Click on WORD or PDF for full content
The WSJ editors show how the arrogant treatment of President Karzai has come back to haunt us.
… This treatment of an ally eerily echoes the way the Kennedy Administration treated Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South Vietnam in the early 1960s. On JFK’s orders, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge refused to meet with Diem, and when U.S. officials got word of a coup against Diem they let it be known they would not interfere. Diem was executed, and South Vietnam never again had a stable government.
By contrast, President George W. Bush decided to support and work closely with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during the 2007 U.S. military surge in Iraq. The Maliki government was sectarian and sometimes incompetent, and some of its officials were no doubt corrupt, but Mr. Bush understood that the larger goal was to defeat al Qaeda and to stabilize the country. From FDR to Reagan, Presidents of both parties have had to tolerate allied leaders of varying talents and unsavory qualities in the wartime pursuit of more important foreign-policy goals. …
Abe Greenwald, in Contentions, also comments on the disrespect of Karzai.
…The point here is not that Karzai is a paragon of trustworthiness and good governance. He is a very flawed and, in some ways, compromised figure. The issue is how best to keep him from actively obstructing our mission and how to lay the foundation for a genuine tilt toward a stable and accountable representative government in Afghanistan. That’s achieved first by backing up a rock-solid commitment to defeat the Taliban and staying on for institution building. At the same time, Karzai should be intelligently coerced in private, not undermined in public.
For a president who has invested so much in style over substance, and dwelled so incessantly on the virtues of listening over dictating, Obama has achieved a strikingly ill conceived tone on Karzai. What’s more his penchant for the perfect compromise has not served him well on Afghanistan. We cannot at once be committed to fighting and winding down the same war. Nor can we treat a partner as both an ally and an antagonist. For all Obama’s talk of Bush’s failures in Afghanistan, the president could learn a few things from his predecessor.
Fouad Ajami places Karzai and Afghanistan in the context of our feckless policies in the region.
…Forgive Mr. Karzai as he tilts with the wind and courts the Iranian theocrats next door. We can’t chastise him for seeking an accommodation with Iranian power when Washington itself gives every indication that it would like nothing more than a grand bargain with Iran’s rulers. …
…All this plays out under the gaze of an Islamic world that is coming to a consensus that a discernible American retreat in the region is in the works. America’s enemies are increasingly brazen, its friends unnerved. Witness the hapless Lebanese, once wards of U.S. power, now making pilgrimages, one leader at a time, to Damascus. They, too, can read the wind: If Washington is out to “engage” that terrible lot in Syria, they better scurry there to secure reasonable terms of surrender.
The shadow of American power is receding; the rogues are emboldened. The world has a way of calling the bluff of leaders and nations summoned to difficult endeavors. Would that our biggest source of worry in that arc of trouble was the intemperate outburst of our ally in Kabul.
Turning to our upcoming rendezvous with April 15th, David Harsanyi has some interesting statistics, the upshot of which is a message to the GOP on how to win the next elections.
…So taxes it is. If I were running a minority party, I would make tax reform a major plank of my campaign.
Cut capital gains and corporate taxes. Simplify and flatten income taxes. Finally — and this is sure to go over well in suburban and lower income households around the nation — spread the income tax burden more equitably, so that all of us can enjoy “investing” in Washington. …
Mark Steyn is on the subject of taxes also.
… for an increasing number of Americans, tax season is like baseball season: It’s a spectator sport. According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax. Obviously, many of them pay other kinds of taxes – state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why). Half a decade back, it was just under 40 percent who paid no federal income tax; now it’s just under 50 percent. By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever-shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury. In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from “No taxation without representation” to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it. …
In Forbes, Richard Epstein tells us to watch Maine and Massachusetts to see where Obamacare will take us. The pressure is building.
…As a matter of first principle, however, this two-state meltdown shows the colossal flaw in the modern theory of health insurance rate regulation. Originally, rate regulation operated as a counterweight to the monopoly power of key providers in network industries–railroads, electricity, power transmission, telecommunications and the like. Those price controls forced these monopoly providers to accept a risk-adjusted competitive return for their services. Knowing, however, that these industries had to invest in infrastructure, courts rejected as confiscatory steep rate cuts that would not allow regulated firms to stay in business.
