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Tony Blankley says the incompetence shows up everywhere.
… Just last week, the Obama administration sustained three self-inflicted international reversals – in Russia, China/Taiwan and the United Nations – regarding the Palestinian/Israeli peace process.
Consider Russia. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced that he would step aside to permit Vladimir Putin to run essentially unopposed for president next year. That means Mr. Putin is likely to be president of Russia for 12 more years because, constitutionally, he can now serve two more consecutive six-year terms.
Unfortunately, President Obama had placed a huge strategic bet that Mr. Putin was not coming back. CNN reported on July 6, 2009: “In an interview with the Associated Press late last week, Obama seemed to be trying to work through the sticking points by driving a bit of a wedge between Medvedev and Putin. ‘The old Cold War approaches to U.S.-Russia relations is outdated and that it’s time to move forward in a different direction,’ said Obama. ‘I think Medvedev understands that. I think Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.’ ”
It doesn’t take much to imagine where Mr. Putin, the former KGB operative, will place one of those booted feet when he gets back in office. That foot placement will be felt hard in Washington.
As Foreign Affairs magazine described it a few days ago, “Mr. Putin’s return is likely to complicate Russia’s thawing relations with the West, particularly the U.S.-Russia ‘reset’ begun in 2009. … ‘If Putin returns then I guess we will need another reset,’ joked a former high-ranking Kremlin official earlier this month. The White House said on Saturday that it would keep making progress in the reset regardless of who the next Russian president was.”
It’s not just that the president has given away a lot to gain Mr. Medvedev’s approval – now of no value to us – by: 1) reneging on our anti-missile defensive commitment to our friends Poland and the Czech Republic and 2) publicly attacking the corruption of Mr. Putin’s associates in order to try making Mr. Medvedev look stronger to his fellow Russians. It’s hard enough for an American president to dabble in American politics, let alone Russian domestic politics. Most shrewd American presidents resist the temptation that Mr. Obama could not. …
Christopher Hitchens lays out the case against Pakistan.
In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Lt. Milo Minderbinder transforms the mess accounts of the American airbase under his care into a “syndicate” under whose terms all servicemen are potential stakeholders. But this prince of entrepreneurs and middlemen eventually becomes overexposed, especially after some incautious forays into Egyptian cotton futures, and is forced to resort to some amoral subterfuges. The climactic one of these is his plan to arrange for himself to bomb the American base at Pianosa (for cost plus 6 percent, if my memory serves) with the contract going to the highest bidder. It’s only at this point that he is deemed to have gone a shade too far.
In his electrifying testimony before Congress last week, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has openly admitted to becoming the victim of a syndicate scheme that makes Minderbinder’s betrayal look like the action of a small-time operative. In return for subventions of millions of American dollars, it now turns out, the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence agency (the ISI) can “outsource” the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, and several other NATO and Afghan targets, to a related crime family known as the Haqqani network. Coming, as it does, on the heels of the disclosure about the official hospitality afforded to Osama Bin Laden, this reveals the Pakistani military-intelligence elite as the most adroit double-dealing profiteer from terrorism in the entire region. …
Bret Stephens says there are many reasons to like solar power. He says that wasn’t the problem with Solyndra.
… At the same time, the market has also been plenty supportive of solar uses that actually do pay for themselves. In 1978, the first solar-powered calculator appeared. Since the 1950s, solar has dominated the powering of satellites in earth orbit. In almost every state in the union (i.e., not just in Alaska) homeowners inconvenient to the grid have found it cost-effective to combine solar with diesel generation. In sunny states solar has been used to help utilities meet peak load, as well as to power everything from railroad signaling to garden lighting.
In the decade up to 2008, solar panel shipments grew at an average of 46% every year. In 2008 alone, total global private investment in solar technology topped $16 billion.
Not only is solar a big industry, with lots of expertise, lots of experience, and highly capable of figuring out where its opportunities lie. But notice something else: Solar still isn’t competitive with traditional fuels for most applications. Nor is there the slightest reason to believe that only the absence of government spending stands between us and a solar revolution. Worse, even if it did, that still wouldn’t justify subsidizing a Solyndra.
You can read a lot of poorly reasoned defenses from the typical offenders along the lines of, “It’s OK Solyndra failed since the whole point is for the government to take risks the private sector won’t.”
This illustrates what might be called the macro Solyndra policy failure. A poor commercial risk is a poor commercial risk, whether private or government investors take it.
