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Jennifer Rubin comments on Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s writings about the heartening and historic outcome of this chapter in the democracy of Honduras.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes on the elections in Honduras:
Unless something monumental happens in the Western Hemisphere in the next 31 days, the big regional story for 2009 will be how tiny Honduras managed to beat back the colonial aspirations of its most powerful neighbors and preserve its constitution. Yesterday’s elections for president and Congress, held as scheduled and without incident, were the crowning achievement of that struggle. National Party candidate Porfirio Lobo was the favorite to win in pre-election polls. Yet the name of the victor is almost beside the point. The completion of these elections is a national triumph in itself and a win for all people who yearn for liberty. …
…Almost 400 foreign observers from Japan, Europe, Latin America and the U.S. traveled to Honduras for yesterday’s elections. Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, the German parliament and Japan will also recognize the vote. The outpouring of international support demonstrates that Hondurans were never as alone these past five months as they thought. A good part of the world backs their desire to save their democracy from chavismo and to live in liberty.
What is disturbing is that Obama did not count himself among those desiring to back “their desire to save their democracy from chavismo and to live in liberty.” It’s hard to fathom what motivates the president and his team, and why they seem so reluctant to oppose our allies’ enemies. Perhaps they have so internalized the criticism leveled by America’s foes that they can no longer discern when the gang in Foggy Bottom is being “played” and what is in our own national interests. We do have them — national interests, that is — and it would be nice if the Obami recognized, articulated, and vigorously defended them, regardless of how loudly Brazil, Venezuela, and much of the rest of the “international community” squawks.
Rick Richman also posts on the Honduran resolution and on the State Department finally joining the party.
…On Friday, the State Department finally endorsed the election, describing it in terms that would have made Simon Bolivar blush:
The electoral process — launched well before June 28 and involving legitimate candidates representing parties with longstanding democratic traditions from a broad ideological spectrum — is conducted under the stewardship of the multi-party and autonomous Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which was also selected before the coup. The electoral renewal of presidential, congressional and mayoral mandates, enshrined in the Honduran constitution, is an inalienable expression of the sovereign will of the citizens of Honduras.
Honduras now holds the Guinness record for shortest Latin American “coup” ever. Yesterday, the election officials announced that more than 61.5 percent of registered Hondurans went to the polls, a historic record turnout:
The announcement from the TSE [Tribunal Supremo Electoral] received a standing ovation from the attentive room of official observers and spectators.
The TSE stated they would welcome any international audit of the results.
The Obama administration deserves credit for finally recognizing that its misguided policy had reached a dead end and reversing course before it was too late. It is a lesson the administration could profitably apply in other foreign-policy areas as well.
We have three items anticipating the speech tonight on our new Afghan policy. Jennifer Rubin comments on Obama’s Afghanistan indecision, and what he must do now that he has decided on a strategy.
…Here Obama has made his own job worse. By empowering the likes of Joe Biden and his domestic policy advisers to second-guess the recommendation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and to warn openly of the domestic consequences of embracing the only viable plan for victory, the president has signaled that he’s looking over his shoulder. The sole target of his concern has not been the enemy and the horrendous potential consequences of a halfhearted effort. Instead he’s been fixated on his left-wing base. He’s obsessed over an exit strategy, forgetting that his predecessor won a war without one and that George W. Bush’s wartime troubles stemmed not from failing to promise an end date but from letting a losing strategy persist too long. Obama’s also muddied the waters on the identity of the enemy and whether we can achieve “victory,” a word never uttered but essential to leading a war effort.
Now, as the editors note, “Both Americans and Afghans wonder whether the president believes in the war and has the will to win it.” One way for Obama to demonstrate that he takes being commander in chief seriously would be to dismiss his left-wingers’ “tax the war” gambit, designed to undermine support for the effort we are about to undertake. He should be clear that this is sheer hypocrisy (where’s the stimulus surtax?) and won’t be realistically entertained.
Frankly, it might be a good time for the president to battle his left flank and demonstrate some moxie, if he has it. The world and a vast number of centrists in America, not to mention conservatives, think he’s a wimp. This is his time to prove them wrong.
In the Daily News, Michael Goodwin says we should evaluate three aspects of Obama’s Afghanistan speech.
