In Denial The Weekly Standard--The meltdown of the climate campaign.
It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.
The body blows to the climate campaign did not end with the Climategate emails. The IPCC—which has produced four omnibus assessments of climate science since 1992—has issued several embarrassing retractions from its most recent 2007 report, starting with the claim that Himalayan glaciers were in danger of melting as soon as 2035. That such an outlandish claim would be so readily accepted is a sign of the credulity of the climate campaign and the media: Even if extreme global warming occurred over the next century, the one genuine scientific study available estimated that the huge ice fields of the Himalayas would take more than 300 years to melt—a prediction any beginning chemistry student could confirm with a calculator. (The actual evidence is mixed: Some Himalayan glaciers are currently expanding.) The source for the melt-by-2035 claim turned out to be not a peer-reviewed scientific assessment, but a report from an advocacy group, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which in turn lifted the figure from a popular magazine article in India whose author later disavowed his offhand speculation.
But what made this first retraction noteworthy was the way in which it underscored the thuggishness of the climate establishment. The IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri (an economist and former railroad engineer who is routinely described as a “climate scientist”), initially said that critics of the Himalayan glacier melt prediction were engaging in “voodoo science,” though it later turned out that Pachauri had been informed of the error in early December—in advance of the U.N.’s climate change conference in Copenhagen—but failed to disclose it. He’s invoking the Charlie Rangel defense: It was my staff’s fault.
The Himalayan retraction has touched off a cascade of further retractions and corrections, though the IPCC and other organs of climate alarmism are issuing their corrections sotto voce, hoping the media won’t take notice. The IPCC’s assessment that 40 percent of the Amazonian rain forest was at risk of destruction from climate change was also revealed to be without scientific foundation; the WWF was again the source. The Daily Telegraph identified 20 more claims of ruin in the IPCC’s 2007 report that are based on reports from advocacy groups such as Greenpeace rather than peer-reviewed research, including claims that African agricultural production would be cut in half, estimates of coral reef degradation, and the scale of glacier melt in the Alps and the Andes. Numerous other claims were sourced to unpublished student papers and dissertations, or to misstated or distorted research.
Peer reviewers in the formal IPCC process had flagged many of these errors and distortions during the writing of the 2007 report but were ignored. For example, the IPCC claimed that the world is experiencing rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather related events brought on by climate change. But the underlying paper, when finally published in 2008, expressly contradicted this, saying, “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.” Perhaps the most embarrassing walkback was the claim that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level, and therefore gravely threatened by rising sea levels. The correct number is 26 percent, which Dutch scientists say they tried to tell the IPCC before the 2007 report was published, to no avail. And in any case, a paper published last year in Nature Geoscience predicting a 21st-century sea level rise of up to 32 inches has been withdrawn, with the authors acknowledging mistaken methodology and admitting “we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.” The IPCC ignored several published studies casting doubt on its sea level rise estimates.
The IPCC isn’t the only important node of the climate campaign having its reputation run through the shredder. The 2006 Stern Review, a British report on the economics of climate change named for its lead author, Lord Nicholas Stern, was revealed to have quietly watered down some of its headline-grabbing claims in its final published report because, as the Telegraph put it, “the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified.” Like rats deserting a sinking ship, scientists and economists cited in the Stern Review have disavowed the misuse of their work. Two weeks ago the World Meteorological Association pulled the rug out from under one of Gore’s favorite talking points—that climate change will mean more tropical storms. A new study by the top scientists in the field concluded that although warmer oceans might make for stronger tropical storms in the future, there has been no climate-related trend in tropical storm activity over recent decades and, further, there will likely be significantly fewer tropical storms in a warmer world. “We have come to substantially different conclusions from the IPCC,” said lead author Chris Landsea, a scientist at the National Hurricane Center in Florida. (Landsea, who does not consider himself a climate skeptic, resigned from the IPCC in 2005 on account of its increasingly blatant politicization.)
It was a thorough debunking, as Roger Pielke Jr.’s invaluable blog (rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com) noted in highlighting key findings in the study:
What about more intense rainfall? “[A] detectable change in tropical-cyclone-related rainfall has not been established by existing studies.” What about changes in location of storm formation, storm motion, lifetime and surge? “There is no conclusive evidence that any observed changes in tropical cyclone genesis, tracks, duration and surge flooding exceed the variability expected from natural causes.” Bottom line? “[W]e cannot at this time conclusively identify anthropogenic signals in past tropical cyclone data.”
When Pielke, an expert on hurricane damage at the University of Colorado at Boulder, pointed out defects in the purported global-warming/tropical storm link in a 2005 edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the lead author of the IPCC’s work on tropical storms, Kevin Trenberth, called the article “shameful,” said it should be “withdrawn,” but in typical fashion refused to debate Pielke about the substance of the article.
Finally, the original Climategate controversy over the leaked documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) (see my “Scientists Behaving Badly,” The Weekly Standard, December 14, 2009) is far from over. The British government has determined that the CRU’s prolonged refusal to release documents sought in 95 Freedom of Information requests is a potential criminal violation.
(Following is the 3rd page--lengthy but sums up the current state of the dissolving climate change alarmist arguments. Fascinating if you follow it closely):
The rout has opened up serious divisions within the formerly closed ranks of the climate campaign. Before Climategate, expressing skepticism about catastrophic global warming typically got the hefty IPCC report thrown in your face along with the mantra that “2,500 of the world’s top scientists all agree” about climate change. Now the IPCC is being disavowed like a Mission Impossible team with its cover blown. Senate Environment and Public Works chairman Barbara Boxer insisted on February 23 that she relied solely on U.S. scientific research and not the IPCC to support the EPA’s greenhouse gas “endangerment finding.” In her opening statement at a hearing, Boxer said, “I didn’t quote one international scientist or IPCC report. . . . We are quoting the American scientific community here.” The U.N. has announced that it will launch an “independent review” of the IPCC, though like the British investigation of the CRU, the U.N. review will probably be staffed by “settled science” camp followers who will obligingly produce a whitewash. But Pachauri’s days as IPCC chairman are likely numbered; there are mounting calls from within the IPCC for Pachauri to resign, amid charges of potential conflicts of interest (like Gore, Pachauri is closely involved with commercial energy schemes that benefit from greenhouse gas regulation) but also in part because Pachauri chose this delicate moment to publish a soft-core pornographic novel. (The main character is an aging environmentalist and engineer engaged in a “spiritual journey” that includes meeting Shirley MacLaine, detailed explorations of the Kama Sutra, and group sex.)
Robert Watson, Pachauri’s predecessor as chairman of the IPCC from 1997 to 2002, told the BBC: “In my opinion, Dr. Pachauri has to ask himself, is he still credible, and the governments of the world have to ask themselves, is he still credible.” Not the most ringing endorsement. Yvo de Boer, the head of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (the diplomatic contrivance that produced the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen circus), announced his surprise resignation on February 18. De Boer will join the private sector after years of saying that warming is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced.
The climate campaign is a movement unable to hide its decline. Skeptics and critics of climate alarmism have long been called “deniers,” with the comparison to Holocaust denial made explicit, but the denier label now more accurately fits the climate campaigners. Their first line of defense was that the acknowledged errors amount to a few isolated and inconsequential points in the report of the IPCC’s Working Group II, which studies the effects of global warming, and not the more important report of the IPCC’s Working Group I, which is about the science of global warming. Working Group I, this argument goes, is where the real action is, as it deals with the computer models and temperature data on which the “consensus” conclusion is based that the Earth has warmed by about 0.8 degrees Celsius over the last century, that human-generated greenhouse gases are overwhelmingly responsible for this rise, and that we may expect up to 4 degrees Celsius of further warming if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t stopped by mid-century. As Gore put it in his February 28 Times article, “the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.” I note in passing that the 2007 Working Group I report uses the terms “uncertain” or “uncertainty” more than 1,300 times in its 987 pages, including what it identified as 54 “key uncertainties” limiting our mastery of climate prediction.
This central pillar of the climate campaign is unlikely to survive much longer, and each repetition of the “science-is-settled” mantra inflicts more damage on the credibility of the climate science community. The scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University, Phil (“hide the decline”) Jones dealt the science-is-settled narrative a huge blow with his candid admission in a BBC interview that his surface temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated, that the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today, and that he agrees that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years—all three points that climate campaigners have been bitterly contesting. And Jones specifically disavowed the “science-is-settled” slogan:
BBC: When scientists say “the debate on climate change is over,” what exactly do they mean, and what don’t they mean?
Jones: It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well [emphasis added].
Judith Curry, head of the School of Earth and Atmos-pheric Sciences at Georgia Tech and one of the few scientists convinced of the potential for catastrophic global warming who is willing to engage skeptics seriously, wrote February 24: “No one really believes that the ‘science is settled’ or that ‘the debate is over.’ Scientists and others that say this seem to want to advance a particular agenda. There is nothing more detrimental to public trust than such statements.”
The next wave of climate revisionism is likely to reopen most of the central questions of “settled science” in the IPCC’s Working Group I, starting with the data purporting to prove how much the Earth has warmed over the last century. A London Times headline last month summarizes the shocking revision currently underway: “World May Not Be Warming, Scientists Say.” The Climategate emails and documents revealed the disarray in the surface temperature records the IPCC relies upon to validate its claim of 0.8 degrees Celsius of human-caused warming, prompting a flood of renewed focus on the veracity and handling of surface temperature data. Skeptics such as Anthony Watts, Joseph D’Aleo, and Stephen McIntyre have been pointing out the defects in the surface temperature record for years, but the media and the IPCC ignored them. Watts and D’Aleo have painstakingly documented (and in many cases photographed) the huge number of temperature stations that have been relocated, corrupted by the “urban heat island effect,” or placed too close to heat sources such as air conditioning compressors, airports, buildings, or paved surfaces, as well as surface temperature series that are conveniently left out of the IPCC reconstructions and undercut the IPCC’s simplistic story of rising temperatures. The compilation and statistical treatment of global temperature records is hugely complex, but the skeptics such as Watts and D’Aleo offer compelling critiques showing that most of the reported warming disappears if different sets of temperature records are included, or if compromised station records are excluded.
The puzzle deepens when more accurate satellite temperature records, available starting in 1979, are considered. There is a glaring anomaly: The satellite records, which measure temperatures in the middle and upper atmosphere, show very little warming since 1979 and do not match up with the ground-based measurements. Furthermore, the satellite readings of the middle- and upper-air temperatures fail to record any of the increases the climate models say should be happening in response to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. John Christy of the University of Alabama, a contributing author to the IPCC’s Working Group I chapter on surface and atmospheric climate change, tried to get the IPCC to acknowledge this anomaly in its 2007 report but was ignored. (Christy is responsible for helping to develop the satellite monitoring system that has tracked global temperatures since 1979. He received NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for this work.) Bottom line: Expect some surprises to come out of the revisions of the surface temperature records that will take place over the next couple of years.
Eventually the climate modeling community is going to have to reconsider the central question: Have the models the IPCC uses for its predictions of catastrophic warming overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases? Two recently published studies funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, one by Brookhaven Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz in the Journal of Geophysical Research, and one by MIT’s Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi in Geophysical Research Letters, both argue for vastly lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases. The models the IPCC uses for projecting a 3 to 4 degree Celsius increase in temperature all assume large positive (that is, temperature-magnifying) feedbacks from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; Schwartz, Lindzen, and Choi discern strong negative (or temperature-reducing) feedbacks in the climate system, suggesting an upper-bound of future temperature rise of no more than 2 degrees Celsius.
If the climate system is less sensitive to greenhouse gases than the climate campaign believes, then what is causing plainly observable changes in the climate, such as earlier arriving springs, receding glaciers, and shrinking Arctic Ocean ice caps? There have been alternative explanations in the scientific literature for several years, ignored by the media and the IPCC alike. The IPCC downplays theories of variations in solar activity, such as sunspot activity and gamma ray bursts, and although there is robust scientific literature on the issue, even the skeptic community is divided about whether solar activity is a primary cause of recent climate variation. Several studies of Arctic warming conclude that changes in ocean currents, cloud formation, and wind patterns in the upper atmosphere may explain the retreat of glaciers and sea ice better than greenhouse gases. Another factor in the Arctic is “black carbon”—essentially fine soot particles from coal-fired power plants and forest fires, imperceptible to the naked eye but reducing the albedo (solar reflectivity) of Arctic ice masses enough to cause increased summertime ice melt. Above all, if the medieval warm period was indeed as warm or warmer than today, we cannot rule out the possibility that the changes of recent decades are part of a natural rebound from the “Little Ice Age” that followed the medieval warm period and ended in the 19th century. Skeptics have known and tried to publicize all of these contrarian or confounding scientific findings, but the compliant news media routinely ignored all of them, enabling the IPCC to get away with its serial exaggeration and blatant advocacy for more than a decade.
The question going forward is whether the IPCC will allow contrarian scientists and confounding scientific research into its process, and include the opportunity for dissenting scientists to publish a minority report. Last March, John Christy sent a proposal to the 140 authors of IPCC Working Group I asking “that the IPCC allow for well-credentialed climate scientists to craft a chapter on an alternative view presenting evidence for lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases than has been the IPCC’s recent message—all based on published information. . . . An alternative view is necessary, one that is not censured for the so-called purpose of consensus. This will present to our policymakers an honest picture of scientific discourse and process.” Christy received no response.
In the aftermath of Climategate, Christy proposed in Nature magazine that the IPCC move to a Wikipedia-style format, in which lead authors would mediate an ongoing discussion among scientists, with the caveat that all claims would need to be based on original studies and data. Such a process would produce more timely and digestible information than the huge twice-a-decade reports the IPCC now produces. Christy told me that he does not hold out much hope for serious IPCC reform. Although he was a lead author in the IPCC’s 2001 report and a contributing author for the 2007 report, the Obama administration has not nominated Christy to participate in the next report. IPCC participants are nominated by governments (a “gatekeeping exercise,” Christy rightly notes). The nomination period closes next week.
