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It’s another Ladies Day!
All of today’s “radical right-wing rants” come from the distaff side. And we have an enjoyable juxtaposition with the first two. Sarah Palin leads off with some of her common sense in a NR piece on oil exploration titled “Drill.” Next from Beth Healy at the Boston Globe, we learn how the bien pensants at Harvard not only lost billions in their endowment, they mixed the grocery money, (i.e. current accounts) with the endowment and lost an additional $1.8 billion there. Let’s send some more of them to Washington.
Here are excerpts from Sarah Palin’s article.
…Those who oppose domestic drilling are motivated primarily by environmental considerations, but many of the countries we’re forced to import from have few if any environmental-protection laws, and those that do exist often go unenforced. In effect, American environmentalists are preventing responsible development here at home while supporting irresponsible development overseas. …
…In addition to drilling, we need to build new refineries. America currently has roughly 150 refineries, down from over 300 in the 1970s. Due mainly to environmental regulations, we haven’t built a major new refinery since 1976, though our oil consumption has increased significantly since then. That’s no way to secure our energy supply. The post-Katrina jump in gas prices proved that we can’t leave ourselves at the mercy of a hurricane that knocks a few refineries out of commission.
Building an energy-independent America will mean a real economic stimulus. It will mean American jobs that can never be shipped overseas. Think about how much of our trade deficit is fueled by the oil we import — sometimes as much as half of the total. Through this massive transfer of wealth, we lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could be invested in our economy. Instead it goes to foreign countries, including some repressive regimes that use it to fund activities that threaten our security. …
…Alternative sources of energy are part of the answer, but only part. There’s no getting around the fact that we still need to “drill, baby, drill!” And if those in D.C. say otherwise, we need to tell them: “Yes, we can!”
And Beth Healy’s article.
Harvard University, one of the world’s richest educational institutions, stumbled into its financial crisis in part by breaking one of the most basic rules of corporate or family finance: Don’t gamble with the money you need to pay the daily bills.
The university disclosed yesterday that it had lost $1.8 billion in cash – money it relies on for the school’s everyday expenses – by investing it with its endowment fund, instead of keeping it in safe, bank-like accounts. The disclosure was made in the school’s annual report for the fiscal year that ended June 30. …
…But Harvard placed a large portion of its cash with Harvard Management Co., the entity that runs the university’s endowment and invests in stocks, hedge funds, and other risky assets. It has been widely reported that Harvard Management’s endowment investments were battered in the market crash – down 27 percent in its last fiscal year. Not revealed until yesterday was that the school’s basic cash portfolio had also been caught in the undertow. …
The executive branch should be protecting free speech, not railing against news agencies that they don’t like, says Claudia Rosett.
…This would be a very good moment for all those other news organizations — CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the newspapers and the news web sites – to offer President Obama the perspective that it is utterly inappropriate for White House personnel to be opining publicly on the overall fitness of specific news outlets. The president has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That includes protecting free speech, not dispatching White House staff and advisers to hold forth publicly as media critics denouncing news outlets they don’t like. …
…The matter of deciding whether a news outlet has “a perspective” — and many do — is something that in a free country, if the country is to remain free, should be left to the private customer. There are legions of critics in the private sector who spend their time analyzing and debating which outlets provide the most reliable news, what’s entertainment, who’s opinionated, and how, and who’s not. They are easy to find. You can tune in, subscribe, and decide for yourself. These folks, like the media they criticize, are subject to the market test — in which private consumers freely make their own choices about what or whom they trust, what they pay for, what they pay attention to, and why.
Government personnel getting into this act is altogether different. These are people paid out of the public purse, and speaking under the imprimatur of public institutions — in this case the White House. Here they are, urging White House-favored news outfits to follow the White House lead, and ostracize a specific news outlet the White House doesn’t like. This is Banana Republic stuff, a stock tactic of pressure and intimidation. The effect of such stuff, as a rule, is not to promote accurate news coverage, but to cover up stories the government doesn’t want aired, and shut up critics. …
Mary Katherine Ham posts on the Weekly Standard blog that the White House is receiving criticism from their friends in the news media for its petty attacks on Fox.
