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In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick reviews recent political and strategic events involving the Middle East. Says to get ready for war.
…Daily reports of weapons build-ups and military exercises in Iran and among Iran’s clients Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas expose the contours of their war plans.
Syria and Iran have armed Hizbullah with some 40,000 missiles and rockets, including hundreds of Scud missiles and guided surface-to-surface solid fuel M600 missiles with a 250 km. range. This week, Hizbullah threatened to attack Israel with non-conventional weapons. Syria itself has a formidable chemical and biological arsenal as well as a massive artillery and missile force at its disposal.
…From the open preparations for war that Iran and its clients have undertaken, it is clear that if they initiate the next round of fighting they will fight a four-front war against Israel. That war will be dominated by missile attacks against the entire country, aimed at breaking the will of the Israeli people while forcing the IDF to divert vital resources away from Israel’s primary target – Iran’s nuclear installations – to contend with Iran’s proxies’ missile stores. …
In the WSJ, Gerard Baker discusses the UK’s election results, and what lies ahead. Remember Baker? He wrote for the London Times until a year ago when the Journal snagged him for some administrative post where, unfortunately he rarely writes. The piece is a good tour de farce.
… But others, like Terry Marsh, hope to make a more serious point.
Angry at the failures of Britain’s political system, Mr. Marsh, a former light-welterweight world boxing champion, wanted to cast a vote by which he could signal his disdain for all the major parties. But under electoral rules it was not possible to formally register a protest vote on a ballot and have it counted. So Mr. Marsh instead paid the 5,000 pounds needed to run as a candidate, changed his name officially to None Of The Above X—the X marking the character the British still use to cast their votes in ink on paper ballots—and registered as a candidate in his local district of Basildon, in Essex, just outside London.
In the event, Mr. X, as he is presumably now known, secured a mere 100 votes out of the 45,000 cast in the district.
But in a larger, much larger, sense, as the results of Thursday’s election trickled and flowed in through the early hours of Friday, it became clear that the cause represented by the Man Formerly Known as Marsh was the real victor in Britain’s most unpredictable election in a generation.
None of the Above won Britain’s election this week. …
…You don’t have to be a political scientist to realize that this historic election result marked something much more than the usual seductive appeal of the Time for a Change message. In fact it has been known for a while now that what is going on in the old country is not just some spasm of reaction to bad economic data, but the flowering of a deep-rooted popular disgust with the entire political class.
Last year’s toe-curling exposure of corruption in high and low places (and everywhere in between) in the political system damned almost all politicians in the eyes of the electorate. The spectacle of members of parliament enriching themselves by exploiting taxpayer-paid expense loopholes in a magnificently English, class-based farce—from the Labour MP’s 88 pence ($1.30) bath plug, to the Conservative who claimed for a moat for his country castle—enraged the recession-weary voters. …
…The U.K. has, according to data from the European Commission published last week, the largest fiscal deficit in the European Union, at 13% of national income, even larger than the U.S. deficit. The scale of Britain’s spending crisis is vast on either side of the ledger: Public spending has risen above 50% of gross domestic product in the last two years, while revenues have fallen below 40%, to their lowest level since the 1960s. …
David Harsanyi makes some important points about giving the government more power when the government isn’t using the current laws appropriately to protect us against terrorists.
…McCain must be aware that the FBI can invoke, as it did in Times Square, the “public safety exception,” which allows officials to postpone Miranda warnings to suspects while they investigate clear and present danger to the public at large. They have the tool. …
…We often misunderstand Miranda. As Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor (who would likely disagree with this column) explained, “Miranda and the Fifth Amendment’s self-incrimination clause are strictly about whether confession evidence gets admitted at trial . . . they just mean that you can’t use against the person any non-Mirandized statements he gives.” …
Debra Saunders, in the San Francisco Chronicle, comments on the government’s response to the most recent terrorist.
…Let us hope that this incident serves as a wake-up call to those who have nothing better to do than predict violence from critics of ObamaCare. There are forces in this country that really do want to kill and intimidate dissenters – and they are not shy about their jihad. Witness a prominent death threat against Comedy Central because of its “South Park” cartoon portrayal of the prophet Muhammad in a bear costume. …
David Goldman (Spengler) comments on the Great Euro-Bail Out.