Here is the catch. Health care insurance is a competitive industry, with no monopoly profits for wise regulators to eliminate. Rate regulation thus makes no sense if its only consequence is to drive up administrative costs while denying competitive firms a competitive rate of return on investment. A sensible constitutional regime would knock out these rate reductions automatically without demanding any detailed case-by-case accounting to reveal the obvious: Open entry eliminates persistent excessive returns. This brass knuckles treatment of state regulators is a pipe dream under today’s permissive constitutional environment that sees rate regulation as an economic panacea. So current regulators first starve the insurance carriers and then invite them do battle with the health care providers. …
…There is no mystery here. Maine and Massachusetts have introduced programs that require them to live beyond their means. They give us an early warning system, like canaries exposed to carbon monoxide in the mine. These new entitlement programs can’t breathe without new oxygen. But there is no air in their fiscal oxygen tank. Runaway costs will lead to price controls that will lead to queuing for standard health care services. …
In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor gives a liberal’s view of the upcoming SCOTUS nomination. Justice Stevens has expanded the government’s power, and federal power over the states. Stevens also authored the Kelo v. New London decision that allows government to steal land from its citizens. Justice Stevens is fond of saying he didn’t change, the court did. Yet, he was first party to a decision to bring back the death penalty and then later ruled against it.
…Stevens, who will still have one of the best minds on the Court when he turns 90 on April 20, has long insisted that he remains the old-fashioned judicial conservative and moderate Republican he was when President Ford appointed him in 1975. But the leftward drift of his opinions over the years has made him the senior member of the four-justice liberal bloc.
The four shortlisters are Solicitor General Elena Kagan; federal Appeals Court Judges Diane Wood of Chicago and Merrick Garland of the District of Columbia; and (though some count her out) Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. President Obama interviewed Kagan, Wood, and Napolitano last spring before choosing Sonia Sotomayor, an Appeals Court judge, to succeed Justice David Souter.
…But Obama knows that a big confirmation battle could deplete his political capital and make it much harder to get his proposed legislation on climate change and other matters through Congress. …
In Future Pundit, Randall Parker tells us about a study that will please some people. Specifically, those who think that mint chocolate chip ice cream is all the green they need in their diet.
“An analysis of dietary data from more than 400,000 men and women found only a weak association between high fruit and vegetable intake and reduced overall cancer risk, according to a study published online April 6, 2010 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.”
Other studies have found the same results. But you can still eat fruits and vegetables for your heart and arteries.
Coincidentally, another recent report finds Vitamin K as K1 found in green leafy vegetables does not cut cancer risk but Vitamin K as K2 found in cheese does cut cancer risk.
The Economist reports on the same study.
FOR snivelling children and recalcitrant carnivores, requests that they should eat five portions of fruit and vegetables every day have mostly fallen on deaf ears. But those who did comply with official advice from charities, governments and even the mighty World Health Organisation (WHO), could remind themselves, rather smugly, that the extra greens they forced down at lunchtime would greatly reduce their chances of getting cancer. Until now, that is. Because a group of researchers led by Paolo Boffetta, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, have conducted a new study into the link between cancer and the consumption of fruit and vegetables, and found it to be far weaker than anyone had thought. …
…Even those who eat virtually no fruit and vegetables, the paper suggests, are only 9% more likely to develop cancer than those who stick to the WHO recommendations.
…More importantly, there is still good evidence that fruit and vegetables protect against heart disease and strokes by reducing blood pressure. A separate investigation of the people involved in Dr Boffetta’s study suggests that those who eat five servings a day of fruit and vegetables have a 30% lower incidence of heart disease and strokes than those who eat less than one and a half servings. It is also possible that some specific foods, such as tomatoes, broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, do offer protective effects against particular kinds of cancer. …
Pickerhead’s favorite TV series, ever, was Frank’s Place. The WSJ reviews a new HBO series Treme that gives hope something like it may appear again. Starts tonite on HBO.
The new HBO series “Treme” (Sunday 10-11 p.m. ET) opens in New Orleans just three months after Katrina. Its a gumbo of so many ingredients that it will take a nice, long time to suck the juice out of them. Best of all, the series producers, David Simon and Eric Overmyer, create a world outside the standard Big Easy-Cajun-honky-tonk-voodoo clichés. From the opening credits to the end of each episode, it delivers jolts of what feels like the real thing, or at least an original thing.
“Treme” begins in the old African-American neighborhood of that name with a rousing second-line parade—so called because musicians form the first line, and second come people who join the procession as it spreads good vibes along the way. …