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Mark Steyn has some important thoughts on what is at work behind the campaign for acceptance of the misogynist cultures in our midst.
The other day, George Jonas passed on to his readers a characteristically shrewd observation gleaned from the late poet George Faludy: “No one likes to think of himself as a coward,” wrote Jonas. “People prefer to think they end up yielding to what the terrorists demand, not because it’s safer or more convenient, but because it’s the right thing?.?.?.?Successful terrorism persuades the terrorized that if they do terror’s bidding, it’s not because they’re terrified but because they’re socially concerned.” …
…Still, Burka Barbie and Fatima’s Secret are minor and peripheral. What about the so-called most powerful man in the world? “The U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it,” President Obama told his audience in Cairo earlier this year. “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.”
My oh my, he’s a profile in courage, isn’t he? It’s true that there have been occasional frictions over, say, the refusal of Muslim women to reveal their faces for their driver’s licences—Sultaana Freeman, for example, sued the state of Florida over that “right.” But the real issue in the Western world is “the right of women and girls” not “to wear the hijab.” A couple of weeks ago in Arizona, a young woman called Noor Almaleki was fatally run over by her father in his Jeep Cherokee for becoming “too Westernized.” If there were a Matthew Shepard-style gay crucifixion every few months, liberal columnists would be going bananas about the “climate of hate” in America. But you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse (to cite merely the most lurid recent examples of North American “honour killings”), and nobody cares. Certainly, there’s no danger of Barack Obama ever standing up for the likes of poor Miss Almaleki to a roomful of A-list imams. When it comes to real hate crimes, as opposed to his entirely imaginary epidemic, the president of the United States has smaller cojones than Ken.
If you eschew the Grand Cherokee in favour of the Toronto subway, you may have noticed that the poster girl for the latest “social justice” campaign is a Muslim woman. “Drop Fees for a Poverty-Free Ontario” is the ringing cry, and next to it is a hijab-clad lady speaking up and speaking out. It’s something to do with the cost of post-secondary education, which, like everything else in Canada, is supposed to be “free.” The image is a curious choice as an emblem for educational access: after all, one of the most easily discernible features of societies that adopt Islamic dress is how ignorant they are. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, girls were forbidden by law to attend school—i.e., not just fritter-away-half-a-decade-on-Ontario-taxpayers “post-secondary” education, but kindergarten and Grade 1. In Pakistan, 60 per cent of women are illiterate. …
The editors at WaPo reach deep into the paper to bring us news about the Dems and DC vouchers. Seems like there won’t be any more voucher kids with Malia and Sasha at Sidwell Friends School.
IT IS DISTRESSINGLY clear that congressional leaders never really meant it when they said there would be a fair hearing to determine the future of the District’s federally funded school voucher program. How else to explain language tucked away in the mammoth omnibus spending bill that would effectively kill the Washington Opportunity Scholarship Program?
Deep in the folds of the thousand-page 2010 spending bill, which wraps together six bills, is language that (thankfully) would continue funding for students currently in the program but close it down for new students. Also included are onerous requirements about testing and site visits.
Contrary to claims of this being a compromise, the measure is really slow death for a program that provides $7,500 annually to low-income students to attend private schools. The number of students participating in the program has already shrunk from more than 1,700 to 1,319, and the nonprofit that administers the scholarships has said that it may have to pull out because the conditions would be untenable. It’s also possible that some schools that now enroll voucher students could be forced to shut down.
Key lawmakers in the appropriation process have been, at best, disingenuous about their intentions, thus placing the program’s advocates in their current no-win situation. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) made encouraging comments about allowing new students but, despite his clout as majority whip, did nothing to make that happen. Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-N.Y.) said that he didn’t want to usurp local control, even as the mayor, the schools chancellor and a majority of the D.C. Council lobbied for the acceptance of new students. …
In Minyanville, John Mauldin looks in-depth at unemployment and the economy, and suggests we will be missing a lot of jobs for a long time.
…As it turns out, Princeton Professor Paul Krugman agrees. On December 11, he wrote in the New York Times:
“I don’t think many people grasp just how much job creation we need to climb out of the hole we’re in. You can’t just look at the eight million jobs that America has lost since the recession began, because the nation needs to keep adding jobs — more than 100,000 a month — to keep up with a growing population. And that means that we need really big job gains, month after month, if we want to see America return to anything that feels like full employment. How big? My back of the envelope calculation says that we need to add around 18 million jobs over the next five years, or 300,000 a month. This puts last week’s employment report, which showed job losses of “only” 11,000 in November, in perspective. It was basically a terrible report, which was reported as good news only because we’ve been down so long that it looks like up, to the financial press.” …
…Everywhere, the headlines said continuing claims are plunging. And they did. But what really happened is that the drop wasn’t from people getting jobs but from people rolling over to the extended-benefits programs. The states, by and large, pay for the first 26 weeks, and that’s where we get the continuing-claim reported number from. (In some parts of the US however, you can get unemployment insurance for up to 99 months, paid for by the federal government. …
…It was reported that the unemployment rate dropped to 10% from 10.2%. To get that number, they had to shrink the number of people looking for work by 98,000. Basically, if you haven’t looked for work in the last four weeks, you’re said to be “discouraged” and are taken out of the unemployment statistics. If you add back in the discouraged workers, the rate goes up to 10.5%. And it’s worse than that. If you haven’t looked for a job in 12 months, you’re taken off the rolls altogether.