How does Obama define the goal? He’s not likely to use the “V-word” because victory is verboten in a war on terror that doesn’t exist to this White House. But if Obama doesn’t say success is our goal and be specific about what that means, the commander in chief will be ducking his chief responsibility. …
How does Obama define the enemy? Last March, he announced a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and repeatedly referred to the Taliban as well as al Qaeda. They were inseparable when he said, “If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban — or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged — that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”
He was right then, but there is considerable doubt he still believes in that linkage. …
…The medieval Sharia government the Taliban wants to impose marches in lockstep with al Qaeda goals. Obama himself cited 9/11 as proof of the connection. Any suggestion now that the Taliban is not part of the problem will reveal he has chosen the path of least political resistance at home.
How much emphasis will Obama put on getting out? Let’s hope press secretary Robert Gibbs’ comment that the president would focus on the exit strategy is only a sop to Democratic liberals opposed to more troops. While some explanation of the endgame is inevitable, a disproportionate emphasis could undercut the new troops before they are deployed. …
Toby Harnden discusses some of the political issues that likely factored into Obama’s indecision.
…He still defines himself principally as the unBush, at every turn reflexively adding the caveat that his predecessor bequeathed him a “mess”. By the time he finally reveals his decision on Afghanistan on Tuesday night, it will be just a day short of three months since General Stanley McChrystal requested 40,000 more troops to stave off American defeat.
This extraordinarily long process has been dubbed “dithering” by his critics, led by former vice-president Dick Cheney, and “deliberative” by his admirers. In fact, it is principally an ostentatious attempt to show that he is not President George W Bush, who once stated that he was “a gut player”.
Alongside that, Obama wants to avoid being President Lyndon Johnson, whose “escalation” (a negative term that is now common currency in news reports) of the Vietnam war condemned him to a one-term presidency despite his Great Society domestic reforms.
…Support for the war in Afghanistan now stands at barely a third of Americans, despite the reality that this was the country from which the 9/11 terrorist attacks were planned – quite a feat for a man who declared it the “good war” in his election campaign. …
…The 90-day “hiatus” – a plainly appropriate word for Bob Ainsworth, the British Defence Secretary to have used last week – in strategic direction from Washington has had a cost in terms of momentum and perception in Afghanistan that will not be easy to overcome. …
Roger Simon blogs on an amazing development in Switzerland. The tolerant worldly Swiss have decided; no more minarets.
In a supposedly surprising development, the Swiss just voted to ban minarets on mosques in their country:
Over 57% of Swiss voters chose to approve a blanket ban on the construction of Muslim minarets, according to official results posted by Swiss news agency ATS.
Just days before the election only 37% of people polled by state-owned television station DRS said they would support the ban.
Swiss feminists were apparently in the lead in the “Stop the Minarets” campaign. No surprise there really. Salman Rushdie is not the only one to read Islamic texts (and behavior) as an assault on women. Anyone with eyes open, certainly an intelligent female, would. If only our own feminists could get off their reactionary multi-culturalist behinds in this regard. …
…Of course this is called a “right-wing proposal.” That must be news to those feminists. And, of course, there is no mention that throughout much of the Islamic world – forget minarets or spires – churches and synagogues are banned altogether (not to mention apostates have their throats slit).
On a personal note I remember Hans-Rudolf Merz well from my recent trip to Geneva for the Durban II Conference where I watched as the Swiss President welcomed the Holocaust-denying-nuclear-bomb-buliding-mega-misogynistic-homosexual-denying-and-now-demonstrator-murdering-religious-psychopath President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Call it ultra-bourgoies multi-culturalism or simply protecting banking interests, the whole thing was despicable. It’s great to see the Swiss people turn their backs on all that. …
We have Thomas Sowell’s third piece on the housing bubble, and the government’s leading role in it’s creation.
…In short, riskier loans were accepted as good loans by one of the key regulators of the housing markets. Moreover, HUD was not just accepting subprime lending but pushing for more. After HUD became a regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 1992, these government-sponsored enterprises were set numerical goals — quotas — for what share of their lending was to be for “affordable housing” mortgages.
In practice, they were pushed to acquire more subprime mortgages.
This was important not only because of the risk to the assets of these two enterprises themselves but, because they are dominant forces in the housing market and major gigantic financial institutions, there were dangers to the whole financial market if things went wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose securities were widely held by other financial institutions on Wall Street and beyond.
The importance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the housing markets is demonstrated by the magnitude of their mortgage guarantees, which total more than two trillion dollars. That is larger than the gross domestic product of all but four nations.
