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We are long again at the end of the week. Partly because of a large humor section which includes Mark Steyn, P. J. O’Rourke, Dilbert, and Scrappleface. And the cartoonists went crazy with the trip to Copenhagen while so many other things call for attention.
Thomas Sowell on all the smart people in DC.
Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.
It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brilliant “brains trust” advisers whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, while claiming credit for ending it. The Great Depression ended only when the Second World War put an end to many New Deal policies. …
… Even in a country which suffered none of the wartime destruction that others suffered in the 20th century, Argentina began that century as one of the 10 richest nations in the world— ahead of France and Germany— and ended it as such an economic disaster that no one would even compare it to France or Germany.
Politically brilliant and charismatic leaders, promoting reckless government spending— of whom Juan Peron was the most prominent, but by no means alone— managed to create an economic disaster in a country with an abundance of natural resources and a country that was spared the stresses that wars inflicted on other nations in the 20th century.
Someone recently pointed out how much Barack Obama’s style and strategies resemble those of Latin American charismatic despots— the takeover of industries by demagogues who never ran a business, the rousing rhetoric of resentment addressed to the masses and the personal cult of the leader promoted by the media. But do we want to become the world’s largest banana republic?
The One doesn’t have enough to do, so he and his Education Secretary, the one who left Chicago with a 40% dropout rate, have decided our kids don’t go to school enough. David Harsanyi has thoughts.
Children can be irritating — especially your children. This is why the notion of a school year extending 12 months is not completely revolting. But, alas, the government is not a babysitting service. Not yet. Hopefully, not ever.
In the midst of grappling with a scattering of thorny issues, President Barack Obama took time to lend a fatherly hand this week. Your little Jake, it seems, doesn’t spend enough time under the gaze of the state. As it turns out, Jake is at a tragic disadvantage when competing against Yuri from Kazakhstan.
If you believe this tale, the administration has an answer for you: Kill summer vacation and add a few hours to the school day. “Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan claimed. “I want to just level the playing field.” …
… the president’s advice would hold more weight if he started sending his own children to public schools before mandating that your child be stuck in one during his or her God-given summer vacation.
John Fund with interesting background on Sarah Palin’s upcoming blockbuster book.
… The book, which will be published on November 17, was a crash project. Ms. Palin actually moved temporarily to San Diego after she resigned the governorship in July so she could be close to her collaborator, Lynn Vincent. I bumped into Ms. Vincent, a former editor at the Christian-oriented World magazine, in New York a few weeks ago, where she had parked herself in a hotel close to the offices of HarperCollins while working on the book’s final edits.
Ms. Vincent didn’t reveal any details about the book, but did acknowledge it will describe Ms. Palin’s frustration over her treatment by the staffers she inherited from the McCain campaign after her surprise pick as the GOP vice presidential nominee last year. Ms. Palin was booked on grueling interviews with hostile reporters while talk-show hosts such as Glenn Beck couldn’t even get through to her aides. Mr. Beck tells me he was stunned when he picked up the phone one day just before the election to discover Sarah Palin was on the other end of the line. “She explained that she had been blocked from reaching her audience, so she was now ‘going rogue’ and booking her own interviews,” Mr. Beck told me. “I was thrilled she had burst out of the cage they’d built for her and we were finally talking.” …
This is fun. What is a tele-prompted empty suit to do? Three days ago Howard Fineman was dissing the prez. Yesterday, Richard Cohen. Now it’s the New Yorker’s George Packer.
… People in the Administration tell me that the horror of unauthorized press accounts is of a piece with the no-drama Obama campaign. They say that Obama hates “process” stories because they end up focussing on trivial matters of personality. They also say that the White House wants to give the impression that everything flows from the top.
