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Thomas Sowell reaches a reasonable conclusion to the question of why Obamacare will not be enacted until 2013.
…One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation’s medical care before the August recess– for a program that would not take effect until 2013!
Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years– more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?
If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election?
If it is not urgent that the legislation goes into effect immediately, then why don’t we have time to go through the normal process of holding Congressional hearings on the pros and cons, accompanied by public discussions of its innumerable provisions? What sense does it make to “hurry up and wait” on something that is literally a matter of life and death?
If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it. …
Robert Samuelson reports that indications are for a slow recovery from the recession, but there is still much that is uncertain.
…”The 1982 recession was largely caused by the desire to break the back of inflation,” says economist Nigel Gault of IHS. “Once the [Federal Reserve] was comfortable it had broken inflation, it lowered interest rates, and economic growth took off.” Interest-sensitive sectors—autos and housing—propelled recovery. By contrast, today’s slump results from the financial crisis, Gault says. The Fed has already cut interest rates, which will probably go up. As overborrowed households repay debt, their spending will be sluggish. The weak recovery then retards new jobs. …
…Of course, today’s bleak economic forecasts could be wrong—just as upbeat forecasts before the financial crisis were wrong. Some economists are warming to this view. “Global manufacturers cut output too deeply,” says David Hensley of JPMorgan Chase. “People thought we might be headed into another depression.” Here and abroad, he says, companies are reversing previous cutbacks. “Businesses overshot. They’ll snap back [in hiring]; that will fuel consumer spending.” One good omen: in August the number of job openings online rose 5 percent, reports the Conference Board.
Job creation has been a historic strength of the American economy. Its capacity to remain so will increasingly frame the economic debate: between those who want more government and those who want less; between those who fear budget deficits and those who favor more economic “stimulus”; between those who see meager wage gains as impeding recovery and those who see them as encouraging hiring. On Labor Day 2009, future jobs are the gigantic question mark hanging over the American economy.
Victor Davis Hanson comments that the cries of racism by successful people demonstrates that Obama is not the post-racial president that many were expecting.
Van Jones in his final communiqué says, “On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.” I have not watched the now supposedly infamous Beck exposures, but I am curious what exactly constitutes a “vicious smear campaign.” Did Jones or did not Jones in public and in interviews compare the president of the United States to a crack-cocaine addict, assert that white people are polluting the ghetto, that only white students commit mass murders in the public schools, that Republicans are a**holes, and sign a petition calling for an investigation of the Bush administration’s purported role in causing 9/11?
The Jones mess brings up a larger issue. Americans were assured that with the ascendance of Barack Obama we would evolve beyond race. Yet in the last ninth months it is almost as if precisely the opposite has occurred — but with a strange twist. The country has been serially lectured about race from some of the most privileged Americans in the country. Columbia law grad elite Eric Holder accused the country of cowardice for its reluctance to speak about race. Harvard-law alum Barack Obama accused the Cambridge police of profiling and acting stupidly in taking elite Harvard professor Skip Gates down to the station after his screaming invective episode. Harvard-law educated Michelle Obama explained Justice Sotomayor’s unease at Princeton by comparing her own ordeal there. Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee Charles Rangel who had serially dodged his tax obligations claims that white angst explains his IRS problems. New York governor David Paterson blames his sinking polls on white racism, more prominent than ever in the age of Obama. Now Yale law graduate Van Jones claims smears did him in. The list could be easily expanded.
What we are seeing is a very unfortunate turn of events in which racism is now the guaranteed retreat position once many prominent African-American elites find themselves in controversy. The problem is that the rest of the population of all races and classes looks at this privileged cohort and does not really detect bias or ill-treatment in their past or present circumstances, but rather remarkable tolerance and race-blind attitudes, as exemplified by their career successes. …
Stephen Spruiell posts in The Corner that the “green jobs czar” position should go.
To buy into the “green jobs” scam, you must have an unshakeable faith in the ability of the government to create a viable industry from whole cloth, because there is no commercial demand for the services these green-collar workers would provide. We don’t have to guess about the future of green jobs; we can look to the ethanol industry.
In 2005, after decades of subsidization, the government finally mandated the consumption of ethanol. It upped the mandate in 2007. This, plus high gas prices, was the boost the industry was looking for. Ethanol plants started springing up all over the Midwest.
Corn prices went up to meet the government-mandated demand for ethanol. Then oil prices fell, bringing the price of ethanol down with it. The industry’s profit-margins disappeared. VeraSun, one of the largest ethanol makers, is in Chapter 11. Last December, the industry asked Congress for a bailout.
Again, this is an industry whose customers are required by law to buy their product, yet it couldn’t survive in the commercial marketplace. Those green jobs are now disappearing. Before he was hoisted with his own petard, Van Jones was in the business of selling illusions — costly ones, too. It’s good that he’s gone, but it would be better if the position of green jobs czar went with him.
Ed Morrissey posts on the lack of reporting on the Van Jones scandal by the MSM, until the story could not be ignored.
