Basic hygiene accounts for a big chunk of physical well-being, but it's one of the first things to fall by the wayside in socialized systems, which is why they become hotbeds of C Difficile, MRSA, and the like. From the Daily Mail:
Hospital Patient So Shocked At Dirty Ward She Climbed Out Of Bed To Clean It Hersel
Well, it seems there's more work to be done. From the BBC:
Maggot infestation hunt continues
A search for the source of a maggot infestation at the Royal Children's Hospital in Aberdeen will continue over the weekend. The discovery has caused the closure of three operating theatres, and postponements of procedures.
"I Wish the Fourth of July Would Never End" [Jonah Goldberg]
I just returned from the annual 4th of July parade (and party) in my neighborhood. It's really becoming one of my favorite traditions, in part because it's one of the few times when DC feels like any other American town. My daughter loves to lunge for candy thrown from the amateurishly decorated cars and trucks. We all applaud the local swim team and the boy scouts and the "different drummer" marching band (complete with lavish gay patriotism), we even cheer — or at least smile — when Marion Barry comes up MacArthur blvd like an American general liberating some French town. The kids dance when the Bolivians come by, and they cheer when the DC horsemen (all African-American) trot past like cowboys heading home. There was a small scare at the fair when the moon bounce briefly deflated and the five-and-older kids nearly rioted. But otherwise, fun was had by all. The lines for the free hotdogs were too long and the balloon animal tent too. But everyone was in good cheer and parents did their best to keep kids from cutting in line. Lucy got an American flag painted on her face and chased bubbles from the bubble machines on the old fashioned fire engine. On the way home, I bought her a lemonade from a stand on someone's porch and told her we still had fireworks to look forward too, as well as the noisemakers we bought her. She squeezed my hand and said, "Daddy, I wish the Fourth of July would never end."
I squeezed her hand back, just a little, and said: "Me too."
On everything except the idea that we can know she's not looking at 2012. In fact, as I said yesterday, her resignation doesn't make much sense to me if she's not looking at 2012.
Update: From a reader:
Unless her reason for stepping down really does have to do mainly with removing her children from the exposure of the continued vicious attacks of the left. In this case, she has decided family first.... and is willing to take the short-term hits for "abandoning" her post. In the long run, I think this is a plus with the conservative base.
Fair enough. It certainly is true that nobody in public life in recent memory has been as shabbily treated as she has.
"It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more."
Conventional wisdom suggests that short-term the Palin decision was unwise — e.g., "quitter," unpredictable, sulking, etc. But what else are her critics really going to say? It's not like a Letterman can trump laughing at her on late-night television as he puns that a Yankees star had sex in a dugout with her 14-year old daughter. Can Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic website go beyond his slurs that she did not deliver her own child? How much more cleverly can N.Y. feminist pundits tsk-tsk her that she's a Wasilla trailer-park retread?
In other words, it doesn't matter that much what critics say, but — should she pursue politics — only what she does with her newfound time, especially if she travels widely, studies foreign policy, and helps galvanize the party base.
In the long run, she can lecture, earn a good income through speaking, develop a coterie of advisers and supporters, take care of her family, not have the constant political warring on all flanks, and invest time in reflecting and studying issues, visit the country, meet leaders, etc. She's not looking at 2012; but in eight years by 2016 she will be far more savvy, still young, and far more experienced. It matters not all that the Left writes her off as daffy, since they were going to do that whatever she did; the key is whether she convinces conservatives in eight year of travel and reflection that she's a charismatic Margaret Thatcher type heavyweight.
Rather than just be a celebrity, this could be a real opportunity for her to show us her stuff — what's important to her, what she wants people to know about her, why we should pay attention to her, why we should consider her for the highest office in the land (after already gone with the cool dude with little national electoral experience — though in his case it was little experience, period). To get people to know her for something more than being Sarah!
I wouldn't be shocked though, if Palin on the National Scene, Act II, starts out low key, with some downtime. She needs to figure out what her voice is, where and how she can shine, and, most importantly, how she and her family can survive it and even flourish in the brutal world of politics. There's no question she has a gift. Now's the time to figure out how to be prudent with it.
From my endless archives, a few samples of how the major media wrote off Ronald Reagan repeatedly:
Newsweek, 1971, “Ronald Reagan’s Slow Fade,” ended with the judgment that “the somber truth is that Sacramento may mark the end of Ronald Reagan’s political road. . . By every normal measure, Ronald Reagan ought to be entitled to any political future he wants.A close aide said, 'The Presidency?Oh, he’s not interested.Four more years and I think you’ll see Ronald Reagan riding one of his horses off into the sunset.'” And see Stephen Roberts in the New York Times Magazine: “In 1976, the reasoning goes, Reagan would be 65, and too old to run.” “When a guy’s built on celluloid,” Democratic State Senator George Moscone said, “he goes up fast, but he burns out quickly.”
After the 1976 campaign, Newsweek offered a reprise, “Into the Sunset": "The concluding line of Reagan’s convention speech—'There is no substitute for victory'—could also turn out to be a epitaph for his own political career."
And not to be left out, John Coyne wrote in some magazine called National Review that "Reagan seems somewhat out of step with the new political stirrings, a man very much of the Sixties. . . For a decade he has been a central symbol of everything that is best in what we call the conservative movement, and if his approach and his ideas are obsolete, then so are those many of us who believe in him.And it’s never much fun to be a middle-aged anachronism."
Everyone should apply the appropriate discount to the Palin commentary and analysis they read today.
This Ellis fella seems to think we're pretty dumb, celebrating on July 4 when nothing happened. I know I wasn't there, so I don't know for sure what happened. I figure he must have traveled back with Mr. Peabody and Sherman on the Wayback Machine to be so smart. I celebrate on the Fourth, because on that piece of parchment in the National Archives, the first words printed, right there at the very top say: "In CONGRESS. July 4, 1776."
That's enough for me.
Sounds about right. The use of the word "fraud" in the Daily Beast's headline strikes me as particularly silly.
The explanation suggested by this latest Martin story seems pretty persuasive to me: get out of Alaska as a bigger stage beckons, earn lots of money to support your family, and keep your options open in national politics. If the world wants you to be a celebrity, why bother with the grinding details and all the frustrations of being governor of Alaska? Be a celebrity.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, today made the following statement after Gov. Sarah Palin’s announcement that she plans to step down as governor later this month.
“I am deeply disappointed that the Governor has decided to abandon the State and her constituents before her term has concluded.”
Sen. Murkowski is in interior Alaska and communicating via satellite phone and is unavailable for follow up questions. She will be available on Monday afternoon.
With respect to many of the Palinologists below, I think they're getting way too hepatomantic over the entrails.
As a political move for anything other than the 2010 Senate race, today's announcement is a disaster. And I'm not sure it's a plus for the Senate - and, even if it were, the manner and timing suggest it was not a professionally planned event and therefore is unlikely to have any grand strategy behind it.
So Occam's Razor leaves us with: Who needs this?
In states far from the national spotlight, politics still attracts normal people. You're a mayor or a state senator or even the governor, but you lead a normal life. The local media are tough on you, but they know you, they live where you live, they're tough on the realyou, not on some caricature cooked up by a malign alliance of late-night comics who'd never heard of you a week earlier and media grandees supposedly on your own side who pronounce you a "cancer".
Then suddenly you get the call from Washington. You know it'll mean Secret Service, and speechwriters, and minders vetting your wardrobe. But nobody said it would mean a mainstream network comedy host doing statutory rape gags about your 14-year old daughter. You've got a special-needs kid and a son in Iraq and a daughter who's given you your first grandchild in less than ideal circumstances. That would be enough for most of us. But the special-needs kid and the daughter and most everyone else you love are a national joke, and the PC enforcers are entirely cool with it.
Most of those who sneer at Sarah Palin have no desire to live her life. But why not try to - what's the word? - "empathize"? If you like Wasilla and hunting and snowmachining and moose stew and politics, is the last worth giving up everything else in the hopes that one day David Letterman and Maureen Dowd might decide Trig and Bristol and the rest are sufficiently non-risible to enable you to prosper in their world? And, putting aside the odds, would you really like to be the person you'd have to turn into under that scenario?
National office will dwindle down to the unhealthily singleminded (Clinton, Obama), the timeserving emirs of Incumbistan (Biden, McCain) and dynastic heirs (Bush). Our loss.
I don't apologize for posting his entire post here, because if you want the links to every theory, you have to go over there. Mickey Writes:
I can see 5 6 7 8 9 10 Palin theories ... and counting: 1) She's running for president; 2) She's undergoing fame withdrawal and plans to get more attention in the lower 48; 3) She wants to cash in ($); 4) There's another shoe about to drop; 5) She'll now run against Murkowski for Senate. 6) She needs to tend to her family. 7) She's bonkers. 8) She's preggers. 9) She wants to "effect positive change outside government at this point in time on another scale and actually make a difference for our priorities." 10) Actually being a governor in a recession is no fun. Gives you ulcers. ... These theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. ... I have no fish in this hunt. ... Update: Mediaite has intravenous drip. ... see also HuffPo ... Murphy is morphing! ...
P.S.: Kurtz is sure! "No way Palin can run for president now." ...Update: Now he asks, "How can these talking heads pop off about the meaning of Palin's resignation when not one of them saw it coming?" ... It's the return of Kurtz vs. Kurtz! ... 4:35 P.M.
