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John Fund on the kid’s photo-op with Hugo.
… And what about his treatment of his own people? Mr. Chavez has been locking up most of the leaders of whatever political opposition he still faces, including the mayor of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. Save for a brief reference that political prisoners would be included on any list of topics brought up in future diplomatic talks with the Chavez regime, Mr. Obama was silent on the issue of human rights in both Venezuela and Cuba. It almost makes one yearn for the days of Jimmy Carter. Mr. Carter also practiced a policy of naiveté in foreign affairs, but at least he never forgot that human rights had to be kept front and center in dealings with overseas adversaries.
Mark Steyn Corner post on regulatory despotism.
… The proper response of free men to the trivial but degrading impositions of the state is to answer as Pierre Lemieux did. But it requires a kind of 24/7 tenacity few can muster – and the machinery of bureaucracy barely pauses to scoff: In an age of mass communication and computer records, the screen blips for the merest nano-second, and your gun rights disappear. The remorseless, incremental annexation of “individual existence” by technologically all-pervasive micro-regulation is a profound threat to free peoples. But do we have the will to resist it?
London Times Op-Ed claims “green jobs” will become the next “sub-prime.”
When everybody seems to have the same big idea, you just know it can only mean trouble. Remember sub-prime mortgages? Now universally excoriated as the spawn of the devil, the proximate cause of the credit crunch and all that followed, a few years back “sub-prime” was everyone’s darling. Financiers loved it because it generated sumptuously high-yielding debt instruments; governments, because it promised to make even the poor into proud property owners.
Now business lobbyists and governments on both sides of the Atlantic have got a new big idea. They call it “green jobs”. Leading the pack is, as you might expect, Barack Obama. The president recently defended a vast package of subsidies for renewable energy on the grounds that it would “create millions of additional jobs and entire new industries”. …
Jennifer Rubin wonders why the kid’s administration has declared war on job creators.
… One wonders where the administration and Congress think jobs come from and what burdens can be placed on employers already struggling. They seem to operate in a fantasyworld in which burden after burden can be loaded onto the backs of businesses, no international competition exists, and no loss of U.S. jobs results. If the Obama team would really like to “save” some jobs they’d call for a time out in the rush to enact job-killing legislation.
And J. G. Thayer says the feds have become a bunch of thugs.
… President Obama’s hand-picked Car Czar, Steven Rattner has chosen the plan to “save” Chrysler. Chrysler will be sold off, and Ratner has narrowed down the list of buyers to precisely one: Fiat. And to help entice Fiat to make the deal, some of Chrysler’s biggest creditors will write off billions of debt.
Why would Chrysler and its banking creditors buy into this deal? Because they accepted federal bailout money. The Golden Rule prevails — that is, “Them with the gold makes the rules.” Chrysler took federal funds, so it has to sell itself to whomever the government says. And the banks took federal funds, so they have to write off whatever debts the government says.
Pollster Kellyanne Conway comments on BO’s numbers.
“His numbers are still high.” “People like him.” “The President has the strong support of a majority of Americans.” These observations are common throughout the blogosphere and within the punditocracy to describe the current standing of President Obama. Trouble is, they rely upon a very thin and limited measurement: presidential approval ratings.
Most polls currently have President Obama’s “approval ratings” around 60%. That is not surprising, and likely will remain there or increase in the coming weeks. He’s likeable. Much of his campaign was built on his personal appeal. Plenty of the nearly 70 million people who voted for him are not about to second-guess their own judgment just five months later. Most Americans want the president — whoever he is — to do well, since they view (rightly or wrongly) a nexus between his success or failure and that of the nation.
But adulation abroad and a perception of charm and charisma at home is not a mandate for the type of sweeping transformations to the domestic economy and foreign policy currently on the table. After all, Candidate Obama ran on “change we can believe in,” not “revolution you must pay for.” …
George Will writes on the policy of treating Russia like it’s a real country.
… Putin — ignore the human Potemkin village (Dmitry Medvedev) who currently occupies the presidential office — must be amazed and amused that America’s president wants to treat Russia as a great power. Obama should instead study pertinent demographic trends.
Nicholas Eberstadt’s essay “Drunken Nation” in the current World Affairs quarterly notes that Russia is experiencing “a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation.” Previous episodes of depopulation — 1917-23, 1933-34, 1941-46 — were the results of civil war, Stalin’s war on the “kulaks” and collectivization of agriculture, and World War II, respectively. But today’s depopulation is occurring in normal — for Russia — social and political circumstances. Normal conditions include a subreplacement fertility rate, sharply declining enrollment rates for primary school pupils, perhaps more than 7 percent of children abandoned by their parents to orphanages or government care or life as “street children.” Furthermore, “mind-numbing, stupefying binge drinking of hard spirits” — including poisonously impure home brews — “is an accepted norm in Russia and greatly increases the danger of fatal injury through falls, traffic accidents, violent confrontations, homicide, suicide, and so on.” Male life expectancy is lower under Putin than it was a half-century ago under Khrushchev. …
Debra Saunders thinks the left coast is out to lunch on offshore drilling.
Last Wednesday, conservatives held coast-to-coast “TEA parties” designed to send the message to Washington and state governments that the partiers feel “taxed enough already.” The exercise struck me as more than a little out of touch with the political realities of President Obama’s America. The next day, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar held a public hearing in San Francisco on a Bush administration proposal to sell federal leases to drill for oil and gas off the California coast. The hearing became the Left Coast equivalent of the right-wing TEA party.
The only difference is that the overwhelmingly anti-drilling crowd was in la-la land on the realities of oil instead of taxes. Every one of the elected officials who spoke were anti-drilling Democrats. Every one seemed out of touch with the realities of the need to increase domestic oil production.
America’s in a tough recession: It’s in no position to turn down good-paying jobs and tax revenue, not to mention a way to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. Here’s a sobering statistic: U.S. imported oil use grew from 24 percent in 1970 to 70 percent last year. …
Julie Gunrock in NRO writes about left coast veggie snobs.
In an interview shortly after the groundbreaking, Alice Waters — the organic-food world’s most active and least humorous spokesperson — commented on the new White House vegetable garden: “The most important thing that Michelle Obama did was to say that food comes from the land. . . . People have not known that. They think it comes from the grocery store.”
Oh, really — is that what people think? To whom, exactly, is Ms. Waters referring? Is she referring to the millions of people living in the grain-belt states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri — states one cannot drive across without spending hours staring at corn and soybean fields? The millions living along the Pacific Northwest coast and Alaska who are supported by the fishing industry? The fishermen of Gloucester, Mass.? Maybe she is talking about people living in Wisconsin — where dairy farms and cow pastures are as ubiquitous as art galleries in New York. Or perhaps she is referring to the thousands of people like me, who — in the suburbs of an East Coast metropolis — just throw a few Lowe’s-purchased plants in the ground, and hope for some rain to support a small backyard garden. Yes, Ms. Waters, even these “people” know that the grocery store doesn’t spontaneously produce food. …
Christopher Buckley says enough with the torture sanctimony.
… It is, yes, good that the U.S.A. is not doing this anymore, but let’s not get too sanctimonious about how awful it was that we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure god-awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they had gotten their mitts on one. And let us move on. There is pressing business. (Are you listening, ACLU? Hel-lo?)
The operative question becomes: What do we do now with captive bad guys who possess information that could prevent another 9/11? We may have moved on. They, assuredly, have not. …