Here’s one of the reasons that the unemployment number is going to remain stubbornly high through 2010. Let’s assume a modest recovery of 3%, which is maybe enough to get jobs back into the 150,000 range. As people go back to work, that 0.5% of discouraged workers starts to look for jobs and they’re now counted as unemployed. That small number of 0.5% is 750,000 people that will be (should be) added back into the unemployment numbers!
Let’s use Krugman’s 100,000 jobs a month needed to keep up with population growth. (Studies are all over the place on this. 100,000 is the low estimate and 150,000 is the high.) That means we need 1.2 million new jobs next year just to keep the unemployment rate at 10%. And another 750,000 jobs to go to the discouraged workers who will want to start looking. Close to two million jobs will be needed to keep the unemployment rate from rising.
And the current business climate says that’s not going to happen. …
IBD editors comment on the government spending that is going on during the recession.
…Congress is raising the federal debt ceiling by as much as $1.8 trillion in hopes that next October, when Republicans will be pounding them on this, voters won’t remember what they were up to way back in December of 2009.
But that astronomical amount is twice what was baked into their budget resolution earlier this year. When asked about so much red ink, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., just shrugged and told the Politico: “The credit card has already been used. When you get the bill in the mail you need to pay it.”
Except that it isn’t Obey or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid or President Barack Obama paying for the trillions they have racked up on their American Excess card. It’s you, the long-suffering American taxpayer. …
…Among the countless absurdities built into the federal salary system is the mandate that when the head of an agency gets a raise, lots of his underlings automatically do too. That’s what happens when it’s play money you’re handling, which is what Washington thinks the revenues provided by the people who give politicians their jobs is.
The average pay for all these thumb-twiddling geniuses is $30,000 more than that of workers in the real world of the private sector — $71,206 vs. $40,331. …
Charles Lane, in WaPo, lists three things that Obama or Congress could do immediately to increase jobs that Congress would not have to spend money on.
…End federal protectionism and price supports for sugar. Since 1982, the federal government has guaranteed the U.S. sugar lobby — er, industry — up to 85 percent of the market. The rest gets divided among other countries lucky enough to hold quotas. The government also guarantees minimum prices for raw cane sugar and refined beet sugar.
Sugar is an ingredient in a huge percentage of candy, beverages and baked goods. Expensive sugar makes it expensive to produce those goodies. U.S. candy-makers and other food processors cite sugar costs as a major factor in their industry’s recent job losses — including 70,000 between 1997 and 2004. …
…Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. Passed in the 1930s to “stabilize” the construction industry (in part by protecting white workers in the North against competition from migrating Southern blacks), this law requires employers to pay the “prevailing” local wage on federally funded projects. Today, Davis-Bacon applies to about a third of all public construction spending.
A large staff at the Labor Department calculates prevailing wages using a formula skewed to reflect union pay rates. This inflates the cost of labor on public construction by an average of about 10 percent, according to a 2008 study by the Beacon Hill Institute of Suffolk University in Boston. The added cost to taxpayers was $8.6 billion in 2007, the study found. …
…We are experiencing the worst unemployment since 1982 (when Congress enacted the sugar program), and the second-worst unemployment since the Great Depression (when we got Davis-Bacon and the federal minimum wage). Yet these outmoded, job-killing policies linger on the books. …
The WSJ editors wants a teaching moment with Obama.
The Obama Administration desperately wants a strong economic recovery, or so it says, but does it have any idea how to encourage one?
It says it wants job growth, but its policies keep raising the cost of creating new jobs. It says it wants small business to take risks, but it keeps reducing the rewards if those risks succeed. And it says it wants banks to lend more money, even as it keeps threatening to punish bankers if they make too many bad loans or make too much money. …
…Mr. Obama summed up his White House meeting with the bank CEOs by once again blaming them for the financial crisis and suggesting that they have an obligation to support new regulation being written by Barney Frank (D., Mass.) and Senator Chris Dodd (D., Conn.).
You have to smile at that irony. No two Members of Congress did more to encourage the financial crisis, by preventing reform of the government-sponsored housing behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. By ignoring Washington’s role in creating the credit mania, Mr. Obama is hardly offering confidence that his financial reform efforts will prevent a repeat. …
In the New York Daily News, James Kirchick comments on the NPR kerfuffle over Mara Liasson’s appearances on FOX.
…According to Politico, NPR honchos in October told Liasson she should “reconsider” appearing on the network.
Liasson stood her ground and is still a Fox regular. You can add this episode to the vast catalogue of incidents demonstrating the American left’s intolerance for the airing of views that dissent from liberal orthodoxy. But what’s so chilling about this revelation is that NPR’s attempt to silence Liasson occurred just as the White House‘s war against Fox News was in full gear. NPR denies that it coordinated with the Obama administration, and that’s probably true, as the station didn’t need prompting. As early as this February, station executives asked NPR contributor Juan Williams not to identify himself as such when appearing on “The O’Reilly Factor.”
NPR should be pleased to have exposure on the country’s top cable news channel, but the station panicked when the mere presence of Liasson led to complaints from the station’s liberal listeners - most of whom, I’ll wager, never even watch Fox.
Station execs never accused Liasson of saying anything objectionable during her Fox appearances. It was simply her attendance at the news desk that so angered Fox’s critics. …