As America looks forward to celebrating Independence Day, this open letter from Tory Diary’s Tim Montgomerie to British Conservative leader David Cameron — a letter partly prompted by unsurprising but appalling revelations of how little young Britons are being taught about their history — is worth mulling, not least this: “It's difficult to love a country that you know little about.”
If Sarah Palin was trying to make news today, she had odd timing. At a time when Farah Fawcett and Ed McMahon’s deaths paled — almost as much as another recently departed celebrity’s skin — into insignificance, perhaps she hoped her resignation on a holiday Friday would pass unnoticed. But that isn’t really her style, which makes today’s abrupt announcement seem more like a whim — a characteristic her detractors worried about during the campaign.
I suspect the media is both concerned and delighted by her news. On the one hand, she’s great material — ridicule sells, and if she really does exit the stage, they’ll have to find someone else to pick on. On the other hand, the great 2012 GOP nominee chess match has already started, and this ensures that her name will be in the mix, even if she has no plans to launch a campaign.
Here’s something I’ve always thought — if a major television network pre-empts regularly scheduled programming to run its anchor comedy show during prime time, and you are the butt of their jokes, you have a serious problem. And I’ve never felt that politically she could ever recover from the 2008 campaign.
While we all speculate about this, it could be that she’d just had enough and wants her life back. Who could blame her?
Now that strikes me as beltway talk, even micro-beltway talk. Schmidt's behavior would not be excusable even if the things he said we're proven true (and I don't think they have been). Schmidt was given a monumental privilege, to essentially run a presidential campaign for a candidate who, despite his flaws, was about as honorable a politician as we've seen in a very long time (yes, sometimes McCain's honor crossed the line into vanity). Schmidt's leaking and self-aggrandizing during the campaign and after reflects poorly on him, and needlessly embarrassed the candidate — regardless of the merits of his complaints. The man is not a journalist, he's not a priest, he's not Thomas More. He's a very, very partisan campaign functionary and his behavior has been tacky, his judgment questionable and his loyalty beyond dubious.
I don't mean to single him out in this regard. Many, if not most, campaign flacks have these qualities to one extent or another. But Schmidt couldn't do what the really talented flacks do — hide his tracks. Schmidt couldn't manage that, which compounds his failures, not exonerates them.
That's my takeaway from today. Not too long ago, "President Barack Obama" was far from "inevitable," while the current secretary of state was. A year ago, the resignation of the Alaska governor would be far from breaking news. A day ago, I thought the July 4th weekend Friday afternoon news story would be Sanford's resignation. A month ago, Jenny Sanford wasn't a obvious candidate for a Vogue profile.
Have a happy Independence Day. God's speed if you're fighting for our continued independence.
Whatever you think of Palin, there is a lot of truth to this statement, isn't there? "Don't explain: Your friends don't need it and your enemies won't believe it anyway."
People who liked Palin's statement tend to say she was "speaking from the heart." But if this decision is about running for president, the speech wasn’t quite speaking from the heart.
The title of that last Geraghty post is "Steve Schmidt wins." I note that only because a smart, pro-life, conservative said to me earlier today after listening to the Palin statement: "this statement is bizarre — is she trying to prove Steve Schmidt right or something?!"
On the theory that the scrutiny of her children was the straw that broke the camel's back, the consultant said, “From the interaction I’ve had with her, that would make some sense.” He noted that Palin had been “really down” at one point after the 2008 convention, largely from being separated from Todd and her children for days at a time; the campaign leadership was nudged to have the family traveling with her as much as possible, having a major impact on her morale. “They finally let her be a mom,” the consultant said.
If she's running for president, I have no idea whether this was shrewd or not. But I'm pretty sure Steve is wrong that if she's running this is a longterm run for 2016 or 2020. If it's 2016, why on earth do you resign now? Why invite all of the criticism about being a "quitter" and so on if you're not running — and therefore don't need to raise money — until 7 or 11 years from now? No, if she's resigning to run it seems it has to be for 2012.
Wow. Not sure what to make of this. Perhaps she's trying to one-up Michael Jackson in taking the heat off Mark Sanford. ("Take that, Jacko!" Which Republican governor will step up next?)
This could be, as Bill Kristol suggests, part of a risky but shrewd long game, not for a run in 2012, but way off in 2016 or 2020. Some folks have mentioned Nixon, rehabilitating himself in the 1960s, and skipping the 1964 election. She may have the self-awareness that she's taken big hits below the waterline, and that her best course is the patient rebuilding of her political life over a decade rather than the next two election cycles. Now she'll have the time to read and study and cultivate wider portfolio as Jonah and others have suggested. But even if she wants to run in 2012, it is certainly the case that it is hard to be a player on the national stage while being governor of Alaska since it is so remote, even in the jet age. (It take longer to get to Alaska than Europe from the east coast and midwest.) If so, she should say this openly. Make a virtue out of it.
Then, too, I wonder, and am slightly hopeful in fact, that she is indeed doing this for authentic family reasons. Political life is hell on decent family life. I have a hard time thinking of a single politician, at any level, who has a happy family life. Kids are usually a mess; non-messed up kids are the rare exception. Whenever I talk to someone about whether to run for any office, that's the first and last aspect I bring up. You shouldn't do it until your kids are grown or off to college is my opinion. This might really be a case of where she has reckoned the cost to her family of near-term political ambition, and chosen her family. Good for her if so.
many are writing her political obit now but in the past she's always risen from the ashes because she "connects" so well w/ ordinary people.
will she run for prez? I would say "probably" just because that's her history/pattern. she ran for lt guv in 2002 and no one thought she had a prayer. she spent pennies compared to the other 4 and came in 2nd. then she took that job at the oil & gas commission but quit that to run for guv. no one gave her a chance and yet she won the primary then went on to beat Tony Knowles.
honestly, I have to take the resignation at face value — she was weary of the unending ethics complaints that she had to defend personally — they are not wealthy people and the debt was staggering. This allows her to finish her book, go on tour, and never have to worry again about being a state employee subject to the Executive Branch ethics laws. she can hopefully knit her family back together and then after the 2010 election, see how she's polling and how much $$$ she's raised.
My Alaskan adds: "she has seemed tired ... not having any fun anymore. The Auburn thing was such a shot of adrenalin. Why stick around here?"
No way around it. She has just labeled herself a "quitter." Someone who doesn't finish what she started. What in the world is wrong with Republican governors? One self-absorbed politician after the next. Governors: "It's not all about you!"
And her bit about polling her kids on her decision to resign was also egregious. We women abruptly quit our public responsibilities because our kids don't want mommy working anymore? This is from the woman who wore a black business suit while she baked hotdogs for her kids. (One of the many weird moments in her "Home with the Palins" Greta van Sustern interviews.)
Here's a suggestion. How about a Ensign/Sanford/Palin YouTube mash up to the tune of "Another One Bites the Dust"? Disgraceful.
If You Can't Stand the Cold, Get Out of Juneau [Rick Brookhiser]
As Cole Porter said, Sarah Palin's got that thing, that special thing that makes the birdies forget to sing, yes she's got that thing — that special thing.
Yet she also makes a more than normal share of misjudgments.
Are we to accept in an aspirant to the Oval Office cutting short her tour of duty in the Alaska statehouse?
I think I have pretty well-established credentials when it comes to being charmed by Sarah Palin, but that statement, as a statement, was simply terrible. Rambling and not at all persuasive as an argument for her decision. More Gibson/Couric than GOP convention speech. She shouldn't have said a thing without getting Matt Scully — or some similarly talented speechwriter — on the case first. As to how this decision plays out ultimately, we'll see. There's plenty of time if (as I assume) she wants to run in 2012, and she obviously has plenty of capital with Republicans. But not an auspicious start.
Republican Governors Association Executive Director Nick Ayers issued the following statement in regards to Sarah Palin’s announcement today that she will not seek reelection in 2010 and will step down from the governorship.
“While we regret the news announced by Governor Palin today, Alaska will continue to have a Republican governor through 2010 and we are confident the state will elect a Republican in next year’s election.
The RGA’s focus remains firmly on the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia this year, and the 37 gubernatorial elections that will take place in 2010. We know that winning these races is the most important task facing our Party over the next two years.”
The Republican Governors Association press office has been working overtime on surprise announcements lately.
The woman in question, meanwhile, tweets: "We’ll soon attach info on decision to not seek re-election… this is in Alaska’s best interest, my family’s happy… it is good, stay tuned"
Who knows all the reasons — Todd and Sarah Palin presumably fully understand.
Listening to her, it seems like this is a combination of stepping back and moving forward. Stepping back, because it's way too overwhelming to be Sarah Palin, political phenom, Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, and Sarah Palin, wife and mother. I don't know that anyone can fulfill all those roles well, simultaneously. And we're unrealistic, I think, when we assume people can or should.
One reservation I've always had about Sarah Palin has to do with her family. If she is stepping down because of what politics has done to her family, because of something in her family life she doesn't want to see as David Letterman fodder, because it's impossible to be governor, a star, and a mom to an infant . . . this is good. It demonstrates good judgment and priorities.
Well, aside from my timing being impeccable, the best I can say is I'm flabbergasted.
Not running again could make sense as a pre-presidential move. Resigning strikes me as very strange. I do hope all is well with her family and that there's the best possible reason for this fairly shocking news.
According to National Review's impressive indictment, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill has this payoff for organized labor:
Projects receiving grants and financing under Waxman-Markey provisions will be required to implement Davis-Bacon union-wage rules, making it hard for non-union firms to compete - and ensuring that these "investments" pay out inflated union wages. And it's not just the big research-and-development contracts, since Waxman-Markey forces union-wage rules all the way down to the plumbing-repair and light-bulb-changing level.