Even a reformed IPCC that offered a more balanced account of climate science would make little difference to the fanatical climate campaigners, whose second line of defense is to double-down on demonizing skeptics and “deniers.” Greenpeace, which should be regarded as the John Birch Society of the environmental movement, is filing its own Freedom of Information Act and state public record act requests to obtain private emails and documents from university-based climate skeptics such as Christy, Pat Michaels (University of Virginia), David Legates (University of Delaware), and Willie Soon (Harvard University/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), hoping to stir up a scandal commensurate with Climategate by hyping a supposed nefarious link between such researchers and energy companies. Greenpeace has sent letters to nongovernmental skeptics and organizations requesting that they submit to polygraph examinations about their role in or knowledge of the “illegally hacked” CRU emails. “We want to do our part,” Greenpeace’s letter reads, “to help international law enforcement get to the bottom of this potentially criminal act by putting some basic questions to people whose bank accounts, propaganda efforts or influence peddling interests benefitted from the theft.” One wonders whether Greenpeace has really thought this through, as a successful FOIA request for the emails of American scientists would open the floodgates to further probing of James Hansen at NASA, Michael Mann at Penn State, and other government climate scientists who probably wrote emails as embarrassing or crude as Phil Jones and the CRU circle.
Greenpeace is hardly alone in its paranoia. Britain’s former chief government science adviser, Sir David King, popped off to the press in early February that a foreign intelligence service working with American industry lobbyists—he intimated that he had the CIA and ExxonMobil in mind—were responsible for hacking the CRU emails last year. King backed away from this claim the next day, admitting he had no information to back it up.
The climate campaign camp followers are exhausting their invective against skeptics. Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Guardian that climate skeptics are akin to tobacco scientists—some of the same people, in fact, though he gave no names and offered no facts to establish such a claim. In the Los Angeles Times Bill McKibben compared climate skeptics to O.J. Simpson’s “dream team” of defense attorneys able to twist incontrovertible scientific evidence. Not to be outdone, Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT) compared climate skeptics to appeasers of Hitler in the 1930s, a comparison, to be sure, that Al Gore has been making since the early 1990s, but Sanders delivered it with his patented popping-neck-veins style that makes you worry for his health.
In addition to being a sign of desperation, these ad hominem arguments from the climate campaigners also make clear which camp is truly guilty of anti-intellectualism. Gore and the rest of the chorus simply will not discuss any of the scientific anomalies and defects in the conventional climate narrative that scientists such as Christy have pointed out to the IPCC. Perhaps the climate campaign’s most ludicrous contortion is their response to the record snowfall of the eastern United States over the last two months. The ordinary citizen, applying Occam’s Razor while shoveling feet of snow, sees global warming as a farce. The climate campaigners now insist that “weather is not climate,” and that localized weather events, even increased winter snowfall, can be consistent with climate change. They may be right about this, though even the IPCC cautions that we still have little ability to predict regional climate-related weather changes. These are the same people, however, who jumped up and down that Hurricane Katrina was positive proof that catastrophic global warming had arrived, though the strong 2005 hurricane season was followed by four quiet years for tropical storms that made a hash of that talking point.
The ruckus about “weather is not climate” exposes the greatest problem of the climate campaign. Al Gore and his band of brothers have been happy to point to any weather anomaly—cold winters, warm winters, in-between winters—as proof of climate change. But the climate campaigners cannot name one weather pattern or event that would be inconsistent with their theory. Pretty convenient when your theory works in only one direction.
The unraveling of the climate campaign was entirely predictable, though not the dramatic swiftness with which it arrived. The long trajectory of the climate change controversy conforms exactly to the “issue-attention cycle” that political scientist Anthony Downs explained in the Public Interest almost 40 years ago. Downs laid out a five-stage cycle through which political issues of all kinds typically pass. A group of experts and interest groups begin promoting a problem or crisis, which is soon followed by the alarmed discovery of the problem by the news media and broader political class. This second stage typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call this the dopamine stage—as activists conceive the issue in terms of global salvation and redemption. One of the largest debilities of the climate campaign from the beginning was their having conceived the issue not as a practical problem, like traditional air pollution, but as an expression, in Gore’s view, of deeper spiritual and even metaphysical problems arising from our “dysfunctional civilization.” Gore is still thinking about the issue in these terms, grasping for another dopamine rush. In his February 28 New York Times article, he claimed that an international climate treaty would be “an instrument of human redemption.”
The third stage is the hinge. As Downs explains, there comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” This is where we have been since the Kyoto process proposed completely implausible near-term reductions in fossil fuel energy—a fanatical monomania the climate campaign has been unable to shake. In retrospect it is now possible to grasp the irony that President George W. Bush’s open refusal to embrace the Kyoto framework kept the climate campaign alive by providing an all-purpose excuse for the lack of “progress” toward a binding treaty. With Bush gone, the intrinsic weakness of the carbon-cutting charade is impossible to hide, though Gore and the climate campaigners are now trying to blame the U.S. Senate for the lack of international agreement.
“The previous stage,” Downs continued, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.” Despite the relentless media drumbeat, Gore’s Academy Award and Nobel Prize twofer, and millions of dollars in paid advertising, public concern for climate change has been steadily waning for several years. In the latest Pew survey of public priorities released in January, climate change came in dead last, ranked 21st out of 21 issues of concern, with just 28 percent saying the issue should be a top priority for Congress and President Obama. That’s down 10 points over the last three years.
A separate Pew poll taken last October, before Climate-gate, reported a precipitous drop in the number of Americans who think there is “solid evidence” of global warming, from 71 percent in 2008 to 57 percent in 2009; the number who think humans are responsible for warming dropped in the Pew poll from 47 to 36 percent. Surveys from Rasmussen and other pollsters find similar declines in public belief in human-caused global warming; European surveys are reporting the same trend. In Gallup’s annual survey of environmental issues, taken last spring, respondents ranked global warming eighth out of eight environmental issues Gallup listed; the number of people who say they “worry a great deal” about climate change has fallen from 41 to 34 percent over the last three years. Gallup’s Lydia Saad commented: “Not only does global warming rank last on the basis of the total percentage concerned either a great deal or a fair amount, but it is the only issue for which public concern dropped significantly in the past year.”
“In the final [post-problem] stage,” Downs concluded, “an issue that has been replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.” The death rattle of the climate campaign will be deafening. It has too much political momentum and fanatical devotion to go quietly. The climate campaigners have been fond of warning of catastrophic “tipping points” for years. Well, a tipping point has indeed arrived—just not the one the climate campaigners expected.
The lingering question is whether the collapse of the climate campaign is also a sign of a broader collapse in public enthusiasm for environmentalism in general. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, two of the more thoughtful and independent-minded figures in the environmental movement, have been warning their green friends that the public has reached the point of “apocalypse fatigue.” They’ve been met with denunciations from the climate campaign enforcers for their heresy. The climate campaign has no idea that it is on the cusp of becoming as ludicrous and forlorn as the World -Esperanto Association.
Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of the forthcoming Almanac of Environmental Trends (Pacific Research Institute).
Thursday, June 9, 2011
How Canada Did It--Yes, showing USA how to grow, hire, cut
How Canada Did It
We wrote here about the fact that Canada has left the U.S. in the dust when it comes to fiscal reform. At the Hoover Institution's Defining Ideas, David Henderson explains how the Canadians did it:
[Since 1993], Canada's federal debt has fallen from almost 70 percent to only 29 percent of GDP. Moreover, every year between 1997 and 2008, Canada's federal government had a budget surplus. ...
About 85 cents of every dollar of deficit reduction was achieved with spending cuts. Beyond that, the government didn't pull every politician's favorite trick of cutting just the growth rate of government spending. It cut absolute spending on many programs in dollar terms. ... Because of the years of spending cuts, federal spending on programs--that is, all spending except for interest on the federal debt--fell from a high of 17.5 percent of GDP in 1992-93 to 11.3 percent in 2000-01.
The fact that Canada achieved these cuts while having socialized medicine hanging around its neck like an albatross makes the feat even more impressive. Did spending cuts depress Canada's economy, as American liberals would predict? No:
As the government cut its spending on programs from 14.9 percent of GDP in fiscal year 1996 to 12.1 percent in fiscal year 2000, more resources were available for people to use productively in the private sector. From 1997 to 2000, when government spending as a percent of GDP fell, Canada's economy experienced a high rate of real growth of between four and five percent per year.
Watching the folly that often passes for government in Washington, it is easy to accept the fatalistic view that spending can never be cut, and America is doomed to fiscal collapse. But if Canada can do it, why can't we?
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/06/029142.php
We wrote here about the fact that Canada has left the U.S. in the dust when it comes to fiscal reform. At the Hoover Institution's Defining Ideas, David Henderson explains how the Canadians did it:
[Since 1993], Canada's federal debt has fallen from almost 70 percent to only 29 percent of GDP. Moreover, every year between 1997 and 2008, Canada's federal government had a budget surplus. ...
About 85 cents of every dollar of deficit reduction was achieved with spending cuts. Beyond that, the government didn't pull every politician's favorite trick of cutting just the growth rate of government spending. It cut absolute spending on many programs in dollar terms. ... Because of the years of spending cuts, federal spending on programs--that is, all spending except for interest on the federal debt--fell from a high of 17.5 percent of GDP in 1992-93 to 11.3 percent in 2000-01.
The fact that Canada achieved these cuts while having socialized medicine hanging around its neck like an albatross makes the feat even more impressive. Did spending cuts depress Canada's economy, as American liberals would predict? No:
As the government cut its spending on programs from 14.9 percent of GDP in fiscal year 1996 to 12.1 percent in fiscal year 2000, more resources were available for people to use productively in the private sector. From 1997 to 2000, when government spending as a percent of GDP fell, Canada's economy experienced a high rate of real growth of between four and five percent per year.
Watching the folly that often passes for government in Washington, it is easy to accept the fatalistic view that spending can never be cut, and America is doomed to fiscal collapse. But if Canada can do it, why can't we?
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/06/029142.php
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Congrats, New Media: Journalism Is Back
Congrats, New Media: Journalism Is Back (go to linked article for all other links--there are many)
New media, including Andrew Breitbart, has brought competence back to the press. And as we see both during and after Weinergate, the MSM has no clue how awful their work has been.
The story is not the photos. The story is the journalism — It’s back. And the MSM is finished.
As Weinergate broke and gained traction, a large majority of the MSM and leftist media stuck their heads in the sand. Joan Walsh of Salon.com savaged those who attempted to make this a story. On MSNBC, she seemed furious at Chris Matthews who — to his credit — would not let Walsh tie the reporting of Weinergate to the case involving Breitbart and Shirley Sherrod.
Others decided this is not a news story — it bores them. Former Clinton administration big-shot Paul Begala quipped to Anderson Cooper while pretending to yawn: “Wake me when we have a real sex scandal.”
As of this writing, Joan Walsh and the team at Salon have written numerous pieces about the press conference and Breitbart … and are still emphasizing the arcane message that Breitbart can’t be trusted. Alex Pareene states:
Andrew: You will get no apology from us — or from me at least! — because sometimes even complete frauds get lucky. I don’t apologize to Glenn Beck the twice a year he’s right about something, either.
At the Huffington Post, New York editor-at-large Dan Collins talked about Nancy Pelosi’s displeasure with Weiner, but mentioned nothing about Weiner’s lying. Collins made sure to note:
No, it’s not the cover-up. It’s Weiner’s idiotic behavior.
Yes, Dan Collins, it is the cover-up, and not from Weiner but from a complicit MSM that refuses to engage in journalism. “Weinergate” is simply the latest example of how the MSM is failing us, and how New Media has filled the vacuum. Take a look at the entire Breitbart organization: they brought us James O’Keefe, who exposed ACORN and exposed NPR’s willingness to take money from a Muslim Brotherhood front group — while badmouthing the Tea Party. (The scandal forced the resignation of CEO Vivian Schiller, who was then promptly employed by NBC!) It was Breitbart who taught us all about the Pigford settlement, the corruption of the system by takers and hucksters, and the plight of real black farmers who were left in the cold, sold out for the “reparations” of others.
I am proudly affiliated with New Media force PJM (I write for PJM, and I host a show on PJTV): here, J. Christian Adams showed us how the New Black Panther case was tossed by the DOJ — a case whose handling was so repulsive that Adams resigned and turned whistleblower because of it. Patrick Poole’s investigative reporting led Rep. Peter King (R-NY) to launch an investigation into Attorney General Eric Holder’s handling of terrorism persecution.
And it was Pajamas Media and contributor Farid Ghadry providing the inside account of the real story — and horrific bloodshed — in Syria.
MSM political leanings and friendships take precedent over news and news coverage — they simply balked at the idea of covering the “Weinergate” scandal. Rather than investigate, they went on the offensive! Surely the story can’t be trusted, since the source was Breitbart. They mocked those who even discussed it.
How many times will they call a story DOA, only to have Breitbart drop one more thing in their lap? How many times will they ignore a story, just to have New Media show how important it is to the future of the republic?
The MSM reacts to New Media in the same manner they have reacted to Sarah Palin’s bus tour. They mock her every step of the way, then have the gall to be infuriated that they — the press! — are not given her itinerary. They complained about being “forced” to relieve themselves on the side of the road, as if Palin forced them to get in their cars and vans and follow her a la The Beatles arriving in America. The MSM believes that they have — and deserve — a monopoly on the stories we read, and when someone doesn’t fall in line with the old guard attitude, they become petulant.
Yesterday we had the uncovering of a scandal involving a sitting congressman, a string of young women, and inappropriate behavior while on the public dime. Despite the clamor from of Joan Walsh, Paul Begala, Markos Moulitsas, Media Matters for America, the New York Times and the Huffington Post, this is called journalism.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/congrats-new-media-journalism-is-back/
New media, including Andrew Breitbart, has brought competence back to the press. And as we see both during and after Weinergate, the MSM has no clue how awful their work has been.
The story is not the photos. The story is the journalism — It’s back. And the MSM is finished.
As Weinergate broke and gained traction, a large majority of the MSM and leftist media stuck their heads in the sand. Joan Walsh of Salon.com savaged those who attempted to make this a story. On MSNBC, she seemed furious at Chris Matthews who — to his credit — would not let Walsh tie the reporting of Weinergate to the case involving Breitbart and Shirley Sherrod.
