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Jennifer Rubin continues to follow the story of the meet and greet with Jewish leaders.
It seems that Obama’s obnoxious advice to American Jews to “engage in serious self-reflection” isn’t going over so well with some Democrats. Marty Peretz writes:
Frankly, I am sick and tired of President Obama’s eldering–more accurately, hectoring–Israel’s leaders. It is, after all, they whose country is the target of an armed and ideological cyclone that Obama has done precious little to ease. …
Spengler writes of Michael as metaphor for our culture. This mini obit of Michael Jackson is not as tightly written as is his norm, but it contains some important ideas.
… The public’s grief was unfeigned and profound, for Jackson embodied the desire of a generation, that is, never to grow up. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray had a portrait that revealed his inner decay, and Michael Jackson had a nose. If one image captures the spirit of the times, it is that nose, which narrowed, shrank and finally fell in, in emulation of the failing youth of his fans.
They forgave Jackson his dysmorphia and even his alleged pedophilia, for Jackson only expressed in extreme form his generation’s refusal to age. In his self-disfigurement and eventual self-destruction, this fey child-man fought madly against maturity with a reckless abandon that his fans secretly admired. They loved him, not in spite of his personality failures, but because of them.
America’s cult of youth persists, despite the rapid aging of its population. During the next 10 years, the country’s elderly dependent ratio will rise to 25%, after holding steady for three decades at around 19%. Still, the baby boomers flee from the awful reality. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of cosmetic procedures per year rose fivefold, from 2 million to 10 million, according to the industry association. Its polling data states that 29% of Americans without children, and 24% of Americans with children, would consider plastic surgery. …
… Something astonishing had happened, compared to which the tulip bulb craze and the South Sea bubble seem like models of sobriety. The eternal adolescence that Michael Jackson so ably represented in fantasy turned into the foundation for the great investing wave of the 1990s. The best minds America could train worked hundred-hour-weeks in pizza-box-strewn lofts to launch the next site for web-based greeting cards or virtual-reality sex. Stock analysts valued new issues in proportion to their “burn rate”, assuming that the more money they lost, the more they were worth. The sort of things the world really needed – hardier seeds, safer nuclear energy, more efficient electrical batteries – never turned up on the radar screen.
Equity markets collapsed and never came back. In nominal dollars, the technology-centered NASDAQ index stands at one-third of its February 2000 peak. Real returns to investment in youth culture followed the same trajectory as Michael Jackson’s nose. Undaunted, Americans stopped speculating in technology stocks and speculated instead in houses. The Peter Pan syndrome continued to afflict the American economy. Rather than save, as aging people should, they borrowed more to acquire bigger houses. The housing bubble prolonged America’s collective adolescence for a few more years, for it allowed Americans to spend money on toys rather than saving for the retirement that came rushing at the baby boomers like an oncoming express train.
Youth culture disoriented the entrepreneurs of America so thoroughly that conventional wisdom – including that of the Vatican and the Barack Obama administration – now ignores the entrepreneur as a source of economic growth. …
David Harsanyi writes of the new “science czar”.
Dr. John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy — better known as the “science czar” — has been a longtime prophet of environmental catastrophes. Never discouraged, but never right.
Thanks to resourceful bloggers, you can read excerpts online from a hard-to-find book co-authored by Holdren in the late 1970s called “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment.”
In it, you will find the czar wading into some unpleasant talk about mass sterilizations and abortions.
It’s not surprising. Holdren spent the ’70s boogying down to the vibes of an imaginary population catastrophe and global cooling. He also participated in the famous wager between scientist Paul Ehrlich, the now-discredited “Population Bomb” theorist (and co-author of “Ecoscience), and economist Julian Simon, who believed human ingenuity would overcome demand. …
David Warren uses a Sarah Palin WaPo Op-Ed as a jumping off place in an essay on the media’s politics.
… I think it is worth considering here the “evolution” of North American media into what is now a liberal monolith — except Rupert Murdoch’s holdings, and what bleats on talk radio and the Internet.
This is a slightly deeper history than is generally supposed, with some non-political causes. These were economic developments as big as the growth of two-income families, and as subtle as the traffic jams that started to prevent efficient daytime distribution of newspapers. Their aggregate effect was to put America’s afternoon dailies progressively out of business, from the 1950s forward.
