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A Pickings issue with in-depth coverage of Margaret Thatcher will come Sunday morning. For now, Anne Applebaum has some memories.
Margaret Thatcher had no small talk. At a private lunch, which I can’t quite date—Denis was there, drinking whiskey out of a large tumbler, so it must have been more than a decade ago—I was seated across from her and at one point became the object of a tirade about the Russian president. “What are we going to do about Mr. Yeltsin,” she demanded, as if either she or I could do anything at all. She’d been out of power for several years at that point and was already forgetting thoughts in the middle of sentences. But whatever else she was losing, the desire to stick to the big issues and the larger subjects was still with her.
And this is what she was best at: the big issues, the politics of symbolism, the crafting of rhetoric. She was less good at nuance. Inside Britain she was the woman who sparked riots and ignored the advice of colleagues. But outside of Britain—in America, in Eastern Europe, even in the Soviet Union—she made herself into an icon, a symbol of anti-communism and the trans-Atlantic alliance at a time when neither was fashionable. She stood by Ronald Reagan in his battle against the Evil Empire. She used the same language as he did—free markets, free people—and entered into a unique and probably unrepeatable public partnership with him. It was useful to them both: If Reagan wanted to pull away from domestic scandals, he could appear with Thatcher on a podium. If Thatcher wanted to enhance her status, she could pay a visit to Reagan at the White House. ,,,
March 28th Pickings covered the alarming rise in disability payments from SSDI. Today we have an item from the Wall Street Journal on how the rise in disability payments is stunting the recovery.
The unexpectedly large number of American workers who piled into the Social Security Administration’s disability program during the recession and its aftermath threatens to cost the economy tens of billions a year in lost wages and diminished tax revenues.
Signs of the problem surfaced Friday, in a dismal jobs report that showed U.S. labor force participation rates falling last month to the lowest levels since 1979, the wrong direction for an economy that instead needs new legions of working men and women to drive growth and sustain a baby boomer generation headed to retirement.
Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist for J.P. Morgan, estimates that since the recession, the worker flight to the Social Security Disability Insurance program accounts for as much as a quarter of the puzzling drop in participation rates, a labor exodus with far-reaching economic consequences.
The unemployment rate in Friday’s report fell to a four-year low of 7.6%, which most times signals job growth. This time it reflected workers leaving the workforce, a problem that could persist: Economists say relatively few people are likely to trade their disability checks for paychecks, in part because the program doesn’t give much incentive to leave.
Former truck driver James Ottesen, who began receiving monthly payments in 2009, said, “I’m not real happy” about being on disability. “It kind of reminds me of welfare.” He said he would “like to get re-educated to do something” because “my body is broke but my mind is not.”
But even if the 53-year-old Ohio man learned of a job he could do with herniated discs, he said, the government disability program feels like “a blanket covering you, and to walk out from it…at my age, it’s a little intimidating.” …
The Daily Beast has more about the present economy.
For a moment, let’s forget about who is president and just look across the country.
Today, 21 and a half million Americans are unemployed or underemployed—about twice as many as six years ago, according to NPR. Work-force participation, a fancy term for the number of Americans either working or looking for work, has dropped to “the lowest level since the malaise of the late 1970’s,” an era when far fewer women were working, according to MSNBC.
Yes, the unemployment rate dropped last month—but only because so many people simply gave up looking for work. The dirty little secret is that after only four weeks of not looking for a job, an unemployed worker stops being counted. So far as the jobless numbers are concerned, that person ceases to exist. But, of course, they do exist and continue to be counted in other, troubling statistics:
More than 16 million Americans have been added to the food stamps rolls since Barack Obama was first elected—a 46 percent increase and greater than the population of Ohio. More than 50 million Americans now live in poverty. That’s one in six Americans, and one in five American children.
The last president who saw poverty at this level was LBJ, and it moved him to launch the war on poverty. …
What with all the problems with our economy, Andrew Malcolm comments on the traveling gun show charade.
