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Stuart Taylor, law correspondent extraordinaire for the National Journal, is not pleased with the supreme pick. It is passing strange to pick a judge whose latest controversial opinion is about to be reversed by the Supreme Court.
… I have been hoping that despite our deep divisions, President Obama would coax his party, and the country, to think of Americans more as united by allegiance to democratic ideals and the rule of law and less as competing ethnic and racial groups driven by grievances that are rooted more in our troubled history than in today’s reality.
I also hope that Obama will use this Supreme Court appointment to re-enforce the message of his 2004 Democratic convention speech: “There’s not a black America, and white America, and Latino America, and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”
But in this regard, the president’s emphasis on selective “empathy” for preferred racial and other groups as “the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges” is not encouraging, as I explained in a May 15 post on National Journal’s The Ninth Justice blog.
As for Sotomayor’s speech, fragmentary quotations admittedly cannot capture every qualification and nuance. She also stressed that although “men lawyers… need to work on” their “attitudes,” many have already reached “great moments of enlightenment.” She noted that she tries to be impartial. And she did not overtly suggest that judges should play identity politics.
I place the earlier quotations in more-detailed context here so that readers can assess Sotomayor’s meaning for themselves. …
… In one of her few explosive cases, Sotomayor voted (without writing an opinion) to join two colleagues in upholding what I see as raw racial discrimination by New Haven, Conn. The city denied promotions to the firefighters who did best on a test of job-related skills because none was black. (See my column, “New Haven’s Injustice Shouldn’t Disappear.”) …
Jennifer Rubin notes the NY Times distress about the fall of the dollar. “What did you expect?” She says.
… It is no mystery how this happened. As the Times notes, the Fed “is printing money from thin air, and the government is issuing trillions of dollars in new debt as it tries to spend its way out of the recession with a huge stimulus package, new lending programs, health care overhauls and automotive rescues.” The immediate impact is already seen in higher oil and other commodity prices and higher interest rates. In the longer term economists now worry about the loss of the U.S. AAA bond rating. All this is occurring as unemployment is climbing into double digits. …
In a normal day, like most business folk, Pickerhead will ask the CFO, “What were collections today?” The same question has been asked about the federal government. A blog post from Safe Haven.com has the distressing answers.
… In 2007 and 2008, government tax revenues averaged about $633.15 billion per quarter. For the first quarter of 2009, however, the numbers just in tell us that tax receipts totaled only about $442.39 billion — a decline of 30%.Looking to confirm the trend, we compared the data for April – the big kahuna of tax collection months – to the 2007-2008 average, and found that individual income taxes this year were down more than 40%.
The situation is even worse for corporate income taxes, which were down a stunning 67%
When you add in all revenue from all sources (including Social Security revenue, government fees, etc.), the fiscal year-to-date – October through April – revenue shortfall comes to 19%, vs. the 14.6% projected in Obama’s budget. If, however, the accelerating shortfall apparent year-to-date, and in April in particular, continues, the spread between projected and actual tax receipts will widen considerably.
Tellingly, for the first time since 1983, the U.S. government posted a deficit in April. That’s a big swing in the wrong direction, as the bump in personal tax collections in April historically results in a big surplus — on average about $68 billion. …
Jennifer Rubin reports even BO has noticed the revenue shortage. Guess who he’s blaming?
… That darn Bush left a mess on national security. And what’s a guy to do with such a deficit left on his doorstep? But the facts tell a different story, as this chart illustrates. To a greater degree than any predecessor, Obama has run up the deficit — with little to show for it.
Blaming the previous administration is a time-honored political trick. But voters tend to hold the party in power responsible for the state of the country’s finances. That’s how the Republicans lost the White House and I suspect the public will be no less forgiving in 2010 or 2012 if things don’t turn around. …
National Review notes Japan’s opposition party is turning the screws on their government for its purchase of dollar denominated assets.
And Sebastian Mallaby explains China’s dollar dilemma.
… China has accumulated at least $1.5 trillion in dollar assets, according to my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Brad Setser, so a (highly plausible) 30 percent move in the yuan-dollar rate would cost the country around $450 billion — about a tenth of its economy. And, to make the dilemma even more painful, China’s determination to control the appreciation of its currency forces it to buy billions more in dollar assets every month. Like an addict at a slot machine, China is adding to its hopeless bet, ensuring that its eventual losses will be even heavier.
It is easy to appreciate China’s sudden appetite for bold new ideas about international finance. But Beijing’s leaders look less like the architects of a new Bretton Woods than like aspiring Houdinis.
Bret Stephens notes the disconnect between deciding something is a worthy goal and actually figuring out how to get there.
… The president’s plan can briefly be described as follows. Phase One: Order Guantanamo closed. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Close Gitmo!
Granted, this is an abbreviated exegesis of his speech, which did explain how some two-thirds of the detainees will be tried by military commissions or civilian courts, or repatriated to other countries. But on the central question of the 100-odd detainees who can neither be tried in court nor released one searches in vain for an explanation of exactly what the president intends to do.
Now take the administration’s approach to the Middle East. Phase One: Talk to Iran, Syria, whoever. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Peace!
In this case, the administration seems to think that diplomacy, like aspirin, is something you take two of in the morning to take away the pain. But as Boston University’s Angelo Codevilla notes in his book, “Advice to War Presidents,” diplomacy “can neither create nor change basic intentions, interests, or convictions. . . . To say, ‘We’ve got a problem. Let’s try diplomacy, let’s sit down and talk’ abstracts from the important questions: What will you say? And why should anything you say lead anyone to accommodate you?”
Ditto for Mr. Obama’s approach to nuclear weapons. In a speech last month in Prague, right after North Korea had illegally tested a ballistic missile, Mr. Obama promised a new nonproliferation regime, along with “a structure in place that ensures when any nation [breaks the rules], they will face consequences.” Whereupon the U.N. Security Council promptly failed to muster the votes for a resolution condemning Pyongyang’s launch.
Now Kim Jong Il has tested another nuke, and we’re back at the familiar three-step. Phase One: Propose a “structure.” . . . …
Simon Heffer of London’s Daily Telegraph thinks sometime Obama will have to take a stand.
Victor Davis Hanson sums it up.
… In other words, rather than explaining the bleak choices before us and explaining why his preferences have the best chance of succeeding, Obama has so far reduced his presidency to two themes: “Bush did it” and “I’m not your normal white male President.” If he keeps this monotony up, at some point even the comedians are going to notice the predictability.
Borowitz reports U.S. prepared to respond to North Korea with “strongest possible adjectives.”
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