Others decided this is not a news story — it bores them. Former Clinton administration big-shot Paul Begala quipped to Anderson Cooper while pretending to yawn: “Wake me when we have a real sex scandal.”
As of this writing, Joan Walsh and the team at Salon have written numerous pieces about the press conference and Breitbart … and are still emphasizing the arcane message that Breitbart can’t be trusted. Alex Pareene states:
Andrew: You will get no apology from us — or from me at least! — because sometimes even complete frauds get lucky. I don’t apologize to Glenn Beck the twice a year he’s right about something, either.
At the Huffington Post, New York editor-at-large Dan Collins talked about Nancy Pelosi’s displeasure with Weiner, but mentioned nothing about Weiner’s lying. Collins made sure to note:
No, it’s not the cover-up. It’s Weiner’s idiotic behavior.
Yes, Dan Collins, it is the cover-up, and not from Weiner but from a complicit MSM that refuses to engage in journalism. “Weinergate” is simply the latest example of how the MSM is failing us, and how New Media has filled the vacuum. Take a look at the entire Breitbart organization: they brought us James O’Keefe, who exposed ACORN and exposed NPR’s willingness to take money from a Muslim Brotherhood front group — while badmouthing the Tea Party. (The scandal forced the resignation of CEO Vivian Schiller, who was then promptly employed by NBC!) It was Breitbart who taught us all about the Pigford settlement, the corruption of the system by takers and hucksters, and the plight of real black farmers who were left in the cold, sold out for the “reparations” of others.
I am proudly affiliated with New Media force PJM (I write for PJM, and I host a show on PJTV): here, J. Christian Adams showed us how the New Black Panther case was tossed by the DOJ — a case whose handling was so repulsive that Adams resigned and turned whistleblower because of it. Patrick Poole’s investigative reporting led Rep. Peter King (R-NY) to launch an investigation into Attorney General Eric Holder’s handling of terrorism persecution.
And it was Pajamas Media and contributor Farid Ghadry providing the inside account of the real story — and horrific bloodshed — in Syria.
MSM political leanings and friendships take precedent over news and news coverage — they simply balked at the idea of covering the “Weinergate” scandal. Rather than investigate, they went on the offensive! Surely the story can’t be trusted, since the source was Breitbart. They mocked those who even discussed it.
How many times will they call a story DOA, only to have Breitbart drop one more thing in their lap? How many times will they ignore a story, just to have New Media show how important it is to the future of the republic?
The MSM reacts to New Media in the same manner they have reacted to Sarah Palin’s bus tour. They mock her every step of the way, then have the gall to be infuriated that they — the press! — are not given her itinerary. They complained about being “forced” to relieve themselves on the side of the road, as if Palin forced them to get in their cars and vans and follow her a la The Beatles arriving in America. The MSM believes that they have — and deserve — a monopoly on the stories we read, and when someone doesn’t fall in line with the old guard attitude, they become petulant.
Yesterday we had the uncovering of a scandal involving a sitting congressman, a string of young women, and inappropriate behavior while on the public dime. Despite the clamor from of Joan Walsh, Paul Begala, Markos Moulitsas, Media Matters for America, the New York Times and the Huffington Post, this is called journalism.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/congrats-new-media-journalism-is-back/
Only 24% Say They Share Obama's Political Views
Only 24% Say They Share Obama's Political Views
Most voters still believe President Obama is more liberal than they are, while just one-out-of-four say they share the same ideological views as the president.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 54% of Likely U.S. Voters think Obama is more ideologically liberal than they are, while only 13% view him as more conservative. Twenty-four percent (24%) say their political views are about the same as the president's. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
The number who see the president as more liberal than they are stayed at 57% in three-out-of-four previous surveys conducted since August of last year. That number climbed to 61% in late February. The number who view the president as more conservative ranged from nine percent (9%) to 12% in that same period.
The number of voters who say they share about the same political views as the president ties the lowest result measured since August and, interestingly, compares exactly with the number who say the same of Congress. Only 24% of voters hold about the same ideological views as the average Republican member of Congress, and another 24% feel that way about the views of the average Democratic congressman.
Forty-five percent (45%) of Democratic voters, however, say their views are about the same as the president’s, although that ties the lowest finding to date. The number of Democrats who felt this way peaked at 60% in late February. Twenty-four percent (24%) of Democrats say the president is more conservative than they are, while 22% think he is more liberal.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/june_2011/only_24_say_they_share_obama_s_political_views
Most voters still believe President Obama is more liberal than they are, while just one-out-of-four say they share the same ideological views as the president.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 54% of Likely U.S. Voters think Obama is more ideologically liberal than they are, while only 13% view him as more conservative. Twenty-four percent (24%) say their political views are about the same as the president's. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
The number who see the president as more liberal than they are stayed at 57% in three-out-of-four previous surveys conducted since August of last year. That number climbed to 61% in late February. The number who view the president as more conservative ranged from nine percent (9%) to 12% in that same period.
The number of voters who say they share about the same political views as the president ties the lowest result measured since August and, interestingly, compares exactly with the number who say the same of Congress. Only 24% of voters hold about the same ideological views as the average Republican member of Congress, and another 24% feel that way about the views of the average Democratic congressman.
Forty-five percent (45%) of Democratic voters, however, say their views are about the same as the president’s, although that ties the lowest finding to date. The number of Democrats who felt this way peaked at 60% in late February. Twenty-four percent (24%) of Democrats say the president is more conservative than they are, while 22% think he is more liberal.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/june_2011/only_24_say_they_share_obama_s_political_views
A Weak Field? On the Democratic Side, Yes
A Weak Field? On the Democratic Side, Yes by John Hinderacker/Powerline
The belief in many quarters is that the Republican presidential contenders constitute a weak field. I don't share this view; I think the announced GOP candidates, as a group, are solid representatives of their party. But let's turn the question around: how strong is the Democratic field?
At present, it consists of one man--Barack Obama--and the American people have had about enough of him. Yesterday's Rasmussen survey found that likely voters prefer a generic Republican over President Obama by 45-43. And that is no fluke; the numbers have been in the same range for some months. Similarly, voters are slightly more likely to call themselves Republicans than Democrats.
It is not unreasonable to expect that a "generic" Republican whom voters do not yet know and who has no skeletons in his closet--Tim Pawlenty, or even Mitt Romney--will be able to improve on those numbers. Whereas it is hard to see just how Obama can better his standing, given that the economy is tanking and Seal Team Six has already made its contribution.
And the Dems have no hope of reinforcements. It may be too late for another candidate to challenge Obama, and, in any event, such challenges tend to be the prelude to a losing campaign. So it seems to me that the Republicans have a field that is likely to yield a strong candidate who already stands even with President Obama, while, if the economy doesn't improve greatly over the next year, voters are likely to desert Obama's sinking ship in droves.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/06/029148.php
The belief in many quarters is that the Republican presidential contenders constitute a weak field. I don't share this view; I think the announced GOP candidates, as a group, are solid representatives of their party. But let's turn the question around: how strong is the Democratic field?
At present, it consists of one man--Barack Obama--and the American people have had about enough of him. Yesterday's Rasmussen survey found that likely voters prefer a generic Republican over President Obama by 45-43. And that is no fluke; the numbers have been in the same range for some months. Similarly, voters are slightly more likely to call themselves Republicans than Democrats.
It is not unreasonable to expect that a "generic" Republican whom voters do not yet know and who has no skeletons in his closet--Tim Pawlenty, or even Mitt Romney--will be able to improve on those numbers. Whereas it is hard to see just how Obama can better his standing, given that the economy is tanking and Seal Team Six has already made its contribution.
And the Dems have no hope of reinforcements. It may be too late for another candidate to challenge Obama, and, in any event, such challenges tend to be the prelude to a losing campaign. So it seems to me that the Republicans have a field that is likely to yield a strong candidate who already stands even with President Obama, while, if the economy doesn't improve greatly over the next year, voters are likely to desert Obama's sinking ship in droves.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/06/029148.php
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Ann Coulter on the 'Liberal Mob' of the American Left
Ann Coulter on the 'Liberal Mob' of the American Left
New York Times bestselling author and conservative political commentator Ann Coulter's new book, "Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America", tackles politics once again, this time taking on the liberal left and what she describes as their "mob behavior."
In "Demonic," Coulter traces the words and movements of groups from the Ku Klux Klan and the SDS to anti-war protesters and Democrats today to argue her point that liberals have "consistently used mob tactics to implement their idea of the 'general will.'"
"Just as fire seeks oxygen, Democrats seek power, which is why they will always be found championing the mob whether the mob consists of Democrats lynching blacks or Democrats slandering the critics of Obama Care as racists," Coulter writes.
"Demonic" is the eighth book from Coulter, also a frequent television political commentator.
Read an excerpt from "Demonic" below, then check out some other books in the "GMA" library
Chapter 1 The Liberal Mob
2 When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him.
3 This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain.
4 For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him.
5 Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.
6 When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him.
7 He shouted at the top of his voice, "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God's name don't torture me!"
8 For Jesus had said to him, "Come out of this man, you impure spirit!"
9 Then Jesus asked him, "What is your name?" "My name is Legion," he replied, "for we are many."
-- Mark 5:2--9
The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. It is the nihilistic mob of the French Revolution; it is the revolutionaries who seized control of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century; it is the Maoist gangs looting villages and impaling babies in China; it is the Ku Klux Klan terrorizing Republicans and blacks in the South; it is the 1992 Los Angeles riot that left fifty dead and did $1 billion of damage after the first Rodney King verdict; it is the bloody riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; it is the masked hoodlums smashing up Seattle when bankers came to town; it is the 500,000 illegal aliens marching under a foreign flag in Los Angeles; it is throngs of Islamic fanatics attending the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's funeral, tearing his body out of its coffin; it is left-wing protesters destroying property and attacking delegates at the 2004 and 2008 Republican National Conventions.
Everything else changes, but mobs are always the same. A mob is an irrational, childlike, often violent organism that derives its energy from the group. Intoxicated by messianic goals, the promise of instant gratification, and adrenaline-pumping exhortations, mobs create mayhem, chaos, and destruction, leaving a smoldering heap of wreckage for their leaders to climb to power.
(Use link to access the other 9 pages of excerpts posted at ABC News site--its well worth your time and may inspire you to buy the book): http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Politics/ann-coulter-conservative-commentator-takes-liberal-mob-read/story?id=13773013
New York Times bestselling author and conservative political commentator Ann Coulter's new book, "Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America", tackles politics once again, this time taking on the liberal left and what she describes as their "mob behavior."
In "Demonic," Coulter traces the words and movements of groups from the Ku Klux Klan and the SDS to anti-war protesters and Democrats today to argue her point that liberals have "consistently used mob tactics to implement their idea of the 'general will.'"
"Just as fire seeks oxygen, Democrats seek power, which is why they will always be found championing the mob whether the mob consists of Democrats lynching blacks or Democrats slandering the critics of Obama Care as racists," Coulter writes.
"Demonic" is the eighth book from Coulter, also a frequent television political commentator.
Read an excerpt from "Demonic" below, then check out some other books in the "GMA" library
Chapter 1 The Liberal Mob
2 When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him.
3 This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain.
4 For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him.
5 Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.
6 When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him.
7 He shouted at the top of his voice, "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God's name don't torture me!"
8 For Jesus had said to him, "Come out of this man, you impure spirit!"
9 Then Jesus asked him, "What is your name?" "My name is Legion," he replied, "for we are many."
-- Mark 5:2--9
The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. It is the nihilistic mob of the French Revolution; it is the revolutionaries who seized control of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century; it is the Maoist gangs looting villages and impaling babies in China; it is the Ku Klux Klan terrorizing Republicans and blacks in the South; it is the 1992 Los Angeles riot that left fifty dead and did $1 billion of damage after the first Rodney King verdict; it is the bloody riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; it is the masked hoodlums smashing up Seattle when bankers came to town; it is the 500,000 illegal aliens marching under a foreign flag in Los Angeles; it is throngs of Islamic fanatics attending the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's funeral, tearing his body out of its coffin; it is left-wing protesters destroying property and attacking delegates at the 2004 and 2008 Republican National Conventions.
Everything else changes, but mobs are always the same. A mob is an irrational, childlike, often violent organism that derives its energy from the group. Intoxicated by messianic goals, the promise of instant gratification, and adrenaline-pumping exhortations, mobs create mayhem, chaos, and destruction, leaving a smoldering heap of wreckage for their leaders to climb to power.
(Use link to access the other 9 pages of excerpts posted at ABC News site--its well worth your time and may inspire you to buy the book): http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Politics/ann-coulter-conservative-commentator-takes-liberal-mob-read/story?id=13773013
The Housing Crash and Smart Growth
There is general agreement the financial crisis that began with the failure of
Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, was worsened by the bursting of the U.S.
housing price bubble. It is also generally acknowledged that some of the fuel for the
housing bubble came from a relaxation of mortgage loan standards that allowed
many families to purchase homes they could not afford with loans on which they
subsequently defaulted.
Executive Summary
There is general agreement the financial crisis that began with the
failure of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, was worsened
by the bursting of the U.S. housing price bubble. It is also generally
acknowledged that some of the fuel for the housing bubble came from
a relaxation of mortgage loan standards that allowed many families
to purchase homes they could not afford with loans on which they
subsequently defaulted. New and excessive demand from mortgagees
drove up home prices faster than the increase in the housing supply.
It is less well understood that the U.S. housing bubble was not a
monolithic event. It varied substantially by geography. Gross national
house value increases and losses were overwhelmingly concentrated
in metropolitan areas with more restrictive land use regulations —
known by a variety of names, such as compact city policy, growth
management or smart growth. Many metropolitan areas with these land
use restrictions were not able to respond to the increased demand for
homeownership caused by the greater availability of mortgage credit.
The inevitable result was higher prices, which encouraged speculation
and increased house prices even more. Thus, from 2000 to 2007,
among the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan markets:
■ In the 10 markets with the greatest rise in prices compared to
income, the cost of a house rose by an average of $275,000,
relative to incomes.
■ Among the second 10 markets with the greatest price escalation,
house prices rose $135,000.
■ By contrast, in the major markets with the least rise in prices,
houses increased only $5,000.
the U.S. housing stock rose $5.3 trillion relative to
household incomes. It is estimated that $4.4 trillion of
this increase occurred in the 20 major markets with
the greatest escalation in housing prices.
