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Mark Steyn wants to know why more and more people depend on government, rather than themselves.
In his not–quite–State of the Union address the other week, President Obama said the following: “I think about Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina — a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom. She had been told that her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this chamber. She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp. The letter asks us for help, and says, ‘We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world. We are not quitters.’ That’s what she said. ‘We are not quitters.’”
There was much applause, and this passage was cited approvingly even by some conservatives as an example of how President Obama was yoking his “ambitious vision” (i.e., record-breaking spending) to traditional appeals to American exceptionalism.
I think not. “We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen . . .” The doctors are on track to becoming yet another group of state employees; the lawyers sue the doctors for medical malpractice and, when they’ve made enough dough, like John Edwards, they get elected to Congress. Is there no one in Miss Bethea’s school who’d like to be an entrepreneur, an inventor, a salesman, a generator of wealth? Someone’s got to make the dough Obama’s already spent. …
And Karl Rove says Obama is pointing out the future of the GOP. Of course, the last time they had this chance they let folks like Trent Lott and Tom Delay throw it away.
Something powerful is stirring in the land, and it may not be good news for President Barack Obama, his agenda or the Democratic Party. Mr. Obama said Tuesday night his budget moves America “from an era of borrow and spend” to “save and invest.” But people are realizing he would add $9.3 trillion to the national debt, doubling it in six years and nearly tripling it in 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). How can that be “save and invest”?
In his inaugural address, Mr. Obama told us, “The stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.” He wants to turn to new issues of education, health care and green jobs, which he plugged at every opportunity in Tuesday’s press conference.
Suddenly, though, it doesn’t seem like a time of new politics and new concerns. Many Americans are anxious — and in some cases angry — about a set of old issues: deficits, taxes and the national debt. …
Jennifer Rubin says we should take note of yesterday’s auction for Treasury notes.
Jennifer also posts on next Tuesday’s vote for a seat in Congress.
This interesting piece on the NY-20 race reveals that the president and the DNC are not going all out — an odd development for a race that has gotten a lot of press and will be seen as an early indicator as to how the president’s personal popularity manifests itself in congressional races. The report notes:
While the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has spent more than $373,000 on the race through Monday, according to Federal Election Commission records, Obama waited until Wednesday morning to endorse Democrat Scott Murphy and still hasn’t cut a TV ad touting the candidate — despite the fact that the election is less than a week away. . .
National Review piece reminds us not to overlook George W’s accomplishments in India/U.S. relations.
Shortly before George W. Bush left office, Harvard historian Sugata Bose told me that strengthening U.S. relations with India “may turn out to be the most significant foreign-policy achievement of the Bush administration.” It is an achievement that Indians greatly appreciate: In mid-February, a spokesman for the ruling Congress party said that Bush deserves India’s top civilian award, the Bharat Ratna (“Jewel of India”), an honor rarely conferred on non-Indians.
“The people of India deeply love you,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Bush last September. In the 2008 Pew Global Attitudes survey, India was one of only three countries out of 24 in which a majority of respondents expressed “a lot” or “some” confidence in Bush to “do the right thing regarding foreign affairs.” (The others were Tanzania and Nigeria.)
Unfortunately, Indian officials have notably less confidence in Barack Obama than they had in Bush. And so far, Obama has done little to assuage their worries. “There’s no question that the Indians are uncertain about this administration,” says a Democratic Senate aide who works on foreign-policy issues. “They had such a good relationship with Bush, and [Obama] ran as the anti-Bush.” Since Obama’s election, an accumulation of perceived slights — some more trivial than others — has intensified New Delhi’s anxiety and fostered an atmosphere of “deteriorating trust.” …
Anne Applebaum says when it comes to relations with Russia, we need a little more than a reset button.
… It would be nice, of course, if U.S.-Russia relations really had been frozen as a result of irrelevant technical complications and could begin afresh. Unfortunately, while America may have a new president, Russia does not. And while America may want to make the past vanish — as a nation, we’ve never been all that keen on foreigners’ histories — alas, the past cannot be changed. The profound differences in psychology, philosophy and policy that have been the central source of friction between the American and Russian governments for the past decade remain very much in place. Sooner or later, the Obama administration will have to grapple with them. …
Thomas Sowell writes on the degradation of our politics evidenced by Barney Frank.
Death threats to executives at AIG, because of the bonuses they received, are one more sign of the utter degeneration of politics in our time.
Congressman Barney Frank has threatened to summon these executives before his committee and force them to reveal their home addresses— which would of course put their wives and children at the mercy of whatever kooks might want to literally take a shot at them.
Whatever the political or economic issues involved, this is not the way such issues should be resolved in America. We are not yet a banana republic, though that is the direction in which some of our politicians are taking us— especially those politicians who make a lot of noise about “compassion” and “social justice.”
What makes this all the more painfully ironic is that it is precisely those members of Congress who have had the most to do with creating the risks that led to the current economic crisis who are making the most noise against others, and summoning people before their committee to be browbeaten and humiliated on nationwide television. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on what we would miss should the government take over health care.
The administration is insistent on pursuing health-care “reform” this year. But before we go uprooting what’s in place perhaps we should take note of what we have. Scott Atlas, M.D. a Hoover Institute fellow, puts out ten helpful facts here. Each is worth reading and references some rather stunning statistics, but the summary is as follows:
Fact No. 1: Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.
Fact No. 2: Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians. …
One of India’s leading IT entreprenuers writes on the country’s changes.
NANDAN NILEKANI, the co-founder of Infosys, one of India’s biggest IT firms, is a corporate icon in his homeland. But to many readers outside the country he is best known for a stray comment he made to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in February 2004. His remark (“Tom, the playing field is being levelled”) inspired the title and thesis of Mr Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, a big-think book about offshoring and globalisation that sold millions. The publishers of “Imagining India”, Mr Nilekani’s admirable first book, must hope that many of those readers will be eager to hear the Indian side of the story, straight from the source.
Not to disappoint them, Mr Nilekani provides a chapter on globalisation and two on information technology. But “Imagining India” is a very different book from Mr Friedman’s bestseller. Mr Nilekani, an intellectual trapped in an entrepreneur’s body, seeks to understand India through the “ebb and flow of its ideas” and debates. …
Scott Ott of Scrappleface was in the Washington Examiner with the news Geithner has taken his junk assets on the road as “Legacy Assets Roadshow.”
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner today announced a public-public partnership with PBS to produce and host a program tentatively dubbed ‘Legacy Assets Roadshow’, with a format reminiscent of the network’s popular ‘Antiques Roadshow.’
Part adventure, part history lesson, and part treasure hunt, the Legacy Assets Roadshow hopes to “tap the viewer’s ongoing curiosity about whether that dusty old thing that looks virtually worthless might turn out to be a precious keepsake worth big bucks.”
Geithner plans to travel to locations around the nation inviting bankers and other financial firm executives to bring in mortgages, mortgaged-backed securities and other items formerly known as “troubled or toxic” but now called “legacy” assets. At the mobile “Roadshow” studio, Geithner and a panel of leading financial experts will offer their appraisals of the debt instruments. …
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