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Jennifer Rubin has news that some Dems are tired of the Obami’s treatment of Israel.
Wow. Yes, Chuck Schumer – who’s angling for Senate majority leader if/when Harry Reid loses in November — has had enough with the president’s Israel-bashing. …
…one suspects that Schumer has gotten nowhere in private and is now forced to unload in public. It seems that while Schumer cares what American Jews think, Obama is unmoved by quiet persuasion. …
Kimberley Strassel knows what the real Republican divide is. And Pickerhead says, “We don’t need no stinkin’ T party to take us back to the Trent Lott and Tom Delay show”.
Marco Rubio appeared on a Sunday talk show this month to say something remarkable. The Republican running for Florida’s Senate seat suggested we reform Social Security by raising the retirement age for younger workers. Florida is home to 2.4 million senior citizens who like to vote. The blogs declared Mr. Rubio politically suicidal.
The response from Mr. Rubio’s primary competitor, Gov. Charlie Crist, was not remarkable. His campaign slammed Mr. Rubio’s idea as “cruel, unusual and unfair to seniors living on a fixed income.” Mr. Crist’s plan for $17.5 trillion in unfunded Social Security liabilities? Easy! He’ll root out “fraud” and “waste.”
Let’s talk Republican “civil war.” Not the one the media is hawking, that pits supposed tea party fanatics like Mr. Rubio against supposed “moderates” like Mr. Crist. The Republican Party is split. But the real divide is between reformers like Mr. Rubio and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, who are running on principles and tough issues, and a GOP old guard that still finds it politically expedient to duck or demagogue issues. As Republicans look for a way out of the wilderness, this is the rift that matters. …
In the Corner, Jay Nordlinger has been looking forward to an article on baseball from Charles Krauthammer.
I see that Charles Krauthammer has at last written his baseball column — and it is a real beauty. Lyrical, smile-making, and sharp. Last fall, I interviewed him and wrote a piece for NR. Toward the end, it said,
Every columnist writes a “soft” column now and then — a column about sports, or fashion, or maybe a beloved former teacher. All summer long, Krauthammer was wanting to write a column about the Washington Nationals, the baseball team. But he never had the opportunity, because “Obama keeps coming at me like a fire hose.” The president is always giving a conservative columnist something to warn about, correct, or condemn.
Obama hasn’t taken a break, unfortunately. The Swedenization of America is a full-time job. (Is that hate speech? An incitement to violence?) …
And here is Charles Krauthammer’s column on the Washington Nationals.
Among my various idiosyncrasies, such as (twice) driving from Washington to New York to watch a world championship chess match, the most baffling to my friends is my steadfast devotion to the Washington Nationals. When I wax lyrical about having discovered my own private paradise at Nationals Park, eyes begin to roll and it is patiently explained to me that my Nats have been not just bad, but prodigiously — epically — bad.
As if I don’t know. They lost 102 games in 2008; 103 in 2009. That’s no easy feat. Only three other teams in the last quarter-century have achieved back-to-back 100-loss seasons. …
…And for a losing baseball team, the calm is even more profound. I’ve never been to a park where the people are more relaxed, tolerant and appreciative of any small, even moral, victory. Sure, you root, root, root for the home team, but if they don’t win “it’s a shame” — not a calamity. Can you imagine arm-linked fans swaying to such a sweetly corny song of early-20th-century innocence — as hard to find today as a manual typewriter or a 20-game winner — at the two-minute warning. …
John Fund looks at voter irregularities in Wisconsin.
…Democratic leaders also worried that a popular amendment to require photo ID at the polls would have been attached to their measure. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle has vetoed three previous photo ID laws, even though Democrats such as state Sen. Tim Carpenter of Milwaukee supported them saying he’s seen “eye opening” public support for the idea.
That backing is based on real evidence. In 2004, John Kerry won Wisconsin over George W. Bush by 11,380 votes out of 2.5 million cast. After allegations of fraud surfaced, the Milwaukee police department’s Special Investigative Unit conducted a probe. Its February 2008 report found that from 4,600 to 5,300 more votes were counted in Milwaukee than the number of voters recorded as having cast ballots. Absentee ballots were cast by people living elsewhere; ineligible felons not only voted but worked at the polls; transient college students cast improper votes; and homeless voters possibly voted more than once.
Much of the problem resulted from Wisconsin’s same-day voter law, which allows anyone to show up at the polls, register and then cast a ballot. ID requirements are minimal. The report found that in 2004 a total of 1,305 “same day” voters were invalid. …
In the Hit and Run Blog from Reason, Radley Balko blogs on government failure. Read the post for Balko’s twists on the topic.
…I don’t promote government failure, I expect it. And my expectations are met fairly often. What I promote is the idea that more people share my expectations, so fewer people are harmed by government failure, and so we can stop this slide toward increasingly large portions of our lives being subject to the whims, interests, and prejudices of politicians.
I will concede that there’s a problem, here. In the private sector failure leads to obsolescence (unless you happen to work for a portion of the private sector that politicians think should be preserved in spite of failure). When government fails, people like Dinauer and, well, the government claim it’s a sign that we need more government. It’s not that government did a poor job, or is a poor mechanism for addressing that particular problem, it’s that there just wasn’t enough government. Of course, the same people will point to what they call government success as, also, a good argument for more government. …
It appears that Obama is not going to help the Democratic candidate who wants to fill Obama’s Senate seat. Jennifer Rubin explains.