For the nation as a whole, house values more than
doubled from 1999 to the peak of the bubble. From
the peak in the fourth quarter of 2006 until the end of
2010, homes values fell more than $6 trillion. Losses
after the bubble burst were even more concentrated
than house price gains. Consider:
■ From the peak of the bubble in 2006 to the
Lehman Brothers’ collapse on September 15,
2008, more heavily regulated metropolitan
markets accounted for 73 percent of aggregate
value losses.
■ The average loss from 2007 to the Lehman
Brothers’ collapse was $175,000 per house in the
11 markets with the greatest run-up in prices and
the greatest fall.
■ All prescriptively regulated markets (more heavily
regulated markets) accounted for 94 percent of
losses, or an average of $97,000 per house.
■ Responsively regulated markets (less restrictively
regulated markets) lost just 6 percent of their
value, or an average of $12,000 per house.
With prices falling and mortgage interest rates
rising, households were no longer able to refinance,
causing many new homeowners to fall into
delinquency and foreclosure.
If the prescriptively regulated metropolitan areas
had instead had responsive land use regulations, prices
likely would have escalated at a much lower rate
during the housing bubble. This is because the land
price premiums that grew during the bubble would
have been less likely to develop, at least to the same
degree. If the housing markets in the prescriptively
regulated markets had replicated the performance of
the responsive markets, it is estimated that the house
value losses from the peak of the bubble to the start
of the financial crisis would have been $0.62 trillion,
one-fourth of the actual loss of $2.44 trillion. The
average loss per house would have been $17,000
instead of $67,000. These more modest losses might
not have set off the financial crisis, or it might have
been less severe.
http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/st335.pdf
Monday, June 6, 2011
Vindication: Three Controversial Bush Policies Help Take Down bin Laden
Vindication: Three Controversial Bush Policies Help Take Down bin Laden
President Barack Obama will visit Ground Zero on Thursday to pay his respects, meet with families of the fallen, and mark a historic American accomplishment: Tracking down and killing the leader of a group responsible for the unhealed gash in lower Manhattan. The president’s predecessor, George W. Bush, will not join him at the ceremony, having politely declined Obama’s magnanimous invitation. Bush is maintaining his stated post-presidency preference to remain out of the political spotlight. Although he won’t be physically present to help mark the demise of Osama bin Laden – the man he’d famously vowed to bring to justice “dead or alive” – Americans owe President Bush a debt of gratitude for instituting a slate of controversial policies that ultimately helped execute that very goal.
Many in the chattering class are crowing about last weekend’s spectacular raid in Pakistan as if it’s an exclusive political victory for President Obama. The current administration does deserve a great deal of praise for planning and directing the successful operation. The plan took political courage: it involved an unannounced incursion into the sovereign territory of a nominal US ally, and it put dozens of elite American warriors’ lives in peril. A bombing or a drone strike would have been far less risky – but it also may have left unsettled the question of whether our top target had been dispatched. The job needed to be done the hard way, and Obama saw it through. Bravo.
Seeking to score cheap political points, some on the left have bragged that Obama did the job Bush was unable to do. This is an unfair, unseemly, and inaccurate attack. In the narrowest sense, yes, the mission was undeniably carried out on Obama’s watch, but evidence continues to mount that it could not have occurred without crucial intelligence gleaned through policies enacted by the Bush administration after September 11, 2001. Specifically, Osama bin Laden was found because the United States military exploited actionable intelligence extracted by subjecting terrorists to enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) in secret CIA prisons, by questioning enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, and by capturing a top al Qaeda source in Iraq.
As long as some liberals remain intent on keeping political score, it must be pointed out that all three sources of these indispensible data points were direct or indirect results of Bush policies – EITs, Gitmo, and the Iraq war – that much of the American Left, including Barack Obama, fought tooth and nail.
We now know the critical key to unlocking the frustrating secret of bin Laden’s whereabouts was identifying and tracking one of his must trusted couriers and confidants. US intelligence and military officials learned of his existence and pseudonym in the years after 9/11 from a terrorist detained at Guantanamo Bay, Muhammad Mani al-Qahtani. Equipped with this information, interrogators were able to wring supplemental information from two high-value prisoners being held at the time in black site CIA prisons: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of the 9/11 plot, and his radical colleague, Abu Faraj al-Libi. This single piece of information, after years of scrutiny and investigation, would be bin Laden’s undoing.
When the American media revealed that the CIA was operating secret prisons during the Bush administration, the Left professed shock and indignation. They spent years demonizing and persecuting American intelligence operatives for engaging in “torture,” insisting that harsh interrogation techniques were an affront to “our values,” and – besides – they didn’t even work. Multiple public opinion polls taken over the last decade have shown, despite the Left’s protestations, the American people aren’t scandalized. US voters overwhelmingly support the limited use of harsh questioning tactics to prevent terrorist attacks on US soil – even when the loaded term “torture” is included in the question.
One such technique is waterboarding, a process employed against exactly three terrorists, and halted altogether in 2003. Waterboarding is widely acknowledged to have broken KSM, who had shown himself to be a hardened and skilled resistor of traditional interrogation methods. Information extracted from KSM disrupted active terror plots, saved innocent lives, and led to the capture or killing of other al Qaeda leaders. But was any of the intelligence related to bin Laden’s courier a direct result of waterboarding? NBC anchor Brian Williams put that question to President Obama’s CIA director, Leon Panetta, in an interview on Tuesday:
WILLIAMS: Can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after Bin Laden?
PANETTA: Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information and that was true here… It's a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got… I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I'm also saying that, you know, the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.
WILLIAMS: So finer point, one final time, enhanced interrogation techniques -- which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years -- that includes waterboarding?
PANETTA: That's correct.
In other words, waterboarding KSM and others may or may not have produced direct information about the identity bin Laden’s courier, but the use of coercive interrogation methods were instrumental in gathering additional strands of intelligence from certain detainees. That waterboarding cracked KSM’s resistance cannot be ignored in this context.
But the mere knowledge that an unidentified bin Laden lackey was roaming the planet under an assumed name was not nearly enough to nail him down or monitor his communication. That imperative piece of the puzzle fell into place after 2004, when the US captured a terrorist operative named Hassan Ghul. Ghul was a key member of Al Qaeda in Iraq, an entity whose very existence many liberals were reluctant to even acknowledge, based on a zealous adherence to the faulty premise that the Iraq war was untethered to our fight against al Qaeda. Ghul was detained in Iraq and shipped off to Pakistan for intense CIA questioning; he eventually provided the true name of bin Laden’s elusive courier: Sheik Abu Ahmed, a.k.a. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Officials have described this morsel of intelligence as the “linchpin” of the bin Laden mission. US spies monitored al-Kuwaiti for several years. A lone phone call in 2010 eventually led them to bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.
This web of intelligence – as sketchy, painstaking, and complex as it may be – is extraordinary: Al-Kuwaiti’s existence was flagged by at least one Guantanamo Bay detainee, his role and pseudonym were confirmed by KSM and al-Libi, and his true identity was spilled by an Al Qaeda terrorist operating in Iraq.
Barack Obama ran for president, in large measure, as the anti-Bush. He was a prominent opponent of the war in Iraq. He promised to shutter the Guantanamo Bay prison. He pledged to ban certain EITs. Today, as president, he is rightfully receiving praise from virtually all quarters for his decisive order to take out the most wanted man in the world. Obama, his supporters, and indeed all Americans have every reason to celebrate that accomplishment. But they must also recognize and appreciate that actions and policies implemented by President Bush, often in the face of searing partisan criticism, played an inextricable role in identifying the dots that were finally connected and acted upon last weekend.
http://townhall.com/columnists/guybenson/2011/05/05/vindication_three_controversial_bush_policies_help_take_down_bin_laden
President Barack Obama will visit Ground Zero on Thursday to pay his respects, meet with families of the fallen, and mark a historic American accomplishment: Tracking down and killing the leader of a group responsible for the unhealed gash in lower Manhattan. The president’s predecessor, George W. Bush, will not join him at the ceremony, having politely declined Obama’s magnanimous invitation. Bush is maintaining his stated post-presidency preference to remain out of the political spotlight. Although he won’t be physically present to help mark the demise of Osama bin Laden – the man he’d famously vowed to bring to justice “dead or alive” – Americans owe President Bush a debt of gratitude for instituting a slate of controversial policies that ultimately helped execute that very goal.
Many in the chattering class are crowing about last weekend’s spectacular raid in Pakistan as if it’s an exclusive political victory for President Obama. The current administration does deserve a great deal of praise for planning and directing the successful operation. The plan took political courage: it involved an unannounced incursion into the sovereign territory of a nominal US ally, and it put dozens of elite American warriors’ lives in peril. A bombing or a drone strike would have been far less risky – but it also may have left unsettled the question of whether our top target had been dispatched. The job needed to be done the hard way, and Obama saw it through. Bravo.
Seeking to score cheap political points, some on the left have bragged that Obama did the job Bush was unable to do. This is an unfair, unseemly, and inaccurate attack. In the narrowest sense, yes, the mission was undeniably carried out on Obama’s watch, but evidence continues to mount that it could not have occurred without crucial intelligence gleaned through policies enacted by the Bush administration after September 11, 2001. Specifically, Osama bin Laden was found because the United States military exploited actionable intelligence extracted by subjecting terrorists to enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) in secret CIA prisons, by questioning enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, and by capturing a top al Qaeda source in Iraq.
As long as some liberals remain intent on keeping political score, it must be pointed out that all three sources of these indispensible data points were direct or indirect results of Bush policies – EITs, Gitmo, and the Iraq war – that much of the American Left, including Barack Obama, fought tooth and nail.
We now know the critical key to unlocking the frustrating secret of bin Laden’s whereabouts was identifying and tracking one of his must trusted couriers and confidants. US intelligence and military officials learned of his existence and pseudonym in the years after 9/11 from a terrorist detained at Guantanamo Bay, Muhammad Mani al-Qahtani. Equipped with this information, interrogators were able to wring supplemental information from two high-value prisoners being held at the time in black site CIA prisons: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of the 9/11 plot, and his radical colleague, Abu Faraj al-Libi. This single piece of information, after years of scrutiny and investigation, would be bin Laden’s undoing.
When the American media revealed that the CIA was operating secret prisons during the Bush administration, the Left professed shock and indignation. They spent years demonizing and persecuting American intelligence operatives for engaging in “torture,” insisting that harsh interrogation techniques were an affront to “our values,” and – besides – they didn’t even work. Multiple public opinion polls taken over the last decade have shown, despite the Left’s protestations, the American people aren’t scandalized. US voters overwhelmingly support the limited use of harsh questioning tactics to prevent terrorist attacks on US soil – even when the loaded term “torture” is included in the question.
One such technique is waterboarding, a process employed against exactly three terrorists, and halted altogether in 2003. Waterboarding is widely acknowledged to have broken KSM, who had shown himself to be a hardened and skilled resistor of traditional interrogation methods. Information extracted from KSM disrupted active terror plots, saved innocent lives, and led to the capture or killing of other al Qaeda leaders. But was any of the intelligence related to bin Laden’s courier a direct result of waterboarding? NBC anchor Brian Williams put that question to President Obama’s CIA director, Leon Panetta, in an interview on Tuesday:
WILLIAMS: Can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after Bin Laden?
PANETTA: Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information and that was true here… It's a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got… I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I'm also saying that, you know, the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.
WILLIAMS: So finer point, one final time, enhanced interrogation techniques -- which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years -- that includes waterboarding?
PANETTA: That's correct.
In other words, waterboarding KSM and others may or may not have produced direct information about the identity bin Laden’s courier, but the use of coercive interrogation methods were instrumental in gathering additional strands of intelligence from certain detainees. That waterboarding cracked KSM’s resistance cannot be ignored in this context.
But the mere knowledge that an unidentified bin Laden lackey was roaming the planet under an assumed name was not nearly enough to nail him down or monitor his communication. That imperative piece of the puzzle fell into place after 2004, when the US captured a terrorist operative named Hassan Ghul. Ghul was a key member of Al Qaeda in Iraq, an entity whose very existence many liberals were reluctant to even acknowledge, based on a zealous adherence to the faulty premise that the Iraq war was untethered to our fight against al Qaeda. Ghul was detained in Iraq and shipped off to Pakistan for intense CIA questioning; he eventually provided the true name of bin Laden’s elusive courier: Sheik Abu Ahmed, a.k.a. Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Officials have described this morsel of intelligence as the “linchpin” of the bin Laden mission. US spies monitored al-Kuwaiti for several years. A lone phone call in 2010 eventually led them to bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.
This web of intelligence – as sketchy, painstaking, and complex as it may be – is extraordinary: Al-Kuwaiti’s existence was flagged by at least one Guantanamo Bay detainee, his role and pseudonym were confirmed by KSM and al-Libi, and his true identity was spilled by an Al Qaeda terrorist operating in Iraq.
Barack Obama ran for president, in large measure, as the anti-Bush. He was a prominent opponent of the war in Iraq. He promised to shutter the Guantanamo Bay prison. He pledged to ban certain EITs. Today, as president, he is rightfully receiving praise from virtually all quarters for his decisive order to take out the most wanted man in the world. Obama, his supporters, and indeed all Americans have every reason to celebrate that accomplishment. But they must also recognize and appreciate that actions and policies implemented by President Bush, often in the face of searing partisan criticism, played an inextricable role in identifying the dots that were finally connected and acted upon last weekend.
http://townhall.com/columnists/guybenson/2011/05/05/vindication_three_controversial_bush_policies_help_take_down_bin_laden
SCOTUS Makes It Official: California A Failed State
SCOTUS Makes It Official: California A Failed State Walter Russell Mead
The controversial US Supreme Court decision (pdf) that could ultimately force California to release tens of thousands of prison inmates is more than a shockingly broad exercise of judicial power. It is also an official declaration by the highest constitutional authority in the land that California meets the strict test of state failure: it can no longer enforce the law within its frontiers.
