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First up, BBC News published a translation of the text messages between a mother and her 16 year-old daughter who was on Utoeya island in Norway where last week’s shooting took place.
Julie
We are hiding in the rocks along the coast.
Mum
Good! Should I ask your grandfather to come down and pick you up when everything is safe again? You have the option.
Julie
Yes.
Mum
We will contact Grandpa immediately.
Julie
I love you even if I still misbehave from time to time.
And I’m not panicking even if I’m shit scared.
Mum
I know that my darling. We love you too very much. Do you still hear shooting? …
Quoting from The Federalist by Edward Banfield, Peter Wehner essays on political mess in Washington and counsels acceptance of it.
…”it is the nature of men to have divergent opinions and interests, and to subordinate the common good to their private and particular interests… the harsh fact is that American society — any society– is not a band of brothers but a set of competitors. Man is a creature more of passion than of reason; he is vain, avaricious, shortsighted.”
The founders believed the common good existed and was worth aspiring to. They conceded some people of “superlative virtue” can be expected to set aside their interests for the interest of others. But above all they knew this: the nature of man — “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good” — ensured factional struggles were inevitable.
That is what we see played out in politics, and in life, every day. Sometimes it’s more apparent (and more frustrating) than others. But the genius of the founders is that they built a system of government based on what human beings are rather than what we wish them to be. They also understood, in their more enlightened moments at least, the human failures they saw in others also resided in themselves, that few of us are unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good.
Every day we’re reminded the American system of government is far from perfect. But so, of course, are we.
Clive Crook, writing London’s Financial Times, has a fair minded liberal’s view of recent Washington events.
When I moved from Britain in 2005 to live and work in the US, I was a born-again admirer of the American people, the American project and the American system of government. I had no patience with the view that the country was entering its twilight years. I was a militant anti-declinist.
Six years on, I am having second thoughts. I am not quite ready to defect, but like any fair-minded observer I am impressed by Washington’s determination to prove the pessimists right.
You could say that the debt-ceiling impasse, which prompts such thoughts, is out of the ordinary and no basis for prediction. It is an extreme case, admittedly: regardless of how it is resolved, Congress and the White House have lately taken fiscal irresponsibility to a new level. In another way, though, the breakdown is representative. Dysfunction in Washington is now so acute that many areas of policymaking have all but shut down.
We anti-declinists have always had two main answers to this kind of gloom. The first is that the underlying strengths of the US economy have nothing to do with Washington, and remain undimmed. The second is that the country’s founders deliberately built dysfunction into the constitution, because they wanted to keep the federal government in check. …
Toby Harnden has a Brit’s view of the GOP race.
The debate convulsing Washington right now is how to prevent the United States defaulting on its national debt while also forcing President Barack Obama to slash spending and Republicans to abandon their fetish of resisting any increase in tax revenues.
It’s a big, important battle involving a clash of political philosophies and the grinding practicality of running a country in economic crisis when there are no easy answers that will satisfy everyone or be guaranteed to work.
Despite what’s at stake in the debt ceiling negotiations, however, the Republican presidential candidates have been missing in action, preferring to stick to vapid talking points or, in the case of the frontrunner Mitt Romney, choosing not to comment at all on the different proposals being offered. …
… To the dismay of many activists, most of the current crop of Republican candidates are acting as if they’re from Venus rather than Mars. …
… Those yearning for an alpha male to join the Republican race look like their wish will be granted. Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor whose tirades against voters have become YouTube classics, seems determined to hold on until 2016.
But Governor Rick Perry of Texas is poised to throw his Stetson into the ring this summer. It was Perry who, last year, was out jogging when he spotted a coyote bearing down on his daughter’s Labrador. Taking out his.380 Ruger pistol, loaded with hollow-point bullets, Perry shot the coyote dead. …
… It remains to be seen whether, four years after George W. Bush left office, Americans are ready for another swaggering Texan in the White House.
But for Republicans who see a vulnerable Obama and doubt whether a safety-first opponent can beat him, an injection of testosterone into the 2012 race can’t come soon enough.
For those who think the GOP is losing in the debt limit debate, Mark Tapscott has soothing words.
Republicans have gained a 10 point lead over Democrats in Rasmussen Reports latest national survey on who the public most trusts to deal effectively with economic issues.
The 10 point lead is the widest margin held by either party in months and has opened up in recent weeks as President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner have become the central players in the debate over how to deal with the approaching debt-ceiling crisis. …
While admitting to having enough of the Palin drama, Pickerhead notes that woman sure can turn a phrase. Ed Morrissey on Sarah’s latest stroke of brilliance.
John Boehner’s (momentary) dismissal of Barack Obama as a partner in deficit-reduction talks has the effect of making him a “lame duck president,” Sarah Palin wrote last night on her SarahPAC website — and she’s pretty happy about it, too. Palin praises the leadership of the Republican caucus for sticking to their promises, and then reminds readers about the history of this President and the deficit: …
We started with Peter Wehner and now we’re about to close with him as he comments on the “petulant and inept president.”
The negotiations about raising the debt ceiling remain extremely fluid, and it’s still too early to draw any definitive conclusions at this stage. But just a week away from the August 2 deadline, a few things do seem clear.
The first is the president’s angry and narcissistic press conference on Friday badly damaged the president, even with those, like David Brooks, who have been sympathetic to Obama’s substantive position.
It’s been clear to some of us for a while that Barack Obama is a man of uncommon self-admiration, quite thin-skinned, and increasingly consumed by his grievances. Obama has masked these traits pretty well so far, but on Friday his mask slipped more than it ever has. And that is bound to hurt him.
Second, Democrats on Capitol Hill are rapidly losing confidence in the president’s competence as a negotiator. Obama’s conduct during the debt ceiling negotiations – from his flip-flops to his irrelevant deadlines to his backtracking on his agreements with various parties – has been so erratic and uneven that his own party has decided the best hope of reaching an agreement is to sideline him. …
Jeff Jacoby takes on the population idiots.
… Has there ever been a more persistent and popular superstition than the idea that having more kids is a bad thing, or that “overpopulation’’ causes hunger, misery, and hopelessness? In the 18th century, Thomas Malthus warned that human population growth must inevitably outstrip the food supply; to prevent mass starvation, he suggested, “we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction,’’ such as encouraging the spread of disease among the poor. In the 20th century, Paul Ehrlich wrote bestsellers with titles like “The Population Bomb,’’ in which he described the surging number of humans in the world as a “cancer’’ that would have to be excised through “brutal and heartless decisions.’’ (His list included sterilization, abortion, and steep tax rates on families with children.)
Just last month, Thomas Friedman avowed in his New York Times column that “The Earth Is Full,’’ and that “we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished.’’
For more than 200 years the population alarmists have been predicting the worst, and for more than 200 years their predictions have failed to come true. As the number of men, women, and children in the world has skyrocketed – from fewer than 1 billion when Malthus lived to nearly 7 billion today – so has the average standard of living. Poverty, disease, and hunger have not been eradicated, of course, and there are many people in dire need of help. But on the whole human beings are living longer, healthier, cleaner, richer, better-educated, more productive, and more comfortable lives than ever before. …