January 11, 2015

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The amazing thing about today’s Pickings is that all the written selections come from the Washington Post. It is heartening to see one of the former standard bearers of the liberal media turn out to have columns and blogs fit for our readers. Two blogs we followed before they associated with the Post are Jennifer Rubin’s and The Volokh Conspiracy. Rubin was part of Commentary’s Contentions and Volokh was on his own.  The cartoons are a hoot today, especially the last one.

 

The first item is by Charles Krauthammer in which he calls for a one dollar per gallon increase in federal gas taxes with a corresponding decrease in social security taxes. So, don’t worry he’s not proposing to give more to the jerks in DC. 

For 32 years I’ve been advocating a major tax on petroleum. I’ve got as much chance this time around as did Don Quixote with windmills. But I shall tilt my lance once more.

The only time you can even think of proposing a gas tax increase is when oil prices are at rock bottom. When I last suggested the idea six years ago, oil was selling at $40 a barrel. It eventually rose back to $110. It’s now around $48. Correspondingly, the price at the pump has fallen in the last three months by more than a dollar to about $2.20 per gallon.

As a result, some in Congress are talking about a 10- or 20-cent hike in the federal tax to use for infrastructure spending. Right idea, wrong policy. The hike should not be 10 cents but $1. And the proceeds should not be spent by, or even entrusted to, the government. They should be immediately and entirely returned to the consumer by means of a cut in the Social Security tax.

The average American buys about 12 gallons of gas a week. Washington would be soaking him for $12 in extra taxes. Washington should therefore simultaneously reduce everyone’s FICA tax by $12 a week. Thus the average driver is left harmless. He receives a $12-per-week FICA bonus that he can spend on gasoline if he wants — or anything else. If he chooses to drive less, it puts money in his pocket. (The unemployed would have the $12 added to their unemployment insurance; the elderly, to their Social Security check.) …

 

 

Jennifer Rubin says there’s more to De Blasio’s stupidity than his mistakes with the NYPD.    

In case you thought New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s worst misstep was his dealings with the police (starting with his opposition to stop and frisk), consider what he has done to welfare.

Robert Doar of the American Enterprise Institute and Fried Siegel of the Manhattan Institute explain:

“From 1994–2009, work rates for single mothers rose from 43 percent to 63 percent. Overall labor force participation rose from under 55 percent to more than 60 percent (during a period when labor force participation nationwide declined). In 2011, even after the Great Recession, child poverty in NYC was almost 10 percentage points lower than in 1993, the year before welfare reform started.

Now de Blasio is proposing to replace these successes. Reviving the hoary notion of entry-level work as representing “dead-end jobs,” de Blasio suggests that, from the get-go, welfare recipients are owed more than an opportunity to work.” …

 

 

Richard Cohen says violence is working quite well for the radical islamists.

As sometimes happens, Jon Stewart is wrong. He said the other night about the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, “There is no sense to be made of this.”

Ah, but there is. There is an inescapable logic to violence. Killing your enemies silences them. Killing your enemies intimidates others. Just look at how the New York Times went about deciding whether to publish Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that, among others things, outraged so many traditional Muslims. The Times polled some of its various foreign bureaus to see whether anyone felt threatened by the possible publication of the cartoons. None did, we are told. Yet the Times did not publish.

The Washington Post’s editorial pages — as opposed to the quite separate news staff — did publish. They did so out of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo and because it was newsworthy. Journalistically, The Post did the right thing; the Times did not. The famed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams called the Times’s decision “regrettable.” I call it appalling. …

 

 

Jennifer Rubin asks now that France’s nightmare is over, is there any chance the delusions of the West will end?

… Will the events of the past few days be sufficient to end the perverse refusal to comprehend this and to persistently dismiss conservatives’ warning that we are engaged in a battle for civilization itself? 

If Israel didn’t build homes in its Jewish neighborhoods . . . if the United States closed GuantanamoBay . . .  if we had not waterboarded terrorist leaders  . . . if we had not become involved in Middle East wars . . . if Europeans did not insult Islam . . . what, what would be different? The jihadists would still seek to slaughter Jews, Christians and Muslims who don’t subscribe to their brand of jihadism. Iran would still sponsor terrorists and seek a bomb. Boko Haram will still kill and murder innocents. There is no action on our part that provokes the sort of barbarism we have seen. There is no way we can cease giving “offense.” Our existence is sufficient to spur the Islamist terrorists. And the only solution is to defeat and destroy the jihadists, their networks and their ability to gain access to more and more deadly weapons. (What if, for example, the French suspects had chemical weapons and not simply guns?)