Stick the equivalent provision in a health care bill—requiring government-administered union wages for hospital janitors and uniform-launderers as well as nurses—and you can kiss Obama's curve-bending health-care cost-savings goodbye. ...
A lot of these folks are angrily writing in to dispute that I ever supported her. For those interested, here's the archive of Corner posts written by me mentioning Palin. Here are longer pieces published on NRO that I've written about her or mentioning her. That's not everything, of course. It doesn't include USA Today stuff, TV appearances, speeches, etc. But I think it rebuts the idea that I've always had it in for the woman.
Update: Folks who want to hash this all out might check out the comments over at HotAir.
As I expected, the e-mail in response to my column is all over the place this morning, but there's a heavy dose of sophomoric name-calling. Here's a smattering (all asterisks are mine):
Jonah,
How about you go back to your basement apartment and shut the f**k up. Maybe study up on the fact the nobody gives a rats a** what you think about Palin.
What a bandwagon rider you are. You write nothing new in this recent little spewing that wasn't spat out by the Vanity Fair article. If anyone is tarnishing their reputations by opening their mouths it is pompous pieces of s**t like yourself.
You and the rest of the "elite" may have a problem with her defending herself from ...well...from people like you, but the rest of us have tired of the Grin and Bear it technique which has done nothing but failed. ...and sorry someone, even a comedian comes out and makes Jokes about my kids on National TV, I am going to have something to say about it...If people from my campaign start leaking innuendo to the media about me and the campaign...I am going to have something to say about it.
Where is your letter to Huckabee? Romney? You are dickhead.
Bottom line you article wreaks of sexism, elitism, and arrogance. You may have your panties in a bundle but luckily the only weight you carry is also held by those same panties.
Okay, before I proceed. Just a few quick points, because I think this e-mail represents, in its purest form, everything I was talking about in my column. Lots of others make similar, some less vitriolic, arguments about "blue bloods" like me ruining the party. Others insist she has perfect political instincts and doesn't need any advice at all.
If Sarah Palin follows the advice of readers like them, she's doomed on the national political stage. She'll make a great Joan of Arc for a certain segment of the public, but she'll never go beyond that. And I think that would be a shame. The upshot of a lot of e-mail is that she hasn't done a single thing wrong — at least nothing that warrants criticism. The idea that she's, in effect, done everything right, baffles me. Palin has lost a huge chunk of her popularity over the last six months. Some readers say that's because the media has been unfair to her. And that's true! The press has been unfair. But guess what? The press isn't going away and successful politicians learn to deal with the reality of liberal media bias. You don't get extra points or extra votes because the press slimes you. What Palin needs to do is figure out how to win back the people she lost, not elicit more cheers from the folks she already has. That's how politics works.
What baffles me even more is the idea that politicians — any politician — doesn't need advisors or advice. Reagan had fantastic political instincts. He also had some of the savviest and most sophisticated political advisors in modern political history. Good politicians know how to take serious advice. Now, maybe my advice is wrong. It's been wrong before, to be sure.
But the idea that a political columnist shouldn't offer advice and observations is just silly and to suggest otherwise bespeaks of a certain thin-skinnedness on the part of some of the fans shouting at me.
Still, the question: "Where is your letter to Huckabee? Romney?" is a good one.
What this reader, and many others, fail to understand is that I haven't written columns like this about other candidates is because I either don't think they need the advice (Romney) or because I have no interest in seeing them succeed (Huckabee). The retreat to charges of sexism is as absurd as it is convenient. As is all of this knee-jerk junk about elitism and snobbery. If I was an elitist and snob of the sort these people claim I am, then why did I ever support her in the first place? Why did I tout her for the job? Is it all part of some elaborate ruse?
Again: If Sarah Palin becomes nothing more than expression of populist resentments of a certain portion of the base she will lose the ability to persuade anybody who isn't already a diehard fan. That is not the route to success.
Anyhow, some more e-mail:
Jonah,
You and Krauthammer are two of my favorite commentators but I have a bone to pick with both of your recent critiques of Palin.
You both essentially say that one cannot get elected POTUS by just peddling platitudes, cliches and truisms. Call me crazy but didn't we just elect a man who did just that!!??
Deep down inside you are probably correct in much of your assessment but you and the great Krauthammer (and a few others at NRO) should guard gainst drifting into snobbery and esotericism.
Perhaps we conservatives need to learn what the Schumers, Durbins, Leahy's, Kennedy's etc etc have learned so well. Never give an inch!! ATTACK, ATTACK toujour ATTACK!!
At Wednesday’s Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board meeting, chairman H.R. Crawford – a former District Council member and Marion Barry confidante – told fellow Board members that he has heard talk on Capitol Hill about yanking former President Ronald Reagan’s name off the local airport and returning it to its previous generic moniker: National Airport.
“It was just a discussion. We’re not aware of anything specific,” MWAA spokeswoman Tara Hamilton later told The Examiner.
It’s clear that the current crop of congressional leaders want no part of Reagan’s grand conservative vision for America, but erasing all trace of his memory from an airport that’s already been named in his honor is about as petty as you can get.
Basic hygiene accounts for a big chunk of physical well-being, but it's one of the first things to fall by the wayside in socialized systems, which is why they become hotbeds of C Difficile, MRSA, and the like. From the Daily Mail:
Hospital Patient So Shocked At Dirty Ward She Climbed Out Of Bed To Clean It Herself
There's a fascinating (and not just for Brits) piece by Fraser Nelson in the Spectator on the immigration data he recently obtained from Britain's Office of National Statistics. Here are some key sections:
The figures show the extent to which Brown’s “boom” was a mirage built not just on debt, but foreign labour. Most seriously, we can see a deep dysfunctionality in the UK labour market. Our system keeps millions on benefits (never less than 5 million have been on some kind of benefits since 1997) while meeting the needs of expanding the economy with a limitless supply of industrious immigrant labour. This means that the direct link between a growing economy and combating poverty is broken. . . .
At no point in the boom did the number on out-of-work benefits fall below five million souls. Almost half have been on welfare for five years or more – and are, therefore, statistically more likely to die than to work again. As I say, were it not for immigration, we’d be forced to confront this problem or our economy would not grow. When I was a business journalist in the late 1990s, I remember writing stories about how bus companies were recruiting in homeless shelters because they couldn’t find the staff. The people in those shelters were being offered structure to their lives, from an employer forced by economic conditions to deal with the greater risk they pose. It was a sign of economic growth addressing social problems – as it should be.
But mass immigration has broken this link. It meant Gordon Brown could actually afford to keep so many million on benefits, as tax receipts were being generated by comparative newcomers. It was a lot easier than trying to reform welfare. Scandalously, that’s what Brown did. To my mind, it is the most contemptible failure of his time as Chancellor. He had the money, the economic boom, to sort out the welfare dependency that afflicts so many communities in Britain. But he took the easy, short term route.
It's worth noting that Mr. Nelson describes himself as a "supporter of immigration."
This piece in the State (h/t RCP) on Sanford's mental state reads a little like a parody:
Psychiatrists, psychologists and other professionals who work with behavior disorders were reluctant to diagnose Sanford based on what they have seen on television or read in newspapers.
But a few were willing to offer theories as to what could be driving the governor’s behavior.
Susan Hardwicke, a licensed social worker who runs a clinical practice in Columbia, said Sanford could be under the influence of brain chemicals that fire when a person falls in love.
“People do crazy things for love,” Hardwicke said. “That’s what all the songs are about. Nobody in their right mind would do what he’s doing.”
This behavior is temporary, she said. Research shows romantic love lasts less than two years. (Sanford’s term as governor has 18 months remaining.)
I find it hard to believe that none of the liberal commentators breathlessly celebrating Wal-Mart's "capitulation" on national health care have even entertained the most parsimonious explanation: that Wal-Mart is in favor of this because it raises the barriers to entry in the retail market, and hammers Wal-Mart's competition. Yet somehow, this appears nowhere in any of the analysis.
Wal-Mart is always going to have a seat at the table when employer mandates are discussed, because Wal-Mart is the nation's largest private employer. Target and Macy's probably won't have a seat at the table. So Wal-Mart can influence the rules in ways that benefit Wal-Mart at the expense of the competition. This is partly because the regulators often cycle into jobs at the firms they regulate, but also simply because the regulator's attention is finite, so being consistently at the table allows you to shape their views over time.
In fact, however, Wal-Mart has been suckling at the government teat for decades, transferring costs to the tax payer whenever possible.
Indeed, Wal-Mart is heavily dependent on government subsidies. Wal-Mart routinely gets sales and property tax abatements when it opens a new store, to cite but one example. According to a 2004 study (albeit one funded by a union) the subsidies can amount to as much as 12 million dollars per store. Additional de facto subsidies come when uninsured or under-insured Wal-Mart employees get health care at government expense. Supporting government-run health care looks like a sop to the politicians who control the subsidy tap.
I examined Wal-Mart's dependence on government subsidies back in 2006 for TCS Daily, writing that: ... both the left and right implicitly cast Wal-Mart in the role of free market capitalist. What's missing from the debate is the extent to which the Wal-Mart story really is the antithesis of laissez-faire capitalism. When you look under the rug, it turns out that Wal-Mart is a beneficiary of corporate welfare.
