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In the Jewish World Review, Paul Greenberg has an excellent article on the Arab Spring, and some of Natan Sharansky’s thoughts on the matter. We highlight Greenberg’s stirring commentary.
…Freedom is no simple thing. It can be a slow, tricky, unpredictable process. It can percolate through a society slowly — or hit like a flash flood. As if out of nowhere. Americans should have learned as much by now, the 150th anniversary of the great war that made us a nation. O, Freedom! It can be long in coming, but it will come. Something in man will stir, and when it does … all deals are off.
Keeping faith with freedom will require strong nerves and constancy of purpose. Just as it does now in Egypt, where a new regime is flirting with the mullahs in Iran and trying to cloak one of the world’s more notorious terrorist outfits — Hamas, in the Gaza Strip — in respectability. It is at such times that Washington should do even more to support Egypt’s democratic parties against the Muslim Brotherhood — just as, after World War II, when the Communists threatened to overwhelm Western Europe’s political system, this country did everything it could to support the democratic parties that eventually prevailed.
Cynics will scurry about looking for complicated explanations for these latest revolutions in the Middle East when the simplest is staring them in the face: Freedom will not be denied forever. No more than it can be turned back in this Arab Spring. It may have to go underground for a time, like a fresh-water spring. Or it may recede like a river returning to its banks. But it will flow on somewhere, and one day break through to the surface, an undeniable fact. Even if it can be diverted for a time, it will come back stronger than ever, like the sea overwhelming Pharaoh’s chariots. …
Spengler explains the magnitude of the crisis looming over Egypt.
Egypt is running out of food, and, more gradually, running out of money with which to buy it. The most populous country in the Arab world shows all the symptoms of national bankruptcy – the kind that produced hyperinflation in several Latin American countries during the 1970s and 1980s – with a deadly difference: Egypt imports half its wheat, and the collapse of its external credit means starvation.
The civil violence we have seen over the past few days foreshadows far worse to come.
…The collapse of Egypt’s credit standing, meanwhile, has shut down trade financing for food imports, according to the chairman of the country’s Food Industry Holding Company, Dr Ahmed al-Rakaibi, chairman of the Holding Company for Food Industries. Rakaibi warned of “an acute shortage in the production of food commodities manufactured locally, as well as a decline in imports of many goods, especially poultry, meats and oils”. According to the country’s statistics agency, only a month’s supply of rice is on hand, and four months’ supply of wheat. …
Charles Krauthammer decimates the “facts” and “logic” in the president’s latest speech.
…Accordingly, the El Paso speech featured two other staples: the breathtaking invention and the statistical sleight of hand.
“The [border] fence is now basically complete,” asserted the president. Complete? There are now 350 miles of pedestrian fencing along the Mexican border. The border is 1,954 miles long. That’s 18 percent. And only one-tenth of that 18 percent is the double and triple fencing that has proved so remarkably effective in, for example, the Yuma sector. Another 299 miles — 15 percent — are vehicle barriers that pedestrians can walk right through.
Obama then boasted that on his watch 31 percent more drugs have been seized, 64 percent more weapons — proof of how he has secured the border. And for more proof: Apprehension of illegal immigrants is down 40 percent. Down? Indeed, says Obama, this means that fewer people are trying to cross the border.
Interesting logic. Seizures of drugs and guns go up — proof of effective border control. Seizures of people go down — yet more proof of effective border control. Up or down, it matters not. Whatever the numbers, Obama vindicates himself. …
Jennifer Rubin blogs about the latest White House attempt to practice Chicago thuggery in DC.
President Obama, as I noted previously, has an executive order ready to go that would require government contractors (well, not professors and labor unions) to disclose political contributions. House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) already has come out in opposition, and now it’s a flood of lawmakers who won’t buy the plan to bring Chicago-style favoritism to federal contracting. Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) have sent a letter to the president telling him to forget it.
As the Hill notes, these are all the key players on the issue. (“Lieberman is chairman, and Collins is ranking member, of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. McCaskill leads the panel’s Contracting Oversight subcommittee; Portman is the ranking member.”) It now seems unlikely with a chorus of bipartisan criticism that the Obama executive order will ever see the light of day. …
And Jennifer Rubin reminds us how lucky we were to dodge the President Kerry bullet.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), if he had some capacity for self-reflection, would be humiliated. The foreign policy gambit with which he has been most identified — the courting of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad — is now over, universally regarded as a dismal and embarrassing failure. You see, even Kerry has discovered Assad is “no reformer.” Hundreds of dead Syrians and thousands more imprisoned have convinced him that the time for reform “was lost.” But that assumes there was a time when such a hope was realistic; you can’t “lose” what was never there. …
…Rogin, who can barely disguise his amazement, reports:
Kerry, who has served as Congress’s point man on engaging the Syrian regime, told an audience…as recently as March 16 — shortly after the current uprising had begun — that he still expected Assad to embrace political reform and move toward more engagement with America and its allies.
“[M]y judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with it and the participation that comes with it,” said Kerry, who has met with Assad six times over the past two years. …
Debra Saunders comments on the hypocrisy of being pro-murder but anti-waterboarding.
…Obama and Dowd long have claimed that it was morally reprehensible for the CIA to waterboard 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Candidate Obama said that waterboarding was “never acceptable” because it “contradicts our values.” Obama even criticized his now-Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for having said in 2006 that she would authorize brutal interrogation measures to prevent a terrorist attack.
Apparently it fits with Obama’s and Dowd’s values to kill an unarmed bin Laden – as long as you don’t waterboard him first to learn possible intelligence that might prevent a terrorist attack.
It’s amazing how partisan politics can make the medicine go down. …
In the WSJ, Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing, discusses the company’s decision to build in South Carolina, and points out a number of negative effects from the NLRB’s overreach.
…The NLRB is wrong and has far overreached its authority. Its action is a fundamental assault on the capitalist principles that have sustained America’s competitiveness since it became the world’s largest economy nearly 140 years ago. We’ve made a rational, legal business decision about the allocation of our capital and the placement of new work within the U.S. We’re confident the federal courts will reject the claim, but only after a significant and unnecessary expense to taxpayers. …
…The world the NLRB wants to create with its complaint would effectively prevent all companies from placing new plants in right-to-work states if they have existing plants in unionized states. But as an unintended consequence, forward-thinking CEOs also would be reluctant to place new plants in unionized states—lest they be forever restricted from placing future plants elsewhere across the country.
U.S. tax and regulatory policies already make it more attractive for many companies to build new manufacturing capacity overseas. That’s something the administration has said it wants to change and is taking steps to address. It appears that message hasn’t made it to the front offices of the NLRB.
Brian Calle, in the Orange County Register, has a mind-blowing story for us, on the exorbitant pay of Newport Beach lifeguards. Would you believe over $200,000?
High pay and benefits for lifeguards in Newport Beach is the latest example of frustrating levels of compensation for public employees. More than half the city’s full-time lifeguards are paid a salary of over $100,000 and all but one of them collect more than $100,000 in total compensation including benefits.
…It might be time for a career change.
…In a phone conversation, Brent Jacobsen, president of the Lifeguard Management Association, defended the lifeguard pay in Newport Beach: “We have negotiated very fair and very reasonable salaries in conjunction with comparable positions and other cities up and down the coast.” “Lifeguard salaries here are well within the norm of other city employees.” And therein is the problem: Local public worker pay has become all too generous and out of line with private sector equivalents. …