If people relied on the mainstream media, especially print media, to keep up to date on the government, then they must have quite a shock this morning with the resignation of Van Jones. For instance, the New York Times makes its first mention of the Jones controversy this morning — by reporting his resignation…
…When did the 9/11 Truther connection come to light? Jim Hoft reported it Thursday, and it flew through the blogosphere. Even more Truther connections came out the next day. When did the New York Times — and to be fair, most other newspapers in the country — get around to reporting in print that a paranoid conspiracy theorist had a job as a White House czar? Today, after he quit.
Byron York gives us the round-up:
Coverage of the Jones controversy was a case study of some of the deep divisions within the media. Fox News’ Glenn Beck devoted program after program to Jones’ past, and a number of conservative blogs were responsible for finding some of Jones’ most inflammatory statements. Yet even as the controversy grew — and even after Jones himself apologized for some of his words — several of the nation’s top media outlets failed to report the story. As late as Friday, as the Jones matter began to boil over, it had not been reported at all in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Although the Post and CBS went on to report the Jones story on Saturday, the Times did not inform its readers about the Jones matter until after Jones resigned.
So much for speaking truth to power, eh? …
Roger Simon posts that one of the New York Times articles was fixated on Glenn Beck.
…There’s some reference to Beck’s advertising woes (a subject with which the Times should be familiar) due to Beck’s having called Obama a “racist.” But the substance is that Beck got the scoop. His numbers are going up and NYT’s continue to go down as the Newspaper of Record searches for a new economic model.
Part of the reason for this is pretty obvious. People trust Beck and they don’t trust the NYT. Beck may be biased, but he’s honest about it. The NYT persists in the illusion of even-handed reporting, even when, in a case like the Van Jones scandal, they clearly decided not to run the story for political reasons, but don’t have the cojones to admit it. Or is there another reason? We’re waiting.
Victor Davis Hanson makes a good point about America’s left-wing radicals.
As Hugo Chavez continues to shut down the media and silence critics, Oliver Stone—who would never be allowed, if he were a Venezuelan filmmaker, to direct as he does in the states—praises Chavez’s coerced socialism.
Michael Moore, known for hard-nosed distribution and profit-making, announces, again like Stone in conjunction with hyping a profit-making movie, that capitalism (for others) is dead.
Van Jones, solidly middle class and Yale-educated, among other things, pontificated about revolution, an apartheid America, redistributing wealth, a–hole Republicans and George Bush’s involvement in 9/11, in between jetting between conferences, espousing his green jobs promotion that hyped book sales and his own career.
What is strange about all this chic-radicalism is how would-be revolutionaries that wish to dismantle America as we know it and/or emulate failed systems abroad, always do so from comfort, security, affluence, and freedom of choice unique to America and Europe, suggesting that radical politics and those who agitate for them are sort of a fashion statement, aimed to resonate among particular elite leftist audiences and to bring dividends from them, but not to be taken too seriously as guides in their own lives.
Even though it pre-dated the Jones resignation, The American Spectator’s questions about whom in the White House overrode suspected Secret Service objections to Mr. Jones. are still germane.
Here are the questions Glenn Beck and others should be asking, based on my own personal experience:
• Who on the White House staff cleared Van Jones?
• What was that person’s connection to Van Jones or Mr. Jones’s political sponsor?
• Who, exactly, was Mr. Jones’ sponsor for this job? How much money did he/she contribute to the Obama campaign?
• Did the Secret Service notify anyone on the White House staff — or the President or First Lady or Vice President Biden — that Mr. Jones had an arrest record on file with police in two cities?
• Did the Secret Service protest any of this, objecting to Mr. Jones’ clearance?
• If the Secret Service did object, who overruled them? The President? The Chief of Staff? Someone else?
• If the answer to this last question is yes, and the Secret Service was overruled by the President or someone else, why did this happen? …
And we have National Review Shorts. Here are two:
Holder’s Justice Department also quietly killed an ongoing pay-for-play corruption investigation of New Mexico governor Bill Richardson — a key Obama ally whose nomination to be commerce secretary the probe derailed. Though the Richardson investigation was being conducted by the U.S. attorney in New Mexico and a grand jury, the Associated Press reported that top DOJ officials in Washington pulled the plug. That would reverse Justice Department protocols, which call for local control of public-corruption cases in order to avoid the appearance of politicized law enforcement. The dropping of the investigation comes on the heels of Holder’s dismissal of a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party (one defendant was an official Democratic-party poll-watcher). During the Bush years, congressional Democrats worked themselves into a frenzy over the mere, never-substantiated possibility that politics would compromise justice. What will they do now that it’s actually happening?
Taro Aso, the outgoing Japanese prime minister, has done something remarkable. In a ceremony marking the end of World War II, he said, “Our country inflicted tremendous damage and suffering on many countries, particularly people in Asia. As a representative of the Japanese people, I humbly express my remorse for the victims, along with deep regret.” And he vowed that Japan would never again behave as it had. There are times for national apologies, and times when such apologies are stupid or cheap, meant only to flatter the apologizers — President Obama’s recent utterances in Europe and elsewhere come to mind. At that World War II ceremony, Aso performed well.