When Wal-Mart plans a new store, it typically asks local and county governments for an array of benefits, principally in the form of various economic development subsidies:
Infrastructure assistance in the form of new or expanded roads and utilities servicing the store location. Sales tax abatements. Property tax abatements. Income tax credits. Enterprise zone treatment for the store location. Eligibility for job training programs. Eligibility for tax exempt industrial revenue bond financing. Economic development loans and grants.
It's always a bit difficult not to be sappy about the Fourth, which I insist on calling The Birthday of the Modern World. But a reader sent me a letter that contains two great paragraphs:
Long before the modern rationalizations for the "benign" nanny state, Confucius had given his own vision of the perfectly ordered pyramid with the emperor at the top, talking to God, and most of the rest of us at the bottom, lucky for the privilege to talk to their dog.
The bulk of human experience is tyranny, whereas liberty is the ultimate unprobability, a.k.a., America. Government of the people, for the people, by the people cannot survive unless the people has enough intestinal fortitude to make it work.
Obama Administration to Involve NSA in Defending Civilian Agency Networks
The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with AT&T as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials.
President Obama said in May that government efforts to protect computer systems from attack would not involve "monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic" and Department of Homeland Security officials say that the new program will only scrutinize data going to or from government systems.
But the program has provoked debate within DHS, the current and former officials said, because of uncertainty over whether private data can be shielded from unauthorized scrutiny, how much of a role NSA should play and whether the agency's involvement in warrantless wiretapping under the Bush administration would draw controversy.
"We absolutely intend to use the technical resources, the substantial ones, that NSA has. But . . . they will be guided, led, and in a sense directed by the people we have at the Department of Homeland Security," the department's secretary, Janet Napolitano, told reporters in a discussion of cybersecurity efforts.
Still, if Sanford's going to do this schtick, it would be cool if he followed McGreevey's example and said something like "At a point in every person's life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is. And so my truth is that I am a straight American."
Update: From a reader:
Nah, he's a "promiscuous American" or maybe a "crossing-the-line American."
In the course of today’s Impromptus, I express admiration for the name Cinnamon Stillwell — she is a journalist, writing in particular about the Middle East. Would you like to hear from the lady herself?
In case you’re wondering, it is indeed the real thing. I’m of that generation of hippie babies born in California in the late 1960s/early ’70s and given names like Forest, Summer, and, well, Cinnamon. Although I wish I could say I were related to Gen. “Vinegar” Joe Stillwell (I get that question a lot), Stillwell is my married name. And as you have noted before, it all flows together rather well, if I say so myself.
Best regards, Cinnamon
P.S. Some of my friends call me Cinn, although I urge them not to take it literally!
In the past, I’ve said that “Ramesh Ponnuru” and “Michelangelo Signorile” are the two most beautiful names in journalism. (Very, very different views, those guys.) “Cinnamon Stillwell” joins that class.
Stephen, speaking as a foreigner, I confess I'm finding it harder and harder to see why you fellows bothered holding a revolution. Under this bill, it will be illegal for me to sell my property to a willing buyer without first bringing it into line with some twerp bureaucrat's arbitrary and ever shifting "environmental" regulations originally designed for California, and which have helped turn the Golden State into the foldin' state, but which are nevertheless now to be applied from Maine to Alaska. And no matter what you spend a couple of years down the road the standards will be "revised" and you'll be out of compliance all over again.
In my part of New Hampshire, come the late fall you'll drive around and see many homes with plastic sheeting over windows and the less-used doors, and bales of hay round the foundation. I doubt that would pass muster with the twerp bureaucrat, but it's what self-reliant people of modest means do to get through the winter. Without that attitude there would be no United States.
This is an assault on property rights, and, more fundamentally, like so much of the Obama program, an assault on citizenship. It seems an odd way to mark "Independence" Day.
I'm with Jonah, Ramesh, and others. My points last week were that I didn't think the fact that the guy had an affair, by itself, was a reason for him to have to resign, and that what I took to be the ethical standard suggested by Chuck Colson — namely, that someone shown to have failed in his private life would necessarily abuse his public duties and therefore shouldn't be permitted to hold public office — was unreasonable and unwise. Maybe I was wrong (I don't think so, but it sure seems like a dumb thing to have said at the moment). But in any event, we've traveled a good distance since then. Apparently his trip to Argentina was on the public dime, and his idea of public office as a side-issue to his personal journey for growth and redemption is nauseating. He ought to resign voluntarily, go away for a while, and get back to us if/when the journey is done.
Earlier today, I had a post on a study by the Goldwater Institute, which found that 3.5 percent of public-high-school students — 3.5. percent — know the answers to basic questions about America (e.g., “Who was the first president?”). This is in marked contrast to immigrants taking the citizenship test, who tend to pass with flying colors — never mind that they prepare for the exam (unlike the surveyed high-school students). (Although you can say that the students have had a lifetime of preparation, or should have.)
I had a thought: Every new American — every young American — is like an immigrant. Every new American should learn about the country, should be acculturated (to use an old-fashioned, possibly discredited word). This is true whether the new American comes from across a border or out of a native-born womb. (Sorry for that slightly cringe-making phrase.) If we thought of our children as immigrants, of a kind, in need of acculturation — we would all be better off.
In response to my Impromptus today, I have gotten several e-mails just like the below. It has rather surprised me — although I understand the point of the e-mails. See what you think.
Hi Jay,
My one quibble with your column today has to do with your valediction, which wishes us all a “Happy Fourth of July.” I have put this phrase in the same category — although it is a lesser offense — as “Happy Holidays.” I much prefer “Happy Independence Day.”
When my now teenagers were much younger, I asked them what we were actually celebrating on the Fourth of July. While they did respond with the correct answer, it did not come immediately. We already struggle enough to remember the meaning of what were once revered holidays — holidays that have now been relegated to barbecue and super-sale weekends. I figure it’s worth the extra syllable to remind people what the Fourth is all about.
In the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson writes about five states that:
went into the final day of the fiscal year facing the prospect of shutdowns of public agencies or paying bills through IOUs unless they devised ways to close the yawning gap between their obligations and their recession-savaged revenue.
The list of states — Democratic and Republican, old economy and new — is sufficiently diverse to dispel any notion that the fiscal crisis of the states is disproportionately the problem of one party or one region. It is, rather, hard-wired into the American system of governance, wherein virtually all the states have required themselves to produce balanced budgets even during depressions — which means they must slash services and lay off workers even though such actions actually deepen the downturn.
Recessions aren't new, and neither are state balanced-budget requirements. To understand the cause of today's budget brinkmanship, we would probably be better off looking at such things as the percentage of state budgets spent on Medicaid — something that has changed, largely in response to federal policy.
The Divine Economy: On the New Papal Encylical [Rev. Robert A. Sirico]
On Tuesday, Pope Benedict XVI will release his first social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. The pre-release buzz from the Catholic Left on each of his two previous encyclicals has so far proven wrong each time, so the rule should be to wait and see what the pope will actually say.
Each time, with previous encyclicals, we have been told that the pope is preparing to lambaste capitalism and call for state measures to heavily regulate it with an eye to redistributing wealth, cleaning up the environment, controlling consumption, etc. Each time, the final text has demonstrated that the pope's conversion to progressivist causes has been greatly exaggerated. Invariably, his arguments have been highly sophisticated and have defied easy political categorization.
In advance of Caritas in Veritate, Catholic “progressives” are working themselves into a frenzy of predictions, recommendations, and anathemas — and not one of them, to my knowledge, has seen even an early draft of the encyclical which has been two years in the making.
Will the document draw attention to the weaknesses of Western-style capitalist systems? One hopes so. We might expect the pope to call on market forces to be regulated by moral concerns, within a strong juridical framework, and an exogenous apparatus of standards to curb excesses.
But here is the operative question: In what sense would such a call be a blow against the idea of free economic institutions? The short answer is that it will not be.
After I posted this item yesterday, a reader sent me the following question:
No personal reply desired, but I've heard on other websites that the Waxman-Markey bill contains a little-publicized provision that would require private homeowners to retrofit their homes to meet federally-mandated energy-efficiency standards when they put their homes up for sale. If this is true, it deserves much wider publicity. I believe many people who are not conservatives would deeply resent this intrusion of the federal government into their personal affairs.
It is true. Kevin Williamson and I came across this provision when compiling our 50 things wrong with Waxman-Markey, up on the home page now. "Your Green House" is no. 24:
The bill requires the EPA to establish environmental standards for residences, meaning a federally dictated one-size-fits-all policy for greening every home in America. When you’re retrofitting your home according to EPA guidelines, it will come as little comfort to know that the government is reimbursing you for your troubles, especially if you’re doing the work around April 15.
Update: The link to the retrofit provisions in the Waxman-Markey bill stopped working, so I removed it. The link to the whole bill can be found here, and from there the retrofit provisions are pretty easy to find. This Reuters story has more info on the national energy efficiency building codes that would become a part of our lives if this bill were to become law.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has arrived in Iraq on a surprise two-day visit, just as U.S. troops have pulled out of the country's cities as part of President Obama's planned withdrawal plan.
The White House announced Thursday that Mr. Biden had arrived, and a pool reporter required to keep the trip secret for safety reasons said the visit was to "try to re-establish contact with Iraqi leaders and try to help foster efforts at political reconciliation."
The Wall Street Journalreports that “Tehran is threatening to cut off relations with EU countries unless they apologize for considering pulling their ambassadors out of Iran.”
But of course, were the EU serious about stopping Iran’s fraudulently elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the militant mullahs who back him from acquiring nuclear weapons that would be one major component of its policy.
