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An Irish film maker went to the Middle East and learned something he shares with us in the UK Independent.
I used to hate Israel. I used to think the Left was always right. Not any more. Now I loathe Palestinian terrorists. Now I see why Israel has to be hard. Now I see the Left can be Right — as in right-wing. So why did I change my mind so completely?
Strangely, it began with my anger at Israel’s incursion into Gaza in December 2008 which left over 1,200 Palestinians dead, compared to only 13 Israelis. I was so angered by this massacre I posed in the striped scarf of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation for an art show catalogue.
Shortly after posing in that PLO scarf, I applied for funding from the Irish Arts Council to make a film in Israel and Palestine. I wanted to talk to these soldiers, to challenge their actions — and challenge the Israeli citizens who supported them.
I spent seven weeks in the area, dividing my time evenly between Israel and the West Bank. I started in Israel. The locals were suspicious. We were Irish — from a country which is one of Israel’s chief critics — and we were filmmakers. We were the enemy.
Then I crossed over into the West Bank. Suddenly, being Irish wasn’t a problem. Provo graffiti adorned The Wall. Bethlehem was Las Vegas for Jesus-freaks — neon crucifixes punctuated by posters of martyrs.
These martyrs followed us throughout the West Bank. They watched from lamp-posts and walls wherever we went. Like Jesus in the old Sacred Heart pictures.
But the more I felt the martyrs watching me, the more confused I became. …
Ann Coulter gives an update on the Obama campaign to keep Romney off the ballot.
Mitt Romney won more than twice as many delegates on Super Tuesday as Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. The Non-Fox Media’s take-away is that Romney suffered a major setback Tuesday night.
No matter what happens, Barack Obama’s boosters in the NFM portray it as a debilitating blow to Romney. On Nov. 7, The New York Times’ headline will be: “Romney ekes out narrow electoral victory, leaving race uncertain.”
To explain the widening gulf in delegates won by Romney compared to the others — he now has more delegates than all other candidates combined — the media claim that a vote for any candidate other than Romney is an explicit vote against Romney.
Of course, even the NFM can’t pretend Ron Paul’s supporters would pick Gingrich or Santorum, both big-government, career politicians, as their second choice.
But in what universe would the second choice of Santorum supporters be a two-time adulterer on his third marriage, who lobbied George W. Bush to support embryonic stem cell research?
And are we to presume that voters who have no problem with Gingrich’s $1.6 million payoff from Freddie Mac would be morally offended by Romney’s hard-earned wealth? That voters willing to forgive a man who called Paul Ryan’s Social Security reform plan “right-wing social engineering” could never trust Romney?
Why isn’t it possible that votes for Santorum are votes against Gingrich, and vice versa?
The NFM doesn’t explain. Reporting their hopes and dreams rather than the facts, they simply assert that all votes for Santorum or Gingrich are “anti-Romney” votes.
It’s not Republicans who are looking for the anti-Romney. It’s Democrats.
Obama is already spending millions of dollars on anti-Romney ads. Obama’s campaign adviser David Axelrod, is desperately tweeting anti-Romney messages all day long. In open primaries in Michigan and Ohio, Obama’s Democratic supporters came out to vote for Santorum or Gingrich. MSNBC hosts openly encourage Democrats to vote for Rick Santorum. …
Charlie Gasparino on why the recovery has taken so long.
… The administration’s policies helped delay the rebound and make it more tepid than it might have been otherwise.
You can begin with Obama’s signature first-term economic “achievement,” the $800 billion stimulus plan that was supposed to create all those shovel-ready jobs and stop unemployment from rising above 8 percent.
We all know how that turned out, with unemployment hovering between 9 percent and 10 percent until recently and GDP floundering such that even some Obama supporters have attacked the stimulus’ futility. Much of the money went to states to plug their budget deficits and reduce government layoffs; another bunch went for cockamamie green schemes floated by such politically connected companies as Solyndra.
As for all the shovel-ready jobs, the president himself has joked about how they weren’t as shovel-ready as he expected.
But Obama’s biggest economic mistake wasn’t just the wasted stimulus but a war on US businesses that continues today.
Even as evidence mounted that his stimulus plan wasn’t working, the president basically ignored the nation’s economic woes and spent most of 2009 and 2010 pushing for the least business-friendly mandate to come out of Washington in years — his universal health-insurance plan.
Timing matters. Obama wasn’t pushing a new mandate during an economic boom, when employers might shrug off the costs and ignore the uncertainty, but when, as he puts it, the economy was in the ditch. Instead of giving the private sector reason for hope, he gave it more to fear — so businesses retrenched, and the “recovery summer” the administration predicted for 2010 never came.
Nor did it come last year. Again, some problems were clearly out of the president’s control. The tsunami in Japan and the euro crisis both were drags on the global economy. But so were Obama’s policies. …
A lot more detail on this from Peter Ferrara in the American Spectator. It is worthwhile reading this a few times since this is the meat of the campaign against the worst president since Jimmy Carter.