Let there be no mistake: when you produce so many criminals that you can’t afford to lock them up, you are a failed state. Virtually every important civil institution in society has to fail to get you to this point. Your homes and houses of worship are failing to build law abiding citizens, much less responsible and informed voters. Your schools aren’t educating enough of your kids to make an honest living. Your taxes and policies are so bad that you are driving thousands of businesses away. Your management systems must be fouled and confused to the max for you to create something so dysfunctional, so wildly beyond your means, that the Supreme Court of the United States (wisely or foolishly is another question) starts to micromanage your jails.
California used to be the glory of this country, the dream by the sea, the magic state. Now it produces so many criminals it can’t pay to keep them locked up.
This is partly a blue social model thing. California’s public unions are sucking the state dry — like a parasite killing its host. Too many Californians buy the ideology of entitlement best described by that great Louisiana prophet of the blue social model Huey Long: “If you aren’t getting something for nothing, you’re not getting your fair share.”
The federal government’s generation of serial failures in migration policy is also to blame. More exposed to illegal migration than any other state, California has been overwhelmed by both legal and illegal immigrants. Immigrants are a net plus for the United States, but neither the federal nor the state governments have been willing to provide the appropriate policy framework to manage this flow — and to cope with the consequences.
Some of the fault is judicial. California’s prison blues partly reflect micromanagement by a host of addled judges who among them have imposed a conflicting and overlapping set of requirements that increase costs to the point where overall conditions decline. One judge imposes a health mandate; another throws in some food and nutrition requirements; somebody else issues an order for exercise, education, visitation rights or what have you. In the end the system becomes unmanageable and unsustainable and in yet another fatheaded intervention the Supreme Court supports a lower court order for mass prisoner release. Judicial intervention in the prison system needs to be safe, legal and rare: at the moment it seems to be none of the above.
It’s partly about corporate flight. Destructive and shortsighted tax policies have literally driven big corporations out of the state. For the last five years, Southern California has been losing roughly one Fortune 500 corporate headquarters a year, while the state as a whole has lost four such companies in the last twelve months in an accelerating flight to greener pastures in less-dysfunctional states like Texas, Colorado and Virginia.
Meanwhile, California has the one of the worst business climates in the country: in three widely-cited rankings, California came 49th or 50th. High taxes, rigid regulations, bribery, unresponsive bureaucrats: California has it all.
It has one of the most expensive and least effective governments in the country. California has the country’s 6th highest total tax burden and yet also the largest budget deficit ($25.4bn projected for FY2012 — that’s about $687 per capita). North Dakota, by contrast, balances its budget every year, educates its kids better, is creating new jobs and taxes its residents at less than half California’s level.
California’s school expenditures bear no relationship to results. In 2008, although California spent more on public schools than any other state in the country and more per pupil than many, its students ranked 49th (out of 51, including DC) in reading achievement, 48th in math. States like South Dakota spent much less per pupil and got much better results.
The former paradise of the automobile can’t even get car policy right; it has the country’s second highest gas prices and some of the worst traffic in the United States.
(Read more at linked article):
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/05/27/scotus-makes-it-official-california-a-failed-state/
The controversial US Supreme Court decision (pdf) that could ultimately force California to release tens of thousands of prison inmates is more than a shockingly broad exercise of judicial power. It is also an official declaration by the highest constitutional authority in the land that California meets the strict test of state failure: it can no longer enforce the law within its frontiers.
Let there be no mistake: when you produce so many criminals that you can’t afford to lock them up, you are a failed state. Virtually every important civil institution in society has to fail to get you to this point. Your homes and houses of worship are failing to build law abiding citizens, much less responsible and informed voters. Your schools aren’t educating enough of your kids to make an honest living. Your taxes and policies are so bad that you are driving thousands of businesses away. Your management systems must be fouled and confused to the max for you to create something so dysfunctional, so wildly beyond your means, that the Supreme Court of the United States (wisely or foolishly is another question) starts to micromanage your jails.
California used to be the glory of this country, the dream by the sea, the magic state. Now it produces so many criminals it can’t pay to keep them locked up.
This is partly a blue social model thing. California’s public unions are sucking the state dry — like a parasite killing its host. Too many Californians buy the ideology of entitlement best described by that great Louisiana prophet of the blue social model Huey Long: “If you aren’t getting something for nothing, you’re not getting your fair share.”
The federal government’s generation of serial failures in migration policy is also to blame. More exposed to illegal migration than any other state, California has been overwhelmed by both legal and illegal immigrants. Immigrants are a net plus for the United States, but neither the federal nor the state governments have been willing to provide the appropriate policy framework to manage this flow — and to cope with the consequences.
Some of the fault is judicial. California’s prison blues partly reflect micromanagement by a host of addled judges who among them have imposed a conflicting and overlapping set of requirements that increase costs to the point where overall conditions decline. One judge imposes a health mandate; another throws in some food and nutrition requirements; somebody else issues an order for exercise, education, visitation rights or what have you. In the end the system becomes unmanageable and unsustainable and in yet another fatheaded intervention the Supreme Court supports a lower court order for mass prisoner release. Judicial intervention in the prison system needs to be safe, legal and rare: at the moment it seems to be none of the above.
It’s partly about corporate flight. Destructive and shortsighted tax policies have literally driven big corporations out of the state. For the last five years, Southern California has been losing roughly one Fortune 500 corporate headquarters a year, while the state as a whole has lost four such companies in the last twelve months in an accelerating flight to greener pastures in less-dysfunctional states like Texas, Colorado and Virginia.
Meanwhile, California has the one of the worst business climates in the country: in three widely-cited rankings, California came 49th or 50th. High taxes, rigid regulations, bribery, unresponsive bureaucrats: California has it all.
It has one of the most expensive and least effective governments in the country. California has the country’s 6th highest total tax burden and yet also the largest budget deficit ($25.4bn projected for FY2012 — that’s about $687 per capita). North Dakota, by contrast, balances its budget every year, educates its kids better, is creating new jobs and taxes its residents at less than half California’s level.
California’s school expenditures bear no relationship to results. In 2008, although California spent more on public schools than any other state in the country and more per pupil than many, its students ranked 49th (out of 51, including DC) in reading achievement, 48th in math. States like South Dakota spent much less per pupil and got much better results.
The former paradise of the automobile can’t even get car policy right; it has the country’s second highest gas prices and some of the worst traffic in the United States.
(Read more at linked article):
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/05/27/scotus-makes-it-official-california-a-failed-state/
Sunday, June 5, 2011
The real unemployment, cont'd
The real unemployment, cont'd--O's economy/unemployment pretty much suck no matter how you look at it.
"The mainstream media are so desperate to portray economic trends in optimistic terms that a lot of our current malaise is left unexplored. To repeat myself, I think this is especially the case with respect to unemployment. The scope of the suffering created by large-scale long-term unemployment has somehow failed to register. The real unemployment will never get in the books, so to speak, at least so long as a Democrat is president and an election is looming..."
(See linked article for further explanation): http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/06/029175.php
"The mainstream media are so desperate to portray economic trends in optimistic terms that a lot of our current malaise is left unexplored. To repeat myself, I think this is especially the case with respect to unemployment. The scope of the suffering created by large-scale long-term unemployment has somehow failed to register. The real unemployment will never get in the books, so to speak, at least so long as a Democrat is president and an election is looming..."
(See linked article for further explanation): http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/06/029175.php
There’s a Reason Why it’s called the Forgotten Man
There’s a Reason Why it’s called the Forgotten Man
Why did the Depression of the 1930s grind on for so long? In late 2009, Amity Shlaes, the author of The Forgotten Man, the best-selling 2007 look at the Depression, reminded readers in her Bloomberg column one of the key reasons:
High taxes, or the prospect of tax increases, do damage as well. In 1937, a tire company executive explained the effect of Roosevelt’s confiscatory rates upon the investor: “He will not risk financing new ventures if the government take is greater than that of the average gambling house.”
Infantilizing the private sector also makes it shut down. In the 1930s, Roosevelt, like Obama, alternated between coddling banks and companies and giving them the equivalent of a good spanking. Both can be counterproductive. The editors of Time magazine formally recognized that by printing a regular rubric over its weekly reports: “Last week the U.S. Government did the following for and to U.S. Business…”
The insistence on executive discretion is a real killer as well. Adolf Berle, Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of state, sounded for all the world like Hank Paulson or Timothy Geithner when he argued in the late 1930s for a “modern financial tool kit.” Tool kit means “let me fiddle around” and not “let us agree together on rules and abide by them, together.”
A year later, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini, was quoted by CNN as saying much the same thing:
Intel is on pace for what Otellini predicts could be the company’s best year ever but said other businesses are not so lucky. “A lot of companies are sitting on the sidelines right now,” he said, due mainly to a lack of clarity about taxes and regulation.
“Take the uncertainly out. Businesses can’t invest until they have fewer variables and right now there are just too many variables,” he said.
As I wrote at the time, hey, when Time magazine compared Obama to FDR, they weren’t kidding, were they?
And curiously, another columnist at Bloomberg has apparently never read Shlaes’ column there, let alone her book. Stephen L. Carter, a professor of law at Yale University has a new article there, linked to by the Insta-professor. It’s built around his chatting onboard during a flight, presumably from somewhere on the west coast to Minneapolis, with a midsized company’s CEO who’s explaining to Carter why his business isn’t hiring:
My seat-mate seems to think that I’m missing the point. He’s not anti-government. He’s not anti-regulation. He just needs to know as he makes his plans that the rules aren’t going to change radically. Big businesses don’t face the same problem, he says. They have lots of customers to spread costs over. They have “installed base.”
For medium-sized firms like his, however, there is little wiggle room to absorb the costs of regulatory change. Because he possesses neither lobbyists nor clout, he says, Washington doesn’t care whether he hires more workers or closes up shop.
We will be landing shortly in Minneapolis. I ask him what, precisely, he thinks is the proper role of government as it relates to business.
`Invisible’
“Invisible,” he says. “I know there are things the government has to do. But they need to find a way to do them without people like me having to bump into a new regulation every time we turn a corner.” He reflects for a moment, then finds the analogy he seeks. “Government should act like my assistant, not my boss.”
We are at the gate. We exchange business cards.
On the way to my connection, I ponder. As an academic with an interest in policy, I tend to see businesses as abstractions, fitting into a theory or a data set. Most policy makers do the same. We rarely encounter the simple human face of the less- than-giant businesses we constantly extol. And when they refuse to hire, we would often rather go on television and call them greedy than sit and talk to them about their challenges.
Recessions have complex causes, but, as the man on the aisle reminded me, we do nothing to make things better when the companies on which we rely see Washington as adversary rather than partner.
Carter describes himself as “As an academic with an interest in policy,” who tends to “see businesses as abstractions, fitting into a theory or a data set. Most policy makers do the same.” In that respect, his article’s title, “Economic Stagnation Explained, at 30,000 Feet,” might have unintentionally hit a little too close to home.
But if Carter sees business as an abstraction, imagine how truly abstracted they are in the mind of a former academic who can actually make policy.
(Use link for the rest of the article with additional source links):
http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2011/05/27/theres-a-reason-why-its-called-the-forgotten-man/
Why did the Depression of the 1930s grind on for so long? In late 2009, Amity Shlaes, the author of The Forgotten Man, the best-selling 2007 look at the Depression, reminded readers in her Bloomberg column one of the key reasons:
High taxes, or the prospect of tax increases, do damage as well. In 1937, a tire company executive explained the effect of Roosevelt’s confiscatory rates upon the investor: “He will not risk financing new ventures if the government take is greater than that of the average gambling house.”
Infantilizing the private sector also makes it shut down. In the 1930s, Roosevelt, like Obama, alternated between coddling banks and companies and giving them the equivalent of a good spanking. Both can be counterproductive. The editors of Time magazine formally recognized that by printing a regular rubric over its weekly reports: “Last week the U.S. Government did the following for and to U.S. Business…”
The insistence on executive discretion is a real killer as well. Adolf Berle, Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of state, sounded for all the world like Hank Paulson or Timothy Geithner when he argued in the late 1930s for a “modern financial tool kit.” Tool kit means “let me fiddle around” and not “let us agree together on rules and abide by them, together.”
A year later, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini, was quoted by CNN as saying much the same thing:
Intel is on pace for what Otellini predicts could be the company’s best year ever but said other businesses are not so lucky. “A lot of companies are sitting on the sidelines right now,” he said, due mainly to a lack of clarity about taxes and regulation.
“Take the uncertainly out. Businesses can’t invest until they have fewer variables and right now there are just too many variables,” he said.
As I wrote at the time, hey, when Time magazine compared Obama to FDR, they weren’t kidding, were they?
And curiously, another columnist at Bloomberg has apparently never read Shlaes’ column there, let alone her book. Stephen L. Carter, a professor of law at Yale University has a new article there, linked to by the Insta-professor. It’s built around his chatting onboard during a flight, presumably from somewhere on the west coast to Minneapolis, with a midsized company’s CEO who’s explaining to Carter why his business isn’t hiring:
My seat-mate seems to think that I’m missing the point. He’s not anti-government. He’s not anti-regulation. He just needs to know as he makes his plans that the rules aren’t going to change radically. Big businesses don’t face the same problem, he says. They have lots of customers to spread costs over. They have “installed base.”
For medium-sized firms like his, however, there is little wiggle room to absorb the costs of regulatory change. Because he possesses neither lobbyists nor clout, he says, Washington doesn’t care whether he hires more workers or closes up shop.
We will be landing shortly in Minneapolis. I ask him what, precisely, he thinks is the proper role of government as it relates to business.
`Invisible’
“Invisible,” he says. “I know there are things the government has to do. But they need to find a way to do them without people like me having to bump into a new regulation every time we turn a corner.” He reflects for a moment, then finds the analogy he seeks. “Government should act like my assistant, not my boss.”
We are at the gate. We exchange business cards.
On the way to my connection, I ponder. As an academic with an interest in policy, I tend to see businesses as abstractions, fitting into a theory or a data set. Most policy makers do the same. We rarely encounter the simple human face of the less- than-giant businesses we constantly extol. And when they refuse to hire, we would often rather go on television and call them greedy than sit and talk to them about their challenges.
Recessions have complex causes, but, as the man on the aisle reminded me, we do nothing to make things better when the companies on which we rely see Washington as adversary rather than partner.