Morning papers circulated chiefly in the city cores, among a readership more liberal, and tended to be Democrat. Evening papers circulated more beyond the city, among a readership more conservative, and tended to be Republican. But from any given city, there were two distinct party points of view, and better-informed people read both newspapers. (In Canada, same thing, but Liberal and Conservative parties; in this very town, the examples were the Ottawa Citizen and the Ottawa Journal.)
The loss of those evening papers, and their replacement with network TV news, and other national media such as newsmagazines — guided ultimately by the attitudes of editors and directors in New York City — helps to explain what happened. The media ground on which American political discussion rests, shifted, largely eliminating public expression of conservative views.
The outrage expressed, today, at the very existence of Sarah Palin, not only by progressive Democrats but by urbane “establishment” Republicans, is in many ways the product of this shift. Increasingly, I find, people on the left simply cannot accept any right-wing view as legitimate. The mere fact it can be so labelled puts it beyond the pale. …
Ed Morrissey comments on the Soto Show.
… her performance adds fuel to the Republican argument that Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor not because she was the best possible candidate and not because she was a moderate, but strictly for political purposes. None of this will affect her tenure on the Supreme Court, but it will provide further evidence that Obama has a big problem in selecting people for his administration, and that there seems to be little effort at vetting nominees for important positions.
In short, every prevarication and stumble Sotomayor makes deepens the impression that Obama is not a competent executive. That’s the real danger for Obama in these hearings, and the tough questioning of Jeff Sessions and Lindsey Graham has made it a reality.
Karl Rove says they can’t change their minds now about what the stimulus was supposed to accomplish.
So what’s a president to do when the promises he made about his economic stimulus program fail to materialize? If you’re Barack Obama, you redefine your goals and act as if America won’t remember what you said originally. That’s a neat trick if you can get away with it, but Mr. Obama won’t. His words are a matter of public record and he will be held to them.
When it came to the stimulus package, the president and his administration promised, in the words of National Economic Director Larry Summers, “You’ll see the effects begin almost immediately.” Now it’s clear that those promised jobs and growth haven’t materialized.
So Mr. Obama is attempting to lower expectations retroactively, saying in an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post that his stimulus “was, from the start, a two-year program.” That is misleading. Mr. Obama never said if his stimulus were passed things might still get significantly worse in the following year.
In February, Mr. Obama said this about the goals of his stimulus package: “I think my initial measure of success is creating or saving four million jobs.” He later explained the stimulus’s $787 billion would “go directly to . . . generating three to four million new jobs.” And his Council of Economic Advisors issued an official analysis showing that the unemployment rate would top out in the third quarter of this year at just over 8%.
That quarter began on July 1, and unemployment is now 9.5%, up from 7.6% when Mr. Obama took office. There are 2.6 million fewer Americans working than there were on the day Mr. Obama was sworn in. …
ABC’s Jake Tapper on Obama’s cabinet as Chicago thugs.
… On This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said of the $787 billion stimulus package, “the reality is it hasn’t helped yet. Only about 6.8 percent of the money has actually been spent. What I proposed is, after you complete the contracts that are already committed, the things that are in the pipeline, stop it.”
A day later, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer received letters from Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar all pointing out the billions headed to Arizona.
Kyl “publicly questioned whether the stimulus is working and stated that he wants to cancel projects that aren’t presently underway,” LaHood wrote to Brewer, a Republican. “I believe the stimulus has been very effective in creating job opportunities throughout the country. However, if you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know.” …
Jennifer Rubin has a three Contentions posts today on Sotomayor that are quite good.
After two days of Sotomayor testimony I thought of Jeffrey Rosen’s piece on Sotomayor back in May (before he had to backpedal and support her so as not to embarrass the “team”). I don’t think much of his temperament criticism, but his analysis of her legal and intellectual capabilities seems exactly on the money: …
… Rosen was trying to warn his liberal compatriots that they could do “better” than Sotomayor. He was right and should get some credit for his effort. Imagine if Diane Wood or Kathleen Sullivan, both liberal in philosophy but undeniably impressive, had been up there over the last couple of days. I suspect that conservatives would have been staring at their shoes, struggling for reasons to say “no” and grudgingly acknowledging that the nominee was going to add something to the Court beyond her gender.
The question is not whether Sotomayor will get through, but why the president felt so compelled to select her. If he was desperate to find a Latina, he should have found a wise one.
Daily Beast has a story on liberal hypocrites. Imagine that.