And yet I doubt we will see President Obama (or critics of U.S. antiterrorism efforts) agree on an enhanced national security budget, adopt a new approach to ending Iran’s hegemonic ambitions, throw away the timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, deploy without limitations on their scope and duration a contingent of U.S. troops sufficient to eradicate the Islamic State swiftly or cease releasing jihadists from Guantanamo Bay. …

 

 

Eugene Volokh points out muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression. 

“Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone.”

So writes “a radical Muslim cleric in London and a lecturer in sharia,” Anjem Choudary, in a USA Today op-ed. USA Today has performed a valuable public service here — I mean this entirely sincerely — in reminding people that there is a very dangerous religious denomination out there, which is willing to teach the propriety of murder of blasphemers, which supports the death penalty for apostasy, and which would more broadly suppress the liberty of both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

To give one more example, a survey touted by CNN as showing that “Around the World, Muslims Heralded Religious Freedom” actually showed that, though “Ninety-seven percent of Muslims in South Asia, 95% in Eastern Europe, 94% in sub-Saharan Africa and 85% in the Middle East and North Africa responded positively to religious freedom, according to the poll,” in many countries huge percentages of Muslims favor “the death penalty for people who leave the Muslim religion.” For instance, in South Asia, death for apostates is favored by 79% of Afghan Muslims, 75% of Pakistani Muslims, and 43% of Bangladeshi Muslims. In the Middle East and North Africa, the numbers were 88% in Egypt, 83% in Jordan, 62% in the PalestinianTerritories, 41% in Iraq, 18% in Tunisia, and 17% in Lebanon. …

 

 

Also in Volokh, David Post calls attention to a David Brooks column which suggests many of the same people with crocodile tears for Charlie Hebdo would have shut it down if it showed up on a campus in the US.

David Brooks has a very thoughtful and important op-ed in today’s New York Times, linking our reactions to the horror at the Charlie Hebdo offices and the campus speech codes.

“The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down.”

Spot on, and pretty disturbing when you think about it – not to mention hypocritical on the part of many who are now so vociferous in their apparent support for untrammeled free expression. …

 

 

If we’re spending time at the Post, we won’t ignore George Will who writes on climate changes through the ages.

We know, because they often say so, that those who think catastrophic global warming is probable and perhaps imminent are exemplary empiricists. They say those who disagree with them are “climate change deniers” disrespectful of science.

Actually, however, something about which everyone can agree is that of course the climate is changing — it always is. And if climate Cassandras are as conscientious as they claim to be about weighing evidence, how do they accommodate historical evidence of enormously consequential episodes of climate change not produced by human activity? Before wagering vast wealth and curtailments of liberty on correcting the climate, two recent books should be considered.

In “The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century,” William Rosen explains how Europe’s “most widespread and destructive famine” was the result of “an almost incomprehensibly complicated mixture of climate, commerce, and conflict, four centuries in gestation.” Early in that century, 10 percent of the population from the Atlantic to the Urals died, partly because of the effect of climate change on “the incredible amalgam of molecules that comprises a few inches of soil that produces the world’s food.”  …

 

 

Turning our attention to the 2016 race, Jennifer Rubin has some advice for our hero - Scott Walker.

… The digs on Walker are well known — not charismatic enough (often compared to former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty), not a college graduate, no foreign policy experience and an insufficiently robust national fundraising network to compete with Bush or Christie. But none of that will matter if he can:

1. Become the pugnacious but reasonable Republican, tough enough for the base and sane enough for the establishment. His lack of a college degree, if not a selling point, can at least shape the image of a scrapper who had to educate himself and rise on sheer tenacity.

2. Put together a succinct and emotionally compelling stump speech. He should take to heart American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks’s admonition — state your mission in moral terms, be for people, not against things, and do it fast (people make snap judgments in less than a minute). Something like: “I’m going to fight for every American’s opportunity to rise, chance to earn success and security from enemies of liberty and tolerance who threaten Western civilization.”

3. Do some foreign travel, meet with top-flight advisers, develop a comfort-level with national security and present a tough-minded national security policy that contrasts with years of weakness, equivocation and shocking inability to support friends and confront enemies. …

 

Don’t forget, the cartoons are very good today.

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