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Spengler writes on the growing dichotomy of interests between Germany and the rest of Europe.
To paraphrase a Wall Street adage: bulls make money, bears make money, and PIIGS get slaughtered. Of course I’m referring to Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Germany won’t bail them out again.
Germans work. The country’s unemployment rate stands at 7.5%, against an average of 13% for Europe’s so-called PIIGS. Those are heavily massaged estimates from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). More revealing is a comparison of youth unemployment, now at 10% in Germany. By contrast, as Doug Saunders observed in the July 16 Globe and Mail, “The under-30 unemployment rate in Spain has just hit 44 per cent, twice the adult rate. Italy also has passed the 40 per cent mark, and Greece has gone even further. If you count all the people who’ve given up looking, it means the number of people between 20 and 30 who have any form of employment in these countries is something like one in five.”
There is another important distinction between the German ants and the southern European grasshoppers: Germans save. They had better, because three-fifths of them are likely to be over the age of 60 by the middle of the present century. Gross national saving in Germany last year stood at 26% according to the OECD, against about 16% among the PIIGS, whose demographic profile is just as bad.
Thrifty, hard-working Germans in May bailed out dissolute, corrupt, feckless, spendthrift and lazy Greeks, Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese. That, at least, is how it appears to the German public. …
Thomas Sowell writes about playing the race card.
… Playing the race card takes many forms. Judge Charles Pickering, a federal judge in Mississippi who defended the civil rights of blacks for years and defied the Ku Klux Klan back when that was dangerous, was depicted as a racist when he was nominated for a federal appellate judgeship.
No one even mistakenly thought he was a racist. The point was simply to discredit him for political reasons — and it worked.
This year’s target is the Tea Party. When leading Democrats, led by a smirking Nancy Pelosi, made their triumphant walk on Capitol Hill, celebrating their passage of a bill in defiance of public opinion, Tea Party members on the scene protested.
All this was captured on camera and the scene was played on television. What was not captured on any of the cameras and other recording devices on the scene was anybody using racist language, as has been charged by those playing the race card.
When you realize how many media people were there, and how many ordinary citizens carry around recording devices of one sort or another, it is remarkable — indeed, unbelievable — that racist remarks were made and yet were not captured by anybody.
The latest attack on the Tea Party movement, by Ben Jealous of the NAACP, has once again played the race card. Like the proverbial lawyer who knows his case is weak, he shouts louder. …
Time to explore the JournoList controversy. Fred Barnes is first.
When I’m talking to people from outside Washington, one question inevitably comes up: Why is the media so liberal? The question often reflects a suspicion that members of the press get together and decide on a story line that favors liberals and Democrats and denigrates conservatives and Republicans.
My response has usually been to say, yes, there’s liberal bias in the media, but there’s no conspiracy. The liberal tilt is an accident of nature. The media disproportionately attracts people from a liberal arts background who tend, quite innocently, to be politically liberal. If they came from West Point or engineering school, this wouldn’t be the case.
Now, after learning I’d been targeted for a smear attack by a member of an online clique of liberal journalists, I’m inclined to amend my response. Not to say there’s a media conspiracy, but at least to note that hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism. …
John Podhoretz is next.
… Until disbanding last month, JournoList was an Internet ingathering of several hundred left-of-center intellectuals. The Web site Daily Caller yesterday published a series of JournoList e-mails dating back to the 2008 campaign and Obama’s relationship with Wright, his spiritual leader for two decades.
The exposure during the primary season of Wright’s disgusting words — blaming the United States for 9/11; accusing the US government of creating the AIDS virus; declaring “God damn America” — raised questions about the silent acceptance of Wright’s opinions by his most famous congregant.
It was always easy to imagine how the Wright matter could have brought down the Obama candidacy. Candidates have been stymied by far less when the media pressure became relentless — lead stories day after day on the evening newscasts; dozens of investigative reporters assigned to expose every word and action of the questionable associate; the pounding and hammering of press secretaries and endorsers and others not by political rivals but by prestigious news outlets.