The nation’s largest fundraiser for progressive causes issued checks to thousands of former workers in the last several weeks after settling a $2.15 million class-action suit alleging it subjected workers to grueling hours without overtime pay.
The nonprofit Fund for Public Interest Inc. was set up in 1982 as the fundraising arm of the network of Public Interest Research Groups, which was founded by Ralph Nader. It deploys legions of door-to-door and street canvassers—and once counted a young Barack Obama as one of its New York City organizers—to solicit contributions for the Human Rights Campaign, the Sierra Club, Environment America, and other groups that together spend millions of dollars each year lobbying Congress.
Those organizations often battle with deep-pocketed corporations; the money raised by canvassers is an important source of funds. In many cases, however, the employees collecting those donations made an hourly rate that worked out to less than minimum wage.
The abrupt shuttering of its Los Angeles office after employees took steps to unionize also brought allegations of illegal union-busting from many, including Christian Miller, an L.A. employee from 2002 to 2006 who filed the suit on behalf of 12,000 canvassers and directors. …
It was 30 years ago Jimmy Carter went on TV and told us it was all our fault. Marty Peretz remembers the “malaise” speech.
… It was not only that there was no gasoline. Or that interest rates and unemployment rates were very high. (Remember, if you’re old enough, the “pain index.”)
A catastrophe had also befallen American foreign policy. The shah had fallen and been replaced by the regime of the ayatollahs. …
Couple of Corner posts from Ed Whelan on the baseball frauds – Obama and Sotomayor.
It turns out that I was too quick to let President Obama off the hook for his reference to the longtime stadium of his supposedly beloved White Sox. First, I failed to take note that Obama referred to “Cominskey Field” (rather than “Park”). As one e-mailer puts it:
When race-car driver Jeff Gordon led “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at Wrigley Field and referred to it as as “Wrigley Stadium,” he was booed mercilessly. At least Gordon had some excuses: he’s not from Chicago, he’s apparently not a baseball fan, and a central feature of his job is not public speaking. Obama has no excuse, especially given that he said “Cominskey Field” while insinuating that Cubs fans are too high-brow to be real baseball fans. …
Reuters has the pitch of the girly man.
Jennifer Rubin continues to follow the story of the meet and greet with Jewish leaders.
It seems that Obama’s obnoxious advice to American Jews to “engage in serious self-reflection” isn’t going over so well with some Democrats. Marty Peretz writes:
Frankly, I am sick and tired of President Obama’s eldering–more accurately, hectoring–Israel’s leaders. It is, after all, they whose country is the target of an armed and ideological cyclone that Obama has done precious little to ease. …
Spengler writes of Michael as metaphor for our culture. This mini obit of Michael Jackson is not as tightly written as is his norm, but it contains some important ideas.
… The public’s grief was unfeigned and profound, for Jackson embodied the desire of a generation, that is, never to grow up. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray had a portrait that revealed his inner decay, and Michael Jackson had a nose. If one image captures the spirit of the times, it is that nose, which narrowed, shrank and finally fell in, in emulation of the failing youth of his fans.
They forgave Jackson his dysmorphia and even his alleged pedophilia, for Jackson only expressed in extreme form his generation’s refusal to age. In his self-disfigurement and eventual self-destruction, this fey child-man fought madly against maturity with a reckless abandon that his fans secretly admired. They loved him, not in spite of his personality failures, but because of them.
America’s cult of youth persists, despite the rapid aging of its population. During the next 10 years, the country’s elderly dependent ratio will rise to 25%, after holding steady for three decades at around 19%. Still, the baby boomers flee from the awful reality. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of cosmetic procedures per year rose fivefold, from 2 million to 10 million, according to the industry association. Its polling data states that 29% of Americans without children, and 24% of Americans with children, would consider plastic surgery. …
… Something astonishing had happened, compared to which the tulip bulb craze and the South Sea bubble seem like models of sobriety. The eternal adolescence that Michael Jackson so ably represented in fantasy turned into the foundation for the great investing wave of the 1990s. The best minds America could train worked hundred-hour-weeks in pizza-box-strewn lofts to launch the next site for web-based greeting cards or virtual-reality sex. Stock analysts valued new issues in proportion to their “burn rate”, assuming that the more money they lost, the more they were worth. The sort of things the world really needed – hardier seeds, safer nuclear energy, more efficient electrical batteries – never turned up on the radar screen.
