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Market turmoil suggests a well-timed WaPo op-ed on the dreaded R word – Recession.
When Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle branded economics the “dismal science” in 1849, he gave it a name that would stick. (Some theorize that he picked on economists since, like most Scots back then, Carlyle had never visited a dentist.) Fortunately for economists, 1849 was a pretty good year. If Carlyle had seen how economists behave during recessions, he probably would have dubbed their subject something far worse.
Economists have the same occupational hazard as baseball managers and football coaches: Every person on the street knows their job better than they do. And if you listened to the economic stimulus package talk last week from the White House and Capitol Hill, not to mention Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, you could be forgiven for thinking that the recession is just around the corner. But the main result of all this chatter is that far too many myths about recessions have made their way into popular culture. …
Claudia Rosett says someone from State gave a speech about North Korea and told the truth. Snowball fight in hell!
No, I could not possibly be talking about U.S. special envoy Chris Hill, who has spent the past year purveying the bizarre calculus that as long as the U.S. keeps its side of the bargain in the Six-Party talks on North Korea, we’re half way to success — never mind if North Korea takes everything and stiffs us on its half of the deal. (Note: putting scotch tape across the door to the Yongbyon reactor, for the second time since 1994, does not count as nuclear disarmament).
The envoy who finally stood up and said the right thing is Jay Lefkowitz, special envoy for human rights in North Korea. In a speech delivered Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute, Lefkowitz spelled out that after four years of Six-Party talks, we’ve got pretty much nothing. Meanwhile, North Korea has conducted an intercontinental ballistic missile test, a nuclear test, and continued brutalizing its own people in ways “deeply offensive to us,†which “should also offend free people around the world.â€
Staking out a position not attempted in the Condi Rice State Department since John Bolton left in 2006, Lefkowitz suggested that “Policy should rest on assumptions that correlate with recent facts and events.†He went on to spell out (without mentioning Chris Hill) the ways in which Chris-Hill diplomacy and the Six-Party talks have been a horrifying flop. …
Never Mind says Dept. of State as the speech disappears from their website. Stalin would have approved.
… On Friday, as can still be found in the cached version on google, Lefkowitz’s speech was posted on the State Department web site, as an entry under “Remarks†for 2008.
But today — hey, presto! — the speech has vanished! As I write this, there are no Lefkowitz “Remarks†for 2008. They’re down the Memory Hole.
Hitch wants to know why Huck’s getting a free pass for his Confederate Battle Flag comments.
In this country, it seems that you can always get an argument going about “race” as long as it is guaranteed to be phony, but never when it is real. Almost every day brings news of full-dress media-oriented spats about Don Imus, Bob Grant, or the recent nonstory about how some golf show had managed to mention Tiger Woods and the word lynch in the same news cycle. The preceding week had involved some trivial but intense parsing of an exchange between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about Dr. Martin Luther King. But just let the real thing occur, with a full-blooded and full-throated bellow of old-fashioned authentic racism, and you can see the entire press refusing to cover it for fear of having to confront the real and unvarnished thing (and perhaps for reasons having to do with other “sensitivities” as well).
Gov. Mike Huckabee made the following unambiguously racist and demagogic appeal in Myrtle Beach, S.C., last week:
You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell ‘em what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do. …
Michael Barone posts on the campaign so far.
… Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are now in a rock ‘em, sock ‘em battle. The astute liberal columnist Michael Tomasky characterizes Clinton’s victory as “downright ugly.” A push poll in Nevada four times identified Clinton’s opponent as “Barack Hussein Obama”—imagine the cries of bigotry that would ensue if a Republican had done that! Bill Clinton was in Las Vegas charging the Obama forces with unfair tactics, and pro-Clinton forces were prosecuting a lawsuit against the caucuses held at nine casino worksites where it was assumed that the 60,000-strong Culinary Workers Union would pitch votes to its endorsed candidate, Obama. Turned out the lawsuit wasn’t necessary and the Culinary Workers couldn’t deliver: Seven of the nine casino voting sites went for Clinton over Obama.