The Obama administration should be working hard, using diplomacy to persuade our European allies to recall their ambassadors — at least for "consultations." Last weekend, Obama deputy David Axelrod said that the clerical regime’s harsh repression of dissidents is isolating Iran “in every way from the community of nations.” As of this moment, that’s just wishful thinking.
Here's why I find the Washington Postcash-for-access story so disturbing. As even Helen Thomas is now realizing, this administration favors certain journalists with extra access. In that respect, it is mimicking the Blair government in the U.K., which was famous not just for giving extra access to favorable journalists, but denying it to critical journalists. Putting the two pieces together, it might not be long before access becomes a commodity, and writing favorably about the administration not only gets extra access, but becomes profitable. That's why I am also very glad to see the excellent Howard Kurtz and via him, the Post's executive editor, recognize that possibility and how appalling it would be.
I fear, however, that other journalists might not be so scrupulous. As to the scruples of the administration, I have no comment.
Numerous readers have picked a nit with the nit I picked with Chris Buckley's "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cow" in my June diary. Not only should "cow" be "dog," they observed, but "jumped" should be "jumps," for the "s" (and then you need "dog" even more, for the "d").
This is right, of course. That Cape Cod air must have addled my brain; or perhaps it was the chowder. For penance I shall now transcribe, with no typographical guarantees at all, the entire entry for 23 February from the late Willard R. Espy's 1975 classic Almanac of Words at Play, which I take to be the last word on these matters.
23 FEBRUARY
Squdgy Fez, Blank Jimp Crwth Vox
The quality of existing pangrams is unsatisfactory. Augustus Morgan's nineteenth-century "I, quartz pyx, who fling muck beds," ignored v and j, recent arrivals on the alphabetical scene. "Cwm fjord-banks glyphs vext quiz" makes room for the v and j, but is not likely to become a common remark even among geologists. Claude E. Shannon wrote, "Squdgy Fez, Blank Jimp Crwth Vox," which has something to do with wearing a squashed Turkish hat and muting a Welsh violin.
If you are willing to fudge by repeating a few letters, the problem of including all twenty-six letters in a single passage becomes more manageable. For instance:
"The five boxing wizards jump quickly." (31) "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs." (32) "Jim just quit and packed extra heavy bags for Liz Owen." (44)
If you wish to use each letter twice, your goal is a sentence of fifty-two letters. The nearest to this I have run into is Mary Youngquist's "Sylvan plight: five jinxed wizards jump, weigh quartz, mock quick baby fox." (60)
Darryl Francis found in Webster's New International Dictionary, second edition, three words totaling thirty-nine letters and including all the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. The words are quick-flowing, semibolshevized, and juxtapyloric. The following verse is a lipogram, since it lacks the letter e, and also a pangram, since it contains all the other letters of the alphabet:
Quixotic boys who look for joys Quixotic hazards run. A lass annoys with trivial toys Opposing man for fun. — Author unknown
[Me] Not quite the last word, perhaps. The utterance "Jump, dogs! Why vex Fritz Blank, Q.C.?" is a perfect pangram, containing each letter of the alphabet precisely once. It makes a great deal more sense than any other perfect pangram I've seen. It also manages to include four different punctuation marks. Unfortunately (a) it's two sentences, not one, (b) it only makes sense in the U.K., where "Q.C." stands for "Queens Counsel," a barrister, (c) it includes that abbreviation, which disallows it, and (d) it includes a made-up proper name — though a very plausible one: Lenin's mother was originally a Blank.
And there's a nit to be picked with Espy, too: It was Augustus De Morgan.
Yes, yes, like a zillion readers, Andrew's post below about the globe-spanning Argentian ant colony competing with humanity for conquest of the globe immediately made me think of the Simpsons episode — "Deep Space Homer" — in which newscaster Kent Brockman thinks earth is being attacked by giant ants:
"Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost the picture, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has apparently been taken over — 'conquered' if you will — by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."
I would have said something earlier, but I was looking all over the place for video of the scene. Apparently, the clip is closely held by the producers so they can accrue even more filthy lucre.
Anyway, as several readers suggested, perhaps Mark Sanford's trip to Argentina wasn't a booty call after all. Perhaps he was promising eternal fidelity to the Queen in her Argentinian sugar cave?
Ramesh has a smart piece in the latest NR on the right and wrong lessons to draw from Ronald Reagan. “When invoking Reagan,” he writes, “conservatives are prone to two characteristic vices: hero-worship and nostalgia. To hear some conservatives talk, you would forget that Reagan was a human being who made mistakes, including in office. You would certainly forget that movement conservatives were frequently exasperated with Reagan’s administration.”
Indeed, during Reagan’s final years in the White House, many conservatives became disillusioned with his embrace of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his pursuit of arms control. In January 1988, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article documenting this angst (titled “The Right Against Reagan”). “The president doesn’t need to discard the people who brought him to the dance,” grumbled North Carolina senator Jesse Helms. Conservative activist Howard Phillips labeled Reagan “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.”
Shortly before the Gipper left office, columnist George Will lamented that he had “accelerated the moral disarmament of the West — actual disarmament will follow — by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.” Will also said that “in the Reagan years there has been what [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan calls a hemorrhaging of reality regarding the fiscal requirements for strength and prosperity. This is a consequence of the narcotic of cheerfulness.”
In recent years, both conservatives and liberals have used the 40th president as a cudgel to bash George W. Bush. Yet they have often misrepresented Reagan’s actual record. (Fred Barnes addressed this in a 2006 Wall Street Journal op-ed.)
A friend emailed this morning to say he couldn’t believe what he heard Mika Brzezinski say on Morning Joe today regarding yesterday’s press briefing where Helen Thomas and Chip Reid asked Robert Gibbs several questions about President Obama’s so-called “Town Hall” on health care yesterday:
The question I would have for her [Helen] is if she felt she could ask that question during the Bush administration and get that aggressive.
Seriously? I almost injured myself when I fell over laughing when I read that comment.
I am no longer a spokesperson, but I feel I can speak for all of Bush’s press secretaries when I say that the question I would like to ask Mika is: Did she miss every press briefing of the Bush administration?
Yesterday was tame by comparison to the grilling we all got — including questions premised on our troops purposely killing innocent people. Those were really fun to field. Not.
The things all press secretaries have in common are going toe-to-toe with Helen Thomas, living through it, and being better communicators for having had the experience.
I wonder if Helen takes offense at the notion she wasn’t aggressive with us.
When I served in the Bush administration, we worked to implement a Congressionally mandated rule to end restrictions on HIV-positive people entering the U.S. One of the sticking points in the implementation we encountered was an assessment by the career scientists at the Centers for Disease Control that the new rule would increase the HIV-positive population in the US by 37,780, with an annual cost to taxpayers of $952 million dollars in 20 years, and a cumulative cost of $12.7 billion over the 20-year period.
The Politico now reports that the Obama administration put out a new implementing regulation ending the ban with these same numbers, but then pulled it back in favor of a revised regulation claiming that the rule would only increase HIV cases in the US by 676. As for the cost, they now estimate it to be $342 million annually in five years. The main justification for the switch is that they moved to a five-year rather than a 20-year window, but the fact remains that they adjusted the numbers to reduce the "sticker shock" on the policy.
I cannot imagine the extent of the hubbub that would have ensued if the Bush administration had tried this tactic. I wonder if those who accused President Bush of politicizing science will object to this numerical sleight of hand, but somehow I doubt it.
More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy” — and thought it fit her perfectly.
Is there any real chance that "several" Alaskans independently told Purdum that they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? I don’t believe it for a moment. I’ve (for better or worse) moved in pretty well-educated circles in my life, and I’ve gone decades without “several” people telling me they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Even Eric Boehlert, of the lefty Media Matters for America, said he agreed with Kristol that Purdum's claim "doesn't pass the smell test." So I thought some very rudimentary investigation was in order. It turns out that the idea that Palin had narcissistic personality disorder as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is something of a meme in liberal circles and has been long before Purdum's VF profile.
To wit, a Google search of the Huffington Post for "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" and Sarah Palin returns some 752 results. Obviously, not all of those results are relevant but in just the first four pages of Google results I found five different comments from the website which reference Sarah Palin having narcissistic personality disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and all were written well before Purdum's profile.See here, here, here, here and here. (It futher appears that one of those commenters has made the observation more than once.)
Again, these examples are from just the first few Google results on one liberal website. It appears this is a meme that gained currency among those on the far left who actively despise Palin and posess no special insight into her. Either Purdum is far too credulous and should have investigated the claim, or Purdum deliberately wrote up baseless claims of narcissistic personality disorder to make it sound like the diagnosis came from Alaska insiders and in the process made the claim far more salacious. Either way, I don't think Purdum's reporting is to be trusted.
I don't think it has occurred to the divine ones that the administration now is at odds with the sort of ideology and attitudes Obama himself espoused on the campaign trail.
They call for patience and for confidence in Iraq — and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, dismiss our chances while demanding a strict and rather rapid timetable to get out.
They ask for understanding about renditions, tribunals, Guantanamo, intercepts, wiretaps, and Predator missile attacks as complex issues — and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, dismiss these necessary tools as Constitution-shredding authoritarianism.
They ask for patience on jobs — and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, pontificate about a "jobless recovery" when jobs and growth were far better.
I’ve been getting some interesting mail on race and ethnicity, America’s perpetual and vexing topic. Is there any subject on which we’re screwier than race and ethnicity? Sotomayormania has only served to highlight this. Anyway, the mail I speak of stems from a couple of items in Impromptus today.
