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Mark Steyn has a wonderful way of exposing the idiocy of current establishment thinking. Here he discusses how multi-culturalism is complicit with Islamo-fascism.
…Too many people in the free world have internalized Islam’s view of them. A couple of years ago, I visited Guantanamo and subsequently wrote that, if I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new copy of the Koran in each cell: To reassure incoming prisoners that the filthy infidels haven’t touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Korans are hung from the walls in pristine, sterilized surgical masks. It’s one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it’s hard to see why it’s in the interests of us infidels to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry. What does that degree of prostration before their prejudices tell them about us? It’s a problem that Muslims think we’re unclean. It’s a far worse problem that we go along with it.
Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in. …
…As I said in America Alone, multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that “in my country everyone is free to criticize the President”, and the Soviet guy replies, “Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your President.” Under one-way multiculturalism, the Muslim world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance, and, likewise, the western world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals’ loathing of their own.
It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threaten it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ “bad cop”. Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people. …
In AOL News, John Merline has an interesting discussion on the official end of the recession and what this means about Obama’s economic measures.
You’d think the news that the Great Recession is officially over would be something to cheer about. On Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research — the official recession scorekeeper — said the downturn that began in December 2007 ended way back in June 2009.
Anyone feel like celebrating?
The news is particularly unhelpful to the Obama administration right now.
…The trouble is that we now know the recession ended just as the stimulus money started to get spent. According to the White House’s own 100-day stimulus report, issued at the end of May 2009, only $45.6 billion in spending and tax relief had gone out the door by then. In other words, less than 6 percent of the stimulus money was in the economy as the recession ended…
John Fund writes about Obama-Carter comparisons.
Comparisons between the Obama White House and the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter are increasingly being made—and by Democrats.
…Walter Mondale, Mr. Carter’s vice president, told The New Yorker this week that anxious and angry voters in the late 1970s “just turned against us—same as with Obama.” As the polls turned against his administration, Mr. Mondale recalled that Mr. Carter “began to lose confidence in his ability to move the public.” Democrats on Capitol Hill are now saying this is happening to Mr. Obama. …
…Pat Caddell, who was Mr. Carter’s pollster while he was in the White House, thinks some comparisons between the two men are overblown. But he notes that any White House that is sinking in the polls takes on a “bunker mentality” that leads the president to become isolated and consult with fewer and fewer people from the outside. Mr. Caddell told me that his Democratic friends think that’s happening to Mr. Obama—and that the president’s ability to pull himself out of a political tailspin is hampered by his resistance to seek out fresh thinking. …
Michael Barone looks at how the gubernatorial races are shaping up.
…Republicans currently lead in polls in 12 of the 18 states where they have governors now, and all of their incumbents are ahead. They’re behind in five relatively small Democratic-leaning states where Republican incumbents are retiring, but by wide margins only in two, Hawaii and Connecticut.
…Democrats are faring worse. Their nominees are currently trailing in 13 of the 19 states where they hold the governorships. Only three of their nominees have double digit leads — in Bill Clinton’s home states of Arkansas and New York and in Colorado, where the Republican nominee has been disavowed by many party leaders.
Most unnerving for Democrats is that their nominees are currently trailing by double digits in the nation’s industrial heartland — in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. These are states Barack Obama carried with 54, 51, 57 and 62 percent of the vote.
Democrats are not supposed to be trailing there in times like these. The old political rule is that economic distress moves voters in the industrial heartland toward Democrats. Oldtimers remember that that is what happened in recession years like 1958, 1970 and 1982. …
Colin Powell showed up last weekend to remind us how silly he can be. The Investor’s Business Daily editors comment on his recent Sunday news program gaffe.
Americans are grateful to Gen. Colin Powell for his exemplary service in uniform. But in his media-ordained role as political wise man, his knowledge and judgment leave a lot to be desired.
Powell is touted as a rare sage within the Republican Party (though it’s a funny kind of Republican who endorses Barack Obama at the worst time imaginable for his GOP opponent, in October 2008). The media present him as a better angel of our nature who has chosen to belong to a hellish political organization dominated by intemperate ideologues.
…But on Sunday, Powell again and again proved his sage status to be little more than a myth. Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the biggest embarrassment came when the veteran of the last three Republican administrations took a shot at “his” party on immigration. …
Common sense has long since left the green movement. Jeff Jacoby discusses the tyranny of the trash police, and the added expense of their mandates.
…Unlike commercial and industrial recycling — a thriving voluntary market that annually salvages tens of millions of tons of metal, paper, glass, and plastic — mandatory household recycling is a money loser. Cost studies show that curbside recycling can cost, on average, 60 percent more per ton than conventional garbage disposal. In 2004, an analysis by New York’s Independent Budget Office concluded, according to The New York Times, that “it cost anywhere from $34 to $48 a ton more to recycle material, than to send it off to landfills or incinerators.’’