Equity markets collapsed and never came back. In nominal dollars, the technology-centered NASDAQ index stands at one-third of its February 2000 peak. Real returns to investment in youth culture followed the same trajectory as Michael Jackson’s nose. Undaunted, Americans stopped speculating in technology stocks and speculated instead in houses. The Peter Pan syndrome continued to afflict the American economy. Rather than save, as aging people should, they borrowed more to acquire bigger houses. The housing bubble prolonged America’s collective adolescence for a few more years, for it allowed Americans to spend money on toys rather than saving for the retirement that came rushing at the baby boomers like an oncoming express train.
Youth culture disoriented the entrepreneurs of America so thoroughly that conventional wisdom – including that of the Vatican and the Barack Obama administration – now ignores the entrepreneur as a source of economic growth. …
David Harsanyi writes of the new “science czar”.
Dr. John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy — better known as the “science czar” — has been a longtime prophet of environmental catastrophes. Never discouraged, but never right.
Thanks to resourceful bloggers, you can read excerpts online from a hard-to-find book co-authored by Holdren in the late 1970s called “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment.”
In it, you will find the czar wading into some unpleasant talk about mass sterilizations and abortions.
It’s not surprising. Holdren spent the ’70s boogying down to the vibes of an imaginary population catastrophe and global cooling. He also participated in the famous wager between scientist Paul Ehrlich, the now-discredited “Population Bomb” theorist (and co-author of “Ecoscience), and economist Julian Simon, who believed human ingenuity would overcome demand. …
David Warren uses a Sarah Palin WaPo Op-Ed as a jumping off place in an essay on the media’s politics.
… I think it is worth considering here the “evolution” of North American media into what is now a liberal monolith — except Rupert Murdoch’s holdings, and what bleats on talk radio and the Internet.
This is a slightly deeper history than is generally supposed, with some non-political causes. These were economic developments as big as the growth of two-income families, and as subtle as the traffic jams that started to prevent efficient daytime distribution of newspapers. Their aggregate effect was to put America’s afternoon dailies progressively out of business, from the 1950s forward.
Morning papers circulated chiefly in the city cores, among a readership more liberal, and tended to be Democrat. Evening papers circulated more beyond the city, among a readership more conservative, and tended to be Republican. But from any given city, there were two distinct party points of view, and better-informed people read both newspapers. (In Canada, same thing, but Liberal and Conservative parties; in this very town, the examples were the Ottawa Citizen and the Ottawa Journal.)
The loss of those evening papers, and their replacement with network TV news, and other national media such as newsmagazines — guided ultimately by the attitudes of editors and directors in New York City — helps to explain what happened. The media ground on which American political discussion rests, shifted, largely eliminating public expression of conservative views.
The outrage expressed, today, at the very existence of Sarah Palin, not only by progressive Democrats but by urbane “establishment” Republicans, is in many ways the product of this shift. Increasingly, I find, people on the left simply cannot accept any right-wing view as legitimate. The mere fact it can be so labelled puts it beyond the pale. …
Ed Morrissey comments on the Soto Show.
… her performance adds fuel to the Republican argument that Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor not because she was the best possible candidate and not because she was a moderate, but strictly for political purposes. None of this will affect her tenure on the Supreme Court, but it will provide further evidence that Obama has a big problem in selecting people for his administration, and that there seems to be little effort at vetting nominees for important positions.
In short, every prevarication and stumble Sotomayor makes deepens the impression that Obama is not a competent executive. That’s the real danger for Obama in these hearings, and the tough questioning of Jeff Sessions and Lindsey Graham has made it a reality.
Karl Rove says they can’t change their minds now about what the stimulus was supposed to accomplish.
So what’s a president to do when the promises he made about his economic stimulus program fail to materialize? If you’re Barack Obama, you redefine your goals and act as if America won’t remember what you said originally. That’s a neat trick if you can get away with it, but Mr. Obama won’t. His words are a matter of public record and he will be held to them.
When it came to the stimulus package, the president and his administration promised, in the words of National Economic Director Larry Summers, “You’ll see the effects begin almost immediately.” Now it’s clear that those promised jobs and growth haven’t materialized.
So Mr. Obama is attempting to lower expectations retroactively, saying in an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post that his stimulus “was, from the start, a two-year program.” That is misleading. Mr. Obama never said if his stimulus were passed things might still get significantly worse in the following year.