…There are good reasons for Obama’s reticence. For starters, Obama has enough sticky connections to the Illinois corruption racket, so he’s wise to stay away from his former hometown. It seems he might, in fact, have had a conversation with the former governor about that Senate seat and another with a union official to relay his preferences to Blago. (If true, this is at odds with what Obama and his “internal review” related to the public when the Blago story first broke.) Blago’s lawyers are now trying to drag the president in to testify in Blago’s case — which will be going to trial this fall. Yikes!
Moreover, Giannoulias is in deep trouble, and it’s far from certain that Obama can help him. After all, he didn’t help Martha Coakley, Creigh Deeds, or Jon Corzine. Coming up short in his own state would prove embarrassing and tend to confirm that he lacks political mojo. Sometimes it’s better to just stay home. …
John Stossel discusses why capitalism is good.
…I was glad to see the publication of “The 5 Big Lies About American Business” by Michael Medved.
“You can only make a profit in this country by giving people a product or a service that they want,” Medved recently told me. “It’s the golden rule in action.” …
…”This is the suspicion of the profit motive — the idea that if somebody is selflessly serving me, they’re going to treat me better than somebody who wants to make a buck,” Medved said. But “(i)f you think about it in your own life, if somebody is benefiting from his interaction with you … it’s a far more reliable kind of interaction than someone who comes and says I’m in this only for you. …
Speaking of the good of free markets, today is an anniversary of Adam Smith’s first book; The Theory of Moral Sentiments. His namesake blog has the story.
On this day, in 1759, Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It was an instant sensation. Since the Greeks, philosophers had tried to work out the basis of human ethics: what it was that made some actions good and others bad. Many, in the age of Enlightenment, thought there must be some rational, logical explanation, and perhaps even some way of measuring the goodness or badness of an action, almost mathematically. Such efforts did not lack ingenuity, but never met with great success.
Smith’s breakthrough was to see ethics as an issue of social psychology. …
David Harsanyi comments on South Park creators stirring up more controversy.
…There is nothing inherently wrong with self-censorship, per se. If slighted groups have the ability to mobilize crowds of people, generate enough negative press and economic pressure to induce a show to rethink its content, hey, that’s the way it works.
We’re only talking about an animated show. But if those who bankroll satirists can be so easily intimidated, shouldn’t we all be troubled about the lesson that sends religious fanatics elsewhere? And what does it say about us?…
Generally it’s good to ignore Chris Matthews, but sometimes he’s partisan to the point of parody. When he is it’s good to use him to kick off the humor section. Lately he has decided to say the GOP voter’s apparent decision to rid the party of RINO’s (Republican’s In Name Only) like Arlen Spector or Charlie Crist is “Stalin-esque” suggesting the party is involved in a purge. A couple of Corner posts deal with this. Jonah Goldberg polishes it off.
… But even here, as Matthews dilutes the meaning of Stalin-esque to nine parts water and one part 2% milk, Matthews still comes out a buffoon. Because if you take out the murder, butchery, and genocide from Stalin-esque, you’re still left with a purge from above. And that is the opposite of what is happening. Arlen Specter is a careerist hack who switched parties because — as he pretty much explicitly explained — he thinks his career is more important than the will of the Republican party. Crist, too, is afraid not of some metaphorical Commissar with a gun in his desk arbitrarily purging him, but of the voters in his own party, voters he’s counted on, voters he’s raised money from, voters he’s lied to.
It would be Stalin-esque (again in the very watered down sense) if Michael Steele unilaterally booted Crist, et al., from the party over the objections of the rank and file. Instead, the rank and file are turning on the long-anointed establishment candidates. This “purge” is a lot closer to what some romantics call “democracy” than what super-geniuses like Matthews call “Stalin-esque.”
Earlier in the month Matthews had complained about Rush Limbaugh describing the administration as a “regime.” Byron York disposes of that bit of Matthews hypocrisy.
… Perhaps Matthews missed all of those references. If he did, he still might have heard the phrase the many times it was uttered on his own network, MSNBC. For example, on January 8 of this year, Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak said that, “In George Bush’s regime, only one million jobs had been created…” On August 21, 2009, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz referred to something that happened in 2006, when “the Bush regime was still in power.” On October 8, 2007, Democratic strategist Steve McMahon said that “the middle class has not fared quite as well under Bush regime as…” On August 10, 2007, MSNBC played a clip of anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan referring to “the people of Iraq and Afghanistan that have been tragically harmed by the Bush regime.” On September 21, 2006, a guest referred to liberals “expressing their dissatisfaction with the Bush regime.” On July 7, 2004, Ralph Nader — appearing with Matthews on “Hardball” — discussed how he would “take apart the Bush regime.” On May 26, 2003, Joe Scarborough noted a left-wing website that “has published a deck of Bush regime playing cards.” A September 26, 2002 program featured a viewer email that said, “The Bush regime rhetoric gets goofier and more desperate every day.”
Finally — you knew this was coming — on June 14, 2002, Chris Matthews himself introduced a panel discussion about a letter signed by many prominent leftists condemning the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror. “Let’s go to the Reverend Al Sharpton,” Matthews said. “Reverend Sharpton, what do you make of this letter and this panoply of the left condemning the Bush regime?” …