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Marty Peretz on the Middle East that is in shambles thanks to The One.
It is not actually his region. Still, with the arrogance that is so characteristic of his behavior in matters he knows little about (which is a lot of matters), he entered the region as if in a triumphal march. But it wasn’t the power and sway of America that he was representing in Turkey and in Egypt. For the fact is that he has not much respect for these representations of the United States. In the mind of President Obama, in fact, these are what have wreaked havoc with our country’s standing in the world. So what—or, rather, who—does he exemplify in his contacts with foreign countries and their leaders? His exultancy gives the answer away. It is he himself, lui-mème. Alas, he is a president disconnected from his nation, without enthusiasts for his style, without loyalists to his policies, without a true friend unless that’s what you can call his top aide de camp,Valerie Jarrett, which probably you can. Obama is lucky, but it’s the only luck he has, that there are nutsy Republican enemies who aspire to his job. Maybe Rick Perry can save him from … well, yes, himself. I wouldn’t take bets on that, though.
Obama’s first personal excursions into the Middle East as president were to Turkey and Egypt. Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed his visit. Indeed, the president’s journey set the framework for the Ottomanization of modern Turkey’s foreign policy. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne formally abrogated the empire’s previous rights in North Africa, these being the rights it had lost in the First World War. From then on, the country was content to make trouble only for the Kurds across its borders and for Greece. A member of NATO, with more than 600,000 troops under arms (omitting more than half a million reservists and paramilitary), it certainly played a role in deflecting Soviet ambitions in the Mediterranean. Now, with the Russian threat (temporarily?) deferred, the military still faces minor annoyance from Georgia, Armenia, Iraq. But since Obama communed with Erdogan—by all accounts, it was love at first sight—the prime minister has been taking on new projects. Only in the last days has he made what can reasonably be called a conqueror’s march through Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, evoking the old empire’s rule in North Africa not so long ago.
After all, let’s face it: Egypt is simply spent. Erdogan can seduce it with a speech or two. Yet it does have up-to-date military equipment. But, if it were tempted by war with Israel, Jerusalem would not give it the respectful pity that it gave Cairo’s Third Army 38 years ago. …
Claudia Rosett wants to know why we keep the UN in New York.
… Seriously, why does the setting for this have to be midtown Manhattan? At far less cost to Americans and their allies, this entire performance could more easily be staged in Doha. Or Beirut. Or Riyadh. Or Tehran. Or, for that matter, Ramallah. If the UN is going to function largely as a vehicle to serve the demands and agenda of the Middle Eastern gang now dominating the doings of the General Assembly in New York, then why should America grant the UN right-of-way in Manhattan, and pay to put fuel in the tank? Ship the whole caboodle to the Middle East. Save American taxpayers roughly $8 billion per year by letting the UN enthusiasts in that part of the world pay for it. And let the new UN patrons know that if they’re willing to play nice and pay for the tickets, American diplomats might perhaps be persuaded it’s occasionally worth the bother to drop by.
Real Clear Politics has a lengthy article by Carl Cannon on Jeb Bush’s education record in Florida.
Rick Perry’s emergence as a prominent Republican presidential contender has confounded some conservative intellectuals, especially those who care about education reform, and not because of Perry’s mediocre grades while attending Texas A&M — or because of his education policies as governor in Austin.
When the 2012 presidential campaign season began, some GOP insiders thought their best candidate, all things being equal, might be the former governor of another Southern state. Jeb Bush was an unalloyed conservative and proven vote-getter who’d presided over a strong economy in a big state while posting a record of legislative achievement so impressive that his nickname was “King Jeb.”
His name was the two-term Florida governor’s problem when it came to any possible aspirations of national office: Not the Jeb part, or even the showy modifier, but rather the surname. It was universally believed, apparently by Jeb Bush himself, that four years wasn’t enough time to counteract the “Bush fatigue” attendant to his oldest brother’s last year in the White House.
Unexpectedly, however, a governor who walks and talks a lot more like George W. Bush than his own brother and who served under Bush in Austin has emerged as the 2012 presidential front-runner.
It’s probably too late for Jeb Bush to reconsider his 2012 options, but it’s certainly not too late to give his record in Tallahassee a second look. And in no area did Bush have more of an impact than in education policy. …
… Since 1994, the reading scores of fourth-graders in this country, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, have risen steadily. “Simply stated, poor and minority students are achieving at dramatically higher levels today than they were two decades ago — in some cases two or three grade levels higher,” writes education reformer Michael J. Petrilli. And Florida, as noted, helped lead the way.
The highlights include:
– In 1998, Florida’s fourth-graders scored at the bottom nationally in NAEP scores in reading and math. By 2009, they had scored above the national average in both categories.
– Florida’s fourth-grade Hispanic students equaled or surpassed the performance of all students in 31 states.
– Fourth-grade African American students in Florida outperform African American students in all but three states in NAEP math tests.
– Low-income Florida elementary school students of all races rank near the top nationally in math.
– High school graduation rates increased 21 percent, even as the requirements got tougher.
