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If you want a clue for one of the reasons the left is still so nasty, even after their big win, it is in Jennifer Rubin’s post about a Quinnipiac poll showing the center-right nature of the country. The left knows they won’t be in power long because the media can’t forever hide all the mistakes.
… We will have the confirmation hearing for Sotomayor this summer. In each of these the public will hear arguments about quotas, preferences, historical discrimination, preferential treatment, and multiculturalism. Conservatives who extol the concept of individual, as opposed to group, rights and who eschew the practice of divvying up by race, are on firm constitutional footing. This poll confirms that they also are speaking for the overwhelming number of Americans who think it is time to get beyond identity politics and racial preferences.
Jonathan Tobin posts on the obsequious Friedman interview with the president.
… Friedman was able to get Obama to stop talking about himself long enough to tell him an old joke about a guy who prays to win the lottery but never buys a ticket. The point of this knee-slapper is that nobody in the Middle East has given peace a chance. It made the president laugh and gave the columnist the opportunity once again to pose as an adviser (rather than a mere Boswell) to the powerful.
Obama, as Max pointed out, then said:
We have a joke around the White House. We’re just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working — and nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East.
Oh, the perils of honesty! That’s the word Obama used earlier this week in another pre-Cairo interview with NPR to describe his hostile attitude toward Israel. If this was a contest to see which of the two was the most self-infatuated, I guess you’ve got to give the decision to Obama.
But the point here is that the big fibbers are Friedman and Obama, not the Israelis who, they imply, have never lifted a finger for peace and have no interest in hearing the truth.
The fact is Israel has been anteing up for peace since 1993, when it signed the Oslo Accords, brought the PLO and its terrorist leader Yasser Arafat back to the country, and handed most of the West Bank and Gaza over to him. …
Mark Steyn posts on Mali Muslim massacre.
David Warren on Tiananmen, D-Day and what we fight for.
We have two important anniversaries this week: tomorrow is the 20th of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Saturday will be the 65th of D-Day. Both events retain “educational value,” and today I shall try to remember why.
I was not around for D-Day. Recently I buried a father who was, and at an age to make me realize that the Second World War will soon exist only as book knowledge. Include, in that book, what was incised in stone over the battlefields of France, where Western leaders will gather on the weekend for verbal tributes, and where a few surviving veterans will recall the comrades of their vanished youth.
Much is forgotten, but nothing is lost. The whole history of the world is inscribed in God’s living memory. We will, according to this religious view, again glimpse that record on a Day of Judgement. I do not believe for one moment that what is forgotten therefore disappears. For that is the ostrich view of space and time, suitable only for those who are in hiding. …
David Harsanyi takes up the subject of General Motors.
For those of you who have carefully avoided piddling away your hard-earned dollars on a General Motors vehicle, resistance is futile. You’re a majority “investor” now. Rejoice.
Taxpayers, our president has decreed, are impelled to preserve a prehistoric, poorly run, unprofitable private corporation. Now, the only question becomes: What does all this sacrifice mean?
Will GM be run as profitably and efficiently as Amtrak? Will GM be paid not to produce like the agricultural sector? Will it feed into an economic bubble like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Will it boast the negligible oversight and waste of the so-called stimulus package? Will it feature the fiscal irresponsibility of Social Security? Or will we see the runaway costs of Medicaid?
So many options. …
National Review editors on the peril for Milwaukee’s school choice program.
Milwaukee is home to America’s most vibrant school-choice program: More than 20,000 students participate, almost all of them minorities. They have made academic gains and boast higher graduation rates than their peers in public schools. They even save money for taxpayers. Inevitably, Democrats in the state capital are trying to eviscerate the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
They’ve wanted to gut school choice for years, at the behest of teacher-union patrons who believe education should be a government monopoly. Until recently, Republicans have stood in the way. That changed following last year’s elections. Now, for the first time since the advent of school choice in Milwaukee two decades ago, Madison is a one-party capital. The governor, Jim Doyle, is a Democrat. Members of his party control both the state assembly and the state senate. School choice is in their crosshairs. …
Karl Rove gets to say, “It’s gonna be the economy, stupid.”
… It is becoming clear that the economy is now the top issue. Mr. Obama’s presidency may well rise or fall on it. The economy will be his responsibility long before next year’s elections. Americans may give him a chance to turn things around, but voters can turn unforgiving very quickly if promised jobs don’t materialize.
That’s what happened in Louisiana, where voters accepted Democrat Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s missteps before Hurricane Katrina but brutally rejected her afterward because she failed to turn the state around.
Until now, the new president has benefited from public willingness to give him a honeymoon. He decided to use that grace period to push for the largest expansion of government in U.S. history and to reward political allies (see the sweetheart deals Big Labor received in the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies).
The difficulty for Mr. Obama will be when the public sees where his decisions lead — higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher taxes, sluggish growth, and a jobless recovery.
Tony Blankley expands on the subject.
The Roman historian Livy famously described the terminal plight of the late Roman Republic: “Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus” (“We can bear neither our shortcomings nor the remedies for them”). As I reread this phrase in Christian Meier’s biography of Julius Caesar this past weekend, I couldn’t help thinking of America’s current fiscal profligacy — which has been growing for years at an ever-accelerating rate.
Of course, since last fall’s financial/economic crisis, the rate of profligacy has become supercharged. Like the Roman Republic’s lament, we think we can’t survive without deficit spending — but we soon won’t be able to survive with deficit spending, either.
In 2012, federal debt will be more than $15 trillion. Annual interest probably will be between $1 trillion and $1.7 trillion — depending on whether long bonds remain at about 3.5 percent or go to recent historic rates (6 to 7 percent). Deficits will average about $1 trillion a year — $22 trillion by 2019. Yearly interest payments then will be more than $2 trillion. That’s the good news. …
A Contentions post too.
… Bernanke is engaged in an effort to stimulate an economic recovery by using monetary tools to reduce the level of medium and long-term interest rates (”quantitative easing”). The Treasury is trying to add to the effort by using fiscal tools (Keynesian stimulus). What everyone hopes will happen is that the economy will pick up and start generating its own momentum, so that by the time interest rates start ticking up by themselves, we’ll be able to lay off both the quantitative easing and the stimulus spending.
The danger, however, is that expectations for economic recovery will cause investor dollars to flow away from Treasury debt and dollar-denominated investments altogether, before the job has been done. As medium and long-term interest rates rise, Bernanke finds himself under considerable pressure to expand the quantitative easing program, which he’s very reluctant to do because of the danger of runaway inflation.
That leaves the Treasury needing to keep borrowing gargantuan amounts of money for a long time to come, probably years. And that keeps steady upward pressure on interest rates in the economically-sensitive medium and long range segments of the yield curve. …
We close this section with a piece from the Financial Times.
Standard and Poor’s decision to downgrade its outlook for British sovereign debt from “stable” to “negative” should be a wake-up call for the US Congress and administration. Let us hope they wake up.
Under President Barack Obama’s budget plan, the federal debt is exploding. To be precise, it is rising – and will continue to rise – much faster than gross domestic product, a measure of America’s ability to service it. The federal debt was equivalent to 41 per cent of GDP at the end of 2008; the Congressional Budget Office projects it will increase to 82 per cent of GDP in 10 years. With no change in policy, it could hit 100 per cent of GDP in just another five years.
“A government debt burden of that [100 per cent] level, if sustained, would in Standard & Poor’s view be incompatible with a triple A rating,” as the risk rating agency stated last week.
I believe the risk posed by this debt is systemic and could do more damage to the economy than the recent financial crisis. …
Borowitz reports the president gave a Chevy Malibu to the Saudi king.
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