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Jennifer Rubin, who has become a bete noire for some on the far right, celebrates the budget deal.
The margin was simply stunning — 332 to 94 — for House passage of a two-year budget that restores some monies for defense, includes minor pension reform, eschews tax increases and maintains the basic structure of the sequester. The far-right groups (Heritage Action, Club for Growth) and their minions squawked, but they were ignored and even insulted by the speaker, who questioned how the folks that brought us the shutdown could question a bipartisan budget deal that takes away the threat of tax hikes and a shutdown for the remainder of the Obama presidency. The era of bullying by the hardliners — if not over — is at least waning.
The victory is a substantial one for the House leadership, for mainstream Republican groups like the Chamber of Commerce (which has roused itself to take on the far right) and most especially House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who struck the deal and persuaded the 168 other Republicans to join him in passing the bill (Dems provided nearly as many votes).
In essence, Ryan saved the GOP from itself, allowing it to forgo endless squabbles and shutdown threats in order to concentrate on the best issues for them, primarily Obamacare. In staring down the far-right groups, the speaker and others in House leadership gain some running room to use on immigration and other issues. With a win this big — one that the country desperately wanted to end the budget histrionics — why quiver at the prospect of Heritage Action e-mails or threats by Club for Growth to primary incumbents? (Let them try to primary 169 Republicans.) …
Roger Simon has the same take.
Excuse me, but I’m a little confused. Just why are “movement” conservatives and libertarians so angry with Paul Ryan about the budget deal he made with Patty Murray?
Now, of course, I understand why some politicians are angry, or pretending to be. They’re Ryan’s competition for POTUS in 2016, assuming the Wisconsin congressman wants to run. They’re positioning themselves for a campaign. But the rest of us?
Let’s stipulate this: No conservative or libertarian is going to get what he or she wants on government spending — or even anything remotely close to it — without winning the Senate in 2014 and the presidency two years later. Barring mass lobotomies, it ain’t gonna happen — not with Barack Obama and Harry Reid standing in the way. You have to get rid of these people first.
The good news is, as of this moment — thanks to the Obamacare fiasco that will likely continue for some time, even get worse, and, to a lesser extent, the Iran deal that, in all probability, is headed for disaster — things are running in the right’s direction. What Ryan quite obviously was trying to do is keep it that way — tread some water until we have at least the first of those elections (2014). He was following Hippocrates’ prescription to do no harm. …
Turns out the same blasé attitudes that gave us the healthcare.gov disaster were in charge of security at Mandela’s memorial. Byron York has the story. This is an administration filled with mediocrities like Ben Rhodes, who must be well liked by Valerie Jarrett, because there cannot be anything else to recommend him. (“Bete noire”, “blasé”; Pickerhead has become continental.)
It’s becoming increasingly clear that when President Obama arrived at the Nelson Mandela memorial service in Johannesburg, South Africa Tuesday, he stepped into an atmosphere so chaotic, disorganized, and unsafe that under any other circumstances the White House and Secret Service might well have insisted the president not appear.
FNB Stadium, where the memorial was held, seats 95,000 people. Even with a steady rain and thousands of empty seats in uncovered areas, there were tens of thousands of people in the area with the president. It appears most of them got in without going through any security.
“There were no security checks upon entry to the stadium,” a local South African activist wrote Friday in a letter to the Johannesburg Star newspaper. “I walked freely to my seat without passing through metal detectors, being searched or any other check.”
The stadium’s main entrance was “completely unattended,” a reporter for a Washington, D.C., television station told Politico. “There were no workers performing bag checks or pat-downs — there were no magnetometers to walk through, no metal detector wands being used — anywhere.” …
… Even as Obama flew to South Africa, White House officials confidently told reporters that the South African government could take care of things. “The sheer number of leaders appearing in the same place at one time raises numerous logistical and security challenges, but the White House expressed confidence in the South African government’s ability to handle the event,” CNN reported. “‘We have not heard any concerns,’ Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters aboard Air Force One. ‘The South Africans hosted the World Cup, so they have experience hosting significant crowds and managing events like this.’”
Now it is clear that American confidence was misplaced. And the United States is lucky the president emerged safely from the confusion and disorder of FNB Stadium.
Ed Carson at IBD drills into the unemployment numbers.
The official unemployment rate has fallen to a five-year low of 7%. But put away the champagne.
That gradual decline reflects a historic drop in labor force participation. Without that drop, joblessness would be 11.3%, holding at 11% or higher in every month but one in the last 50 months.
To be considered unemployed, a person has to be out of work but actively looking. So when people give up the job hunt, they reduce unemployment — even if the number of people working hasn’t risen.
At the start of the recession in December 2007, the labor force participation rate was 66%. It fell sharply, tumbling to 62.8% in October, a 35-year low. It rose slightly to 63% last month.
The actual labor force has declined by 217,000 so far this year, even with nonfarm payrolls up by 2.1 million.
During recessions and the early stages of a recovery, discouraged people leave the workforce. So the unemployment rate at these times typically masks how bad the job market really is.
But the size and scope of the distortion is far higher now than in past economic recoveries. The gap between the official and “true” unemployment rate is 4.3 percentage points — more than four years after the recession ended.
After the brief 1990-1991 slump, the unemployment gap never was wider than 2 percentage points. …
Nolan Finley says Robin Hood policies hurt the poor. If you understand that the government always screws up, you then expect that policies to help the poor will make them poorer.
President Barack Obama has some bad news for poor and working class Americans: He’s going to spend the final three years of his presidency attacking the income gap.
“The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe,” the president said in a recent speech.
No coincidence the pledge to stamp out inequality comes at the same time Obama’s popularity and performance ratings are plunging due to the Obamacare fiasco. He always pivots to populism when he gets in trouble.
But this is no grand shift. Obama has been playing Robin Hood since Day One. All his major initiatives have been built on soaking the rich.
And what’s happened? Those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder have less disposable income than they did when he took office, and the fat cats are fatter than ever. …
Megan McArdle says the pill was important, but there would be no sexual revolution with antibiotics.
Last night, I had a drink with Peter Huber, who has a terrific new book out on how the legal system is holding back medical innovation. We chatted about a lot of things, but one thing we discussed was how antibiotics have been the unseen driver of so many developments in the modern world.
Most of them are medical, like transplant surgery, and I’ve written about those before. But here’s one you might not have thought of: the sexual revolution. Most of us, if we think about it at all, probably attribute the rise in premarital sex to The Pill, among other factors. But before the birth control pill, there was another invention that was just as necessary: antibiotics. …
Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink? Turns out there’s gobs of fresh water in aquifers under the world’s oceans. Walter Russell Mead with the story.
We may soon be looking to our oceans for our freshwater—or more accurately, we’ll be looking underneath our oceans. A new study, the first to comprehensively survey the world’s known reserves of undersea freshwater, estimates that there are roughly 120,000 cubic miles—more than 100 times the amount of freshwater we’ve drilled from the ground since 1900—of fresh and nearly-fresh water trapped underneath seabeds. The upshot: we could be seeing more offshore drilling for water as well as oil in the future. ScienceDaily reports:
“… The water, which could perhaps be used to eke out supplies to the world’s burgeoning coastal cities, has been located off Australia, China, North America and South Africa. [...]
These reserves were formed over the past hundreds of thousands of years when on average the sea level was much lower than it is today, and when the coastline was further out, [lead author Dr Vincent Post] explains…”So when it rained, the water would infiltrate into the ground and fill up the water table in areas that are nowadays under the sea. ‘ …