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Mark Steyn found one item worth celebrating from the shutdown theatre. Then he gets back to Armageddon as usual.
The least dispiriting moment of another grim week in Washington was the sight of ornery veterans tearing down the Barrycades around the war memorials on the National Mall, dragging them up the street, and dumping them outside the White House. This was, as Kevin Williamson wrote at National Review, “as excellent a gesture of the American spirit as our increasingly docile nation has seen in years.” Indeed. The wounded vet with two artificial legs balancing the Barrycade on his Segway was especially impressive. It would have been even better had these disgruntled citizens neatly lined up the Barrycades across the front of the White House and round the sides, symbolically Barrycading him in as punishment for Barrycading them out. But, in a town where an unarmed woman can be left a bullet-riddled corpse merely for driving too near His Benign Majesty’s palace and nobody seems to care, one appreciates a certain caution. …
… My friends on the American right fret that if we’re not careful we’ll end up like Europe. But we’re already worse than many parts of Europe, and certainly than the non-European West — by any measure you care to use. According to the IMF, the Danish government’s net debt is 10.3 percent of GDP, Australia’s is 12.7 percent, New Zealand’s 28.8 percent, the Netherlands’ 35.5 percent, Canada’s 35.9 percent, Germany’s 56.2 percent, France’s 86.5 percent — and the United States’ 89 percent. If you take America’s total indebtedness, it averages out to three-quarters of a million dollars per family: We are on course to becoming the first nation of negative-millionaires. But let’s just stick with the federal debt, the figure for which those bipartisan schmoozers are officially responsible: In Australia, each citizen’s share of the debt is $12,000; in New Zealand, it’s $15,000 per person; in Canada and Spain, $18,000; in the United Kingdom, $28,000; in Germany and France, $38,000; Italy, $44,000. And in the United States it’s $54,000 per person — twice as much as Britain, thrice as much as Canada, closing in on five times as much as Oz. On this trajectory, America is exiting the First World.
And that’s before counting the “unfunded liabilities” that Washington keeps off the books but which add another million bucks per taxpayer. Nor does it include Obamacare, with which the geniuses of the “technocracy” have managed to spend a fortune creating the Internet version of a Brezhnev-era Soviet supermarket. …
WSJ Editors think the HHS Sec and her aides should be available to answer questions posed by congressional committees.
The Affordable Care Act’s botched rollout has stunned its media cheering section, and it even seems to have surprised the law’s architects. The problems run much deeper than even critics expected, and whatever federal officials, White House aides and outside contractors are doing to fix them isn’t working. But who knows? Omerta is the word of the day as the Obama Administration withholds information from the public.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is even refusing to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing this coming Thursday. HHS claims she has scheduling conflicts, but we hope she isn’t in the White House catacomb under interrogation by Valerie Jarrett about her department’s incompetence.
The department is also refusing to make available lower-level officials who might detail the source or sources of this debacle. Ducking an investigation with spin is one thing. Responding with a wall of silence to the invitation of a duly elected congressional body probing the use of more than half a billion taxpayer dollars is another. This Obama crowd is something else. …
John Hinderaker posts on the hopelessness created by this administration.
Of all the bitter fruit of the Barack Obama disaster, the most bitter may be the sense of hopelessness that has descended on Americans, especially the young. Has there ever been anything like it in our history? Even on the eve of the Civil War, was there this much pessimism about our future? Gallup wasn’t around in those days, but I wonder.
For a simple measure of how the Obama administration has crushed any sense of hopefulness in the American people, take a look at the survey that Rasmussen Reports does periodically on whether America’s best days are behind her, or still in the future. It’s a great question that tells a lot about how Americans are feeling. …
It’s not too late to sink obamacare says Jennifer Rubin.
… With some direction from leadership, Republicans previously at each other’s throats can unite around the common goal of showing why Obamacare is untenable. They’ve made the philosophic and economic arguments but now they have the goods, the evidence. That — and the Ryan negotiations — should occupy the lion’s share of Congress’s time until the end of the year.
Republicans need to have at the very least a proposal to help those for whom Obamacare is unaffordable. They can start with a proposal to allow individuals to escape the insurance that they’re being told they must have and is more expensive than their existing insurance. The promise of Obamacare — keep your insurance if you have it — wasn’t “lose your coverage and pay more.” Republicans should be the heroes of the lower- and middle-class Americans who are being punished by a horribly designed program. (And if sign-ups stay low, the subsidy from healthy young people to poorer, older people will only worsen.)
And for those uninsured Americans at or below the poverty line, Republicans should propose that in exchange for states covering individuals up to the poverty line (or higher), the feds would give governors waivers to reduce costs, fight fraud and provide better coverage for less. Reform Medicaid before you expand it. Let the Democrats insist that people who can’t afford the Affordable Care Act must sign up or be fined. Let the Democrats be the ones to refuse to improve the Medicaid program. …
National Review looks askance at the Nobel Peace award.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The justification for the prize was largely the anti-chemical-weapons group’s work in Syria. “Recent events in Syria, where chemical weapons have again been put to use, have underlined the need to enhance the efforts to do away with such weapons,” said the Committee.
While there is no doubt that the OPCW is a professional and important organization, it’s premature to issue an award before the results can be obtained about the fate of Syrian president Bashar Assad’s 1,000 tons of chemical weapons scattered around the country. It is worth recalling that the OPCW and the international community apparently failed to confront Turkey about its alleged use of chemical weapons to target the militant Kurdish group PKK.
This is just the latest episode in a long tradition of the Nobel Committee showering recipients with the Peace Prize before concrete results materialized (e.g., President Obama, the European Union).
The award this year — a kind of mirror image of last year’s prize to the EU — is a sign of self-congratulatory failure. The overwhelming deaths (now believed to be near 120,000) and the conflict that’s tearing Syria and the region apart were caused by Assad’s conventional weapons, supplied by the Russians, Iranians, and Hezbollah.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Chemical weapons have killed over 1,000, and conventional weapons have murdered over 100,000. Disturbingly, the West and members of the OPCW have played a role in helping Assad gain his chemical capability, anyway. Germany delivered “dual-use” chemical agents to Assad’s regime over the years, selling military usage agents to the country as late as 2011, including chemicals that can be used for the deadly nerve gas sarin. The U.S. accused Assad of killing over 1,400 people on August 21 with sarin gas.
My preference, however utopian given the left-leaning tendencies of the Noble Committee, would have been to award the U.S. armed forces the prize. After all, the U.S military has achieved remarkable counterterrorism successes over the years — and its threat, not the OPCW’s authority, has made the elimination of Assad’s chemical warfare stockpile possible.
The award to OPCW is a feel-good action without substance. It will be interpreted by Secretary of State Kerry, Russian President Putin, and Syria’s Assad as their victory. The losers are the Syrian people.