There is mail in that column, too. And I so like one letter I publish, I’m going to talk about it again, here in the Corner. The letter comes from an Italian-American friend of ours — reader, cruiser, etc. (I’m not implying anything by “cruiser” — it’s just that he has come on at least one of National Review’s cruises.) He was thinking about the Ricci case. And he says that, when he was growing up in Kansas City, Italians weren’t considered white — far from it. Now they’re lily, it seems.
“I can’t figure out if we got a promotion or a demotion. I mean, just as it’s time to line up for minority benefits, we get bumped to the back of the line for being white.”
And I especially loved this: “Heck, here in Los Angeles” — where our cruiser now lives — “people refer to me as Anglo. Imagine that, in the very place where Rudolph Valentino was the original Latin Lover.”
Valentino would not be a “Latin lover” today — Sonia would definitely say no. He would be an unwise non-Latino, with a poverty of experience. America has always been screwy about race and ethnicity, of course. But you’ll agree that that screwiness moves.
The labor market remains tough terrain: Companies are still letting more workers go than they are hiring, and wages have stagnated the past few months. But today's data do not reflect another leg down for the economy as a whole. Payroll losses were higher than expected, but still less severe than they were earlier this year. In addition, the unemployment rate ticked up less than expected. Although some will attribute the smaller-than-expected increase in the jobless rate in June to a decline in the labor force (the number of people working or actively looking for work), the labor force has increased 1.2 million in the last five months. Without this increase, the jobless rate would be 8.8 percent today, not 9.5 percent.
Other recent data on the labor market show improvement. New claims for unemployment insurance dropped 16,000 last week to 614,000. Continuing claims for regular benefits fell 53,000 to 6.702 million. Meanwhile, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based job-placement firm, reported employers are planning fewer layoffs than at the same time last year. The U.S. economy has never healed in a perfectly straight line with all aspects of the economy getting better at the exact same time. As is often the case, the labor market is lagging behind other indicators showing the recession is over, including yesterday's ISM Manufacturing report. A healing economy with a lagging labor market is a recipe for a major improvement in corporate profits. — Robert Stein is a senior economist at First Trust Advisors.
Romney really is the frontrunner. He has done himself well. He is a grown-up. He knows economics. He's trusted on that.
There is also a tradition among Republicans of nominating the next in line, as we did with George Bush, Sr. in 1988, Dole in '96, and McCain in '08, sort of the last grown-up who was left over from the last campaign.
And I think that Romney has done well. Look, he is the guy who is as clean as clean can get. You are not going to wake up in the morning and discover he is crying in Argentina. This is a solid guy and he's got a record.
Now, as to Palin, I agree entirely with what Mara said. She is—she has star power without any doubt. She has an extremely devoted following. But she is not a serious candidate for the presidency.
She had to go home and study and spend a lot of time on issues in which she was not adept last year, and she hasn't. She has to stop speaking in clichés and platitudes. It won't work.
It could work for eight weeks if you're the number two candidate, as she was last year. But even so, she got singed a lot in that campaign. You cannot sustain a campaign of platitudes and clichés over a year and a half if you're running for the presidency.
On Obama’s pattern of broken campaign promises:
If it's a promise that becomes a goal, it's on its way to becoming a betrayal. It certainly will happen on taxes. There is no doubt on that.
The way he reversed himself on a host of issues—on detention without trial, on rendition, on state secrets and on having lobbyists in his administration. But all that is penny ante stuff.
The real betrayal of this presidency, the premise of the campaign last year, which he talked about endlessly—and the audiences were swooning over this—was he was going to introduce a new politics. He was going to have a politics of the people.
He would take the lobbying and the lobbyists and the influence peddlers out of government, the money changers out of the temple. That is what he represented.
All that was rubbish last year, and now it's all the more so. We have had, because of his ambitious government takeover—at least attempted—on stimulus, on health care, on cap and trade, which is the entire energy industry, with so much allocation of capital out of Washington, the frenzy of lobbying in Washington has been unprecedented.
It's not business as usual as he promised. It's worse. It's the biggest frenzy of lobbying in American history.
It's no accident that the oil and gas industries have 50 percent increases in lobbying expenses, and wind industry is on its way to a tripling of its expenses on lobbying. All this is as a result of his ambitions of regulating and controlling the economy...
‘Teach the Children Well,’ Blah, Blah, Blah [Jay Nordlinger]
Here’s something interesting — and sad, and a little alarming. Some defenders of public schools — I mean, die-hard, grasping-at-straws defenders — say, “The reason we have public schools is that no one else can be counted on to teach basic facts about our country — to teach civics. And we need such education if we’re to hold the country together.” We sure do. How are the public schools doing?
The Goldwater Institute, in Phoenix, has explored this question. They commissioned a survey of Arizona high-school students to find out what they know. I will quote from the executive summary (which you can find here):
. . . we surveyed . . . students with questions drawn from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) item bank, which consists of 100 questions given to candidates for United States citizenship. The longstanding practice has been for candidates to take a test on 10 of these items. A minimum of six correct answers is required to pass. The service recently reported a first-try passing rate of 92.4 percent.
The Goldwater Institute survey, conducted by a private survey firm, gave each student 10 items from the USCIS item bank. We grouped results according to the type of school students attend — public, charter, or private. Questions included (1) Who was the first president of the United States? (2) Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? and (3) What ocean is located on the East Coast of the United States?
All three groups of Arizona high school students scored alarmingly low on the test. Only 3.5 percent of Arizona high school students attending public schools passed the citizenship test. The passing rate for charter school students was about twice as high as for public school students. Private school students passed at a rate almost four times higher than public school students.
This does not mean the sky is falling. But the sky should be watched, for signs of national, civilizational apocalypse. (How’s that for non-hysteria?)
Just think of it: 3.5 percent of high-school students passed! That was in the public schools. And the kids in the charter and private schools — not impressively better. I’m proud to say that I know who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Crispus Attucks, right? And that ocean? Piece of cake: Long Island Sound. I think I’ll be in it this weekend . . .
P.S. The first president? You mean, not Barack Obama? Was there America — any America worth speaking of — before Barack Obama? (Sorry, I have a case of political crabbiness this morning.)
Memo To Mark Sanford: Man Up and Go Home [Jonah Goldberg]
I've not had much to add to what's been said around here about Mark Sanford, and I still don't have much new to say. But Jeez-O-Peet it's time for this guy to step down. Go in the woods and bang drums, wear dresses at the shopping mall or become a Trappist Monk — whatever you need to do to get your act together on your own dime and on your own time. South Carolina, it seems to me, is not a state where politicians are expected to air out their "personal journeys" from the Governor's mansion and I know the Republican Party doesn't need to become an unseemly hybrid of est seminar, Plato's Retreat and Bible Camp. Invoking King David as your inspiration for hanging around like a lech at a strip club after last call was stupid enough, but if you're going to do that, you can't start crying (again) about your Argentinian girlfriend or blathering on in a way that might cause John Belushi to descend from heaven just to smash your guitar against the wall. If stepping down makes it harder for the GOP or for some rivals to run for governor, Jimmy crack corn, and I don't care. You need to get off the stage.
The GOP needs to march to your office and tell you, "Look, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."
For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.
The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."
The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.
And it's a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices.
"Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate," says the one-page flier. "Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. ... Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders."
Perhaps Governor Sanford Can Learn Something [John Hood]
As far as I can tell, this story out of Kiev, Ukraine is on the level — though I suspect more than a few Ukrainians wish it wasn’t. The mayor of the city, Leonid Chernovetsky, has political style that few American politicians could pull off. Well, okay, Chernovetsky doesn’t really pull it off, either. Facing massive fiscal woes and corruption allegations, the mayor staged a media event that put even Sobbin' Mark Sanford to shame:
After jogging and doing 15 chin-ups, he stripped down to a Speedo and swam 15 meters. “I want to demonstrate to the whole world that I am absolutely fit physically and mentally,” he announced.
A millionaire businessman and evangelical Christian, Mr. Chernovetsky has gained a reputation for wacky ideas. With Kiev facing an economic crisis, Chernovetsky proposed charging fees to enter cemeteries, selling his kisses in a raffle, and selling burial plots for frogs.
When thousands gathered outside his offices to protest corruption, he entertained them with a song and announced that he was launching a singing career. “I will make millions of dollars per day. Because who sings better than I do? No one does, except God,” he enthused.
The lesson? If a politician is going to disgrace himself, he should at least make a good show of it. Come on, American pols, rise to the challenge!
SEOUL, South Korea (CNN) — North Korea test-fired a fourth short-range missile off its east coast Thursday, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reported.
South Korea's Defense Ministry had earlier confirmed three launches, but could not immediately be reached about the fourth reported missile.
The first three missiles were fired at 5:20 p.m., 6 p.m., and 7:50 p.m. local time from Sinsang-ni near the eastern coastal city of Wonsan, a ministry spokesman said.
A U.S. official told CNN "the missile firings come as no surprise."
"The North has been carrying out provocative acts for some time," said the official, who did not want to be named for security reasons. "North Korea needs to stop this type of activity and return to the process of bringing about a denuclearization of the Korean peninsula."
One of the strangest things about the Iranian tragedy is this spate of mea culpa confessionals from columnists who for the last two years insisted that Bush's decision not to talk to the thuggish Ahmadinejad — e.g., his sending terrorists into Lebanon to destroy democracy; trying to kill Americans in Iraq with lethal IEDs and assassinate Iraqi democrats; subsidies for rocketeers in Gaza; promising to exterminate Israel; violating U.N. non-proliferation accords; rounding up and eliminating journalists, minorities, and dissidents — was at best counterproductive, and at worst proof of his cowboyish know-nothingism.
