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Toby Harnden, in “Wanted; Dead or Dead,” brings up a remarkable irony: Obama’s positions regarding captured terrorists leave Obama with no choice but to kill terrorists rather than take prisoners. It’s a strange moral high ground.
…Under Mr Obama, drone strikes in Pakistan have increased dramatically, resulting in dead suspects, civilian casualties and fewer prisoners to interrogate.
Terrorists who would have been captured under Mr Bush so that every last morsel of information could be wrung out of them have been sent straight to their maker under Mr Obama.
…A US Navy SEAL veteran of operations in Afghanistan told me that the simpler, less risky operation would have been one designed to capture bin Laden. “You could have driven right up to the compound and crept in,” he said.
“Capturing him could have yielded an incredible amount of intelligence. But that’s not the stance of our government. Imagine the headaches: detention, interrogation,legal issues. Does Obama really want that?” …
In the WSJ, Michael Mukasey, former Attorney General, discusses the ineffective, reactionary policies of the current administration.
…The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful. …
The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It’s available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation. …
Linda Chavez, in the Washington Examiner, has an excellent article on the Attorney General that Obama can’t control.
…CIA Director Leon Panetta has acknowledged that the initial information that led to the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad came, in part, from information obtained by “enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees.” Yet, Attorney General Holder persists in what appears to be a vendetta against these very CIA interrogators.
In August 2009, Holder ordered a continued investigation into “enhanced interrogation” techniques used by the CIA, even though an earlier investigation by career prosecutors concluded that no crimes were committed. The irony in all of this is made worse by President Obama’s acknowledgment of intelligence agencies’ role when he announced that bin Laden had been killed.
“Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome,” Obama said. “The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.”…
Victor Davis Hanson paints a portrait of the current culture in central California.
…In some sense, all the ideas that are born on the Berkeley or Stanford campus, in the CSU and UC education, political science, and sociology departments, and among the bureaus in Sacramento are reified in places like Selma — open borders, therapeutic education curricula, massive government transfers and subsidies, big government, and intrusive regulation. Together that has created the sort of utopia that a Bay Area consultant, politico, or professor dreams of, but would never live near. Again, we in California have become the most and least free of peoples — the law-biding stifled by red tape, the non-law-biding considered exempt from accountability on the basis of simple cost-to-benefit logic. A speeder on the freeway will pay a $300 ticket for going 75mph and justifies the legions of highway patrol officers now on the road; going after an unlicensed peddler or rural dumper is a money-losing proposition for government.
…about one in five adults is not working in the traditional and formal sense. A morning drive through these valley towns confirms anecdotally what statistics suggest: hundreds, no, thousands, are not employed. Construction is almost nonexistent. Agriculture is recovering, but environmentally driven water cut-offs on the West Side (250,000 acres), increasing mechanization, and past poor prices have combined to reduce by tens of thousands once plentiful farm jobs.
…But we are experiencing a funny sort of depression, or rather a surreal sort. I grew up with stories from my grandparents of 28 people living in my present house. My grandmother, she used to brag, had a big kettle of ham bones and beans cooking nonstop each day and fed assorted relatives as they came in from the vineyard and orchard. My grandfather made one trip to Fresno (16 miles away) every 10 days for “supplies.” The pictures I have inherited from my mother show an impoverished farm — this house unpainted and in disrepair, ancient cars and implements scattered about, a sort of farm of apparent 1910 vintage, but photographed in the 1930s — one that I could still sense traces of as a little boy here in the late 1950s.
…I’ve been discussing these disconnects with farmers, a professor or two from CSU Fresno, and local business people. All come to the same conclusions. There is a vast and completely unreported cash economy in Central California. Tile-setters, carpenters, landscapers, tree-cutters, general handymen, cooks, housekeepers, and personal attendants are all both finding work and being paid in cash. Peddlers (no income or sales taxes) are on nearly every major rural intersection. You can buy everything from a new pressure washer to tropical fruit drinks. For this essay, I stopped at one last week and surveyed their roto-tillers, lawn mowers, and chain saws, new and good brands. …
Howard Nemorov, in PJ Tatler, remarks on Victor Davis Hanson’s article.
Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent piece about the disconnect between California “poverty” and economic reality. Highly recommended.
It reminds me of my 18 years in California. We were two middle-class working professionals, self-employed and trying to live like citizens. The problem was, we didn’t have an eight-digit trust fund to pay for the house. When you have 2 people earning $90,000 annually and can’t afford a mortgage, something’s wrong.
We got out before the real estate crash and moved to Texas. …
People in CA chided me about moving to redneck-land. I decided to be polite to most of them and hold my silence. But if you want to live with angry, intolerant, narrow-minded, mean-spirited people who act aggressive if you don’t agree with their views, move to California.
In Carpe Diem, Mark Perry highlights an article about the problems rent control has created in San Francisco.
The Bay Citizen — “In San Francisco, one of the toughest places in the country to find a place to live, more than 31,000 housing units — one of every 12 — now sit vacant, according to recently released census data. That’s the highest vacancy rate in the region, and a 70 percent increase from a decade ago.”
The reason? The city’s pro-tenant, outdated rent control laws that make it difficult to raise rents or evict a tenant.
…MP: As we know from basic economic theory, rent control laws are doomed to fail with many predictable unintended consequences in the long run: fewer new rental units are built or made available, many apartments are removed from the market, a decline in the quality of housing, lower rental rates for long-term tenants but much higher rents for new tenants, inefficient use of housing space, etc. In other words, rent control laws guarantee that there will be less affordable housing in the long run, not more.
And here’s the article from Elizabeth Lesly Stevens, in the Bay Citizen.
…Increasingly, small-time landlords like Koniuk are just giving up. One of his Divisadero Street neighbors has left two large apartments on the second and third floors of her building vacant for more than a decade, after a series of tenant difficulties. It’s just not worth the bother, or the risk, of being legally tied to a tenant for decades.
“Vacancy rates are going up because owners have decided to take their units off the market,” said Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive member of the Board of Supervisors. He attributes that response to “peaking frustrations in dealing with the range of laws that protect tenants in San Francisco that make it difficult for small property owners to thrive.”
Perversely, that is hurting the city’s renters as well, as a large percentage of the city’s housing stock is allowed to just sit vacant, driving up rents that newcomers pay for market-rate housing. …