Carter describes himself as “As an academic with an interest in policy,” who tends to “see businesses as abstractions, fitting into a theory or a data set. Most policy makers do the same.” In that respect, his article’s title, “Economic Stagnation Explained, at 30,000 Feet,” might have unintentionally hit a little too close to home.
But if Carter sees business as an abstraction, imagine how truly abstracted they are in the mind of a former academic who can actually make policy.
(Use link for the rest of the article with additional source links):
http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2011/05/27/theres-a-reason-why-its-called-the-forgotten-man/
Saturday, June 4, 2011
The GOP Field v. The MSM Meme Police
The GOP Field v. The MSM Meme Police By Hugh Hewitt
Republican primary voters have a very strong field of potential opponents for President Obama in November 2012 from which to choose. Three governors with great executive experience –Jon Huntsman, Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney—are certain to make the race and two others, Sarah Palin and Rick Perry are still looking at the contest. A two term senator with deep roots in the conservative movement, Rick Santorum , and a new voice of a new political dynamic, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann bring passion and energized constituencies to the battle. Herman Cain excites new voters and former Speaker Newt Gingrich has an army of virtual activists ready to assist his campaign.
It is a deep field, and the president is on his heels with another round of terrible economic news buffeting his poll ratings which ought to be soaring into the 60 percent approval territory after the killing of bin laden.
But tune into to most network news and cable coverage and all you hear is doom and gloom about the prospects of the GOP prospects.
Mitt Romney is “weak frontrunner” burdened by “Romneycare” which birthed Obamacare. Pawlenty is boring and was for cap and trade. Huntsman is unknown and burdened not just by past support for cap and trade but also by having been Obama’s ambassador to China. Newt has crumbled, Santorum tangled with John McCain on torture and Palin and Bachmann are competing against each other for a small and shrinking slice of the electoral pie.
All of these canards reflect the Manhattan-Beltway media elite’s obsessive need to talk down the Republican Party and its agenda while striving mightily to prop up a failed presidency.
That’s “failed presidency,” not “failing presidency.” The employment cake is already baked for 2012, and the country will still be near or at the 8% unemployment mark --or even higher!-- 18 months from now, and even if home prices stage a modest rebound in the next year they can’t recover to anywhere near 2008 values by the time the votes are cast. The high-flying IPOs are making new billionaires but America’s middle class is staring at flat wages and higher health insurance premiums and the many promises of Obamacare haven’t materialized.
President Obama’s three signature laws—the “stimulus,” Obamacare, and the banking “reform” have all failed to do anything except burden America with an astonishing and dangerous debt that is growing like a lethal malignancy. While the president ordered the killing of bin laden, everything else about his leadership abroad has been feckless, flaccid and full of apologies for American power and purpose. The president’s hostility towards Israel has shocked even his own party’s base voters.
That is the storyline of 2012 –the referendum on a president who makes Jimmy carter look strong and decisive. All of the Republicans in the race will be making these points each day from now until the party selects a nominee and then all of them who didn’t succeed will continue the effort to unseat Obama because they are each committed to the country’s future and the U-turn the country so desperately needs.
All of the candidates and every conservative needs to battle the MSM memes on behalf of the entire GOP field from now until Iowa and New Hampshire. Certainly elbows will be thrown among the candidates, and supporters will trumpet their favorites’ strengths, but the MSM’s tropes should be denounced by all people seeking the exit of Obama from the Oval Office in January 2013.
The weakest candidate in the field is the incumbent, and the election is a referendum on him. That is the story of 2011, and 2012.
Hugh Hewitt
Hugh Hewitt is host of a nationally syndicated radio talk show. Hugh Hewitt's new book is The War On The West.
http://townhall.com/columnists/hughhewitt/2011/06/03/the_gop_field_v_the_msm_meme_police
Republican primary voters have a very strong field of potential opponents for President Obama in November 2012 from which to choose. Three governors with great executive experience –Jon Huntsman, Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney—are certain to make the race and two others, Sarah Palin and Rick Perry are still looking at the contest. A two term senator with deep roots in the conservative movement, Rick Santorum , and a new voice of a new political dynamic, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann bring passion and energized constituencies to the battle. Herman Cain excites new voters and former Speaker Newt Gingrich has an army of virtual activists ready to assist his campaign.
It is a deep field, and the president is on his heels with another round of terrible economic news buffeting his poll ratings which ought to be soaring into the 60 percent approval territory after the killing of bin laden.
But tune into to most network news and cable coverage and all you hear is doom and gloom about the prospects of the GOP prospects.
Mitt Romney is “weak frontrunner” burdened by “Romneycare” which birthed Obamacare. Pawlenty is boring and was for cap and trade. Huntsman is unknown and burdened not just by past support for cap and trade but also by having been Obama’s ambassador to China. Newt has crumbled, Santorum tangled with John McCain on torture and Palin and Bachmann are competing against each other for a small and shrinking slice of the electoral pie.
All of these canards reflect the Manhattan-Beltway media elite’s obsessive need to talk down the Republican Party and its agenda while striving mightily to prop up a failed presidency.
That’s “failed presidency,” not “failing presidency.” The employment cake is already baked for 2012, and the country will still be near or at the 8% unemployment mark --or even higher!-- 18 months from now, and even if home prices stage a modest rebound in the next year they can’t recover to anywhere near 2008 values by the time the votes are cast. The high-flying IPOs are making new billionaires but America’s middle class is staring at flat wages and higher health insurance premiums and the many promises of Obamacare haven’t materialized.
President Obama’s three signature laws—the “stimulus,” Obamacare, and the banking “reform” have all failed to do anything except burden America with an astonishing and dangerous debt that is growing like a lethal malignancy. While the president ordered the killing of bin laden, everything else about his leadership abroad has been feckless, flaccid and full of apologies for American power and purpose. The president’s hostility towards Israel has shocked even his own party’s base voters.
That is the storyline of 2012 –the referendum on a president who makes Jimmy carter look strong and decisive. All of the Republicans in the race will be making these points each day from now until the party selects a nominee and then all of them who didn’t succeed will continue the effort to unseat Obama because they are each committed to the country’s future and the U-turn the country so desperately needs.
All of the candidates and every conservative needs to battle the MSM memes on behalf of the entire GOP field from now until Iowa and New Hampshire. Certainly elbows will be thrown among the candidates, and supporters will trumpet their favorites’ strengths, but the MSM’s tropes should be denounced by all people seeking the exit of Obama from the Oval Office in January 2013.
The weakest candidate in the field is the incumbent, and the election is a referendum on him. That is the story of 2011, and 2012.
Hugh Hewitt
Hugh Hewitt is host of a nationally syndicated radio talk show. Hugh Hewitt's new book is The War On The West.
http://townhall.com/columnists/hughhewitt/2011/06/03/the_gop_field_v_the_msm_meme_police
Pro-Obama media always shocked by bad economic news
Pro-Obama media always shocked by bad economic news Michael Barone Politics Washington Examiner
Unexpectedly!
As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.
"New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed," reported CNBC.com May 25.
"Personal consumption fell," Business Insider reported the same day, "when it was expected to rise."
"Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month," Reuters reported May 25, "worse than economists' expectations."
"Previously owned home sales unexpectedly fall," headlined Bloomberg News May 19.
"U.S. home construction fell unexpectedly in April," wrote the Wall Street Journal May 18.
Those examples are all from the last two weeks. Reynolds has been linking to similar items since October 2009.
Mainstream media may finally be catching up. "The latest economic numbers have not been good," David Leonhardt wrote in the May 26 New York Times. "Another report showed that economic growth at the start of the year was no faster than the Commerce Department initially reported -- 'a real surprise,' said Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics."
Which raises some questions. As Instapundit reader Gordon Stewart, quoted by Reynolds on May 17, put it, "How many times in a row can something happen unexpectedly before the experts start to, you know, expect it? At some point, shouldn't they be required to state the foundation for their expectations?"
One answer is that many in the mainstream media have been cheerleading for Barack Obama. They and he both naturally hope for a strong economic recovery. After all, Obama can't keep blaming the economic doldrums on George W. Bush forever.
I'm confident that any comparison of economic coverage in the Bush years and the coverage now would show far fewer variants of the word "unexpectedly" in stories suggesting economic doldrums.
It's obviously going to be hard to achieve the unacknowledged goal of many mainstream journalists -- the president's re-election -- if the economic slump continues. So they characterize economic setbacks as unexpected, with the implication that there's still every reason to believe that, in Herbert Hoover's phrase, prosperity is just around the corner.
A less cynical explanation is that many journalists really believe that the Obama administration's policies are likely to improve the economy. Certainly that has been the expectation as well as the hope of administration policymakers.
Obama's first Council of Economics Advisers chairman, Christina Romer, whose scholarly work is widely respected, famously predicted that the February 2009 stimulus package would hold unemployment below 8 percent. She undoubtedly believed that at the time; she is too smart to have made a prediction whose failure to come true would prove politically embarrassing.
But unemployment zoomed to 10 percent instead and is still at 9 percent. Political pundits sympathetic to the administration have been speculating whether the president can win re-election if it stays above the 8 percent mark it was never supposed to reach.
Administration economists are now making the point that it takes longer to recover from a recession caused by a financial crisis than from a recession that occurs in the more or less ordinary operation of the business cycle. There's some basis in history for this claim.
But it comes a little late in the game. Obama and his policymakers told the country that we would recover from the deep recession by vastly increasing government spending and borrowing. We did that with the stimulus package, with the budget passed in 2009 back when congressional Democrats actually voted on budgets, and with the vast increases scheduled to come (despite the administration's gaming of the Congressional Budget Office scoring process) from Obamacare.
All of this has inspired something like a hiring strike among entrepreneurs and small-business owners. Employers aren't creating any more jobs than they were during the darkest days of the recession; unemployment has dropped slowly because they just aren't laying off as many employees as they did then.
In the meantime, many potential job seekers have left the labor market. If they re-enter and look for jobs, the unemployment rate will stay steady or ebb only slowly.
We tend to hire presidents who we think can foresee the future effect of their policies. No one does so perfectly. But if the best sympathetic observers can say about the results is that they are "unexpected," voters may decide someone else can do better.
Michael Barone,The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/pro-obama-media-always-shocked-bad-economic-news#ixzz1OJuns9vA
http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/pro-obama-media-always-shocked-bad-economic-news
Unexpectedly!
As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.
"New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed," reported CNBC.com May 25.
"Personal consumption fell," Business Insider reported the same day, "when it was expected to rise."
"Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month," Reuters reported May 25, "worse than economists' expectations."
"Previously owned home sales unexpectedly fall," headlined Bloomberg News May 19.
"U.S. home construction fell unexpectedly in April," wrote the Wall Street Journal May 18.
Those examples are all from the last two weeks. Reynolds has been linking to similar items since October 2009.
Mainstream media may finally be catching up. "The latest economic numbers have not been good," David Leonhardt wrote in the May 26 New York Times. "Another report showed that economic growth at the start of the year was no faster than the Commerce Department initially reported -- 'a real surprise,' said Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics."
Which raises some questions. As Instapundit reader Gordon Stewart, quoted by Reynolds on May 17, put it, "How many times in a row can something happen unexpectedly before the experts start to, you know, expect it? At some point, shouldn't they be required to state the foundation for their expectations?"
One answer is that many in the mainstream media have been cheerleading for Barack Obama. They and he both naturally hope for a strong economic recovery. After all, Obama can't keep blaming the economic doldrums on George W. Bush forever.
I'm confident that any comparison of economic coverage in the Bush years and the coverage now would show far fewer variants of the word "unexpectedly" in stories suggesting economic doldrums.
It's obviously going to be hard to achieve the unacknowledged goal of many mainstream journalists -- the president's re-election -- if the economic slump continues. So they characterize economic setbacks as unexpected, with the implication that there's still every reason to believe that, in Herbert Hoover's phrase, prosperity is just around the corner.
A less cynical explanation is that many journalists really believe that the Obama administration's policies are likely to improve the economy. Certainly that has been the expectation as well as the hope of administration policymakers.
Obama's first Council of Economics Advisers chairman, Christina Romer, whose scholarly work is widely respected, famously predicted that the February 2009 stimulus package would hold unemployment below 8 percent. She undoubtedly believed that at the time; she is too smart to have made a prediction whose failure to come true would prove politically embarrassing.
But unemployment zoomed to 10 percent instead and is still at 9 percent. Political pundits sympathetic to the administration have been speculating whether the president can win re-election if it stays above the 8 percent mark it was never supposed to reach.
Administration economists are now making the point that it takes longer to recover from a recession caused by a financial crisis than from a recession that occurs in the more or less ordinary operation of the business cycle. There's some basis in history for this claim.
But it comes a little late in the game. Obama and his policymakers told the country that we would recover from the deep recession by vastly increasing government spending and borrowing. We did that with the stimulus package, with the budget passed in 2009 back when congressional Democrats actually voted on budgets, and with the vast increases scheduled to come (despite the administration's gaming of the Congressional Budget Office scoring process) from Obamacare.
All of this has inspired something like a hiring strike among entrepreneurs and small-business owners. Employers aren't creating any more jobs than they were during the darkest days of the recession; unemployment has dropped slowly because they just aren't laying off as many employees as they did then.
In the meantime, many potential job seekers have left the labor market. If they re-enter and look for jobs, the unemployment rate will stay steady or ebb only slowly.
We tend to hire presidents who we think can foresee the future effect of their policies. No one does so perfectly. But if the best sympathetic observers can say about the results is that they are "unexpected," voters may decide someone else can do better.
Michael Barone,The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/pro-obama-media-always-shocked-bad-economic-news#ixzz1OJuns9vA
http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/05/pro-obama-media-always-shocked-bad-economic-news
Friday, June 3, 2011
What Obama did to Israel--more undermining of allies, boosting enemies
What Obama did to Israel - The Washington Post By Charles Krauthammer
Every Arab-Israeli negotiation contains a fundamental asymmetry: Israel gives up land, which is tangible; the Arabs make promises, which are ephemeral. The long-standing American solution has been to nonetheless urge Israel to take risks for peace while America balances things by giving assurances of U.S. support for Israel’s security and diplomatic needs.
