, which helped further his political career. Mr. Perez feared that the Justices, via Magner, might invalidate his legal interpretation and prevent future settlements.
Congress launched an investigation, and House oversight investigators asked Mr. Perez whether he used personal email to communicate about the quid pro quo. He answered in a March 22 interview, “I don’t recall whether I did or didn’t.” He later amended that response, claiming “I don’t have any recollection of having communicated via personal email—on this matter.” …
Great piece from National Review on government fools trying to build an airplane.
It was the early 20th century. America was in a race with the powers of the world to invent the first airplane. Much was at stake. Our leaders feared that the Germans, the British, and, if you can suspend your disbelief, the French might beat us to the punch, giving the winning country a huge advantage militarily and economically.
Who better to win the race for us, thought our leaders, than the best and brightest minds the government could buy? They chose Samuel Langley. You don’t know him, but in his day, Langley was a big deal. He had a big brain and lots of credentials. A renowned scientist and a professor of astronomy, he wrote books about aviation and was the head of the Smithsonian.
It was the kind of decision that well-intentioned bureaucrats would make throughout the century — and still make today. Give taxpayer money to the smartest guys in the room, the ones with lots of degrees. They’ll innovate and do good for us.
Langley did have some success with unmanned flight, using a catapult-like system to propel his machines into the air. On the basis of that limited success, the Department of War gave him $50,000 for two experiments, and he extracted a decent sum from the Smithsonian, too. That was real money back then. Today, bureaucrats wouldn’t stop to pick up $50,000 if it were lying on the street.
What did the citizens of the United States get for that “investment,” the kind we are making today in green energy? It was the Great Aerodrome, and on October 7, 1903, the aircraft developed by Langley’s team of experts was launched from a catapult on a houseboat in the Potomac River.
The crowds lined up, as did the press. As the aircraft accelerated and reached full speed, it was hurtled along a catapult toward a launch. A few scant seconds of sudden acceleration were followed by a sudden and shocking plunge into river. “It fell like a ton of mortar,” a reporter wrote.
The plane that couldn’t fly and the man flying it were somehow salvaged, and preparations were made for another flight. The project needed some tweaks, the experts told the world. On December 8, Langley and his team of brainiacs tried it again. This time, the airplane got caught up in the launching mechanism and dropped into the river.
Langley’s machine should have been called the Not So Great Aerodrome; it never got airborne. The media had a field day. “The Boston Herald suggested that Professor Langley ought to give up airplanes and try submarines,” Burt Folsom notes in a lecture in HillsdaleCollege’s series of online courses, “American Heritage.” The Brooklyn Eagle led its story with this quote from a now-forgotten congressman: “You tell Langley for me that the only thing he ever made fly was government money.” …
Andrew Malcolm says North Korean warriors are going to sneak up on the sun.
North Korea’s latest little Kim has proudly announced that his hermit kingdom will soon launch a manned mission to the Sun. …
… And Kim added that he has carefully calculated the North Korean space capsule’s launch, arrival and descent to the Sun’s surface for a night-time landing.