Well, it’s not the first time the Grande Liberal Dame of the press corps has had words for the Obama White House, but today Helen Thomas is voicing more unlikely sentiments by telling the White House attack dogs to heel in the Fox News fight.
In an interview with MSNBC, the columnist ..stressed the White House ought to “stay out of these fights.”
“They can only take you down. You can’t kill the messenger,” said Thomas, who has covered every president from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama.
The New York Times also joined the chorus of folks telling the White House to chill this weekend. The Grey Lady may be in danger of being labeled a “wing of the Republican Party,” for using such uncharacteristically sharp language in criticizing the president, but I’m sure they’ll scrub the offending parts when the White House rings. In the meantime, enjoy …
…People who work in political communications have pointed out that it is a principle of power dynamics to “punch up “ — that is, to take on bigger foes, not smaller ones. A blog on the White House Web site that uses a “truth-o-meter” against a particular cable news network would not seem to qualify. As it is, Reality Check sounds a bit like the blog of some unemployed guy living in his parents’ basement, not an official communiqué from Pennsylvania Avenue. …
Ruth Marcus, in WaPo, summarizes much of the commentary against the White House deciding to battle with Fox.
There’s only one thing dumber than picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel — picking a fight with people who don’t even have to buy ink. The Obama administration’s war on Fox News is dumb on multiple levels. It makes the White House look weak, unable to take Harry Truman’s advice and just deal with the heat. It makes the White House look small, dragged down to the level of Glenn Beck. It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian — Agnewesque? — aroma at worst. It is a self-defeating trifecta: it distracts attention from the Obama administration’s substantive message; it serves to help Fox, not punish it, by driving up ratings; and it deprives the White House, to the extent it refuses to provide administration officials to appear on the cable network, of access to an audience that is, in fact, broader than hard-core Obama haters. …
…Where the White House has gone way overboard is in its decision to treat Fox as an outright enemy and to go public with the assault. Imagine the outcry if the Bush administration had pulled a similar hissy fit with MSNBC. “Opinion journalism masquerading as news,” White House communications director Anita Dunn declared of Fox. Certainly Fox tends to report its news with a conservative slant — but has anyone at the White House clicked over to MSNBC recently? Or is the only problem opinion journalism that doesn’t match its opinion? On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace replayed a quote from an Obama interview: “I don’t always get my most favorable coverage on Fox, but I think that’s part of how democracy is supposed to work. You know, we’re not supposed to all be in lock step here.”
Maybe he should tell the rest of the team.
Debra Saunders follows up on the Obamacare bill, in the San Francisco Chronicle.
…The worst suspicions of the plan’s critics thus have been confirmed. Under ObamaCare, those who have health care will be paying more – fair enough – but for less health care – which is not so fair.
As for proposed limits on what insurers can charge based on age or gender – again, these schemes don’t control costs. They shift costs. And cost shifting is the practice that has led to runaway health care spending in America.
With all the freebies thrown into versions of the package – with millions of additional people covered, no denials for pre-existing conditions, free checkups and preventive procedures – ObamaCare can only increase the nation’s health care tab. …
…If there’s one thing this Congress cannot do, it’s subtract.
Jennifer Rubin gives the latest poll numbers showing the public does not want Obamacare, but the Dems are still determined to ram this down our throats.
A new poll from the Galen Institute provides fresh evidence the public isn’t buying what Democrats are pushing. The poll tells us:
Seventy-one percent of those surveyed said they would oppose “a new law saying that everyone either would have to obtain private or public health insurance approved by the government or pay a tax of $750 or more every year.” Only 21 percent said they would support the law. More than half (54 percent) of all respondents indicate a “strong” opposition to the individual mandate, including 58 percent of those 45-54 years of age and 58 percent of those 55 years and older.