In February, Mr. Obama said this about the goals of his stimulus package: “I think my initial measure of success is creating or saving four million jobs.” He later explained the stimulus’s $787 billion would “go directly to . . . generating three to four million new jobs.” And his Council of Economic Advisors issued an official analysis showing that the unemployment rate would top out in the third quarter of this year at just over 8%.
That quarter began on July 1, and unemployment is now 9.5%, up from 7.6% when Mr. Obama took office. There are 2.6 million fewer Americans working than there were on the day Mr. Obama was sworn in. …
ABC’s Jake Tapper on Obama’s cabinet as Chicago thugs.
… On This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said of the $787 billion stimulus package, “the reality is it hasn’t helped yet. Only about 6.8 percent of the money has actually been spent. What I proposed is, after you complete the contracts that are already committed, the things that are in the pipeline, stop it.”
A day later, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer received letters from Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar all pointing out the billions headed to Arizona.
Kyl “publicly questioned whether the stimulus is working and stated that he wants to cancel projects that aren’t presently underway,” LaHood wrote to Brewer, a Republican. “I believe the stimulus has been very effective in creating job opportunities throughout the country. However, if you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know.” …
Jennifer Rubin has a three Contentions posts today on Sotomayor that are quite good.
After two days of Sotomayor testimony I thought of Jeffrey Rosen’s piece on Sotomayor back in May (before he had to backpedal and support her so as not to embarrass the “team”). I don’t think much of his temperament criticism, but his analysis of her legal and intellectual capabilities seems exactly on the money: …
… Rosen was trying to warn his liberal compatriots that they could do “better” than Sotomayor. He was right and should get some credit for his effort. Imagine if Diane Wood or Kathleen Sullivan, both liberal in philosophy but undeniably impressive, had been up there over the last couple of days. I suspect that conservatives would have been staring at their shoes, struggling for reasons to say “no” and grudgingly acknowledging that the nominee was going to add something to the Court beyond her gender.
The question is not whether Sotomayor will get through, but why the president felt so compelled to select her. If he was desperate to find a Latina, he should have found a wise one.
Daily Beast has a story on liberal hypocrites. Imagine that.
The nation’s largest fundraiser for progressive causes issued checks to thousands of former workers in the last several weeks after settling a $2.15 million class-action suit alleging it subjected workers to grueling hours without overtime pay.
The nonprofit Fund for Public Interest Inc. was set up in 1982 as the fundraising arm of the network of Public Interest Research Groups, which was founded by Ralph Nader. It deploys legions of door-to-door and street canvassers—and once counted a young Barack Obama as one of its New York City organizers—to solicit contributions for the Human Rights Campaign, the Sierra Club, Environment America, and other groups that together spend millions of dollars each year lobbying Congress.
Those organizations often battle with deep-pocketed corporations; the money raised by canvassers is an important source of funds. In many cases, however, the employees collecting those donations made an hourly rate that worked out to less than minimum wage.
The abrupt shuttering of its Los Angeles office after employees took steps to unionize also brought allegations of illegal union-busting from many, including Christian Miller, an L.A. employee from 2002 to 2006 who filed the suit on behalf of 12,000 canvassers and directors. …
It was 30 years ago Jimmy Carter went on TV and told us it was all our fault. Marty Peretz remembers the “malaise” speech.
… It was not only that there was no gasoline. Or that interest rates and unemployment rates were very high. (Remember, if you’re old enough, the “pain index.”)
A catastrophe had also befallen American foreign policy. The shah had fallen and been replaced by the regime of the ayatollahs. …
Couple of Corner posts from Ed Whelan on the baseball frauds – Obama and Sotomayor.
It turns out that I was too quick to let President Obama off the hook for his reference to the longtime stadium of his supposedly beloved White Sox. First, I failed to take note that Obama referred to “Cominskey Field” (rather than “Park”). As one e-mailer puts it:
When race-car driver Jeff Gordon led “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at Wrigley Field and referred to it as as “Wrigley Stadium,” he was booed mercilessly. At least Gordon had some excuses: he’s not from Chicago, he’s apparently not a baseball fan, and a central feature of his job is not public speaking. Obama has no excuse, especially given that he said “Cominskey Field” while insinuating that Cubs fans are too high-brow to be real baseball fans. …
Reuters has the pitch of the girly man.