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In the WSJ, Elliot Abrams looks at a number of players in the Middle East, and the current issues facing them. Abrams discusses the irony of reluctant understandings forming between Israel and some Arab states as the Iranian nuclear threat grows.
…And two weeks ago, the Israeli press carried reports of a visit to Saudi Arabia by Gen. Meir Dagan, chief of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency; Gen. Dagan is the point man on Iran for the Israeli government. This follows stories in the Times of London two months ago claiming that the Saudis would suspend their air defense operations to permit Israeli fighter planes to cross Saudi air space en route to an attack on Iran. …
…The Egyptian regime feels no love for the Israelis, but there is significant security cooperation between the two countries; Egypt’s rulers see the Shia in Iran, not the Jewish state, as the more dangerous threat to Arab power in the region. Egypt’s decisions in late July to bar an Iranian Red Crescent ship carrying aid to Gaza from entering the Suez Canal and to prevent four Iranian parliamentarians from crossing the border into Gaza are the most recent proof of this Egyptian attitude. …
…The Gulf regimes have long relied on American protection, and the U.S. maintains large bases in the UAE, Bahrain (the Fifth fleet’s headquarters), Qatar and Kuwait. For these regimes and for the Saudis, Iran is a constant threat and the issue of the day is who will be, to use the old British phrase, “top country” in the region. Repeated American offers to negotiate with Iran, and statements from Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates respectively that an attack on Iran would be “incredibly destabilizing” or “disastrous” do not reassure them. They want Iran stopped. They are not sure the need to do that is understood as well in Washington as it is in Jerusalem—and at Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv. …
Ed Morrissey comments on Christina Romer’s departure.
…Romer’s legacy will probably mostly focus on the Porkulus chart that argued for a $775 billion stimulus package and predicted it would hold the unemployment rate at 8% or below. …
…Romer also played a big role in botching the future deficits projection last year, missing the mark by $2 trillion. King Banaian showed the arbitrary (and unsupportable) assumptions that went into Romer’s initial figures, and the lame excuses that followed their exposure. Romer made a career in this administration of making unsupportable claims and bad bets, and she should have resigned a year ago over that amateurish episode.
That makes two key members of Obama’s economic team to depart this summer. Peter Orszag, the budget director who couldn’t spot Romer’s $2 trillion error and who presided over the biggest deficit expansion in modern history, hit the road for family obligations earlier. With approval ratings on the economy for Obama and Democrats crashing while unemployment skyrockets, it looks as though the White House wants to clean house and argue for a fresh start just before the midterms. Until that “fresh start” begins to reduce spending, taxes, and regulatory burdens, though, the composition of Obama’s economic team isn’t going to make any difference at all.
Ed Morrissey also interprets some recent economic statistics for us.
…They also forget the point about job losses being cumulative, as they almost always do, by attempting to cheer people up about layoffs and terminations having “moderated significantly”:
Despite the tepid private sector jobs growth, the pace of layoffs has moderated significantly from the first quarter of last year, when employers were culling an average of 752,000 jobs a month.
Well, yeah — because those jobs are still lost. No one thought that pace would continue forever, regardless of the economic policies of the Democrats. The point is that a year later, we should be looking at significant gains in recovering those jobs, not tooting horns because the slope of the decline has shallowed out.
Christopher Hitchens shares his thoughts on the discovery and diagnosis of his cancer.
…Working back from the cancer-ridden squamous cells that these first results disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth. The word “metastasized” was the one in the report that first caught my eye, and ear. The alien had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node. And its original base of operations was located—had been located for quite some time—in my esophagus. My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not? …
Karl Rove says there’s good news in many gubernatorial elections, for GOP candidates and for the economy if the GOP works to reign in government.
…The GOP’s edge in statehouse contests could have major ramifications for a long time to come, including next year’s redistricting of the House of Representatives. The more GOP governors, the stronger Republican dominance of the process will be. Eighteen of the 21 states that could add or lose congressional seats have governors’ races this fall. There also will be a lot more Republican legislators after November to help draw redistricting lines for the coming decade.
Republicans are poised to elect a new generation of leaders. After this fall’s election, the GOP could have two Indian-American, two Hispanic, and as many as seven women governors. This would provide powerful evidence of the GOP’s diversity and help refurbish the party’s image.
…Already, the GOP victors in last year’s gubernatorial contests are providing powerful contrasts to Mr. Obama’s policies. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell erased his state’s nearly $2 billion deficit without raising taxes. Facing a $13 billion shortfall, a hostile Democratic legislature and more than $7 million in negative ads launched against him by labor unions, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie nonetheless balanced the budget while cutting taxes. …
In Forbes, Reihan Salam reports on the success of Amazon’s Kindle, and where new technologies may lead society.
In the 33 months since the launch of Amazon’s Kindle platform, sales of Kindle e-books have surpassed sales of hardcover books. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicts that e-book sales will surpass paperback sales within the next 12 months, and combined hardcover and paperback sales soon after that. This despite the fact that the 600,000 titles in the Kindle bookstore represents only a fraction of Amazon’s inventory.
That the success of the Kindle is good news for Amazon should go without saying. But it represents a remarkable environmental advance as well. The publishing industry in the U.S. felled roughly 125 million trees and generated vast amounts of wastewater. And, of course, physical books have to be transported by trucks, which generate carbon emissions, exacerbate congestion, increase traffic fatalities and cause wear-and-tear on already overburdened roads. One assumes that Bezos didn’t have the environment foremost in mind when he pushed the Kindle concept forward, yet he’s arguably done more to fight climate change by threatening hardcovers and paperbacks with extinction than any number of environmental activists. …