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Writing in National Review, John Bolton has thoughts on the treaty with Russia.
On April 8, in Prague, the United States and Russia signed what they call the “New START” bilateral arms-control agreement, important specifics of which, in hallmark Obama-administration fashion (see health care), were still being negotiated. Nonetheless, the president and his acolytes are calling for the treaty’s swift ratification.
The Senate would better protect our country’s future by actually deliberating before rushing over the precipice. A vital constitutional imperative, the Senate’s role in making binding treaty commitments, is at stake. While some consider it passé to insist that legislators read and understand what they vote upon, senators should insist on their constitutional prerogatives, drawing a line in the sand on this national-security issue.
In fact, there is no compelling reason for the Obama-Medvedev treaty, and there are many reasons to fear its impact. Since the still-incomplete text has just become public, continuing careful analysis will be necessary before we can come to definitive understandings and conclusions. Nonetheless, our very uncertainty lights the road ahead for arduous questioning, ranging from the assumptions of the negotiators to the consequences of implementing the treaty’s provisions. …
In the Daily Beast, Charlie Gasparino provides some background to the charges behind “Goldman’s Fall From Grace.”
Before Goldman Sachs was lampooned in the media, famously labeled by Rolling Stone magazine the evil “vampire squid,” and became the symbol on Main Street for all that was wrong on Wall Street, the big firm was already the most hated investment bank among investment bankers.
But now Goldman has even bigger problems, having been accused by the SEC of securities fraud. The SEC claims that Goldman sold a complex type of mortgage bond, known as a collateralized debt obligation, to investors without alerting them that hedge-fund manager John Paulson had selected the same bonds as likely to default.
Paulson made money because he was actually shorting the bonds (a trade that becomes profitable when prices decline), as Goldman was selling the bonds to investors, suggesting they buy them because the housing market would continue to boom.
These allegations only further the case for Goldman’s dismal reputation on the Street. …
Another Goldman has had a fall from grace; sort of. We refer to a kerfuffle between two of our favorites; David Goldman (AKA Spengler) and John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary and the Contentions blog. Goldman wrote a particularly harsh post about Obama on April 9th. Most everything Goldman writes finds its way into Pickings. This did not; in part because of the language and because the occasion for the post was a story in the Israeli Daily Maariv which we could not confirm and which later proved to be incorrect in substantive areas. See Roger Simon. There is enough reason to be aghast at the policies of this administration without getting personal. And, in fact, given Obama’s family background, it is proof of some extraordinary strengths of the man to have left that milieu behind and fashioned a good marriage and nurturing home for his children.
Our guide for this will be Michael Ledeen who is, more or less, sympathetic to David Goldman’s point of view.
… David has been saying these things for quite a while, and has offered plenty of evidence to explain why he believes them. John hasn’t felt obliged to pick a fight before, and I think he would have done better if had taken a bit of time to study the facts of Obama’s life. Contrary to John’s dismissal of any Indonesian influence (he was only there for “less than a year”), for example, young Barack spent four important years (from age 6 to 10) there, and attended a Muslim school (which wasn’t “very Muslim” actually, but I digress). And his characterization of Mrs Obama’s family as “lower middle class from Mercer Island, Washington” is not quite right either: the parents were from Kansas, and lived briefly on Mercer Island (which is a pretty pricey neighborhood, at least in recent years); the mother was a bank vice president, and I can’t find an account suggesting that Obama’s mother had an economically challenged childhood. That came later, as a result of moving to Indonesia.
I totally agree with John–indeed I have written it myself–when he says that Obama’s view of the world is of a piece with the political correctness now rampant in American colleges and universities. His mother was a trailblazer in this regard, and it shouldn’t be controversial to say it.
I’m baffled when John accuses David of somehow trying to make the president “responsible” for his mother. It’s surely important to pay attention to biography, as John no doubt agrees in calmer moments. I don’t understand his complaint about “speculation about…sexual history.” It’s not speculative to say that she married a Kenyan and then an Indonesian, and produced children from both. …
More on this from Jonah Goldberg and Corner readers.
… This strikes me as a not unreasonable conjecture given Obama’s own narrative in Dreams from My Father, and given that it has been a commonplace on the hard left since at least Vietnam to affect—and internalize—an alienated stance against America. Obama’s come out of a more ideologically pure left-wing environment than any major Democratic figure in a while. That he might share its tendency to prefer America as it should be to America as it is isn’t out of left field. It might be wrong, but it’s not loony.
I mean, all of this is kind of silly psychoanalytic speculation, but if we understand Goldman’s clunky phrase “third-world anthropologist” to mean someone’s whose consideration of American society and politics is sort of at a abstracted distance and whose emotive sympathies lie more with the damnés de la terre than the bitter Sky-God, boom-stick clingers…I don’t see where it’s wrong, per se, or where it fails to explain his conduct. …
Christopher Booker says we need to keep exploring climategate.
If you were faced with by far the biggest bill of your life, would you not want to be confident that there was a very good reason why you should pay it? That is why we need to know just how far we can trust the science behind the official view that the world is threatened with catastrophe by global warming – because the measures proposed by our politicians to avert this supposed disaster threaten to transform our way of life out of recognition and to land us with easily the biggest bill in history. (The Climate Change Act alone, says the Government, will cost us all £18 billion every year until 2050.)
Yet in recent months, as we know, the official science on which all this rests has taken quite a hammering. Confronted with all those scandals surrounding the “Climategate” emails and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the political and academic establishments have responded with a series of inquiries and statements designed to show that the methods used to construct the official scientific case are wholly sound. But as was illustrated last week by two very different reports, these efforts to hold the line are themselves so demonstrably flawed that they are in danger of backfiring, leaving the science more questionable than ever. …
Telegraph, UK has comments on our new space program.
A few years ago, on a visit to the Kennedy Space Centre, I was surprised to see dozens of vultures perched on fences outside the museum. Apparently, they’re permanent residents. Were I to return today, I suspect those vultures would look very different. What were once ugly birds are now potent symbols. NASA is dying.
Doom has come in the form of President Barack Obama, who yesterday unveiled plans for a stripped-down space agency during a speech at the Kennedy Space Centre. The speech was more like a funeral oration than a new policy announcement, since the president’s intentions have been made abundantly clear over the past two months. Nevertheless, while there was little surprise in what Obama said, the sense of betrayal felt in Florida was no less bitter. …