This last is the one that troubles me most. Even if such a thing were possible, it isn’t healthy. I’d even say it’s undemocratic. Something as vast and complex as the U.S. government cannot be presented to the public along the same lines as a Presidential campaign. In the end—I saw this happen to the Bush Administration in Iraq—the result is that the White House doesn’t seal information in, but, instead, it seals itself off from information. The levers of government eventually stop working because no one in the bureaucracy wants to explain what’s going on for fear of the White House press office, which means the ability to think clearly grows sclerotic. …
Chicago Trib’s John Kass tells us why there’s a trip to Denmark to sell Chicago’s Olympics. One of Pickings readers says Obama is having a rough week since he is forced to go to Copenhagen and say nice things about our country.
… It is about paying political debts. It is about waltzing with the one that brought him to the dance, not so much Michelle, as dancing with the little guy with the short shanks on the 5th floor of City Hall.
So he will fly halfway around the world when he doesn’t have the time, with so many other items on his agenda, because he has to.
He’s Chicago’s president. And he got the call from the boss.
Boy! We’re so lucky Michelle and Barack are in the White House. Byron York writes about the “sacrifice” Michelle made.
In her speech in Copenhagen today, First Lady Michelle Obama said her trip to Denmark, along with the travel of her “dear friend” and “chit-chat buddy” Oprah Winfrey, as well as tomorrow’s visit by President Obama, is a “sacrifice” on behalf of the children of Chicago and the United States. “As much of a sacrifice as people say this is for me or Oprah or the president to come for these few days,” the first lady told a crowd of people involved in the Chicago project, “so many of you in this room have been working for years to bring this bid home.” …
Krauthammer’s Take from the Corner is rich.
On the positive achievements of the Obama administration:
“To me, that is a lightning round question, but I will dig deep and I will give him credit for continuing the Bush policy of the rendition and detention without trial.
Rendition is handing over a bad guy that you capture abroad over to another country, which was denounced by the left in the Bush years as inhuman. And detention without trial, of course, was attacked by the Democratic left as a rape of the constitution.
So I’m glad Obama is continuing the inhumanity and the constitutional rape of the Bush administration. It shows a certain broadmindedness.
(LAUGHTER)
I will give him credit for one other thing, for having so depleted his political capital on health care that he really doesn’t have the charisma and political resources now to do a lot of mischief.”
Phillip Howard in WSJ says tort reform is absent from ObamaCare because the trial lawyers own the Dems.
Eliminating defensive medicine could save upwards of $200 billion in health-care costs annually, according to estimates by the American Medical Association and others. The cure is a reliable medical malpractice system that patients, doctors and the general public can trust.
But this is the one reform Washington will not seriously consider. That’s because the trial lawyers, among the largest contributors to the Democratic Party, thrive on the unreliable justice system we have now.
Almost all the other groups with a stake in health reform—including patient safety experts, physicians, the AARP, the Chamber of Commerce, schools of public health—support pilot projects such as special health courts that would move beyond today’s hyper-adversarial malpractice lawsuit system to a court that would quickly and reliably distinguish between good and bad care. The support for some kind of reform reflects a growing awareness among these groups that managing health care sensibly, including containing costs, is almost impossible when doctors go through the day thinking about how to protect themselves from lawsuits. …
Tom Friedman is worried about incivility in DC. Peter Wehner has thoughts.
… I’ve written before about the importance of civility in public discourse and the need for what has been called the “etiquette of democracy.” One question, though: When George W. Bush was being routinely savaged by those on the Left—including prominent Democrats like Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Harry Reid—where were those Friedman columns of ringing condemnation? I don’t recall them; perhaps you do. …
Michael Barone notices things others don’t. Last month the percentage of Americans who were foreign born declined. First decline in almost 40 years.
… On their face, the numbers do not sound stunning. The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey reported that the foreign-born percentage of the nation’s population was 12.6 percent on July 1, 2007, and 12.5 percent on July 1, 2008, and there is some margin of error in ACS data. Nonetheless, this 0.1 percent refers to a large number of people. The foreign-born population was 38,048,456 according to the 2007 ACS and (by my calculation) about 38,007,466 (12.5 percent of 304,059,728) according to the 2008 ACS. That’s a decline of about 40,000 people—and a sharp reversal of trend.