Sixty-eight percent don’t like the idea of reducing “some health insurance benefits for senior citizens in order to expand health insurance for some people who are uninsured.” That includes 86 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of Independents, and 59 percent of Democrats. By a 58 to 39 percent margin, respondents disagree (44 percent “strongly”) with the idea of ”an increase in taxes on the working and middle class if it would help provide health insurance to more Americans.” Seventy-one percent are worried that their health care will change if Congress passes health-care-reform legislation. And 49 percent like a ”targeted approach that addresses a few problems at a time.”
Yet the Democrats seem determined to push through — along party lines and with a parliamentary sleight of hand — a bill that the majority of Americans don’t want. It’s an almost unprecedented act of political hubris, but it’s also politically reckless. Democrats seem to think everyone will “learn to like it” and have to live with it once it’s in place. But of course they won’t have to; there’s always another election, and there are consequences for legislative malpractice. The only question remains whether moderate and conservative Democrats can be strong-armed into voting for a bill that may well provide the grounds for a political backlash. They may not care greatly if the bill is antithetical to Americans’ interests, but they’ll at least pause before voting for something that is potentially contrary to their own.
In the LA Times, Bett Morrison has an enlightening interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman of Somali Muslim descent, who has spoken out for women’s rights, and now lives under guard in the United States.
When it comes to women in Africa, is the U.S. using too many of its values or too few?
There is too much apologizing for what freedom means. In Africa, you’re told, “Oh, this is our custom — polygamy is our custom, female genital mutilation is our custom, these are our values.” Then you have the Americans and the Europeans being very shy and saying, “Oh, I’m really sorry, it’s your custom.”Will any country ever go to war for rights and women’s safety?
It looks like it will not happen. But I am very, very optimistic — not about going to war but about human beings changing their minds. You’ll remember how communism was stigmatized. The big problem is [how] to define the protection of women’s rights as the problem of the 21st century. If the world does that, [women's inequality] will become like the eradication of apartheid — people will insist that it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, and that’s when change happens.I’ve asked other feminists this question: Why are women’s rights always the ones up for negotiation?
Yes, isn’t that interesting? Women are mainly oppressed by their own fathers, their own brothers, their own mothers-in-law, their grandmothers, so it’s the most intimate kind of oppression. Another thing: Western feminism still defines the white man as the oppressor, but right now it’s the brown man, the black man, the yellow man. When you tell them, “Stop oppressing your women,” they’ll tell you, “Don’t impose your culture on me.” It would have been fantastic if, when [President] Obama went to Cairo, he [had said], “We have taught the white man that bigotry is bad and he has given it up, at least most of it. Now bigotry is committed in the name of the black man, the brown man, the yellow man, whatever color.”Do you make a distinction between mainstream and radical Islam?
I refuse to do that because one gives birth to the other. You are born into mainstream Islam. You are taught: Do not question the prophet; everything in the Koran is true. And then the radicals come and they expand on that, they build on that. So it is up to so-called mainstream Islam to tackle the radical element. [Mainstream Muslims] have to question the infallibility of the prophet Muhammad. They have to quit teaching children and young people that everything in the Koran is true and has to be taken seriously.You can see it in the Christian world. You have pockets of very radical Christians who refuse to change. But most Christians have decided to reform, to introduce new ways of looking at [the Bible] and to allow freedom of thought and speech. So if people move away from the radical ideas, they’re not killed, they’re not beheaded. …
Jennifer Burns, in Foreign Policy, reports that Ayn Rand has found a following in India.
…Rand’s celebration of independence and personal autonomy has proven to be powerfully subversive in a culture that places great emphasis on conforming to the dictates of family, religion, and tradition. Gargi Rawat, a correspondent and news anchor for top tv channel ndtv and a former Rand admirer, says Rand’s theory of the supremacy of reason and the virtue of selfishness adds up to “the antithesis” of Indian culture, which explains the attraction for Rawat in her youth and for many rebellious Indian teens today.
