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Spengler gives a Mid-East exam.
Here’s your final exam question in Middle Eastern studies:
A mass of Coptic Christians marches through Cairo to protest the military government’s failure to protect them from Muslim radicals. They are attacked by stone-throwing, club-wielding rowdies. Armed forces security personnel intervene, and the Copts fight it out with the soldiers, with two dozen dead and scores injured on both sides. Who is to blame?
The full credit answer is: Benjamin Netanyahu, for building apartments in Jerusalem. If that’s not what you wrote, don’t blame me if you can’t get a job at the New York Times.
Rarely in the course of human events have so few been blamed by so much for so many. There are precedents, for example, when Adolf Hitler claimed that a Jewish “stab in the back” lost World War I for Germany. The notion that the problems of three hundred million Arabs revolve around the governance of a few million Palestinians has the same order of credibility. …
Nile Gardiner says the recently uncovered Iran DC terror bombing plot hangs a BS label on Obama’s approach to the Mullahs.
The foiled plot by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States is a slap in the face for the Obama administration, after its efforts to extend the hand of friendship to the brutal regime in Tehran. As Con Coughlin noted earlier, this should be a wake-up call for the White House. As it has done with Russia, the Obama presidency has attempted to “reset” relations with Iran. But with both Moscow and Tehran, Washington has failed. Both hostile powers have grown emboldened and aggressive in the face of American weakness, and Iran’s brazen attempt to kill a foreign diplomat in the capital city of the United States showcases the folly of the White House’s softly-softly approach towards the ruling mullahs.
While Washington dithers, Iran is marching closer and closer to developing a nuclear weapon, which according to some estimates is just six months away. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to threaten Israel with genocide, while the Obama administration has significantly cooled relations with Jerusalem – hardly the right signal to send to a close friend and ally at a time of mounting tensions in the Middle East. …
Friday afternoon is when the administration gives us the news they hope will be ignored. National Review editors are on the job though.
In a Friday bad-news dump that was a whopper even by its own standards, the Obama administration added to the announcement of a near-record annual deficit and an escalation of undeclared war in Uganda the news that the CLASS Act, an ill-conceived adjunct of the Affordable Care Act, is no more. The upshot is this: Obamacare just got a whole lot more expensive than advertised, and there is reason to believe that its Democratic architects have long known this would happen.
The Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act was the brainchild of the late senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, and it was supposed to be a kind of Social Security that provided long-term care for the elderly. It figured heavily into the Democrats’ dubious accounting of the cost of the Affordable Care Act, and at the time of passage was expected to account for $70 billion out of a total $143 billion in “deficit reduction” claimed in the bill.
But that number was a lie twice over. …
Andrew Malcolm lists the percentage of Americans who think the country is on the wrong track.
… However, since the sixth month of his White House lease Obama’s right track number has been on the southbound track.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, 91% of Republicans believe the country is on the wrong track.
Ominously, though, fully 80% of independents, so crucial to any president’s election, are now convinced the country is on the wrong track.
And a substantial majority of Democrats, those expected to be the most loyal to the Chicagoan, are also now thinking wrong track by 59%.
Time for the Real Good Talker to give some more speeches.
Karlyn Bowman and Andrew Rugg from AEI say that’s not the only problem for the president.
President Obama is in deep political trouble. While that’s hardly news—the president’s approval rating sits at 40 percent in the latest Gallup poll—the picture is much bleaker than that figure would suggest. Comparing President Obama to other incumbent presidents at this point in the campaign on a variety of indicators shows how grim the picture is for the 44th president.
Just 11 percent of respondents say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the country in Gallup’s most recent poll. Only Jimmy Carter had numbers like this: In November 1979, 19 percent reported they were satisfied with the way things are going in the country. …
Joel Kotkin explains the changes that have come to Silicon Valley. Sitting at the commanding heights doesn’t create many jobs.
Even before Steve Jobs crashed the scene in late 1970s, California’s technology industry had already outpaced the entire world, creating the greatest collection of information companies anywhere. It was in this fertile suburban soil that Apple — and so many other innovative companies — took root.
Now this soil is showing signs of exhaustion, with Jobs’ death symbolizing the end of the state’s high-tech heroic age.
“Steve’s passing really makes you think how much the Valley has changed,” says Leslie Parks, former head of economic development for the city of San Jose, Silicon Valley’s largest city. “The Apple II was produced here and depended on what was unique here. In those days, we were the technology food chain from conception to product. Now we only dominate the top of the chain.”
Silicon Valley’s job creation numbers are dismal. In 1999 the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area had over 1 million jobs; by 2010 that number shrank by nearly 150,000. Although since 2007 and early 2010 the number of information jobs has increased substantially — up roughly 5000 to a total of 46,000 — the industrial sector, which still employs almost four times as many people as IT, lost around 12,000. Overall the region’s unemployment stands at 10%, well above the national average of 9.1% …
Debra Saunders says there’s no fool like a “green jobs” fool.
Before the Senate failed to pass his American Jobs Act Tuesday, President Obama made a last-ditch speech to talk up his troubled bill. But not once did Obama mention “green jobs” – his erstwhile jobs of the future.
Smart move. Obama’s $787 billion 2009 stimulus package included $500 million for green-jobs training programs that were supposed to create new middle-class jobs for thousands of Americans. Last month, however, the Department of Labor’s inspector general conducted an audit that found, as of June 30 with one-third of the funds spent and more than 50,000 participants, that only 10 percent of trainees were placed in jobs. And only 1,336 participants (or 2 percent) had held jobs for six months or longer.
The audit reported that grant recipients “expressed concerns that green jobs had not materialized and job placements into subsidized employment had been much less than expected.” …
At dinner a few days ago, Pickerhead expressed the thought it is impossible for our society to move forward until we can reconcile the competing narratives about the causes of the credsis. Here’s another attempt as a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed addresses the Occupiers. You know, the left’s version of the tea party – what Ann Coulter calls the “flea party.”
There is no mystery where the Occupy Wall Street movement came from: It is an offspring of the same false narrative about the causes of the financial crisis that exculpated the government and brought us the Dodd-Frank Act. According to this story, the financial crisis and ensuing deep recession was caused by a reckless private sector driven by greed and insufficiently regulated. It is no wonder that people who hear this tale repeated endlessly in the media turn on Wall Street to express their frustration with the current conditions in the economy.
Their anger should be directed at those who developed and supported the federal government’s housing policies that were responsible for the financial crisis.
Beginning in 1992, the government required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct a substantial portion of their mortgage financing to borrowers who were at or below the median income in their communities. The original legislative quota was 30%. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development was given authority to adjust it, and through the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations HUD raised the quota to 50% by 2000 and 55% by 2007. …