Click on WORD or PDF for full content
In the New Republic, Yossi Klein Halevi gives us an insider’s view of what Obama’s Middle Eastern strategy has wrought.
…Astonishingly, Obama is repeating the key tactical mistake of his failed efforts to restart Middle East peace talks over the last year. Though Obama’s insistence on a settlement freeze to help restart negotiations was legitimate, he went a step too far by including building in East Jerusalem. Every Israeli government over the last four decades has built in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; no government, let alone one headed by the Likud, could possibly agree to a freeze there. Obama made resumption of negotiations hostage to a demand that could not be met. The result was that Palestinian leaders were forced to adjust their demands accordingly.
Obama is directly responsible for one of the most absurd turns in the history of Middle East negotiations. Though Palestinian leaders negotiated with Israeli governments that built extensively in the West Bank, they now refused to sit down with the first Israeli government to actually agree to a suspension of building. Obama’s demand for a building freeze in Jerusalem led to a freeze in negotiations. …
…That Obama could be guilty of such amateurishness was perhaps forgivable because he was, after all, an amateur. But he has now taken his failed policy and intensified it. By demanding that Israel stop building in Ramat Shlomo and elsewhere in East Jerusalem—and placing that demand at the center of American-Israeli relations—he’s ensured that the Palestinians won’t show up even to proximity talks. This is no longer amateurishness; it is pique disguised as policy. …
In Streetwise Professor, Craig Pirrong describes how appeasement is working for the Obami.
Hillary Clinton just visited Moscow. While there, she was sandbagged by Vladimir Putin. Putin scammed his way onto her schedule for what was supposed to be a grasp-and-greet photo op, then launched into a six minute diatribe against the United States, in front of the assembled press corps …
…But wait! There’s more! Putin/Russia added injury to insult.
The other most contentious moment of Clinton’s trip was also thanks to Putin after he announced yesterday that a nuclear power plant Russia is building in Iran will be completed in the next few months. …
Alan Dershowitz, the usual ally of people who wish to increase the size of the state, warns Obama saying Neville Chamberlain is remembered for appeasing Hitler, not his progressive social programs. Actually, weak thinking in both areas goes hand in hand. Dershowitz also hangs the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on W, when it was part of a long line of problems the intel community created for Bush’s efforts to confront Iran. Not withstanding all these caveats, the piece does explain the risks inherent with nuclear weapons in Iran.
…There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do. Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, boasted in 2004 that an Iranian attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Mr. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated with its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose about 15 million people, which he said would be a small “sacrifice” of the billion Muslims in the world.
The second way in which Iran could use nuclear weapons would be to hand them off to its surrogates, Hezbollah or Hamas. A third way would be for a terrorist group, such as al Qaeda, to get its hands on Iranian nuclear material. It could do so with the consent of Iran or by working with rogue elements within the Iranian regime. …
Spengler portrays a foreboding financial picture. Those who were elected to serve the American public have brought the nation to a fiscal precipice.
…Governments averted a financial apocalypse in 2009 by bailing out the bankrupt banking system. But who will bail out the governments? The answer for the time being is that they will bail themselves out at the expense of the private economy. In the post-apocalyptic financial world, private banks have turned into flesh-eating zombies that cannibalize the private economy in order to finance government borrowing requirements not seen since World War II. …
…The monetary base is growing at a 40% annual rate. Under normal circumstances, this would lead to double-digit inflation. As long as banks reduce lending to the private sector, and buy government securities that replace lost tax revenues, the result is a so-called liquidity trap. …
…Weaker governments like Greece and Spain, or even the United Kingdom, could snap the chain. A shift out of US dollars in response to monetary inflation could force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. An attempt by investors to ease out of the carry trade could provoke a stampede for the exits. Japan has managed to keep its bubble going for 20 years. But Japan did so on the strength of its domestic banking system under the supervision of the Bank of Japan; the United States depends on the reserve status of the dollar, which makes less and less sense when the Treasury is flooding the world with US liabilities.We have never seen anything quite like this before, and one hesitates to make forecasts about an arrangement so absurd and unstable that the list of potential break-points is endless. Now that the whole world is buying US government debt on borrowed money, it makes no sense to own it. It will end badly – but it is too early to specify just how and when.
In the Corner, John Derbyshire comments on the insatiable appetite of the government.
Dismal news from the mother country today:
State spending now accounts for more than half of Britain’s economy, for the first time since OECD records began. Money from Whitehall and town halls made up 52 per cent of Gross Domestic Product last year, and the proportion is certain to rise.