Unlike in the United States, Rand’s most popular novel in India-anecdotally at least-is not the overtly political Atlas Shrugged, but her earlier novel, The Fountainhead, in which Rand’s political views are muted. The novel tells the story of Howard Roark, an architect who refuses to compromise his designs for clients or the public in a heroic expression of personal will. It is Rand’s most accessible work, and also the one that makes the strongest emotional appeal to those who feel suppressed by attempts to put the collective ahead of the individual.
In recent years, the so-called “Howard Roark effect” has swept across wealthy Indian society. Shortly after winning Miss India Earth, the country’s top beauty pageant, in 2005, Niharika Singh cited The Fountainhead as her favorite book. “Ayn Rand helped me win the crown,” she declared. Other stars, including biotech queen Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, actress Preity Zinta, and soccer-player-turned-dancer Baichung Bhutia have all credited Rand with helping them succeed. …
In the Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery discusses current events (Polanski, Letterman, and Nobel) that have shown a negative light on the glitterrati.
Three times in the past several weeks, fortune has seemed to beam on conservatives, in unexpected and unprompted ways. Not that they’ve won much, but their tormentors keep losing. Three days in fall 2009 damaged or neutralized three liberal institutions, whose powers have now been curtailed.
Break number one came on September 26, when Roman Polanski, on his way to collect a lifetime achievement award from the Zurich Film Festival, was intercepted by Swiss police and tossed into prison, pending extradition to the United States, which he had fled 30 years earlier to avoid a jail sentence for drugging and raping a girl of 13 (a crime he had pleaded down to unlawful sex with a minor). This outrage–the arrest, not the rape–stunned the global artistic community, which quickly drew up a petition in protest, signed by la crème de la crème of stage and screen, including Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols (Mr. Diane Sawyer), Martin Scorsese, Isabelle Huppert, Diane von Furstenberg (Mrs. Barry Diller), and Woody Allen, famous for having married his former flame’s daughter, whom he seduced when she was still in her teens. The excuses were many, and flew very fast. Whoopi Goldberg exonerated the French-Polish director on the grounds that it wasn’t “rape-rape” and thus not important. French sage Bernard-Henri Lévy, who organized a petition of support, called it a “youthful indiscretion” (Polanski was 43 at the time). Debra Winger, the Zurich festival’s president, called the arrest “philistine collusion” with puritanical America and typical of the persecutions that beset artists everywhere. ….
… For years–even more so since 2002, when the Nobel Peace Prize committee smiled on ex-President Carter (as a slap at George Bush, it freely admitted)–conservatives have longed in vain to see the Norwegian parliamentarians exposed as a gaggle of partisans. It only got worse when the committee gave its prize in 2005 to Mohamed ElBaradei, the anti-U.S., pro-Iran U.N. arms inspector, and in 2007 to Al Gore, who had lost to Bush in 2000 in an exceedingly close and contentious election and railed against him ever since as a warmongering liar, and worse. Conservatives struggled for years but failed to gain traction with their critiques. So picture their glee on the morning of October 9 when they awoke to discover that the committee had contrived to discredit itself. In its ultimate slap at George Bush (who is no longer in office, but why should this stop them?), it had given the peace prize to Barack Obama for doing not much of anything beyond setting a new “tone.” …
…Back in America, the Los Angeles Times said that the committee’s award had embarrassed Obama and diminished its own credibility. “I like Barack Obama as much as the next liberal, but this is a farce,” said Peter Beinart in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast. “Let’s hope the Nobel Committee’s decision meets with such a deafening chorus of chortles and jeers that it never does something this stupid again.”
It may or may not, but it no longer matters, as it is clear that the jig is up. For decades, the peace prize committee has seemed to speak with the voice of humanity, or of the world community, or of the Almighty, but it is clear now that it speaks with the voice of five more or less insular nitwits, of great self-regard and no great distinction, too clueless and tone-deaf to sense how their choice would be seen. Like the culture elites defending Polanski and Letterman, they have no sense of irony, much less of perspective or rectitude.
If there were a Nobel Prize for shark-jumping, these people would share it: They have proved themselves more inane than their critics imagined. With friends such as these, the left hardly needs enemies. And with enemies such as these, the right may not really need friends.