But Solyndra is also a micro failure. Think about it this way: The Manhattan Project was an engineering venture aimed at putting into effect a solution already thoroughly understood in theoretical terms. No such solution is in sight for the fundamental problem holding back solar, which isn’t energy collection at all but storage—a problem that’s not even unique to solar (see plug-in cars, laptops and phones charged on the grid).
Because there are no generation costs and sunshine is abundant, collection (Solyndra’s business) does not have to be particularly efficient if you can solve the storage problem. Likewise, in the absence of a storage solution, incremental gains in collection efficiency like those pursued by Solyndra do little to alter deployment prospects.
Joel Kotkin thinks if you want to create jobs, look to traditional energy industries.
… But the biggest growth by far has taken place in the mining, oil and natural gas industries, where jobs expanded by 60%, creating a total of 500,000 new jobs. While that number is not as large as those generated by health care or education, the quality of these jobs are far higher. The average job in conventional energy pays about $100,000 annually — about $20,000 more than finance or professional services pay. The wages are more than twice as high as those in either health or education.
Nor is this expansion showing signs of slowing down. Contrary to expectations pushed by “peak oil” enthusiasts, overall U.S. oil production has grown by 10% since 2008; the import share of U.S. oil consumption has dropped to 47% from 60% in 2005. Over the next year, according to one recent industry-funded study, oil and gas could create an additional 1.5 million new jobs.
This, of course, violates the widespread notion that the future lies exclusively in the information and technology industries. While technology may well be ubiquitous, as a sector it is far from a reliable creator of high-wage jobs. Since 2006 the information sector has hemorrhaged over 330,000 jobs. And those who do have jobs make on average about $20,000 less than their oil-stained counterparts per year.
How about those “green jobs” so widely touted as the way to recover the lost blue-collar positions from the recession? Since 2006, the critical waste management and remediation sector — a critical portion of the “green” economy — actually lost over 480,000 jobs, 4% of its total employment. Pay here is lower still, averaging something like $32,000 annually, about one-third that of the conventional energy sector. …
Jonah Goldberg says healthcare was a step too far.
… In March 2010, liberal columnist Peter Beinart argued that, for decades, Democratic politicians treated America’s innate conservatism like a slumbering bear: If you make no sudden moves and talk quietly, you can get a lot done. But if you wake the bear, as Democrats did in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the ursine silent majority will punish you.
But Obama promised to change that. He was tired of the timid, almost apologetic talk. He was going to be an FDR, or at least a Reagan for liberalism. He was going to “fundamentally transform” the country. And to those who counseled that Democrats can’t govern that way, Obama and his followers responded with shouts of “Yes, we can!”
You might think it was those shouts that woke the bear, but that’s not what happened. After all, Obama enjoyed stunning popularity when he entered the Oval Office.
No, it wasn’t words but deeds that roused the beast. The poorly crafted, deeply partisan stimulus was like a sharp stick to the bear’s belly. But it was “Obamacare” that ended the hibernation.
Despite his deployment of every rhetorical weapon in the progressive arsenal, Obama could never make the thing popular. At town hall meetings, the bear growled and snorted, in a posture that the experienced psephological woodsman understands means “leave the bear alone.” The Democratic response was to mock the grizzly. Nancy Pelosi even called the town hall protesters “un-American.” …
Roger Simon reviews Herman Cain’s campaign book.
The secret of Herman Cain is that he seems — at least to me — genuinely to be a mentally healthy human being.
This is no small thing, particularly in the world of politics — even more so presidential politics, where large dollops of nearly clinical narcissism are necessary to propel the ambition needed to run for this most powerful of offices.
As most of us know by now, Cain leavens his narcissism with generous jolts of humor — much of it self-deprecating — that make him, at this moment anyway, the most engaging figure on the political scene.
But beneath the humor is the more serious tale of a self-made man who has pulled himself up by the proverbial bootstraps — a “po’” boy (not a poor boy), as he describes himself in his just released autobiography campaign manifesto, This Is Herman Cain: My Journey to the White House. …
Andrew Malcolm has late-night humor.
Letterman: There’s a fabulous new CBS show out called ‘Unforgettable.” It’s about a woman who remembers every minute of her life. A woman who, I think, it’s called a wife.
Conan: Big news story out today that SAT reading scores have reached an all-time low. Or as the headline put it, “SATs Be Most Baddest.”
Leno: President Obama says his new jobs bill will create 1.9 million new jobs, up to 50 of them right here in America.