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He has cynical views on Iraq and Afghanistan, but despite them we have Spengler‘s thoughts on the Iranian nuclear issue and US foreign policy.
…There is no Obama administration as such; there is only Obama, who appears to run the entire show out of his Blackberry. As David Rothkopf wrote in his Foreign Policy blog March 12, Obama’s is “an administration in which seeking the favor of the president has taken on an importance that is in fact, much more reminiscent of the historical czars than is the role being played by anyone with this now devalued moniker”.
As I wrote on this space February 18: “Israel has a strategic problem broader than the immediate issue of Iran’s possible acquisition of nuclear weapons: it is an American ally at a moment when America has effectively withdrawn from strategic leadership. That leaves Israel at a crossroads. It can act like an American client state, or a regional superpower. Either decision would have substantial costs.”(See The case for an Israeli strike against Iran, Asia Times Online, February 18) …
A Corner post by Joel Rosenberg does a good job of summarizing the current Israeli/Obama flap. Yesterday we led with Nile Gardner’s piece on our continuingly crumbling relationship with Great Britain. Now we see how the Obama administration is fanning the flames over the settlement incident which could have settled down without serious repercussions. But, it seems Obama is intent on destroying another key relationship with a close ally.
As Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington this weekend to address the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, relations between the U.S. and Israel appear to be headed for a train wreck. Indeed, Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., told Israeli diplomats in a conference call over the weekend that U.S.-Israel relations face their worst crisis in more than three decades.
Here’s what happened and why. …
Abby Thernstrom and Tim Fay alert us to a racial incident in a Philadelphia school. Thernstrom and Fay ask whether the Departments of Education and Justice will address the situation, given that the perpetrators in this instance were black. They also draw our attention to the problem of violence in public schools.
…Duncan wants to eliminate racial disparities in education in general, including in student discipline in particular. …But what will they do in response to a formal complaint filed by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) in the wake of serious black-on-Asian violence at South Philadelphia High School (SPHS)? AALDEF has charged that the district acted with “deliberate indifference” to the harassment of Asian students and with “intentional disregard” of their welfare.
…Even before the SPHS incident, the Philadelphia Office of the Safe Schools Advocate (OSSA) had issued a blistering report about the level of violence in the system and the inability, or unwillingness, of school officials to take meaningful action. Ironically, OSSA was “defunded” this past summer. According to press accounts, “defunded” is Pennsylvania edu-speak for “we didn’t like the fact that OSSA accurately reported on this issue when we told them not to, so we closed the office and let the staff go.”
Urban school systems in general try to keep the truth about violence and chaos well hidden. A revealing 2007 report by the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General makes the obvious point that no school wants to be labeled as “persistently dangerous.” And as long as schools can set the criteria by which persistent danger is measured, they can escape the label. …
…Federal data tells a much more chilling story. According to a 2000 survey conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), 71 percent of public elementary and secondary schools experienced at least one violent incident during the 1999–2000 school year (including rape, sexual battery other than rape, physical attacks or fights with and without a weapon, threats of physical attack with and without a weapon, and robbery with and without a weapon). In 20 percent of public schools, what NCES calls “serious violent incidents” occurred. These data, of course, do not include incidents of bullying and the host of disruptive behaviors that make teaching and learning very difficult. …
In Forbes, Nouriel Roubini says that news on the economy is troubling.
A slew of poor economic data over the past two weeks suggests that the U.S. economy is headed for a U-shaped recovery–at best–in 2010. The macro news, including data on consumer confidence, home sales, construction and employment, actually suggests a significant downside risk even to the anemic levels of growth which I forecast for H1 (the first half of the year). The U.S. faces continued challenges in H2–particularly as historic levels of fiscal stimulus fade–and appears far too close to the tipping point of a double-dip recession.
This is not the conventional wisdom. Heated debate continues to rage in the U.S. on whether the economic recovery will be V-shaped (with a rapid return to robust growth above potential), U-shaped (slow anemic, subpar, below trend growth for at least the next two years) or W-shaped (a double-dip recession). …
…a slew of new U.S. macro data have come out. They have been almost uniformly poor, if not outright awful. Consumer confidence, based on the Michigan survey, has tanked. On the real estate front, new home sales are collapsing again, existing home sales are also falling sharply and construction activity (both residential and commercial) is sharply down. Durable goods orders are down, and initial claims for unemployment benefits remain stubbornly high (way above the 400,000 mark). Real disposable income for Q4 has been revised downward while real disposable income (before transfers) for January was negative again. …
David Warren responds to a feminist who disparaged him in an article.
…What I found most telling, was another parenthetical assertion, about persons of my ilk. “(Personally, I don’t even know any men like that — not among family, friends or neighbours.)”
That she doesn’t, strikes me as a measure of the bubble in which the “liberal intelligentsia” are living, and with which I am over-familiar from my own dealings within the “mainstream media.” Indeed, it is how Fox came to trounce CNN, MSNBC, and other purveyors of television news; how a specialized business newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, came to have such a large circulation; how “talk radio” got started, along with the whole “vast rightwing conspiracy” in the blogosphere. …
In Power Line, John Hinderaker comments on one story that gives big business a bad name.
The failing business would be the New York Times Company, which, like most newspapers, has fallen on hard times and laid off many employees. The greedy executives include Chairman Pinch Sulzberger:
Top executives at the beleaguered New York Times Company reaped hefty rewards last year, with Chairman Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger more than doubling his total compensation to $6 million. CEO Janet Robinson got even more, reaping $6.3 million, a 31.9 percent hike.
The increases come against a backdrop of declining ad revenue, layoffs, frozen pension plans, unpaid vacations and a 5 percent pay cut for most of the rank-and-file workers last year.
Hypocrisy, your name is Pinch. …