The reason: ethnic politics. Previous contests didn’t have appreciable numbers of black, Latino, and Jewish voters. The Nevada Democratic caucuses did (the fact that many blacks and Latinos could vote was Nevadans’ strongest argument to the national Democrats for having an early caucus there). The entrance poll showed that blacks favored Obama over Clinton 83 to 14 percent, while Hispanics favored Clinton over Obama by 64 to 26 percent and Jews favored Clinton over Obama by 67 to 25 percent. Blacks and Hispanics were 15 percent of the sample, Jews 5 percent (enough to be statistically significant given the large number of respondents). …
George Will too.
Nevada‘s caucuses turned a simmering subtext of the Democratic presidential nomination contest into a dominant narrative. South Carolina winnowed out a Republican candidate, whether Mike Huckabee knows it or not, and the candidate who counted on being winnowed in there, Fred Thompson, wasn’t.
Speaking in the sunshine after her Nevada victory, Hillary Clinton said there were many people to thank but mentioned only one: Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles‘s Hispanic mayor. Her 64 percent of Nevada’s Hispanic vote produced her victory. Although the culinary workers union had endorsed Barack Obama, many of its workers are Hispanic and went their own way.
The 22 Democratic primaries and caucuses of Feb. 5 occur in many states with huge Hispanic populations (e.g., California, New York, New Jersey, Obama’s Illinois), so for Obama’s campaign, the suddenly pressing question is: Will America’s largest minority group, Hispanics, support a candidate from the second-largest minority, African Americans?
Also, Obama seems flummoxed by the Clintons’ Clintonness. When he committed the gaffe (defined as the utterance of a truth in conditions inhospitable to that fugitive virtue) of saying that for many years the Republicans were “the party of ideas,” he was merely repeating something said decades ago by an exemplary Democrat, the senator whose seat Clinton fills — well, occupies: Pat Moynihan.
Clinton promptly resorted to the sort of bilge that the adjective “Clintonian” was created to denote. She said she did not think privatizing Social Security was “a better idea …
Daily Telegraph says Britain’s National Health Service is failing to take care of the nation’s teeth.
In Britain today, you can stuff yourself on deep-fried Mars Bars, drink 20 pints a night, inject yourself with heroin, smoke 60 cigarettes a day or decide to change your sex – and the NHS has an obligation to treat you. You might go on a waiting list, but it will do its best to cure your lung cancer, patch up your nose after a drunken brawl or give you a hip replacement. It doesn’t charge for operations or beds; it may even throw in some half-edible food.
But if you have bad teeth, forget it. You may be rolling on the bathroom floor in agony with an abscess, your gums may be riddled with disease, or people may recoil at the sight of your fangs as you walk down the street, but the NHS doesn’t have to help you.
It is now virtually impossible for many people to find an NHS dentist, and if they do manage to squeeze on to a list, they could still be charged 80 per cent of the cost of treatment – unless they are a child, pregnant or on benefits.
The health service under both the Tories and Labour has victimised the dentally challenged – that is, anyone who hasn’t inherited strong teeth and a perfect picket fence smile. Few can easily afford to go to any dentist now. My husband went to a private dentist after a 15-year gap, and was left reeling after they extracted £2,000 for 12 fillings. My three-year-old son received a bill for £90 after I stupidly asked my private dentist whether she could have a quick look at his teeth.
A survey by Mori for the Citizens Advice Bureau this week found that seven and a half million Britons have failed to gain access to an NHS dentist in the past two years. In one quarter of the country, no NHS dentists are allowing new patients to join their lists. And despite government targets that every child should have his teeth seen by an expert every year, more than one in three children never see an NHS dentist. …
Good post from Cafe Hayek.
Corner post notes volcanoes may be Antarctica’s ice-melting culprit. But, it’s still BushHitler’s fault.
… My other favorite lecture was about how George Bush is causing a rise in global volcanic activity. You see, George Bush failed to sign the Kyoto treaty. Because Bush failed to sign Kyoto global warming has continued unabated. The rise in global temperatures has caused the melting of the ice caps. This, in turn, has caused sea level to rise. The rise in sea level has caused increased pressure at the sea bottom, including subduction zones. The increased pressure on subduction zones has caused more crust material to be forced into the mantle. CAUSING MORE VOLCANOES. Therefore, George Bush is causing volcanic eruptions. QED (quod erat démÅnstrandum – [which was demonstrated])