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We start today like we started last Thursday night, with John Fund introducing us to Scott Brown. This time John has an interview with the new senator.
…Massachusetts’ senator-elect says he had always admired JFK as a president who “wanted to help everybody,” and when he and his staff pored over that president’s speeches his defense of tax cuts leaped out. “That’s what we need now. Across-the-board tax cuts,” he says. “A payroll tax cut would have been better than any government stimulus.” …
…Nonetheless, Mr. Brown is clearly sensitive—and a tad defensive—about his state’s own universal health-care system. It now covers about 95% of the population; but it has also led to the nation’s highest insurance premiums. It is driving hospitals towards bankruptcy and making it more difficult for people to see a doctor. Mr. Brown voted for the system in 2006 when it was proposed by then-GOP Gov. Mitt Romney. “Of course, it can be made better,” Mr. Brown says today. “But it was bipartisan and it fit our local needs. We were being eaten alive by health-care costs.” Universal coverage hasn’t changed that, however. …
…Mr. Brown says it frustrates him that too many politicians still believe that people will be fooled by what they’re proposing. “People aren’t stupid, and leaders should figure out they’re better informed now than ever.” Perhaps that explains how Scott Brown was able to pull off his improbable Cinderella story.
Back in September, picking up on the rising tide of public anger over health reform, excessive spending, and one-party arrogance, he fashioned a simple, compelling narrative to deal with it: no to a rushed, confusing health-care bill, yes to a freeze on federal spending and to introducing some sunlight into government. Mr. Brown repeated it over and over with the inner confidence that his message would eventually resonate. It did.
Mark Steyn discusses The One-Hit Wonder. Is more government Obama’s only answer to every question?
…when he’s attacking the tired old Washington games, he’s just playing the tired old Washington games. But, when he’s proposing the tired old Washington solutions, he means it; that’s the real Obama, the only Obama on offer. And everything the president proposes means more debt, which at the level this guy’s spending means, at some point down the road, either higher taxes or total societal collapse.
Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state’s whims happen to be that morning.
That’s why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president’s proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of “health” “care” “reform” that will allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees’ health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law, some of them won’t. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they’re being made up as they go along – and that some of them might even be retroactive, as happened this week with Oregon’s new corporate tax.
In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker down and sit things out? …
Peter Schiff comments that Obama’s policies worsen the state of the union.
…To lead us back to brighter days, he articulated a vision of a centrally planned recovery, where clean energy and a Soviet style five-year plan to double our exports would make our economy preeminent once more. He fails to understand that the only reason our economy rose to the top in the first place is that the government left it alone.
In the words of the Spanish philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Since our President cannot even learn from the mistakes of his immediate predecessor, to say nothing of those he made himself while in the Senate or during his first year as president, we are surely doomed to repeat them, perhaps more quickly than Santayana could have imagined.
Rather than tightening the reins on the reckless monetary policy that undermined our savings, diminished our industrial output, inflated asset bubbles, and led to reckless speculation on Wall Street and excess consumption on Main Street, we are loosing them further. Rather than repealing regulations that distort markets and create moral hazards, we are adding new ones that do more of the same. Rather than cutting government spending to reduce the burden it places on our economy, we are increasing both the amount of the spending and the size of the burden. Rather than making government smaller so that the private sector can grow, we are making government bigger and forcing the private sector to shrink. Rather than paying off our debts we are taking on even more. Rather than encouraging people to save we are enticing them to spend. Rather than creating jobs, we are merely creating unemployment benefits.
As a result, instead of seeding the soil for a real recovery we are setting the stage for a prolonged depression.
Randy Barnett makes a number of excellent points in his article in the WSJ. He says that Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court during the State of the Union address was wrong in judgment and in fact.
…Then there is the substance of the remark itself. It was factually wrong. The Court’s ruling in Citizens United concerned the right of labor unions and domestic corporations, including nonprofits, to express their views about candidates in media such as books, films and TV within 60 days of an election. In short, it concerned freedom of speech; in particular, an independent film critical of Hillary Clinton funded by a nonprofit corporation.
While the Court reversed a 1990 decision allowing such a ban, it left standing current restrictions on foreign nationals and “entities.” Also untouched was a 100-year-old ban on domestic corporate contributions to political campaigns to which the president was presumably referring erroneously.
That is a whole lot to get wrong in 72 sanctimonious words. Clearly, this statement had not been vetted by the president’s legal counsel. Solicitor General Elena Kagan, for example, would never have signed off on such a claim. Never. …
The NRO staff posted Charles Krauthammer’s remarks on the matter in the Corner.
The president attacked the Supreme Court at the State of the Union, which I believe is unprecedented. …
The court actually is at that event not for pleasure and not even as a duty — it’s not required — but as a sign of respect for the other branches, for the presidency and the Congress. And to subject it to a direct attack in a setting in which it can’t respond, I thought, was a breach of etiquette which shouldn’t have happened.