President Obama was on again Monday about gun laws, not enforcing the existing ones. But getting some new ones, any new ones so he can claim some kind of political victory after all of the promises and vows he made in the emotional days last December.
But Obama wasn’t working on the senators from his own party who will actually determine the fate of these measures. That would be political leadership.
No, Obama was out of town again, up in Hartford for a photo op with Connecticut legislators and some Newtown families. Of course, it wasn’t so much about everyone coming together to agree on new safeguards to protect children anymore, as he talked way back in December. No, as usual, this latest campaign rally was all about him. The usual suspects yelled their love. Obama mentioned himself 40 times.
And Obama told the crowd: “The day Newtown happened was the toughest day of my presidency.” Poor baby. He had to make a statement in the Briefing Room that day, tearing up on cue and promising “meaningful action.” He ordered federal flags to half-staff. Was probably a little tough too that day for the families of the 26 Newtown victims.
But Monday was all about Obama lending his royal presence to Hartford. His statement there means that of all the 1,540 days that he and his mother-in-law have lived in the White House, Dec. 14 was the toughest day. Seriously? …
Jammie Wearing Fools on a fundraising stop next month in New York.
Even the most diehard Obama-bots are suffering Obama fatigue. As yet another big bucks NYC fundraiser is announced for May 13, some donors are getting fed up with the endless campaign.
Now they know how the rest of us feel.
‘But Obama’s visit has annoyed political insiders who want to see results for the dollars they’ve already forked over. “We’ve got a mayoral race he’ll be getting in the way of,” said one. “We should be focusing on that and individual congressional candidates. It’s like ‘Lord of the Flies’ . . . [Obama] is cannibalizing donors.”
And others expressed fund-raiser fatigue: “It is stunning that [Obama] is back here fund-raising. We’d like to see some results for the money we’ve already given. And his impact on the traffic congestion in the city is the perfect example of why we need an infrastructure bill that he’s never put any muscle behind.”’
In case they missed it, there was a trillion-dollar stimulus rammed through four years ago. First prize goes to the Obama donor who can tell us where a single dollar of that went.
Power Line thinks Perez should get a filibuster.
Katrina Trinko wonders whether Tom Perez, President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Labor, will face the kind of stiff opposition in the Senate that Chuck Hagel encountered. He certainly should. Indeed, he should be filibustered.
Trinko notes that in 2009, 22 Republicans voted against Perez’s confirmation to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Since then, Perez has done plenty to warrant more robust opposition. Consider:
Perez is under congressional investigation regarding his involvement with an alleged quid pro quo deal between the Justice Department and St. Paul, Minn. Pursuant to that deal, the Justice Department would cease prosecuting a case against St. Paul (which could have net around $180 million for the federal government) if the city dropped a case that could have led to a Supreme Court decision to change the definition of “disparate impact” in housing-discrimination cases.
Perez’s Civil Rights Division appears to have allowed political/racial considerations to affect its handling of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case from Philadelphia.
A federal district judge found that Perez, when under oath, gave incorrect testimony about the involvement of political appointees in the handling of the New Black Panther Party case. …
WSJ’s Political Diary has a look at one of Perez’s cohorts who has been nominated for the bench.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will consider Srikanth “Sri” Srinivasan’s nomination to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday. Mr. Srinivasan, currently the Principal Deputy Solicitor General, is an accomplished, high-profile nominee and deserves the hearing. He also deserves to be questioned about his role in a quid pro quo with the City of St. Paul, Minnesota, that his Justice colleague Tom Perez—now Obama’s labor secretary nominee—hatched in 2011.
As these columns have reported, Mr. Perez has, in effect, extorted millions of dollars in settlements from lenders over the past few years by threatening to sue them for discrimination under a loose interpretation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. St. Paul’s case, M agner v. Gallagher , was likely to curb or even prohibit this practice. So Mr. Perez convinced his Justice colleagues and officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to drop two False Claim Act cases against the city, in exchange for St. Paul withdrawing Magner from the nation’s highest court. …