That’s a growth of 12 percent in just 13 years…
…The U.S. figure for 1997 was 33.77 percent.
What is it today? 44.48 percent and climbing. …
John Hinderaker relates the shocking history of Alcee Hastings.
…Hastings was once a federal judge, but he was impeached…because he solicited bribes from criminal defendants. … That’s a little extreme, even for a Democrat. Hastings’ efforts to make himself rich in this criminal fashion came to light and he was investigated. He responded to the investigation by committing perjury.
As a result of his multiple crimes, Hastings was removed as a federal judge by the United States Senate, one of the few times in history that has happened. Here is the really astonishing thing: instead of going to jail, Alcee Hastings went to Congress! Democratic voters were not in the least concerned that he is a criminal of the most verminous sort. On the contrary, they elected him to represent them in Florida’s 23rd Congressional District! That, really, tells you all you need to know about the depravity to which the Democratic Party has sunk. …
… We are being ruled by people who should be behind bars.
Tunku Varadarajan comments on the passage of Obamacare.
…What Americans saw next was the legislative souk at its most squalid: cajoling, bribing, threatening, wheedling, all designed to bring on board those Democratic congressmen and -women whose votes were needed to attain (or surpass) the number 216, and whose “principles” were getting in the way of a “yes” vote. Hewing to principle is difficult, because it makes party whips angry, spoils dinner parties, and ends careers and friendships. So Kucinich, Stupak & Co. succumbed. To borrow a phrase from Tony Judt, the historian, writing in the latest New York Review of Books: “We… have abandoned politics to those for whom actual power is far more interesting than its metaphorical implications.” …
In American.com, Charles Murray voices concern about the direction of the country.
…Yes, the Democrats will suffer at the polls this fall. But there will be no repeal of health reform. Politicians never withdraw entitlements. The Democrats are right to think that what happened yesterday makes enactment of the rest of the European welfare state easier. But do Obama and Pelosi have any understanding of how profoundly they have violated the sense of the American project? Do they have any idea how hard it is to sustain democracies over long periods of time, and how fragile our democracy has become because of what they did?
I’m sure they don’t. I can see no evidence that we have a president or Democratic congressional leaders who think in terms of “the sense of the American project.” It’s just another political system to them, to be manipulated as all political systems can be manipulated.
This morning, unlike any other day in my life, I feel like I am living in an occupied country.
George Will has a description – Enronesque.
… Health care will not be seriously revisited for at least a generation, so the system’s costliest defect — untaxed employer-provided insurance, which entangles a high-inflation commodity, health care, with the wage system — remains. Obama could not challenge this without adopting measures — e.g., tax credits for individuals, enabling them to shop for their own insurance — that empower individuals and therefore conflict with his party’s agenda of spreading dependency.
On Sunday, as will happen every day for two decades, another 10,000 baby boomers became eligible for Social Security and Medicare. And Congress moved closer to piling a huge new middle-class entitlement onto the rickety structure of America’s Ponzi welfare state. Congress has a one-word response to the demographic deluge and the scores of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities: “More.”
There will be subsidized health insurance for families of four earning up to $88,200 a year, a ceiling certain to be raised, repeatedly. The accounting legerdemain spun to make this seem affordable — e.g., cuts (to Medicare) and taxes (on high-value insurance plans) that will never happen — is Enronesque. …
In Politico, Robert Zelnick comments on aspects of Obamacare.
…About rising medical bills – often owing to exotic life support systems for the terminally ill, the new law does nothing. Ditto with the rising costs of specialists. The bill would take a mighty chunk out of payments to physicians a few years down the road. But not one in 50 familiar with physician compensation questions believes those sorts of cuts will ever come to pass.
The bill slaps s series of tax boosts on the earnings of those in the quarter million per year bracket and above together with taxes on investment, corporate earnings, other “unearned” (I.e., job-creating investment income) and estates, again nothing remotely linked to the subject of the legislation. …
The Economist reviews a new study on fairness in different societies.
…Joseph Henrich at the University of British Columbia and his colleagues wanted to test these conflicting hypotheses. They reasoned that if notions of fairness are, indeed, calibrated to the Palaeolithic, then any variation from place to place should be random. If such notions are cultural artefacts, though, they will vary systematically with some aspect of society. In a study just published in Science, Dr Henrich and his team looked at the relationship between notions of fairness and two social phenomena: the degree to which a society is economically integrated and how religious the individuals within it are. …