Ordinarily, financial markets would become less willing to invest in an enterprise with ever-growing risks. But, although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are officially private, profit-making enterprises, their size and the federal government’s involvement in both their creation and their ongoing operations led many investors to assume that the federal government would never allow them to fail. …
…In short, the policies and practices of many institutions, local and national, public and private, set the stage for the housing boom and the housing bust that followed.
Placing the roots of the housing boom and bust in the free market and the solution in government is very convenient for politicians and for those who favor government interventions. But such explanations are inconsistent with facts, however impressive they might be as exercises in rhetoric. …
In Jewish World Review, Michael Barone sums up global warming theory in the wake of Climategate.
…The most charitable plausible explanation I have seen comes from The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle. “The CRU’s main computer model may be, to put it bluntly, complete rubbish.”
Australian geologist Ian Plimer, a global warming skeptic, is more blunt. The e-mails “show that data was massaged, numbers were fudged, diagrams were biased, there was destruction of data after freedom of information requests, and there was refusal to submit taxpayer-funded data for independent examination.”
Global warming alarmist George Monbiot of the Guardian concedes that the e-mails “could scarcely be more damaging,” adding, “I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.” He has called for the resignation of the CRU director. All of which brings to mind the old computer geek’s phrase: garbage in, garbage out. …
The large number of unemployed teenagers should be one of Obama’s priorities. But instead, he pays obeisance to the left’s worship of minimum wage laws; always coercion over freedom. Steven Horwitz, in the Nightly Business Report, reports on one consensus that didn’t require hiding data or rigging numbers.
During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama promised that, in contrast to his predecessor, his presidency would be a “science presidency.” In his first year, Obama may well have taken some science more seriously than his predecessor, but one set of settled scientific research he has chosen to ignore has been the economics of the minimum wage. The result has been a nightmare for young workers, especially young workers of color.
Economic theory predicts that raising the minimum wage will cause those employees who are least productive to lose their jobs. If we raise the minimum wage from, say, $6 to $7, it’s the same thing as saying “any worker who cannot produce $7 worth of value each hour is not worth hiring.” Younger workers are, of course, among the least skilled in the economy. In addition, thanks to poor schools and historical discrimination, young workers of color are over-represented in this category. Higher minimum wages should disproportionately affect young workers and especially ones of color.
The empirical evidence to support this theoretical claim is abundant. Hundreds of studies of this relationship have been done by economists and they are nearly unanimous that higher minimum wages are associated with some level of increased unemployment among lower-skilled workers. Whatever consensus there might be among climate scientists about global warming, that among economists about minimum wage laws is at least as great (and, as we discovered recently, we don’t need to rig the computer code to make our models reconstruct pre-historic data to come out the way we want). Despite what the science says, the Obama Administration supported a minimum wage increase last July. …
In WSJ, Arch Puddington reviews David Engerman’s new book, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts. The people living in the pretend world of the academy, came to view the Soviets in the pretend world of their minds.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union is today regarded by most of the world as an unalloyed good: the overdue collapse of a system that was incubated in terror and maintained by a vast police-state apparatus. The Soviet Union deprived ordinary people of their liberties, subjected entire nations to colonial rule, and ruined its own economy and that of its neighbors. Even those who objected to America’s policies during the period of superpower rivalry do not dispute that the Soviet “experiment” proved an abject failure, with terrifying human cost.
But as David C. Engerman reminds us in “Know Your Enemy,” his engrossing history of “the rise and fall of America’s Soviet experts,” the center of the scholarly universe had a more benign appraisal of Soviet reality through much of the Cold War. …
…In the early years, the relationship between the U.S. government and the scholarly community was one of happy co-existence. Government funds allowed scholars to conduct pioneering research, which in turn helped the policy community. University officials “could not imagine government work as presenting any challenge to academic autonomy,” Mr. Engerman notes. By the 1970s, however, the relationship had changed. The radical currents that swept through the universities in the 1960s stirred a hostility to cooperating with officialdom.
At the same time, a new generation of specialists emerged: They were determined to assess the Soviet experience—present and past—in a more optimistic light. Social scientists churned out study after study seeking to demonstrate that Soviet institutions functioned much like their counterparts in the U.S. and ridiculing the use of the word “totalitarian” to describe the Soviet system. Likewise, revisionist historians like Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote accounts of the Stalin period that dealt primly with the Terror and upbraided traditionalist historians for being, as she put it, “preoccupied with questions of moral judgment.” …