“There is not a community curbside recycling program in the United States that covers its cost,’’ says Jay Lehr, science director at the Heartland Institute and author of a handbook on environmental science. They exist primarily to make people “feel warm and fuzzy about what they are doing for the environment.’’
But if recycling household trash makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, why does it have to be compulsory? Mandatory recycling programs “force people to squander valuable resources in a quixotic quest to save what they would sensibly discard,’’ writes Clemson University economist Daniel K. Benjamin. “On balance, recycling programs lower our wealth.’’ Now whose idea of exciting is that?
Froma Harrop explores the economic unsustainability of universities, but then brings up an exciting alternative.
…Bill Gates recently predicted: “Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”
A year at a university costs an average $50,000, the Microsoft founder and Harvard dropout said last month. The Web can deliver the same quality education for $2,000.
Yet American colleges continue to float in the bubble of economic exceptionalism once occupied by Detroit carmakers. American median income has grown 6.5 times over the past 40 years, but the cost of attending one’s own state college has ballooned 15 times. This kind of income-price mismatch haunted the housing market right before it melted down. …
…The market will eventually recognize the out-of-whack economics of today’s “place-based colleges” and intervene. Some day soon, Web alternatives will let students of modest means try their hand at a college education. And what a great day that will be.
In Reason, Steve Chapman comments on Cuba’s dismal economic and political situation. It’s so bad that the UN has praised Castro.
…the average Cuban makes only about $20 a month—which is a bit spartan even if you add in free housing, food, and medical care. For that matter, the free stuff is not so easy to come by: Food shortages are frequent, the stock of adequate housing has shrunk, and hospital patients often have to bring their own sheets, food, and even medical supplies.
…Instead of accelerating development, Castro has hindered it. In 1980, living standards in Chile were double those in Cuba. Thanks to bold free-market reforms implemented in Chile but not Cuba, the average Chilean’s income now appears to be four times higher than the average Cuban’s. …
…The latest instrument for strangling dissent is a law allowing the arrest of people exhibiting “dangerous” un-socialist tendencies even before they commit crimes. “The most Orwellian of Cuba’s laws, it captures the essence of the Cuban government’s repressive mindset, which views anyone who acts out of step with the government as a potential threat and thus worthy of punishment,” says Human Rights Watch.
But even economic failures and political tyranny have been not enough to deprive Castro of Western admirers. On a 2000 visit to Havana, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asserted, “Castro’s regime has set an example we can all learn from.” …
And we have NRO Shorts. Here are three:
Senate Democrats (plus Republican George Voinovich) looked ready at press time to pass a bill that would push another TARP-like infusion of capital into the banking system, on the theory that the banks do not have enough money to lend, or, if they do have enough, that they are not making enough loans to small businesses and need to be given better incentives to do so. To that end, the Small Business Lending Fund would allow the Treasury Department to make up to $30 billion in credit available to small community banks at varying rates of interest: The more politically conforming loans the banks make, the less interest they pay. Banks that “plan to provide linguistically and culturally appropriate outreach” would receive special consideration, of course. The fund is a bad idea. Those community banks that are most eager to borrow from the fund are more interested in political protection than in making sound loans, while those community banks that have responded to the weak economy with an appropriate and measured reluctance to lend are unlikely to take the money anyway. There is the administration’s economic policy in a nutshell: reckless borrowing to finance reckless lending.
In a renewed effort to promote homeownership, the Home Affordable Modification Program now instructs mortgage servicers to identify all applicants by race, even if they balk. The program’s new guidebook stipulates that if the borrower declines to provide a racial affiliation, “the servicer should . . . provide the information based on visual observation, information learned from the borrower or surname.” It gets creepier. Servicers are advised to provide employees with “training and job aids (e.g. desk references)” to help them racially inspect clients with clinical expertise and up-to-date stereotypes. The purpose, naturally, is to fight racial bias.
When in the past we have criticized college courses for catering to students’ tastes, we were speaking metaphorically. Not anymore. Earlier this month, 600 students crammed into a 350-seat lecture hall at Harvard University for a new class, “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science.” The course, which fulfills a core-curriculum requirement, promises to “discuss concepts from the physical sciences that underpin . . . everyday cooking.” It will feature guest lectures by world-famous chefs, such as Enric Rovira on “his chocolate delicacies.” Here’s a sampling of the required reading: On Food and Cooking, Kitchen Mysteries, and The Science of Ice Cream. When asked by the Harvard Crimson why he was taking the class, one knowledge-hungry student responded: “I think the fact that you can eat your lab is pretty much the coolest thing ever.” Given tuition, it had better be five-star.