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For the most part we ignored the president’s speech Monday night, but a post from Streetwise Professor shouldn’t be missed.
I would have loved to have been a fly on Nicolas Sarkozy’s wall last night, during Obama’s address about Libya. Mr. Me made it sound like the entire Libyan venture was his idea, and that he had been pushing it from the beginning. The truth, of course is that just as with Egypt, Obama was a Johnny-come-lately who reacted to events rather than shaped them. He was chasing the parade, and now he claims he was the drum major the entire time. In reality, Sarkozy and Cameron were out in front on this, and dragged Obama along–and only then with a shove from inside his administration from Clinton, Rice, and Power.
Given the stark difference between the reality and Obama’s self-serving representation thereof, I am sure that Sarkozy–a man with no small ego himself–is furious. Indeed, Obama didn’t even mention Sarkozy by name, and France and the UK received one token mention. In contrast to Obama’s repeated use of first person pronouns, this was petty and disrespectful.
Yes, “Smart Power” at work.
That was not the only pettiness in Obama’s speech. His slurring of his predecessors Clinton and Bush was unnecessary, uncalled for, and beneath the office Obama holds.* Usually presidents, after having experienced the difficulties of making life-and-death decisions, gain a respect for the challenges their predecessors faced, and mute their criticisms accordingly. Not Mr. Me.
They called Clinton “The Big Me.” He’s a piker in the narcissism category, compared to Obama, as frightening as that is to contemplate. …
John Hinderaker from the blog PowerLine with a great post illuminating the corruption surrounding GE and the administration.
General Electric, along with General Motors, is the prototype of Big Business in the Age of Obama. GE bills itself as the world’s largest industrial company; currently it ranks #4 in the Fortune 500, with revenues in 2010 of around $156 billion. All has not been well at GE, however. Since 2002, the company has laid off around 20 percent of its work force in the U.S., while expanding its overseas operations. And the company’s financing arm, GE Capital, sustained massive losses and had to be bailed out by the federal government:
“General Electric, the world’s largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government’s key rescue programs for banks. …
The company did not initially qualify for the program, under which the government sought to unfreeze credit markets by guaranteeing debt sold by banking firms. But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE.”
A consistent feature of GE’s symbiotic relationship with the federal government is that its greatest successes have been gained through lobbying rather than innovation.
“Public records show that GE Capital, the company’s massive financing arm, has issued nearly a quarter of the $340 billion in debt backed by the program, which is known as the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, or TLGP. The government’s actions have been “powerful and helpful” to the company, GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt acknowledged in December.
GE’s finance arm is not classified as a bank. Rather, it worked its way into the rescue program by owning two relatively small Utah banking institutions, illustrating how the loopholes in the U.S. regulatory system are manifest in the government’s historic intervention in the financial crisis. …”
The Census Bureau has released more and Michael Barone helps us make sense of the numbers.
The Census Bureau last week released county and city populations for the last of the 50 states from the 2010 census last week, ahead of schedule. Behind the columns of numbers are many vivid stories of how our nation has been changing — and some lessons for public policy as well.
Geographically, our population is moving to the south and west, to the point that the center of the nation’s population has moved to Texas County, Missouri.
That sounds like the familiar story of people moving from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt, but that’s not exactly what’s happening. Instead, the fastest growth rates in the 2000-to-2010 decade have been in Texas, the Rocky Mountain states and the South Atlantic states.
We’re familiar with the phenomenon of people moving to the West Coast. But the three Pacific Coast states — California, Oregon and Washington — grew by 11 percent in the last decade, just 1 percent above the national average, while the South Atlantic states from Virginia through the Carolinas and Georgia to Florida grew by 17 percent. …
Historian Andrew Roberts reviews a new Ghandi biog for WSJ.
Joseph Lelyveld has written a generally admiring book about Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet “Great Soul” also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist—one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.
For all his lifelong campaign for Swaraj (“self-rule”), India could have achieved it many years earlier if Gandhi had not continually abandoned his civil-disobedience campaigns just as they were beginning to be successful. With 300 million Indians ruled over by 0.1% of that number of Britons, the subcontinent could have ended the Raj with barely a shrug if it had been politically united. Yet Gandhi’s uncanny ability to irritate and frustrate the leader of India’s 90 million Muslims, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (whom he called “a maniac”), wrecked any hope of early independence. He equally alienated B.R. Ambedkar, who spoke for the country’s 55 million Untouchables (the lowest caste of Hindus, whose very touch was thought to defile the four higher classes). Ambedkar pronounced Gandhi “devious and untrustworthy.” Between 1900 and 1922, Gandhi suspended his efforts no fewer than three times, leaving in the lurch more than 15,000 supporters who had gone to jail for the cause.
A ceaseless self-promoter, Gandhi bought up the entire first edition of his first, hagiographical biography to send to people and ensure a reprint. Yet we cannot be certain that he really made all the pronouncements attributed to him, since, according to Mr. Lelyveld, Gandhi insisted that journalists file “not the words that had actually come from his mouth but a version he authorized after his sometimes heavy editing of the transcripts.”
We do know for certain that he advised the Czechs and Jews to adopt nonviolence toward the Nazis, saying that “a single Jew standing up and refusing to bow to Hitler’s decrees” might be enough “to melt Hitler’s heart.” (Nonviolence, in Gandhi’s view, would apparently have also worked for the Chinese against the Japanese invaders.) Starting a letter to Adolf Hitler with the words “My friend,” Gandhi egotistically asked: “Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?” He advised the Jews of Palestine to “rely on the goodwill of the Arabs” and wait for a Jewish state “till Arab opinion is ripe for it.” …
Andrew Ferguson has really struck a nerve with his book on college admissions. George Will columns on it.
For many families, this is March madness — the moment of high anxiety concerning higher education as many colleges announce their admittance decisions. It is the culmination of a protracted mating dance between selective institutions and anxious students. Part agony, part situation comedy, it has provoked Andrew Ferguson to write a laugh-until-your-ribs-squeak book — “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College.”
He begins in Greenwich, Conn. — a hedge fund habitat — watching Katherine Cohen, an “independent college admissions counselor,” market her $40,000 “platinum package” of strategies for bewitching Ivy League admissions officers. “Everyone in the room,” writes Ferguson, “was on full alert, with that feral look of parental ambition. They swiveled their tail-gunning eyes toward Kat when she was introduced.” Kat introduced them to terror:
“There are 36,000 high schools in this country. That means there are at least 36,000 valedictorians. They can’t all go to Brown. You could take the ‘deny pile’ of applications and make two more classes that were every bit as solid as the class that gets in.” …