Now they've had and gone through our callous realpolitik moment, in which we sat on the sidelines as thousands of brave reformers were silenced. Our administration worried that the internationalist Obama would not have his long-awaited chance to show his "this is our moment" post-nationalist stuff, in charming Ahmadinejad and a few theocrats to promise to kill and maim fewer people.
And as a result they seem to be "shocked" that 1) Iran is really not a democracy after all, and that, after 30 years, it still rigs elections, preselects candidates, and kills off opponents, confident that its thin veneer of voting fools Western elites; 2) does not much care whether we talk or not to its clerics, and whether we act nicely or badly toward them; 3) long ago figured that what little downside there was to getting the bomb was far outweighed by the upside (cf. the deference showed to Pakistan post-1998), and nothing was/is going to stop them.
From CNN's Scott Spoerry at the Labor Department: — The unemployment rate rose to 9.5 % in June. *Unemployment rate is the worst since Aug. 1983 —The U.S. economy lost 467,000 jobs in June. ***A consensus of economists surveyed by Briefing.com had expected the unemployment rate to rise to 9.6% and a loss of 363,000 jobs in June.
Felix Salmon provides a list of who gets paid in cash and who gets an IOU now that California is running out of money. The next time somebody tells you about how the government is looking out for you, take a look at it. The academic name for this is "public-choice theory."
A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.
Homeland Security is making a show of cracking down on employers of illegals, but without raids. They told members of Congress Wednesday that they'd just sent notices to 652 business that their personnel records would be audited to look for illegal workers (as opposed to 503 such notices sent to businesses in all of last year). Obviously, this is part of the administration's amnesty campaign — the spoonful of enforcement to help the amnesty go down. And I'm happy to see it. But . . . this doesn't tell us anything about a commitment to future enforcement. And that's not just my cussedness talking. In 1998–1999, Janet Reno's INS launched exactly the same kind of effort, called Operation Vanguard, which audited all the meatpacking plants in Nebraska in an effort to have a more orderly and thorough enforcement strategy. (There's a description of the operation, and how it turned out, about halfway down this Washington Post article.) It was meant to be repeated every few months to wean the businesses off use of illegal workers. But the businesses, churches, politicans, et al. went bonkers and it was stopped and the initiator fired from the INS.
This is why no one-time performance should convince anyone of the administration's commitment to enforcement. Only after new enforcement tools have been institutionalized can such a claim be made — for instance, mandatory use of E-Verify by all employers, and not a promise to do that but actually phasing in the program over a period of several years and overcoming court challenges. Only then is legalization even a legitimate topic for debate.
American Apparel, an L.A. firm which has been very active in promoting amnesty for illegal aliens, apparently did so a for a reason — ICE has identified one-third of its workforce as illegal aliens!
EU Commissioners (the union's top bureaucrats) are not famed for their straightforwardness, so full marks to the Irish EU commissioner for the observation that Europe's political leaders know "quite well" that if their electorates had been asked to vote on the Lisbon Treaty (the "non-constitution" constitution) "the answer in 95 percent of the countries would probably have been No."
And that, of course, is why, in most cases, they were not asked. Charming.
President Obama sounded like a man who was glad to have missile defenses last month, when it became apparent that North Korea was planning to test a long-range rocket over the Pacific Ocean: “Well, first of all, let’s be clear. This administration — and our military — is fully prepared for any contingencies,” he assured Harry Smith of CBS News. “The t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted in terms of what might happen.”
The launch of North Korea’s Taepodong-2 may take place in the next several days, and the rocket may fly perilously close to Hawaii. If it does, mobile ground-based interceptors and a sea-based radar system — recently deployed to Kauai and the waters nearby — are in position to protect Honolulu and its environs.
Will this experience give Obama second thoughts about his hostility toward missile defense? It should, but Obama’s opposition is deeply ingrained. During the presidential campaign, he pledged to slash missile-defense spending. In recent months, he has made good on his promise. His proposed budget for 2010 includes more than $1 billion in cuts. One of the main casualties is a system of interceptors in Alaska and California whose purpose is to protect the West Coast from North Korea. Obama would halt their deployment at 28 anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs), short of the 44 the Pentagon had hoped to put in place by 2011. Another victim is Airborne Laser (ABL), which seeks to mount lasers on 747s. The goal is to target the fuel casings of enemy rockets just after they’ve blasted off and to destroy them when they’re big, slow, and still over their home territories. ABL may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but the technical aspects of the project are more or less proven. To become a reality, it merely requires continued funding.
Also in jeopardy is a missile-defense system currently planned for Eastern Europe. The NATO-endorsed program, which would include about ten interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic, aims to protect Europe and the United States from the emerging menace of Iran. In February, rocket scientists in the service of the ayatollahs demonstrated their sophistication when they put a satellite into orbit, using the same ballistic technology that can launch warheads. Yet Russia has objected to this proposed defensive system on the preposterous grounds that it would create a deterrent to its own massive arsenal. Moscow’s real concern is the expansion of Western influence in former Soviet satellite states. Unfortunately, Obama has given every indication that he’s ready to abandon the program.
Wishing away these threats won’t cause them to disappear. North Korea’s imminent test may show that Pyongyang has the ability to strike Alaska and Hawaii with its rockets. Iran already can hit Israel and parts of Europe. It no doubt shares North Korea’s ambition of building rockets that can reach the continental United States. New risks may emerge as well, especially if Islamic radicals grab power in Pakistan. The time to prepare for these problems is now, before they’ve had a chance to mature and when there’s still an opportunity to research, build, and deploy the weapons that will continue to let Obama tell the public that the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted.
COLUMBIA, South Carolina (CNN) — Prior to revelations of an extramarital affair that effectively brought an end to his political career, Mark Sanford was preparing to publish a book outlining his policy beliefs, his publisher told CNN Wednesday.
Sentinel, a conservative imprint of Penguin Group, has included a book by Sanford entitled "Within Our Means" in their Spring 2010 catalogue, the proofs of which have already been sent to the printers. It was described by the publisher as "a manifesto about fiscal conservatism — why the government needs to spend less and fix the deficit ASAP."
That was before Sanford's life changed forever. Sentinel associate publisher Will Weisser told CNN Wednesday that the company will "most likely" make an announcement about the book's fate later this week.
(CNSNews.com) - Following a testy exchange during today’s briefing with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas told CNSNews.com that not even Richard Nixon tried to control the press the way President Obama is trying to control the press.
“Nixon didn’t try to do that,” Thomas said. “They couldn’t control (the media). They didn’t try.
“What the hell do they think we are, puppets?” Thomas said. “They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.”
Thomas said she was especially concerned about the arrangement between the Obama Administration and a writer from the liberal Huffington Post Web site. The writer was invited by the White House to President Obama’s press conference last week on the understanding that he would ask Obama a question about Iran from among questions that had been sent to him by people in Iran.
“When you call the reporter the night before you know damn well what they are going to ask to control you,” Thomas said.
“I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well—for the town halls, for the press conferences,” she said. “It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame.”
SEOUL, South Korea (CNN) — North Korea test-fired what appeared to be two short-range missiles off its east coast on Thursday, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.
“One was fired at 5:20 p.m. and the other at 6 p.m. from Sinsang-ni,” near the eastern coastal city of Wonsan, South Korean defense ministry spokesman Won Tae-jae said, according to Yonhap.
It’s fairly easy to persuade Americans that health care ought to be “reformed.” But the public’s thinking on health care isn’t too far from the prescriptions of “Oscar Rogers,” the faux financial expert on Saturday Night Live who, when asked what should be done in the aftermath of last fall’s economic troubles, kept yelling “Fix it!” No matter how he was asked, his recommendations never got more detailed than, “Identify the problem and FIX IT!”
This is, in fact, the path HillaryCare trod 15 years ago. Americans weren’t terribly pleased by the way they were paying for health care back in the early 1990s. Employees always think their premiums and co-pays are too high; employers always feel like they’re shouldering too much of the burden; and those without insurance always think somebody should step in and provide them with some. Everybody wants everything they need covered by their insurers, as well as some things they probably don’t need (e.g., gastric bypass surgery, chiropractors, hair prosthesis — all subjects of mandates or attempted mandates in various states).
So reform sounds great in the abstract. But then the public learns the details of the legislation — say, from an incredulous Harry and Louise sitting around a breakfast table — and it doesn’t seem like such an improvement. Town-hall meetings don’t build a majority of “aye” votes, and when there is no real effort to engage the arguments of the opposition, just the usual straw man that the alternative is to “do nothing,” one wonders whether these town-hall meetings are worth anyone’s time, much less the president’s.
If Obama really wanted worthwhile reform more than he wants a signing ceremony, he would have to do two things he has not yet indicated he’s willing to do. The first is not only to know what you want — besides “fix it!” — but to be able to rank those often-competing goals in a hierarchy. At some point, policies aiming to cover everyone and policies aimed at reducing costs crash into each other. A review board that aims to ensure that the government pays only for cost-effective treatments is at some point going to deny citizens care that they want. A president has to know exactly what’s a deal-breaker for him, what’s worth a veto threat, what provision or concept is so important that he’d rather see no bill than a bill that lacks it. At this point, it’s not clear that Obama really knows where his own red line is drawn.