On the substance, when the president said that it [the Court] was breaking a 100-year precedent, it was wrong. As even Linda Greenhouse, the liberal Supreme Court reporter of the New York Times pointed out, the ruling 100 years ago was the prohibition of a direct sending of money from corporations into the treasuries of candidates. That remains illegal. It was not touched in this decision. So there was no overturning of that precedent. What it dealt with is a question of corporations funding speech attacking a candidate. …
In the New York Times, Samuel Pisar speaks about his experiences at the hands of the Nazis, and the importance of the Holocaust victims sharing their stories with the world.
…It took a long time for the news of the American-led invasion of Normandy to slip into Auschwitz. There were also rumors that the Red Army was advancing quickly on the eastern front. With the ground shrinking under their feet, the Nazis were becoming palpably nervous. The gas chambers spewed fire and smoke as never before.
One gray, frosty morning, our guards ordered those of us still capable of slave labor to line up and marched us out of the camp. We were to be shunted westward, from Poland into Germany. I was beside myself with excitement — and dread. Salvation somehow seemed closer — yet we also knew that we could be killed at any moment. The goal was to hang on a little longer. I was almost 16 now, and I wanted to live.
We marched from camp to camp, day and night, until we and our torturers began to hear distant explosions that sounded like artillery fire. One afternoon we were strafed by a squadron of Allied fighter planes that mistook our column for Wehrmacht troops. As the Germans hit the dirt, their machine guns blazing in all directions, someone near me yelled, “Run for it!” I kicked off my wooden clogs and sprinted into the forest. There I hid, hungry and cold, for weeks, until I was discovered by a group of American soldiers. The boys who brought me life were not much older than I. They fed me, clothed me, made me a mascot of their regiment and gave me my first real taste of freedom.
Today, the last living survivors of the Holocaust are disappearing one by one. Soon, history will speak about Auschwitz with the impersonal voice of researchers and novelists at best, and at worst in the malevolent register of revisionists and falsifiers who call the Nazi Final Solution a myth. This process has already begun. …
In Friday’s Pickings, Marty Peretz pointed out that Obama had neglected to mention Israel’s significant contribution to Haiti disaster rescue operations. Today, Peretz responds to criticism from Time’s Joe Klein’s.
I am glad Joe Klein tried to take me to task for criticizing the president about his not giving Israel the respect it deserved for its efforts in Haiti. … But, in fact, Obama passed over Israel entirely in his enumeration of especially worthy aid providers. Here’s what Bill Clinton said about Israel’s contribution: “I don’t know what we would have done without the Israeli hospital in Haiti.” Israel’s operational unit was, Clinton noted, the only facility capable of performing surgeries and advanced examinations. Meanwhile, that unit is staying on with a change of personnel and is relocating its field hospital to an orphanage. CBS, in a moment of exaggeration, called the Israeli facility the “Rolls-Royce” of the entire aid effort.
Despite his carping, Joe concedes that I was correct. That, in fact, the president should have mentioned Israel and should do much more with the Jewish state to balance his courting of the Arab world (which hasn’t done his presidency or his policies any good).
So what is Klein’s bitch with me? He writes in his “Swampland” blog–yes, that’s what it’s actually called, and I must concede that it’s aptly titled–that Obama’s omission had no meaning and was not the result of any decision at all. So what was it? It was “an oversight.” Oh, I see. This administration which crosses every ‘t’ and dots every ‘i’ just forgot to mention Israel. You know what I say to that? …
Ben Webster at the Times, UK, reports that Dr. Rajendra Pachauri knew about the glacial inaccuracy for two months before he was pressured into addressing it. Hey, why stop the gravy train?
The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.
Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.
The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions. …
In the WaPo, Neely Tucker writes that the meteorite that recently landed in Northern Virginia is stirring up some drama.
…The doctors who were nearly bonked on the head by the thing when it came plummeting from the asteroid belt into Examining Room No. 2 in the Williamsburg Square Family Practice, gave it to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. In return, Smithsonian officials planned to give them $5,000 in appreciation. The doctors, Marc Gallini and Frank Ciampi, planned to donate the money to earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. The Smithsonian planned to put the meteorite on prominent display and study it as a 4.5 billion-year-old postcard from the formation of the solar system. …
…But in an extraterrestrial soap opera still unfolding, the landlords of the Virginia building that houses the doctors’ office now say they are the rightful owners of the meteorite. Museum officials said the landlords informed them, midday Thursday, that they were coming to take the stone out of the Smithsonian by sundown. …
…The remnants are valuable to scientists, particularly when discovered just after impact, because they have not been subject to the gravity, erosion and atmospheric pressures of Earth, and thus can offer insights about what the solar system looked like long ago. …