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Charles Krauthammer has ideas on how we might stop Putin.
… we can do nothing decisive in the short or even medium term. But we can severely squeeze Russia in the long term.
How? For serious sanctions to become possible, Europe must first be weaned off Russian gas. Obama should order the Energy Department to expedite authorization for roughly 25 liquified natural gas export facilities. Demand all decisions within six weeks. And express major U.S. support for a southern-route pipeline to export Caspian Sea gas to Europe without traversing Russia or Ukraine.
Second, call for urgent bipartisan consultation with congressional leaders for an emergency increase in defense spending, restoring at least $100 billion annually to the defense budget to keep U.S. armed forces at current strength or greater. Obama won’t do it, but he should. Nothing demonstrates American global retreat more than a budget that reduces the U.S. Army to 1940 levels.
Obama is not the first president to conduct a weak foreign policy. Jimmy Carter was similarly inclined — until Russia invaded Afghanistan, at which point the scales fell from Carter’s eyes. He responded boldly: imposing the grain embargo on the Soviets, boycotting the Moscow Olympics, increasing defense spending and ostentatiously sending a machine-gun-toting Zbigniew Brzezinski to the Khyber Pass, symbolizing the massive military aid we began sending the mujahideen, whose insurgency so bled the Russians over the next decade that they not only lost Afghanistan but were fatally weakened as a global imperial power.
Invasion woke Carter from his illusions. Will it wake Obama?
Paul Mirengoff spots the dumbest John Kerry statement, ever. There is a lot of competition for this, but Pickerhead agrees. It is a beautiful thing to see how the president has gathered blithering idiots to his cabinet; Kerry, Hagel, and the president – a matched set of incompetents. The American voting public has a lot to answer for.
John Kerry has said some criminally stupid things in his time. Recall, for example, this statement by Kerry from 2010 about Bashar al-Assad:
Let me just say that I am . . . absolutely convinced that carefully calibrated diplomacy, that if that is what we engage in, that Syria will play a very important role in achieving a comprehensive peace in the region and in putting an end to the five decades of conflict that have plagued everybody in this region.
Kerry is never merely convinced of things, he’s “absolutely convinced.” And almost invariably, he’s absolutely wrong.
Kerry is now absolutely convinced that “it’s a mistake” for Israeli leaders “again and again” to raise the PLO’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state “as the critical decider of their attitude toward the possibility of a [Palestinian] state and peace.” Apparently, Kerry believes that Israel should consider as its peace partner an entity that doesn’t accept its right to exist as it is fundamentally constituted. …
Andrew Ferguson caught a bunch of economists admitting their mistakes.
… The new report is not solely an admission of error. It is also a catalogue of errors by type. The biggest mistakes, the economists point out, occurred when they forecast growth rates in countries with a relatively high level of government regulation. This surprises the economists, though it won’t surprise anyone who takes a dim view of government regulation generally. The forecasters, good statists all, assumed that the regulations “would help to cushion financial shocks” in the highly regulated countries and would therefore aid recovery.
The economists now say they failed to consider the damaging effects of regulation. In the real world, regulations “delay[ed] necessary reallocations across [economic] sectors in the recovery phase”—which, translated from the Economese, means that government was retarding the ability of businesses to do what they do best: find a way to create value and make money even in calamitous circumstances. The concession is implied, but it’s clear the economists regret letting an ideological assumption in favor of government intervention overwhelm their forecasts as the recession swept the globe, raining on the regulated and unregulated alike.
Failures of foresight are common among experts—commoner among them, probably, than among the rest of us, who are unburdened by the expertise that tends to bind rather than liberate habits of mind. The OECD economists are happy to point out that their failures in figuring out the economy from one country to the next are no greater than those of the profession as a whole, especially in the years before and after the recession. Yet no amount of publicity about such spectacular failures deters their clients, whether in government or business, from asking economists for more. …
Perhaps one of this administration’s most contemptible actions came last week with proposals for changes to over-time pay work rules. It was not the result of any diligent effort of study. It is simply something flicked out there to compensate for, and change the subject from, their manifest failures in domestic and foreign policy. Ed Morrissey comments.
The Roman Empire notoriously distracted its citizenry by providing bread and circuses to mollify and distract them from the real problems of their lives and the failures of their government. WashingtonDC kept up that hoary tradition this week, starting with an all-night Senate session on global warming, conducted by Senate Democrats protesting the lack of action by the US government on the issue.
That protest had two big problems for Democrats’ credibility. First, they control the upper chamber, so they can introduce legislation any time they wish – and they offered no legislation during the all-nighter. Second, climate change falls far down the list of priorities for Americans; according to Gallup, it’s second to last on a non-exclusive list of concerns overall, and near the bottom even among Democrats. The top priorities on Gallup’s list are the economy and unemployment, for voters of both parties.
With the failure of the circus on Capitol Hill, the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue focused on the bread. The White House told The New York Times and other media outlets that President Obama would take executive action to redefine salaried employment in order to expand overtime payment from employers. As usual, this top-down and unforeseen change in regulation will create more problems than it solves, and likely result in lowered compensation rather than the explosion of riches for the working class the Obama administration will claim. …
…All this does is give Obama and Democrats a wonky talking point for the midterm elections, and a way to distract the voters universally impacted by the negative consequences of Obamacare by discussing changes at the margins that will worsen the stagnation in the current economy. It’s just another ring in the circus, with imaginary bread promised to magically appear at some later date.
Camille Paglia never fails to surprise. Her comments on the failures of sex education is spot on. She wants more sex.
Fertility is the missing chapter in sex education. Sobering facts about women’s declining fertility after their 20s are being withheld from ambitious young women, who are propelled along a career track devised for men.
The refusal by public schools’ sex-education programs to acknowledge gender differences is betraying both boys and girls. The genders should be separated for sex counseling. It is absurd to avoid the harsh reality that boys have less to lose from casual serial sex than do girls, who risk pregnancy and whose future fertility can be compromised by disease. Boys need lessons in basic ethics and moral reasoning about sex (for example, not taking advantage of intoxicated dates), while girls must learn to distinguish sexual compliance from popularity.
Above all, girls need life-planning advice. Too often, sex education defines pregnancy as a pathology, for which the cure is abortion. Adolescent girls must think deeply about their ultimate aims and desires. If they want both children and a career, they should decide whether to have children early or late. There are pros, cons and trade-offs for each choice.
Unfortunately, sex education in the U.S. is a crazy quilt of haphazard programs. A national conversation is urgently needed for curricular standardization and public transparency. The present system is too vulnerable to political pressures from both the left and the right–and students are trapped in the middle. …