The record of President Obama’s first three years in office is in, and nothing that happens now can go back and change that. What that record shows is that President Obama, with his throwback, old-fashioned, 1970s Keynesian economics, has put America through the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression. The American people are much poorer now because of that, and will remain poorer, falling farther and farther behind, until we change course and restore traditional American prosperity.
The recession started in December, 2007. Go to the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research to see the complete history of America’s recessions. What that history shows is that before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months.
Dude, Where’s My Recovery?
Yes, the economy was in recession when President Obama entered office, which he never tires of telling us. But that was not unique to Obama. There have been 12 recessions in America since the Great Depression. The American people have forgotten what that was like because President Reagan and his Reaganite Republicans gave us a 25 year economic boom from 1982 to 2007 with no serious downturn.President Obama’s responsibility was to manage a timely, robust recovery to get America back on track again. His record in achieving that is not to be measured from the worst of the recession, but to previous recoveries in U.S. history. And, no, President Obama cannot say that his recovery is so bad because the recession was so bad (worse than he thought he now tells us, after spending all of 2008 telling us it was the worst recession since the Great Depression). The American historical record is that the worse the recession the stronger the recovery, as traditional, long-term, American prosperity has always been restored.
Based on that historical record, we should be in the third year of an economic recovery boom right now. That is what we experienced under Reagan, which was the last time we recovered from a recession of similar magnitude.
In the first 2 ½ years of the Reagan recovery, the American economy created 8 million new jobs, the unemployment rate fell by 3.6 percentage points, real wages and incomes were jumping, and poverty had reversed an upsurge started under Carter, beginning a long-term decline. While Obama crows about 227,000 jobs created last month, in September, 1983 the Reagan recovery less than a year after it began created 1.1 million jobs in that one month alone. In the second year of the Reagan recovery, real economic growth boomed by 6.8%, the highest in 50 years.
In contrast, under President Obama, unemployment actually rose after June 2009, when NBER counts the recession as officially ending, and did not fall back down below that level until 18 months later in December 2010. Instead of a recovery, America has suffered the longest period of unemployment this high since the Great Depression. Even today, 51 months after the recession started, the U6 unemployment rate counting the unemployed, underemployed, and discouraged workers is still nearly 15%.
And that doesn’t include all the workers who have fled the workforce under Obama’s economic oppression. Under Obama’s supposed recovery, the number of working age Americans not in the labor force rose by 7.14 million. As John Lott and Grover Norquist recently observed, “There is no comparable post-World War II ‘recovery’ where this type of exodus has occurred.” …
Proof that government can work comes from John Steele Gordon writing about Walker’s Wisconsin.
… For the first time in decades, school administrations are now actually able to administer their districts without union interference, and the savings have been huge. The MacIver Institute, a Wisconsin think tank, reports that of the 108 school districts that completed contracts with employees, 74 of them, with 319,000 students, have reported savings of no less than $162 million. If this is extrapolated out to all districts, it would amount to savings of nearly $448 million.
The biggest area of savings have been in health insurance. The teachers union insisted that districts use the union’s own health insurance company to provide coverage. No longer forced to use a monopoly provider, districts have either switched providers or used the threat of switching to force the union health insurance company to dramatically lower premiums. Savings have averaged $730,000 in districts that have switched providers or forced competitive bidding.
As a result of these dramatic savings, districts that have been able to benefit immediately from the reforms (some districts are locked into long-term contracts and cannot) have been able to avoid laying off teachers despite a significant drop in state aid and to avoid raising school taxes. Indeed, school tax bills that went out last December had an average increase of only 0.3 percent.
It is hard to imagine that with results like this, Governor Walker has anything to worry about.
NY Times on India’s changes over the last 20 years.
ANOTHER brick has come down in the great wall separating India from the rest of the world. Recently, both Starbucks and Amazon announced that they would be entering the Indian market. Amazon has already started a comparison shopping site; Starbucks plans to open its first outlet this summer.
As one Indian newspaper put it, this could be “the final stamp of globalization.”
For me, though, the arrival of these two companies, so emblematic of American consumerism, and so emblematic, too, of the West Coast techie culture that has infiltrated India’s own booming technology sector, is a sign of something more distinctive. It signals the latest episode in India’s remarkable process of Americanization.
I grew up in rural India, the son of an Indian father and American mother. I spent many summers (and the occasional biting, shocking winter) in rural Minnesota. I always considered both countries home. In truth, though, the India and America of my youth were very far apart: cold war adversaries, America’s capitalist exuberance a sharp contrast to India’s austere socialism. For much of my life, my two homes were literally — but also culturally, socially and experientially — on opposite sides of the planet.
All that began changing in the early 1990s, when India liberalized its economy. Since then, I’ve watched India’s transformation with exhilaration, but occasionally, and increasingly, with some anxiety.
I left for boarding school in America in 1991. By the time I graduated from high school, two years later, Indian cities had filled with shopping malls and glass-paneled office buildings. In the countryside, thatch huts had given way to concrete homes, …