It’s on the basis of such solemn assurances that Israel undertook, for example, the Gaza withdrawal. In order to mitigate this risk, President George W. Bush gave a written commitment that America supported Israel absorbing major settlement blocs in any peace agreement, opposed any return to the 1967 lines and stood firm against the so-called Palestinian right of return to Israel.
For 21 / 2 years, the Obama administration has refused to recognize and reaffirm these assurances. Then last week in his State Department speech, President Obama definitively trashed them. He declared that the Arab-Israeli conflict should indeed be resolved along “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”
Nothing new here, said Obama three days later. “By definition, it means that the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different” from 1967.
It means nothing of the sort. “Mutually” means both parties have to agree. And if one side doesn’t? Then, by definition, you’re back to the 1967 lines.
Nor is this merely a theoretical proposition. Three times the Palestinians have been offered exactly that formula, 1967 plus swaps — at Camp David 2000, Taba 2001, and the 2008 Olmert-Abbas negotiations. Every time, the Palestinians said no and walked away.
And that remains their position today: The 1967 lines. Period. Indeed, in September the Palestinians are going to the United Nations to get the world to ratify precisely that — a Palestinian state on the ’67 lines. No swaps.
Note how Obama has undermined Israel’s negotiating position. He is demanding that Israel go into peace talks having already forfeited its claim to the territory won in the ’67 war — its only bargaining chip. Remember: That ’67 line runs right through Jerusalem. Thus the starting point of negotiations would be that the Western Wall and even Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter are Palestinian — alien territory for which Israel must now bargain.
The very idea that Judaism’s holiest shrine is alien or that Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter is rightfully or historically or demographically Arab is an absurdity. And the idea that, in order to retain them, Israel has to give up parts of itself is a travesty.
Obama didn’t just move the goal posts on borders. He also did so on the so-called right of return. Flooding Israel with millions of Arabs would destroy the world’s only Jewish state while creating a 23rd Arab state and a second Palestinian state — not exactly what we mean when we speak of a “two-state solution.” That’s why it has been the policy of the United States to adamantly oppose this “right.”
Yet in his State Department speech, Obama refused to simply restate this position — and refused again in a supposedly corrective speech three days later. Instead, he told Israel it must negotiate the right of return with the Palestinians after having given every inch of territory. Bargaining with what, pray tell?
No matter. “The status quo is unsustainable,” declared Obama, “and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.”
Israel too ? Exactly what bold steps for peace have the Palestinians taken? Israel made three radically conciliatory offers to establish a Palestinian state, withdrew from Gaza and has been trying to renew negotiations for more than two years. Meanwhile, the Gaza Palestinians have been firing rockets at Israeli towns and villages. And on the West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas turns down then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer, walks out of negotiations with Binyamin Netanyahu and now defies the United States by seeking not peace talks but instant statehood — without peace, without recognizing Israel — at the United Nations. And to make unmistakable this spurning of any peace process, Abbas agrees to join the openly genocidal Hamas in a unity government, which even Obama acknowledges makes negotiations impossible.
Obama’s response to this relentless Palestinian intransigence? To reward it — by abandoning the Bush assurances, legitimizing the ’67 borders and refusing to reaffirm America’s rejection of the right of return.
The only remaining question is whether this perverse and ultimately self-defeating policy is born of genuine antipathy toward Israel or of the arrogance of a blundering amateur who refuses to see that he is undermining not just peace but the very possibility of negotiations.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-obama-did-to-israel/2011/05/26/AGJfYJCH_story.html
Every Arab-Israeli negotiation contains a fundamental asymmetry: Israel gives up land, which is tangible; the Arabs make promises, which are ephemeral. The long-standing American solution has been to nonetheless urge Israel to take risks for peace while America balances things by giving assurances of U.S. support for Israel’s security and diplomatic needs.
It’s on the basis of such solemn assurances that Israel undertook, for example, the Gaza withdrawal. In order to mitigate this risk, President George W. Bush gave a written commitment that America supported Israel absorbing major settlement blocs in any peace agreement, opposed any return to the 1967 lines and stood firm against the so-called Palestinian right of return to Israel.
For 21 / 2 years, the Obama administration has refused to recognize and reaffirm these assurances. Then last week in his State Department speech, President Obama definitively trashed them. He declared that the Arab-Israeli conflict should indeed be resolved along “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”
Nothing new here, said Obama three days later. “By definition, it means that the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different” from 1967.
It means nothing of the sort. “Mutually” means both parties have to agree. And if one side doesn’t? Then, by definition, you’re back to the 1967 lines.
Nor is this merely a theoretical proposition. Three times the Palestinians have been offered exactly that formula, 1967 plus swaps — at Camp David 2000, Taba 2001, and the 2008 Olmert-Abbas negotiations. Every time, the Palestinians said no and walked away.
And that remains their position today: The 1967 lines. Period. Indeed, in September the Palestinians are going to the United Nations to get the world to ratify precisely that — a Palestinian state on the ’67 lines. No swaps.
Note how Obama has undermined Israel’s negotiating position. He is demanding that Israel go into peace talks having already forfeited its claim to the territory won in the ’67 war — its only bargaining chip. Remember: That ’67 line runs right through Jerusalem. Thus the starting point of negotiations would be that the Western Wall and even Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter are Palestinian — alien territory for which Israel must now bargain.
The very idea that Judaism’s holiest shrine is alien or that Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter is rightfully or historically or demographically Arab is an absurdity. And the idea that, in order to retain them, Israel has to give up parts of itself is a travesty.
Obama didn’t just move the goal posts on borders. He also did so on the so-called right of return. Flooding Israel with millions of Arabs would destroy the world’s only Jewish state while creating a 23rd Arab state and a second Palestinian state — not exactly what we mean when we speak of a “two-state solution.” That’s why it has been the policy of the United States to adamantly oppose this “right.”
Yet in his State Department speech, Obama refused to simply restate this position — and refused again in a supposedly corrective speech three days later. Instead, he told Israel it must negotiate the right of return with the Palestinians after having given every inch of territory. Bargaining with what, pray tell?
No matter. “The status quo is unsustainable,” declared Obama, “and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.”
Israel too ? Exactly what bold steps for peace have the Palestinians taken? Israel made three radically conciliatory offers to establish a Palestinian state, withdrew from Gaza and has been trying to renew negotiations for more than two years. Meanwhile, the Gaza Palestinians have been firing rockets at Israeli towns and villages. And on the West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas turns down then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer, walks out of negotiations with Binyamin Netanyahu and now defies the United States by seeking not peace talks but instant statehood — without peace, without recognizing Israel — at the United Nations. And to make unmistakable this spurning of any peace process, Abbas agrees to join the openly genocidal Hamas in a unity government, which even Obama acknowledges makes negotiations impossible.
Obama’s response to this relentless Palestinian intransigence? To reward it — by abandoning the Bush assurances, legitimizing the ’67 borders and refusing to reaffirm America’s rejection of the right of return.
The only remaining question is whether this perverse and ultimately self-defeating policy is born of genuine antipathy toward Israel or of the arrogance of a blundering amateur who refuses to see that he is undermining not just peace but the very possibility of negotiations.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-obama-did-to-israel/2011/05/26/AGJfYJCH_story.html
Thursday, June 2, 2011
What Texas can teach us--It's the jobs, stupid California
What Texas can teach us Michael Barone Beltway Confidential Washington Examiner
What Texas can teach us
If you want to see a place where the private sector in America has been booming and generating jobs, you should look at Texas. That’s my take from these absolutely fascinating numbers compiled from Bureau of Labor Statistics figures by The Business Journals, tracking the increase or decrease in private sector jobs in the ten years between April 2001 and April 2011. Any precise ten-year period is somewhat arbitrary, of course, since the two endpoints can fall at different points in the business cycle, and so picking different starting and end points will produce different pictures. But the numbers here look pretty unambiguous.
In those 10 years, Texas gained 732,800 private sector jobs, far ahead of the number two and three states, Arizona (90,200) and Nevada (90,000). The nation overall lost more than 2 million private sector jobs, with the biggest losses coming in California (623,700), Michigan (619,200) and Ohio (460,900).
Texas’s gain was also impressive as a percentage of jobs at the beginning of the period. Texas had job growth of 9%, more than any other state except much smaller North Dakota (19%), Alaska (17%), Wyoming (16%), Montana (12%) and Utah (10%). The biggest losers in percentage terms, by far, were Michigan (16%) and Ohio (10%).
Obviously Michigan and Ohio were hurt by the parlous condition of the Detroit-based auto firms and other manufacturers; North Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Montana were helped by local oil, gas and coal booms. Texas and California are both too big to be explained by just local factors.
The lesson of the previous decade seems clear: if you take a previously prosperous and creative state and subject it to high taxes and intrusive regulations, it loses 5% of its private sector jobs; if you take a previously somewhat less prosperous and creative state and govern it with low taxes and light regulation, it gains 9% more jobs, even as the nation’s economy is suffering.
I’ve explored previously this contrast between our two largest states. Here’s another set of numbers about our second and third largest states that tells a story about what has happened over a longer period of time. In 1970 New York had 18 million people. In 2010 New York had 19 million people. In 1970 Texas had 11 million people. In 2010 Texas had 25 million people.
Don’t tell me public policy doesn’t account for much of the difference.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/05/what-texas-can-teach-us#ixzz1O82nLvKH
What Texas can teach us
If you want to see a place where the private sector in America has been booming and generating jobs, you should look at Texas. That’s my take from these absolutely fascinating numbers compiled from Bureau of Labor Statistics figures by The Business Journals, tracking the increase or decrease in private sector jobs in the ten years between April 2001 and April 2011. Any precise ten-year period is somewhat arbitrary, of course, since the two endpoints can fall at different points in the business cycle, and so picking different starting and end points will produce different pictures. But the numbers here look pretty unambiguous.
In those 10 years, Texas gained 732,800 private sector jobs, far ahead of the number two and three states, Arizona (90,200) and Nevada (90,000). The nation overall lost more than 2 million private sector jobs, with the biggest losses coming in California (623,700), Michigan (619,200) and Ohio (460,900).
Texas’s gain was also impressive as a percentage of jobs at the beginning of the period. Texas had job growth of 9%, more than any other state except much smaller North Dakota (19%), Alaska (17%), Wyoming (16%), Montana (12%) and Utah (10%). The biggest losers in percentage terms, by far, were Michigan (16%) and Ohio (10%).
Obviously Michigan and Ohio were hurt by the parlous condition of the Detroit-based auto firms and other manufacturers; North Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Montana were helped by local oil, gas and coal booms. Texas and California are both too big to be explained by just local factors.
The lesson of the previous decade seems clear: if you take a previously prosperous and creative state and subject it to high taxes and intrusive regulations, it loses 5% of its private sector jobs; if you take a previously somewhat less prosperous and creative state and govern it with low taxes and light regulation, it gains 9% more jobs, even as the nation’s economy is suffering.
I’ve explored previously this contrast between our two largest states. Here’s another set of numbers about our second and third largest states that tells a story about what has happened over a longer period of time. In 1970 New York had 18 million people. In 2010 New York had 19 million people. In 1970 Texas had 11 million people. In 2010 Texas had 25 million people.
Don’t tell me public policy doesn’t account for much of the difference.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/05/what-texas-can-teach-us#ixzz1O82nLvKH
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
The Marxian Worm--eating away at our free market system
Pajamas Media » The Marxian Worm By Sarah Hoyt
In ancient Norse myth the universe was a tree at whose roots a worm gnawed. When the worm brought the tree down, the ultimate battle between good and evil would happen.
Lately I’ve been wondering if they were mostly right.
Our own civilization is a sort of tree, with its roots in property rights and the rule of law, and its branches lifting the rarefied heights of science, technology, arts, and literature.
For the last forty years in the U.S. — longer in other places – a worm has been gnawing at the roots and sickening the tree. That worm is the philosophy of Karl Marx.
Karl Marx is described as a nineteenth century philosopher (which is true) but also as an economist, a historian, and a sociologist (which are only true if prefaced with “very bad.” [1])
Marxist theory is now applied to all those fields and more. (In the 70s, in Portugal, I studied it in history, sociology, economics, literature, art, and philosophy. They were only waiting for the proper choreography to teach Marxist interpretive dance in Phys Ed). Because of its many permutations, and how it has been interpreted, it would take me a small tome to take Marx to the woodshed properly and cut through the Gordian knot Marxists have woven around his thought. (These disciples now, like a restaurant changing its name after a case of food poisoning, call themselves Marxian, instead of Marxist.)
I don’t have a small tome, so I’ll have to be brutally simplistic. At his most basic, Marx believed history could be described as a struggle between classes, in which each class rose to the top with each new change in the means of production and ownership of said means. He believed in the future the proletariat — urban workers — would seize the means of production and thereby institute a dictatorship. After that a miracle would occur, the state would naturally wither away, and this would lead to a utopian, classless society, where everything worked on the basis of “From each according to his ability and to each according to his need.” (I’ve always suspected this last step involved unicorn flatulence and, possibly, skittles.)
We were never told how this miracle would occur, though at least in the Soviet interpretation, it entailed the appearance of a new creature, a Homo Sovieticus [2], devoid of greed and egoism. Which shows you that even those trying to bring Marxist paradise to fruition realized that it required every man to be a combination saint and ant.
But it is worse than that. Even if the Homo Sovieticus had issued forth from Lenin’s laboring over Marx, neither this fabled creature nor its minions could make a Marxist society work.
Marx’s problems extend to the whole definition of “class.” He might have seen it as a purely economic concept, which is how it was taught to me in economics in Portugal. It might be he thought those who labored for others were always proletarians. But in the real world, things have become a lot more complex. Are farmers proletarian or not? What about tenant farmers? How about tenant farmers who own a cow? (Marx, the blood of the Kulaks is on your hands.)
More importantly — more damagingly — though, Marx managed to be an economist who did not understand the most fundamental concept of economics: value.
It is thought he based his theory of value on David Ricardo [3], who was already considered erroneous and out of date when Marx used it. Which is no wonder, because no functional economy can be built on Marx.
Marx believed that raw materials + labor = value. The more the raw materials were worth or the more labor put into transforming them, the more the end product would be worth. No other considerations applied.
