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Mark Steyn is tired of the imperial presidency.
Rick Perry, governor of Texas, has only been in the presidential race for 20 minutes but he’s already delivered one of the best lines in the campaign:
“I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.”
This will be grand news to Schylar Capo, 11 years old, of Virginia, who made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days, and for her pains, was visited by a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter (with accompanying state troopers) who charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species and issued her a $535 fine. If the federal child-abuser has that much time on his hands, he should have charged the cat, who was illegally transporting the protected species from his gullet to his intestine.
So 11-year-old Schylar and other middle-schoolers targeted by the microregulatory superstate might well appreciate Gov. Perry’s pledge. But you never know, it might just catch on with the broader population, too.
Bill Clinton thought otherwise. “I got tickled by watching Gov. Perry,” said the former president. “And he’s saying ‘Oh, I’m going to Washington to make sure that the federal government stays as far away from you as possible – while I ride on Air Force One and that Marine One helicopter and go to Camp David and travel around the world and have a good time.’ I mean, this is crazy.”
This is the best argument the supposedly smartest operator in the Democratic Party can muster? If Bill Clinton wants to make the increasingly and revoltingly unrepublican lifestyle of the American president a campaign issue, Gov. Perry should call his bluff. If I understand correctly the justification advanced by spokesgropers for the Transportation Security Administration, the reason they poke around the genitalia of 3-year-old girls and make wheelchair-bound nonagenarians in the final stages of multiple sclerosis remove their diapers in public is that, by doing so, they have made commercial air travel the most secure environment in the United States. In that case, why can’t the president fly commercial.
Streetwise Professor leads off a couple of articles on the future of Europe.
The recent volatility in the market has been linked with the S&P downgrade, but the real epicenter is Europe. The shock waves that commenced in Greece and then Portugal and Ireland have spread to Italy and Spain, and tremors are being felt in France as well.
Europe has two choices: amputation or gangrene.
The amputation option is to jettison the Euro project by lopping off the weak Med countries, and letting them respond to fiscal crisis in the old fashioned way, through a currency devaluation that would permit these countries to become more competitive, and which would reduce the real burden of their debts. …
… Gangrene kills slowly, but it kills. It is difficult to see how Europe can survive in the long run as currently constituted, with the rot progressively eating its way from country to country. Amputation is a shattering experience, but it can be survived, and can increase the odds of long term survival. But politicians typically choose to avoid pain today even if it is beneficial in the long run. Which means that Europe’s future is bleak indeed.
Noted European historian Walter Laqueur tries to understand what has happened.
“The twenty-first century may yet belong to Europe.” Thus said the late Tony Judt, author of a widely praised history of Europe after the Second World War. Historians are not necessarily prophets, and our century has a while to go, but the prospects of such a future coming to pass are not brilliant at present. Tony Judt was in good and numerous company at the time, in America even more so than on the Continent, and the reasons for such misplaced optimism (which has now quite often given way to panic) will no doubt be studied in the years to come.
Some five years ago in a book entitled The Last Days of Europe I dealt with Europe’s decline—and was criticized for my pessimism. And yet I now feel uneasy facing the apocalyptic utterances of yesterday’s Euro-enthusiasts. For even if Europe’s decline is irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.
At a time of deep, multiple crises in Europe it is too easy to ridicule the delusions of yesteryear. The postwar generations of European elites aimed to create more democratic societies. They wanted to reduce the extremes of wealth and poverty and provide essential social services in a way that prewar generations had not. They had had quite enough of unrest and conflict. For decades many Continental societies had more or less achieved these aims and had every reason to be proud of their progress. Europe was quiet and civilized.
Europe’s success was based on recent painful experience: the horrors of two world wars; the lessons of dictatorship; the experiences of fascism and communism. Above all, it was based on a feeling of European identity and common values—or so it appeared at the time. Euroskeptics suspected it was simply a community of material interests; it began, after all, as an iron, steel and coal union. Jean Monnet, the father of the European Union, saw the dangers ahead. He later said that he would have put the emphasis on culture rather than economics if he had to start all over again.
When did things start to go wrong? It would seem the immediate crisis is certainly one of sovereign debt, of common currency and of other financial issues. It was no doubt a mistake to believe that an economic union could be established in the absence of a political one. And yet, did the current crisis perhaps happen because the European idea (meaning the welfare state), the basis of the scheme, was eroded? …
Speaking of failed enterprises, Ed Morrissey speculates on the idea Obama may quit.
… Some will scoff at the notion that Obama and his large ego would walk away from the office, but LBJ was also rumored to think pretty highly of himself. It’s a low-probability outcome, but it isn’t a zero probability outcome. Obama’s ratings have tanked this year along with the economy, and he hasn’t come up with an original thought on economic policy since Porkulus. The leaks of his rumored plan sound a lot like Porkulus II, a sequel to a flop. This gives the impression that Obama has run out of ideas, and as Noonan argues in her piece, his attacks on Republicans for their supposed refusal to pass a plan he has yet to even submit to them sounds like a man who realizes that he’s out of ideas, too.
But the decision may end up being out of his hands if the political environment doesn’t improve. Obama’s numbers are plummeting in places Democrats can hardly afford to lose. In Pennsylvania, where Obama will top a ticket that also includes Bob Casey’s bid for a second Senate term, he’s either at 43% approval (Quinnipiac) or at 35% (Muhlenberg). Wisconsin turned Republican last year and a series of elections this year confirmed it, and Herb Kohl’s seat in the Senate is up for grabs. Obama can be expected to drag down the ticket in Virginia (James Webb’s seat is open), Florida (Bill Nelson), Ohio (Sherrod Brown), Maryland (Ben Cardin), and Michigan (Debbie Stabenow). …
Last week we closed with the student loan piece from the Atlantic. There’s some follow-up with a scary graph. Alert readers will note a contradiction. The article in the Atlantic noted student debt was approaching $1 trillion while this piece says it has ballooned to $550 million. We will follow up on that.
You think the housing bubble was enormous? Meet the education bubble. On Wednesday, an article here by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus explained the debt crisis at American colleges. But some startling statistics will help to make their analysis a little more tangible. The growth in student loans over the past decade has been truly staggering.
Here’s a chart based on New York Federal Reserve data for household debt. The red line shows the cumulative growth in student loans since 1999. The blue line shows the growth of all other household debt except for student loans over the same period.
This chart looks like a mistake, but it’s correct. Student loan debt has grown by 511% over this period. In the first quarter of 1999, just $90 billion in student loans were outstanding. As of the second quarter of 2011, that balance had ballooned to $550 billion.