The foreign-born percentage of the U.S. population rose from 9.7 percent in 1850 to 14.7 percent in 1890, subsided slightly to 13.6 percent in 1900 and then rose to 14.7 percent again in 1910.1 Immigration was cut off during the war years 1914 to 1918 and then by restrictive immigration laws passed in 1921 and 1924, and as immigrants died off the foreign-born percentage fell to a post-1850 low of 4.7 percent in 1970. It has risen relentlessly since then, as Latin and Asian immigration has surged, contrary to the expectations of the framers of the 1965 immigration act, to 12.6 percent in 2007, a figure almost as high as those recorded in decennial censuses from 1860 to 1920. …
This is rich. WaPo says that Raúl Castro is introducing private farms in Cuba. Lenin did this 88 years ago when he announced the New Economic Policy in 1921 so that the first communist famine in Russia, might end. In a speech defending against charges he sold out to the capitalists, Lenin assured followers (Trotsky among them) the government would control “the commanding heights” of the economy. Another memorable phrase, like “useful idiots”, from the mind of Vladimir Ilyich.
… The Cuban government, in its most dramatic reform since Castro took over for his ailing older brother Fidel three years ago, is offering private farmers such as Fuentes the use of fallow state lands to grow crops — for a profit.
Capitalism comes to the communist isle? Not quite, but close. Raúl Castro prefers to call it “a new socialist model.” But Fuentes gets to pocket some extra cash.
“The harder you work, the better you do,” said Fuentes, who immediately understood the concept.
Castro’s government says it has lent 1.7 million acres of unused state land in the past year to 82,000 Cubans in an effort to cut imports, which currently make up 60 percent of the country’s food supply. …
…At a major speech honoring the revolution in July, Castro smacked his hand on the podium and announced: “The land is there, and here are the Cubans! Let’s see if we can get to work or not, if we produce or not, if we keep our word. It is not a question of yelling ‘Fatherland or Death!’ or ‘Down with imperialism!’ or ‘The blockade hurts us!’ The land is there waiting for our sweat.” …
Mark Steyn waited a few weeks to note his run-ins with Ted Kennedy.
I was overseas when Sen. Edward Kennedy died, and a European reporter asked me what my “most vivid memory” of the great man was. I didn’t like to say, because it didn’t seem quite the appropriate occasion. But my only close encounter with the Lion of the Senate was many years ago at Logan Airport late one night. A handful of us, tired and bedraggled, were standing on the water shuttle waiting to be ferried across the harbor to downtown Boston. A sixth gentleman hopped aboard, wearing the dark-suited garb of the advance man, and had a word in a crew member’s ear, and so we waited, and waited, in the chilly Atlantic air, wondering which eminence was the cause of our delay. And suddenly there he was on the quay, looming out of the fog. He stepped aboard. The small launch lurched and rocked, waves splashed the deck, luggage danced in the air, and the five of us all grabbed for whatever rail was to hand as the realization dawned that we’d been signed up for a watery excursion with Senator Kennedy. …
P. J. O’Rourke is getting tired from all the hating he’s been doing. You know, being a right winger and all.
Whew, I’m pooped. Jimmy Carter has got me run ragged with all the hating I’m supposed to do. Jimmy says I’m a racist because I oppose President Obama’s health care reform program. Even Jimmy Carter can’t be wrong all the time. And since Jimmy Carter has been wrong about every single thing for the past 44 years, maybe–just as a matter of statistical probability–he’s right this time.
I hadn’t noticed I was a racist, but that was no doubt because I was too busy being a homophobe. Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot. Since I do not want America to suffer another Sean Penn movie, I will accept that I’m a homophobe, too. And I’m a male chauvinist due to the fact that I think Nancy Pelosi is blowing smoke–excuse me, carbon neutral, biodegradable airborne particulate matter–out her pantsuit. …
Dilbert has figured out China is doomed. Hint; it has to do with lawyers.
Scrappleface is here.