Clearly Marx never taught a child to cook. You start with raw materials worth something, you spend hours on cooking (and putting out small fires), and the result is, more often than not, a mess that has to be thrown away. This disproves his theory, which is not exactly hard as it’s a very silly theory. It doesn’t take into account such things as distribution. Because to Marx, value is value is value. Marx thought an Appalachian quilt would be worth the exact same thing in the small town where it was made as in the most artsy areas of New York City — and no monetary reward should go to anyone who transports and resells the thing. More importantly, since no one should resell, if a NYC resident wants a quilt, he’d best intuit they exist and travel to the Appalachians to buy it. At least, according to Uncle Karl.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, where people don’t often wander the countryside looking for products they never heard of, value is based on what someone is willing to pay. Therefore, a quilt might be worth time and materials in the Appalachian, combined with its value as something to keep warm under. But it will be worth that plus a sizable premium for craft collectors in NYC. This means the middle-man who serves that market deserves the fee he pockets and — if he’s smart — goes back to the Appalachians and offers more money for better quilts so he can make more money.
Again in the real world, someone can invent a process that takes raw materials, up till then considered useless, and turns them into something valuable. (Gas powered engines. Various kinds of cosmetic mud. For that matter, going back far enough in history, pottery-clay and metal.)
In the Marxist world this makes no sense. First, his predictions for the future never took into account the possibility of technological innovation beyond his own era [4]. Manufacturing would always be massive and labor-intensive, and the only way to make life more equitable was for the workers to own the means of production. Second, it never occurred to him that something valueless can be made valuable through innovation and invention.
This is why societies driven by Marxist principles only produce an abundance of turnips and, perhaps, size 52 shoes for the left foot — because value is value and what people want doesn’t matter.
But famines and the abject poverty of Marxian paradises notwithstanding, the damage is yet deeper.
His world was a closed economy [5] of limited value. If raw materials + labor = value, then there is a finite amount of both and therefore a finite amount of value in the world and all we can do is slice it into ever thinner slices.
This lead Marx and his followers to believe that old prophet of doom, Malthus [6], and therefore view humans as a net drain on society. No matter how much they labored, after all, there was an upper limit to how productive they could be and besides they’d all have to use the same, dwindling, raw materials. It also lead them to believe anyone who had more than the bare necessities had “stolen” the wealth from others. Also, since value was viewed as raw materials + labor, his theory now leaves all those who work in non-material products, like software, or books, or music, or movies (now that they’re divorced of the physical object) feeling like thieves who don’t do anything and yet get compensation.
Of course this is nonsense, but Marxist precepts are so imbued in society [7] they’ve become the unexamined basis of many people’s thought. So, this explains the left’s twin obsessions with ridding the Earth [8] of surplus humans [9] (and in its ultimate iteration of all humans save for a chosen few living in harmony or something, aka Homus Avataricus) and the guilt of intellectuals over getting goods they didn’t “produce.”
But no one can live with guilt forever. Or at least no one – except for a few monks — can live in guilt and holy poverty for very long. So our university indoctrinated/educated intellectuals eventually turn it around.
It goes like this — if all excess wealth is theft, then of course we should all have only the bare minimum. But in this corrupt modern society, with so many people, there’s always going to be theft. So, if someone is going to steal, why shouldn’t I? At least I feel guilty about it. And I’m a good person and — insert proof of “goodness” here — donate to progressive causes or eat organic food or volunteer at the homeless shelter or drive a Prius or…
People who perform acts of Marxian “atonement” [10] feel like they have a license to steal. Everyone is doing it. And besides, they deserve it. And furthermore, ALL wealth is theft.
This attitude has corrupted both our government and our business to the point where capitalism works only by fits and starts [11] and in the spaces between. People who believe they are in a world of thieves try to steal before they’re stolen from, to backstab before they’re stabbed in the back. And the government tries to oversee the theft in the serene belief its job is to distribute to those who have less and, of course, favor themselves and their friends, who look out for the “little people.”
Respect for private property erodes. Wealth is seen as evil and humans as drains on the system. Our finances lurch from crisis to bubble to crisis under the aegis of crony capitalism. Movies and books demonize business people [12] and extol “selfless” bureaucrats [13].
Forget Ragnarok and the great battle between good and evil after the fall of the world tree. The battle is now and we’re in it.
I believe wealth can be created. I believe this is best facilitated by removing the Marxians from any power over the economy. I believe each human brings within himself the possibility of making an invention which can give us infinite wealth.
Who is with me?
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-marxian-worm/
In ancient Norse myth the universe was a tree at whose roots a worm gnawed. When the worm brought the tree down, the ultimate battle between good and evil would happen.
Lately I’ve been wondering if they were mostly right.
Our own civilization is a sort of tree, with its roots in property rights and the rule of law, and its branches lifting the rarefied heights of science, technology, arts, and literature.
For the last forty years in the U.S. — longer in other places – a worm has been gnawing at the roots and sickening the tree. That worm is the philosophy of Karl Marx.
Karl Marx is described as a nineteenth century philosopher (which is true) but also as an economist, a historian, and a sociologist (which are only true if prefaced with “very bad.” [1])
Marxist theory is now applied to all those fields and more. (In the 70s, in Portugal, I studied it in history, sociology, economics, literature, art, and philosophy. They were only waiting for the proper choreography to teach Marxist interpretive dance in Phys Ed). Because of its many permutations, and how it has been interpreted, it would take me a small tome to take Marx to the woodshed properly and cut through the Gordian knot Marxists have woven around his thought. (These disciples now, like a restaurant changing its name after a case of food poisoning, call themselves Marxian, instead of Marxist.)
I don’t have a small tome, so I’ll have to be brutally simplistic. At his most basic, Marx believed history could be described as a struggle between classes, in which each class rose to the top with each new change in the means of production and ownership of said means. He believed in the future the proletariat — urban workers — would seize the means of production and thereby institute a dictatorship. After that a miracle would occur, the state would naturally wither away, and this would lead to a utopian, classless society, where everything worked on the basis of “From each according to his ability and to each according to his need.” (I’ve always suspected this last step involved unicorn flatulence and, possibly, skittles.)
We were never told how this miracle would occur, though at least in the Soviet interpretation, it entailed the appearance of a new creature, a Homo Sovieticus [2], devoid of greed and egoism. Which shows you that even those trying to bring Marxist paradise to fruition realized that it required every man to be a combination saint and ant.
But it is worse than that. Even if the Homo Sovieticus had issued forth from Lenin’s laboring over Marx, neither this fabled creature nor its minions could make a Marxist society work.
Marx’s problems extend to the whole definition of “class.” He might have seen it as a purely economic concept, which is how it was taught to me in economics in Portugal. It might be he thought those who labored for others were always proletarians. But in the real world, things have become a lot more complex. Are farmers proletarian or not? What about tenant farmers? How about tenant farmers who own a cow? (Marx, the blood of the Kulaks is on your hands.)
More importantly — more damagingly — though, Marx managed to be an economist who did not understand the most fundamental concept of economics: value.
It is thought he based his theory of value on David Ricardo [3], who was already considered erroneous and out of date when Marx used it. Which is no wonder, because no functional economy can be built on Marx.
Marx believed that raw materials + labor = value. The more the raw materials were worth or the more labor put into transforming them, the more the end product would be worth. No other considerations applied.
Clearly Marx never taught a child to cook. You start with raw materials worth something, you spend hours on cooking (and putting out small fires), and the result is, more often than not, a mess that has to be thrown away. This disproves his theory, which is not exactly hard as it’s a very silly theory. It doesn’t take into account such things as distribution. Because to Marx, value is value is value. Marx thought an Appalachian quilt would be worth the exact same thing in the small town where it was made as in the most artsy areas of New York City — and no monetary reward should go to anyone who transports and resells the thing. More importantly, since no one should resell, if a NYC resident wants a quilt, he’d best intuit they exist and travel to the Appalachians to buy it. At least, according to Uncle Karl.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, where people don’t often wander the countryside looking for products they never heard of, value is based on what someone is willing to pay. Therefore, a quilt might be worth time and materials in the Appalachian, combined with its value as something to keep warm under. But it will be worth that plus a sizable premium for craft collectors in NYC. This means the middle-man who serves that market deserves the fee he pockets and — if he’s smart — goes back to the Appalachians and offers more money for better quilts so he can make more money.
Again in the real world, someone can invent a process that takes raw materials, up till then considered useless, and turns them into something valuable. (Gas powered engines. Various kinds of cosmetic mud. For that matter, going back far enough in history, pottery-clay and metal.)
In the Marxist world this makes no sense. First, his predictions for the future never took into account the possibility of technological innovation beyond his own era [4]. Manufacturing would always be massive and labor-intensive, and the only way to make life more equitable was for the workers to own the means of production. Second, it never occurred to him that something valueless can be made valuable through innovation and invention.
This is why societies driven by Marxist principles only produce an abundance of turnips and, perhaps, size 52 shoes for the left foot — because value is value and what people want doesn’t matter.
But famines and the abject poverty of Marxian paradises notwithstanding, the damage is yet deeper.
His world was a closed economy [5] of limited value. If raw materials + labor = value, then there is a finite amount of both and therefore a finite amount of value in the world and all we can do is slice it into ever thinner slices.
This lead Marx and his followers to believe that old prophet of doom, Malthus [6], and therefore view humans as a net drain on society. No matter how much they labored, after all, there was an upper limit to how productive they could be and besides they’d all have to use the same, dwindling, raw materials. It also lead them to believe anyone who had more than the bare necessities had “stolen” the wealth from others. Also, since value was viewed as raw materials + labor, his theory now leaves all those who work in non-material products, like software, or books, or music, or movies (now that they’re divorced of the physical object) feeling like thieves who don’t do anything and yet get compensation.
Of course this is nonsense, but Marxist precepts are so imbued in society [7] they’ve become the unexamined basis of many people’s thought. So, this explains the left’s twin obsessions with ridding the Earth [8] of surplus humans [9] (and in its ultimate iteration of all humans save for a chosen few living in harmony or something, aka Homus Avataricus) and the guilt of intellectuals over getting goods they didn’t “produce.”
But no one can live with guilt forever. Or at least no one – except for a few monks — can live in guilt and holy poverty for very long. So our university indoctrinated/educated intellectuals eventually turn it around.
It goes like this — if all excess wealth is theft, then of course we should all have only the bare minimum. But in this corrupt modern society, with so many people, there’s always going to be theft. So, if someone is going to steal, why shouldn’t I? At least I feel guilty about it. And I’m a good person and — insert proof of “goodness” here — donate to progressive causes or eat organic food or volunteer at the homeless shelter or drive a Prius or…
People who perform acts of Marxian “atonement” [10] feel like they have a license to steal. Everyone is doing it. And besides, they deserve it. And furthermore, ALL wealth is theft.
This attitude has corrupted both our government and our business to the point where capitalism works only by fits and starts [11] and in the spaces between. People who believe they are in a world of thieves try to steal before they’re stolen from, to backstab before they’re stabbed in the back. And the government tries to oversee the theft in the serene belief its job is to distribute to those who have less and, of course, favor themselves and their friends, who look out for the “little people.”
Respect for private property erodes. Wealth is seen as evil and humans as drains on the system. Our finances lurch from crisis to bubble to crisis under the aegis of crony capitalism. Movies and books demonize business people [12] and extol “selfless” bureaucrats [13].
Forget Ragnarok and the great battle between good and evil after the fall of the world tree. The battle is now and we’re in it.
I believe wealth can be created. I believe this is best facilitated by removing the Marxians from any power over the economy. I believe each human brings within himself the possibility of making an invention which can give us infinite wealth.
Who is with me?
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-marxian-worm/
Is "Now Hiring" the new "We do our part" sign of the Depression?
Dr. Helen: Is "Now Hiring" the new "We do our part" sign of the Depression?
Why are there "Now Hiring" signs in front of so many businesses these days when so many people are complaining about not finding a job? Everywhere I go in Knoxville, there are generic "Now Hiring" signs from the hotels to the car dealerships to the stores at the mall.
Is it just a slogan to make people feel better about the business? Are they truly hiring? Or are they just waiting for the perfect person to show up and taking applications from the rest? I find it puzzling because if businesses were really that desperate to hire, so much so that they are all putting up signs, why are so many people saying they are having trouble finding work?
During the Depression, businesses showed their compliance with New Deal programs by putting up the "Blue Eagle," with the motto "We do our part." "The eagle, which had been modeled on an Indian thunderbird, was displayed in windows and stamped on products to show a business's compliance." Consumers were encouraged to only shop at the businesses that displayed the blue Eagle logo. It seems that I remember also reading something about this in Amity Shlae's terrific book The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression where most of my (limited) knowledge of the Great Depression comes from.
Is the "Now Hiring" sign just a slogan being used to show the business "supports their community" in the current recession even though they are not really hiring? Is it a ploy to make people feel good about the business so they will shop there or is it legit, or both? Do you see these signs in your area? Any thoughts?
http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2011/05/is-now-hiring-new-we-do-our-part-sign.html
Why are there "Now Hiring" signs in front of so many businesses these days when so many people are complaining about not finding a job? Everywhere I go in Knoxville, there are generic "Now Hiring" signs from the hotels to the car dealerships to the stores at the mall.
Is it just a slogan to make people feel better about the business? Are they truly hiring? Or are they just waiting for the perfect person to show up and taking applications from the rest? I find it puzzling because if businesses were really that desperate to hire, so much so that they are all putting up signs, why are so many people saying they are having trouble finding work?
During the Depression, businesses showed their compliance with New Deal programs by putting up the "Blue Eagle," with the motto "We do our part." "The eagle, which had been modeled on an Indian thunderbird, was displayed in windows and stamped on products to show a business's compliance." Consumers were encouraged to only shop at the businesses that displayed the blue Eagle logo. It seems that I remember also reading something about this in Amity Shlae's terrific book The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression where most of my (limited) knowledge of the Great Depression comes from.
Is the "Now Hiring" sign just a slogan being used to show the business "supports their community" in the current recession even though they are not really hiring? Is it a ploy to make people feel good about the business so they will shop there or is it legit, or both? Do you see these signs in your area? Any thoughts?
http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2011/05/is-now-hiring-new-we-do-our-part-sign.html
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