Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Robert J. Samuelson comments on the lack of effect seen from the stimulus bill.
It’s not surprising that the much-ballyhooed “economic stimulus” hasn’t done much stimulating. President Obama and his aides argue that it’s too early to expect startling results. They have a point. A $14 trillion economy won’t revive in a nanosecond. But the defects of the $787 billion package go deeper and won’t be cured by time. The program crafted by Obama and the Democratic Congress wasn’t engineered to maximize its economic impact. It was mostly a political exercise, designed to claim credit for any recovery, shower benefits on favored constituencies and signal support for fashionable causes.
As a result, much of the stimulus’s potential benefit has been squandered. Spending increases and tax cuts are sprinkled in too many places and, all too often, are too delayed to do much good now. Nor do they concentrate on reviving the economy’s most depressed sectors: state and local governments; the housing and auto industries. None of this means the stimulus won’t help or precludes a recovery, but the help will be weaker than necessary. …
Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie review the first six months of hope and change.
Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president’s approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to “accomplish too much,” and 57 percent think the country is on the “wrong track.”
From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. “Give it to me!” the president egged on a Michigan audience last week, pledging to “solve problems” and not “gripe” about the economic hand he was dealt.
Despite such bravura, Obama must be furtively reviewing the history of recent Democratic administrations for some kind of road map out of his post-100-days ditch.
So far, he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter. Like the 39th president, Obama has inherited an awful economy, dizzying budget deficits and a geopolitical situation as promising as Kim Jong Il’s health. Like Carter, Obama is smart, moralistic and enamored of alternative energy schemes that were nonstarters back when America’s best-known peanut farmer was installing solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Like Carter, Obama faces as much effective opposition from his own party’s left wing as he does from an ardent but diminished GOP. …
Stuart Taylor Jr. contrasts a Sotomayor speech to the responses she gave in the Congressional hearing.
As one who had hoped for a moderately liberal, intellectually honest nominee and feared the possibility of an unprincipled left-liberal ideologue steeped in identity politics, I am having trouble figuring out Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., captured my own puzzlement when he told Sotomayor on Tuesday that although her 17-year judicial record struck him as “left-of-center but within the mainstream, you have these speeches that just blow me away…. Who are we getting here?”
Graham was talking mainly about a succession of at least five very similar speeches between 1994 and 2003 in which Sotomayor appeared to glorify ethnic and gender identity repeatedly at the expense of the judicial obligation to be impartial and suggested that “a wise Latina woman” would be a better judge than “a white male.”
In response to questions such as Graham’s, Sotomayor and her supporters have touted her judicial decisions as proof that she has been a solid, impartial judge.
They have a point. Sotomayor’s more than 3,000 mostly unremarkable rulings have not been ultra-liberal, have not displayed any broad pattern of bias in race or gender cases, and have closely followed precedent. Ordinarily, a judge’s record on the bench is the best guide to what she would do on the Supreme Court. She has also lived an admirable life.
But how persuasive were Sotomayor’s efforts to explain away those jarring speeches? Below I juxtapose excerpts from a typical speech — in October 2001, to an audience of Hispanic activists and others at the University of California (Berkeley) — with portions of her testimony on Tuesday and Wednesday. …
Krauthammer’s take on the Soto hearings.
It is a waste of time, and it isn’t even an entertaining show. Ever since Robert Bork spoke the truth in answering his questions about his philosophy and was denied a seat on the court, everybody understood that it’s kabuki. …
… Her performance was absolutely incredible in the sense that it was not believable, but it will get her on the court.
And Richard Cohen is underwhelmed by Sotomayor. This is our third item today from the Washington Post that trashes the Obama agenda.
A political ad that lucky New Yorkers get to see on television begins with “A million lawyers in America” and goes on to wonder about certain no-bid contracts in nearby New Jersey that will not concern us today. But every time the ad runs, I cannot help thinking about Sonia Sotomayor: A million lawyers in America, and Barack Obama chooses her for the Supreme Court.