That didn’t happen, not really, in this case — because the media covering Obama were uncomfortable playing that adversary role with him. And in part that was surely due to the efforts made by the JournoListers. …
Roger Simon gets in his licks.
… Journalism, no matter what the J-schools say, is not cardiology. It’s not even plumbing. It’s just another biased human activity practiced by those who can get — and keep — the job. The Daily Caller has performed a service in publishing the dull maunderings of the Journolist crowd. It takes them all down yet another peg. How many are left to go?
Of course, this doesn’t apply just to self-described liberals or leftists. Simply because their ideology is in desperate retreat doesn’t make them unique in this regard. No matter what our views, we are all merely citizens of a virtual Grub Street. Almost anyone can do what we do. In his jaunty cynicism, James Boswell had more to say about the life of a journalist than all the professors at Columbia added up and squared. The “elite” members of Journolist, who take themselves sooo seriously, would be well advised to read — our reread — his London Journal
Walter Williams shows how Washington really works. This example uses sugar to show how rent seekers game the system and how the politicians sell their souls.
… studies have linked diets rich in high-fructose corn syrup to elevated risks of high triglycerides (a type of blood fat), fat buildup in the liver and insulin resistance, notes Dr. Gerald Shulman and his colleagues at Yale University School of Medicine.
“This is the first evidence we have that fructose increases diabetes and heart disease independently from causing simple weight gain,” said Kimber Stanhope, a molecular biologist who led the UC Davis study, adding, “We didn’t see any of these changes in the people eating glucose.”
You say, “Williams, sucrose, fructose — what’s the fuss?” Glucose is the sugar sold in 5- or 10-pound bags at your supermarket that Americans have used as a sweetener throughout most of our history. Fructose is a sweetener that has more recently come into heavy use by beverage manufacturers and food processors. You ask, “How come all the fructose use now?”
Enter the U.S. Congress. The Fanjul family of Palm Beach, Fla., a politically connected family, has given more than $1.8 million to both Democratic and Republican parties over the years. They and others in the sugar industry give millions to congressmen to keep high tariffs on foreign sugar so the U.S. sugar industry can charge us higher prices. According to one study, the Fanjul family alone earns about $65 million a year from congressional protectionism.
Chairman Emeritus of Archer Daniels Midland Company, Dwayne Andreas, has given politicians millions of dollars to help him enrich ADM at our expense. For that money, congressmen vote to restrict sugar imports that in turn drive up sugar prices. …
Shmuley Boteach (yes that’s his name) writes in the Jerusalem post about a recent Tom Friedman column.
… more puzzling is The New York Times column about Fadlallah penned by Tom Friedman, a man for the whom the line between right and wrong is increasingly blurred by the day.
Recall that three weeks ago Friedman wrote a column accusing Israel of employing “Hama rules”’ in Gaza, thereby comparing a thriving democracy battling Hamas, a terrorist organization that fired thousands of rockets at its citizens, to a bloodthirsty tyrant in Syria who mowed his people down with tanks when they dared rise up against his brutal regime.
Now, in his column on Fadlallah, Friedman begins by condemning CNN for firing its senior editor for Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr, after she tweeted that she was “sad to hear of the passing of’ Fadlallah,” adding for good measure that the terrorist was “one of Hizbullah’s giants I respect a lot.”
Friedman concedes that Nasr’s posting was “troubling,” but not because she lamented the death of a terrorist but because “reporters covering a beat” undermine their credibility when they “issue condolences” for the people they cover.
If that amorality weren’t wacky enough, Friedman then begins to personally praise Fadlallah, quoting Richard Norton of Boston University who said that Fadlallah supported women and “was not afraid to speak about sexuality,” adding that “he even once gave [a mosque sermon] about sexual urges and female masturbation.” …
In the long line of recent bizarre columns by Friedman, this one wins a prize. …