– Some 38,000 Florida high school students were taking Advanced Placement exams for college credit a decade ago. Offering merit pay of up to $2,000 for teachers who get students to take — and pass — AP exams helped boost this number to 157,000.
– The number of African American and Latino students passing AP tests increased 365 percent.
For skeptics who believe that standardized testing sucks the creativity out of the learning process, Jeb Bush always had a stock answer: “What gets measured, gets done.”
In the early years, things did not always go swimmingly. The teacher unions made opposing Bush a crusade, even mortgaging their own building to raise money to support his 2002 opponent in his re-election bid. Bush weathered that challenge, but gains at the middle school level didn’t really kick in until his last two years in office, leading to some testy press conferences, as his top education adviser, Patricia Levesque, recalled.
In the end, it would be nice to say that Florida’s impressive results speak for themselves, but it’s never quite that simple in the politics of education.
David Harsanyi says why not eat the rich.
… When President Barack Obama unveiled his new un-passable “deficit reduction plan,” many accused him of playing class envy. The plan ostensibly calls for $1 in budget cuts (cuts that would never happen) for every $1 in tax increases ($1.5 trillion). And if we’re not willing to ask more from the rich, says the president, “then the logic — the math — says everybody else has to do a whole lot more; we’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor.”
This argument is offered by Obama in endless iterations, but it won’t add up until we invent an Arabic numeral that signifies a lie. In no way, by no percentage, no matter how you quantify or qualify or twist it, does the middle class (or certainly the poor) pay more in taxes than the rich. As an Associated Press fact check put it, “on average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data.”
That doesn‘t mean a person can’t argue the rich should pay more than the 80 or 90 percent of federal taxes they already do. Go for it. In that debate, Republicans can make many strong arguments about how tax-the-rich schemes (seemingly Obama’s sole idea) are counterproductive. But there are three points that they can’t make but should. …
Joel Kotkin analyzes the vote in NY’s 9th congressional district.
… Some Democrats like California Rep. Henry Waxman have another explanation for the vote: greed. “They want to protect their wealth,” he explained, “which is why a lot of well-off voters vote for Republicans.” You almost have to admire the chutzpah of such views from a man who represents Beverly Hills.
Waxman, of course, is wrong. This election was driven not by desertions of the rich but by the shift to the GOP among largely middle or working class voters. In many ways this election followed the pattern established by Sen. Scott Brown’s stunning 2009 Massachusetts victory, which came largely from middle-income voters. The ninth district’s new representative, Bob Turner, won big in modest Middle Village and South Brooklyn, while losing decisively in the wealthiest precincts such as Forest Hills and some minority, immigrant-oriented enclaves.
The big story here, as Bronstein suggests, lies in the growing unease about the national and New York economies among large sections of the city’s beleaguered middle class. Despite the enormous wealth generated on Wall Street, New York’s middle class has been fleeing the city at breakneck speed for decades.
According to the Brookings Institution, New York has suffered the fastest declines of middle class neighborhoods in the U.S.: Its share of middle income neighborhoods is roughly half that of Seattle or the much maligned Long Island suburbs. Twenty-five percent of New York City was middle-class in 1970, but by 2008 that figure had dropped to 16%.
Even the young, who so dominate parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, do not appear to be hanging around once they get into their 30s, particularly after their children reach school age. One reason: Bloomberg’s much touted school reforms have been, for the most part, ineffective in turning the bulk of the city’s public schools around. …
James Delingpole spots another rogue trader.
A rogue trader at one of the world’s largest banks (USA Inc., second in economic power only to China Inc.) has been exposed as the biggest fraudster in the history of mankind. The fraud – conservatively estimated at $38.6 billion, though others believe it could be at least 20 times bigger once his secret trading accounts in a file mysteriously marked “Stimulus Package” are fully investigated – comfortably exceeds the paltry $2.3 billion losses run up by UBS trader Kweku Adoboli.
Though full details of the Uber Rogue Trader – known only by his initials B.O. – have yet to be released, he is believed to be either of Hawaiian or Kenyan birth, with a plausible speaking manner and a deceptive aura of competence and gravitas. He is said to be “coolly unrepentant” about his crime, which, he claims, he was only doing to provide “hope and change” to his 200 million victims. …
Dilbert thinks liberal attacks have gone over the top.
… Consider Rick Perry. He called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” As analogies go, that’s a good one. I believe I have used it myself. It’s a colorful way of saying the math doesn’t work well when the population of retired people greatly increases and the number of workers funding Social Security does not. Literally no one on Earth disagrees with the central point of Perry’s analogy. But I keep seeing Perry’s Ponzi scheme quote reported as if it were some sort of idiot misunderstanding or conspiracy theory or foreshadowing of evil. WTF?
I’ve never seen more vicious, cheap attacks on a candidate than I’ve seen leveled at Michelle Bachmann. Recently she made a glancing reference to a well-known joke/parable about God using natural disasters to get the attention of humans. When I read Bachmann’s quote, I understood her generic point that politicians need to open their eyes to both the problems and the solutions in front of them. The liberal media reported the quote as if a crazy street person was yelling that God sent floods as a message. …