Don’t get me wrong. She is fully qualified. She is smart and learned and experienced and, in case you have not heard, a Hispanic, female nominee, of whom there have not been any since the dawn of our fair republic. But she has no cause, unless it is not to make a mistake, and has no passion, unless it is not to show any, and lacks intellectual brilliance, unless it is disguised under a veil of soporific competence until she takes her seat on the court. We shall see.
In the meantime, Sotomayor will do, and will do very nicely, as a personification of what ails the American left. She is, as everyone has pointed out, in the mainstream of American liberalism, a stream both intellectually shallow and preoccupied with the past. We have a neat summary of it in the recent remarks of Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), who said he wanted a Supreme Court justice “who will continue to move the court forward in protecting . . . important civil rights.” He cited the shooting of a gay youth, the gang rape of a lesbian and the murder of a black man — in other words, violence based on homophobia and racism. Yes. But who nowadays disagrees?
What, though, about a jurist who can advance the larger cause of civil rights and at the same time protect individual rights? This was the dilemma raised by the New Haven firefighters’ case. The legal mind who could have found a “liberal” way out of the thicket would deserve a Supreme Court seat. As an appellate judge, Sotomayor did not even attempt such an exercise. She punted. …
Former Oklahoma representative J.C. Watts weighs in with more negative consequences that would result from Obamacare.
Medical specialists are doctors who train for many years to understand every system and nuance of the human body. They complete their residency at the local hospital, and then they commit many more years to the study and understanding of a single human system in order to specialize in a particular surgical technique or diagnosis.
Medical specialists are doctors who can cure what general practitioners are unable to recognize. And they will no longer exist under President Obama’s nationalized health care plan.
The glory of American medicine today is that it encourages students of medicine to dig deeper, work harder and find a specialty niche in which they can invest their time and training because — through these specialties — they will save more lives, offer more choice to America’s sick and ailing population, and yes they will probably make more money. …
…Under President Obama’s nationalized health care program, surgical clinics and highly advanced surgical procedures will be a thing of the past. The goal of nationalizing health care is to standardize services, not to specialize in them. Rather than treating each individual as a unique medical case, everyone will be treated the same.
Government-run health care systems do not encourage personal achievement for doctors, nor do they pay for additional knowledge and expertise. Medical schools in this country will be graduating only general practitioners; specialty fields will no longer be taught because there is no government reward or financial incentive for specializing more than the person next to you. …
Tom Elia posts that members of Congress are already considering how to use the car companies they’ve “bought”.
College student Dan Lawton wrote about the lack of political diversity on his campus.
…I argued that the lifeblood of higher education was subjecting students to diverse viewpoints and the university needed to work on attracting more conservative professors.
I also suggested that students working on right-leaning ideas may have difficulty finding faculty mentors. I couldn’t imagine, for instance, that journalism that supported the Iraq war or gun rights would be met with much enthusiasm.
What I didn’t realize is that journalism that examined the dominance of liberal ideas on campus would be addressed with hostility.
A professor who confronted me declared that he was “personally offended” by my column. He railed that his political viewpoints never affected his teaching and suggested that if I wanted a faculty with Republicans I should have attended a university in the South. “If you like conservatism you can certainly attend the University of Texas and you can walk past the statue of Jefferson Davis everyday on your way to class,” he wrote in an e-mail. …
Steve Forbes comments on the economy and what Washington should do to help.
The Obama Administration is making noises about the need for a second stimulus package. This is nuts. Hyped-up government spending is useless, if not damaging, for providing sustained economic growth. Our own experiences, as well as those of other countries, particularly Japan in the 1990s and the early part of this decade, have demonstrated that repeatedly.
Obama’s economic pooh-bahs should instead focus on making the dollar strong and stable. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed head Ben Bernanke should both publicly vow that the Fed will not monetize future government debts and that they will restore the integrity of the U.S. dollar by measuring how it’s doing against other currencies and commodities, particularly gold. Alas, an elastic dollar is seen by these officials as an essential policy tool instead of a weapon that destroys market confidence, thereby retarding investment and risk-taking. …