Just when we were told that the governments and central banks of the world had put the financial crisis behind us, the governments of Europe found it necessary to commit more than a trillion dollars to support of the financial system – a $962 billion facility to support the weak periphery of the Eurozone, plus an unspecified volume of outright purchases of government bonds by the European Central Bank as well as Germany’s Bundesbank, not to mention an emergency swap facility by which the Federal Reserve will lend Europe all the dollars it requires.
The banking system really was about to come down. The reason is that sovereign debt is a bigger problem than subprime mortgages ever were. ..
… Now the government are going to bail out the banks again, with money raised–from the banks. I’m holding my gold positions. This is truly ludicrous and may lead to a decline in confidence in all major currencies.
Why Greece matters by Robert Samuelson.
What we’re seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn’t Greece’s problem alone, and that’s why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven’t fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies.
Americans dislike the term “welfare state” and substitute the bland word “entitlements.” Vocabulary doesn’t alter the reality. Countries cannot overspend and overborrow forever. By delaying hard decisions about spending and taxes, governments maneuver themselves into a cul-de-sac. To be sure, Greece’s plight is usually described as a European crisis — especially for the euro, the common money used by 16 countries — and this is true. But only to a point. …
Jennifer Rubin has Elena Kagan thoughts.
Although records from her years in the Clinton administration may raise other concerns, at this stage the most significant vulnerability for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is her position in opposing giving military recruiters access to Harvard Law School because of the armed services’ Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. This is problematic in two respects.
First, as Bill Kristol observes, the level of invective directed at the military is noteworthy: …
More on Kagan from Daniel Foster in The Corner.
Roger Simon comments on the demise of Newsweek.
…The Washington Post would have to pay me to take Newsweek off its hands – and a substantial sum, in the neighborhood of sixty million. You figure it out. In 2008, the magazine lost $16.1 million; in 2009, that went to $29.3 million. Not a promising proposition.
And what is Newsweek anyway? In recent years it’s been nothing more than a semi-leftwing propaganda rag for Upper West Side dentists – chock full of the kind of opinion you can get for nothing on the Huffington Post or even the Daily Kos. …
No one’s interested in paying to read liberal opinions, writes John Podhoretz.
…For years, Newsweek was a liberal journal of opinion masquerading as a news publication that attempted to sell itself to a mass readership with a lot of health-care, entertainment, and lifestyle fluff. As a vehicle for news analysis, it was entirely conventional; as a purveyor of sociological fluff, it was kind of fun, though often enragingly so; as a journal of opinion, it was to actual journals of opinion as tofutti is to gelato, flavorless and bland and mock. Last year, Meacham and Co. ditched much of the news analysis and sociological fluff in favor of more and more opinion.
It will not surprise you to know that much of the opinion dealt with the ways in which Barack Obama was right and noble and good and strong and tough and resourceful and a good symbol and an agent of change and so is his wife, by the way — and when it was not about that, it was primarily about how the right is at war with itself and torn and in conflict and dominated by anger and full of rage and presumptively racist and anti-gay and anti-women and anti-media. That was to be expected. But there was really almost nothing else in there, and what was there as a matter of ideological coloration wasn’t especially tough or good or interesting or novel. …
Scott Johnson has some good Newsweek quips in Powerline.
Linking to this story regarding the Washington Post’s efforts to unload Newsweek, NRO’s Jim Geraghty tweets: “Newsweek’s latest promo: With a 12-month subscription, they’ll throw in the entire organization for free.” More Geraghty tweets (and laughs) here.
UPDATE: This just in: A Dartmouth reader reports:
Just read your brief post this morning about the declining fortunes of Newsweek magazine. As it happens, this is pledge week at Vermont Public Radio (the Hanover area’s main NPR affiliate). VPR is now offering free Newsweek subscriptions as a giveaway for contributions made to VPR — something I do not recall ever occurring during our 22 years living in the Upper Valley and listening to public radio here.
Newsweek: The perfect companion to Democrat State Radio.