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The Streetwise Professor, Craig Pirrong has an unbelievable story about a former president.
Apparently panicked that Barrack Obama may supplant him as the Worst Foreign Policy President in History, in an effort to show that he gives way to no man when it comes to foreign policy idiocy, Jimmy Carter dashed off to his home-away-from-home–Pyongyang–to accuse the United States and South Korea of human rights violations for refusing to provide food aid to North Korea.
…Any mention of the fact that North Korea is the most brutal, repressive dictatorship on the planet? Surely you jest. Any mention of the fact that the starvation in North Korea is the product of the regime’s destructive, inhumane policies full stop? No: Carter merely “observe[d] the country’s food rationing system.” A rationing system that is, by the way, a major element of the regime’s mechanism of political control by which the population is brutalized.
In other words, Jimmy Carter played Enabler-in-Chief to the world’s most reprobate regime, and traveled to that country to attack his own nation. It used to be unpardonable for any prominent American politician, let alone an ex-president, to slander his own country from abroad. To do so from Pyongyang is beyond unpardonable. …
Toby Harnden lists ten thoughts about bin Laden’s assumption of room temperature.
5. There is likely to be a lot of “Obama got Osama” crowing from Democrats but the intelligence that led to the raid originated in 2007, during the Bush administration. Listening to the account of the long and patient process that followed, this seems like an example of the US military and intelligence community working seamlessly from one administration to the next.
6. I was struck by the way Obama used his address to highlight again and again his personal role. Fair enough – Obama, by any analysis, deserves immense credit – but this perhaps presages a campaign theme. There’s little doubt that Obama will receive a political boost from this, though ultimately the 2012 election will be decided by the economy.
7. There’s a lot of chatter about the likelihood of al-Qaeda striking back immediately. It might happen, but experience tells us that al-Qaeda tends to work on its own timetable.
Mark Steyn on the debt ceiling debate.
…Anyway, Secretary O’Neill popped up the other day on Bloomberg Television to compare debt-ceiling holdouts to jihadists. “The people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling,” he said, “are our version of al-Qaida terrorists. Really.”
Really?
…”They’re really putting our whole society at risk by threatening to round up 50 percent of the members of the Congress, who are loony, who would put our credit at risk.”…
…Under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day the government of the United States spends a fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have. …
In the United Press, Arnold de Borchgrave talks to George Karlweis about financial trends.
…So the man behind Soros’ original success is worth listening to today — unafraid to speak his mind in retirement.
The financial crises that have been blowing up for years are speeding up, Karlweis says, due to expenditure exceeding income, “borrowing hand over fist, even for no good reason, on ever shakier fundamentals.”
“Everyone is realizing we have gone too far,” he wrote, “The coffers are depleted … the excessive spending of the past has created a huge overhang, and no one knows how new borrowing can be financed.”
People who live on their savings, adds Karlweis, “have been fleeced. Their investments yield nothing, chances are they have lost everything.”
“Times ahead do not look pretty,” he warns. …
In the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein discusses the silver lining on the economic cloud.
…Obama’s political fortunes have often been compared to Reagan’s, because both men took office during a bad economy and saw their once high approval ratings nosedive. And if you compare the trajectory of their approval ratings using Gallup’s handy tool, the overall pattern is quite similar up until this point. Yet by this time in 1983, Reagan’s approval rating had bottomed out and had begun its recovery. While we can’t predict where Obama’s will go, economic data suggest he’s much less likely to get as big a political boost as Reagan.
This morning, the Commerce Department reported that first quarter GDP grew at a mere 1.8 percent clip. While the number is an advance estimate and could change, it’s not going to get near the 5.1 percent growth in the comparable quarter during Reagan’s first term (i.e. Q1 1983). And while growth is expected to pick up in the second quarter, it won’t get anywhere near the 9.3 percent rate of 1983′s second quarter.
…Yet it’s also important to note that Reagan was also fighting a battle on multiple fronts. He took office after a year of 13.5 percent inflation in 1980, and by 1984 it dropped to 4.3 percent. On the flip side, Obama took over at a time of low inflation, and we’re now starting to see prices rise, especially on food and gas, which Americans tend to notice. …
Al Neuharth, in USA Today, comments on the end of the space age.
President Obama plans to attend the next-to-the-last space shuttle launch scheduled today. Ironically, he’s saying goodbye to our space program at the Kennedy Space Center, named after the president who said hello to space.
The decision to phase out the shuttle program was made by President George W. Bush. But Obama has made no concrete future space plans of any kind.
Like Bush, Obama is making a mockery of something that excited and united us in the 1960s and for decades to follow. …
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Phil Bronstein reports on the White House struggling with totalitarian instincts: ban a reporter who covered people protesting against Obama, then reverse position and refuse to comment.
…So what’s up with the White House? We can’t say because neither Press Secretary Jay Carney nor anyone from his staff would speak on the record.
Other sources confirmed that Carla was vanquished, including Chronicle editor Ward Bushee, who said he was “informed that Carla was removed as a pool reporter.” Which shouldn’t be a secret in any case because it’s a fact that affects the newsgathering of our largest regional paper (and sfgate)and how local citizens get their information.
What’s worse: more than a few journalists familiar with this story are aware of some implied threats from the White House of additional and wider punishment if Carla’s spanking became public. Really? That’s a heavy hand usually reserved for places other than the land of the free. …
Pickerhead’s first acquaintance with Robert W. Fogel was his 1974 collaboration with Stanley Engerman. The product of that effort was “Time On The Cross” an econometric history of American slavery. Fogel now has turned his data gathering techniques to the developments in the size of humans. NY Times reviewed his new effort; The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700.
For nearly three decades, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert W. Fogel and a small clutch of colleagues have assiduously researched what the size and shape of the human body say about economic and social changes throughout history, and vice versa. Their research has spawned not only a new branch of historical study but also a provocative theory that technology has sped human evolution in an unprecedented way during the past century.
…“The rate of technological and human physiological change in the 20th century has been remarkable,” Mr. Fogel said in an telephone interview from Chicago, where he is the director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago’s business school. “Beyond that, a synergy between the improved technology and physiology is more than the simple addition of the two.”
This “technophysio evolution,” powered by advances in food production and public health, has so outpaced traditional evolution, the authors argue, that people today stand apart not just from every other species, but from all previous generations of Homo sapiens as well.
“I don’t know that there is a bigger story in human history than the improvements in health, which include height, weight, disability and longevity,” said Samuel H. Preston, one of the world’s leading demographers and a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Without the 20th century’s improvements in nutrition, sanitation and medicine, only half of the current American population would be alive today, he said. …