Senators Sessions and Kyl Demand Answers on Obama's Negotiations with Iran-Backed Terrorist and Release of a Terrorist Responsible for Murdering U.S. Troops [Andy McCarthy]
The Washington Times has the story this morning, here. My column on this disgrace is here.
I realize the media is in the tank for this president, but this is the most shocking story we have had in a steady stream of shock since the start of the Obama presidency. Will no one ask about why we have released an Iran-backed terrorist who is responsible for the 2007 abduction/murder of our troops (five murdered, four of them after being kidnapped) in Karbala?
The administration, if anyone bothers to ask, will undoubtedly spout nonsense about promoting "Iraqi reconciliation." But this is a terrorist who murdered Americans — an unlawful combatant who committed war crimes. Even if that were not true, it's absurd to suggest that releasing the leaders of a terrorist network is going to promote peace in Iraq — does Obama think we should release the Blind Sheikh, the embassy bombers, or KSM to promote a peaceful settlement with al-Qaeda? But even if it were not absurd on its face, the Iraqi interest here is not the paramount interest for us; terrorists who methodically target and kill Americans, and whom we capture, are supposed to be tried and executed or imprisoned by us. We don't release them for the benefit of other countries, and we certainly don't barter them for hostages — in violation of American policy and common sense — because that endangers our troops, our civilians, and our allies.
Why are we still in negotiations with an Iran-backed terror network to release the network's leaders? Even if that were not a stupid idea on its face, have we learned nothing from the last go-round? In exchange for the terrorist described above, we got back two dead bodies of British hostages — i.e., not even the five live British hostages whose freedom we were foolishly hoping to secure.
Finally, why is this being done at a time when the Iranian regime is not only murdering and repressing its own population but, as Michael (Ledeen) pointed out yesterday, is continuing to support and train terrorists to kill American military personnel in Iraq?
Veronique mentioned the much-blogged-about Forbes piece on the success of McDonald’s in France. I’m here with three children, so I’ve given the subject some consideration. We don’t eat fast food at home — for many reasons, but living in Manhattan makes it less of an issue. But here it is easy to see the temptation. Restaurants are very expensive. There is a range, of course, but it starts high. Way higher than neighborhood places in Manhattan, for instance. And few places are truly child friendly. The French do not much like children. Restaurant meals are available at very limited hours. You want lunch — it had better be between 12 and 2. Miss that and you can have a snack — but only if you are in a place big enough to have a range of restaurant types. Dinner starts at 7, no matter that you missed lunch and want a burger or a salad at 5, not ice cream or a beer. And meals take forever. I like the leisurely lunch as much as any journalist, of course. But not with my kids, every day — which leaves us with grilled-cheese sandwiches, hold the ham. Oh, you can’t hold the ham? Thanks.
Finally, there is a lot of bad food in France — especially around tourist sites, including the great museums. I will not say what I paid for two sandwiches and two salads — all premade so unwanted ingredients could not be removed in advance — and a few soft drinks at the Louvre, after braving the crowds to see the Mona Lisa (which attracts tour buses full of people eager to take group pictures of themselves in front of the picture). There is much excellent food, of course. But who wants really excellent food every day? Sometimes you just want to get everyone fed and get on with your activities. Fast food exists because a mediocre, entirely predictable burger from McDonald’s is no worse than what you would get a certain percentage of the time at individual places that might not be as clean and certainly won’t be as quick. There is an obvious open niche for a service-oriented place that downplays the drama and provides reasonably healthy food in a clean setting. And as for the health claim — I don’t personally buy it. But I am currently in a region where every farmers’ market, farm stand, and café sells foie gras, duck confit, and excellent high-fat cheeses, and what passes for a vegetable in restaurants is potatoes sautéed in duck fat. A few carrot sticks and an apple and Mickey D wins that one — so no surprise that it’s doing well.
Even after a hard day of canoeing down the Dordogne river in southwest France, I felt the need to comment on a few of the more pressing stories of the day. I agree entirely with Mark Steyn about Mark Sanford. Last week I believed that he could tough it out by just moving forward and continuing the good fight. After his most recent public wallow, he’s toast.
Toughing it out requires ceasing the whinging, adolescent babbling about your stupid, trite reasons for straying, and your sense that your personal adulterous relationship is deeper and more wondrous than everyone else’s dumb affair. You know what we call men who have dumb affairs and keep their mouths shut? Husbands. Occasionally, presidents. Hard to see how a wife with any self-respect could tolerate hearing the guy she’s trying to forgive and reconcile with refer to the other woman as his soulmate — on the record, and in public. There are limits to what marriage therapy can do when someone doesn’t want to be there. Ditto being politically sound. You can have great ideas and be such a head case — in this case, such an egotist — that voters can’t pull the lever. We’re there. And I bet that Sanford — unlike Newt, Giuliani, Clinton, etc. – isn’t unhappy with that resolution. Mark Sanford doesn't want to be president.
If the American Clean Energy and Security Act passes through the Senate, it could be bad news for the Alberta oil sands.
In Alberta, Canada, there's thought to be more oil buried underground than in the whole of Saudi Arabia. Alberta's oil sands can be processed to yield billions of barrels of oil, and many believe that they could be key to providing North America with energy security and independence — the sands now are now the top provider of oil to U.S.
But the oil is dirty. Really dirty. And the House version of the climate bill calls for largely increased tariffs on environmentally-unfriendly goods and commodities, which this oil easily falls into. President Obama has warned against this sort of environmental protectionism, but it looks like the Senate may be facing a decision between environmental safety and energy security in the coming weeks.
Now Canada is announcing that it will take measures to avoid the tariffs. These measures are bound to make Canadian oil more expensive, which will increase the price Americans pay at the pump. It's weird — when gas prices were at $4 a gallon, politicians in both parties were tripping over themselves to offer plans to reduce them. One year later, the Democrats are pushing through legislation that is explicitly designed to make gasoline more expensive. I guess they'd better hope that the analysts predicting a medium-term oil-price spike are mistaken.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A Puerto Rican civil rights organization advised by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor campaigned against seating conservative Robert Bork on the high court in the late 1980s, according to new documents that shed light on the group that's become a key focus of Republicans questioning Sotomayor's fitness to be a justice.
The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund officially opposed GOP nominee Bork in 1987, "because of the threat he poses to the civil rights of the Latino community," its president reported in one of several documents from the group that the Senate Judiciary Committee released Wednesday. The 350-plus pages of material offer little evidence about Sotomayor's role in the cases and causes the organization, now known as LatinoJustice PRLDEF, took up while she served on its board from 1980 until 1992.
President Obama has made passage of an expensive new entitlement to health insurance his top legislative priority this year even as it has become abundantly clear that his fiscal policy is driving the country headlong toward a crisis.
In June, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) took another, more complete look at President Obama’s budget plan and found the following:a $2.7 trillion spending increase over ten years, not counting the full costs of a health-care plan; annual deficits exceeding $600 billion every year — and rising as the years pass; a cumulative ten-year budget deficit of $9.1 trillion; and $17 trillion in government debt at the end of 2019.
Who's the Palin Leaker from the McCain Campaign? [Mark Hemingway]
The publication of aVanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin appears to have opened old wounds in the McCain campaign. At issue is a question that was never resolved following McCain’s loss in November: Who in the McCain campaign was secretly trashing Sarah Palin to the press?
After being forwarded some explosive emails from inside the McCain campaign, I spoke to various campaign officials – including a central figure in the current controversy – to better understand what’s happening here. But first, this requires some unpacking. The best summation of the fallout from the VF piece is this Politico story by Jonathan Martin. In a nutshell, the controversy centers on this sentence from the VF profile: “Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression? (Palin’s youngest son was less than six months old.)”
The slattern-like willingness of Big Business to get in bed with government has been a particular bugaboo of mine of late. From my cover story in April:
Then there's big business. The story corporate America tells itself is that it's the living embodiment of the American Dream. They're for free markets and competition and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism. They stand opposed, on high principle if nothing else, to government intrusions into the marketplace. If they get involved in the filthy business of lobbying government, it's to protect themselves from the Fabian succubi of the Leviathan state, which is always desperate to drain the lifeblood of entrepreneurialism from the American Way. "As the voice of business," explains the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's website, "the Chamber's core purpose is to fight for free enterprise before Congress, the White House, regulatory agencies, the courts, the court of public opinion, and governments around the world." Their mission statement is even more high-minded: "To advance human progress through an economic, political and social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity, and responsibility."
The problem with both stories is that they are exactly that — stories, self-esteem boosters that businessmen and liberals repeat not so much so they can respect each other, but so they can respect themselves in the morning. It defies all the data. As National Review's Kevin D. Williamson recently noted ("Losing Gordon Gekko," March 9), in the last two election cycles, big Wall Street firms gave more to Democrats than to Republicans. Democrats also led in most other big-business sectors. One explanation of this is that businessmen are opportunistic and their money follows political power. While largely true, this is hardly evidence that big business is steadfast in its free-market principles.
This tendency goes far beyond campaign contributions. Leaf through various editions of Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy and you'll find that corporations have always given overwhelmingly to left-leaning non-profits that agitate for anti-business policies. "There are few phenomena so remarkable today," William Simon wrote in one such report in 1988, "as the seemingly relentless determination of America's largest business corporations to set aside a portion of their earnings for the benefit of their enemies."
In his book The Suicidal Corporation, journalist Paul Weaver famously recounts how he left his job at Fortune to work for Ford's public-affairs department. Excited to champion a great American company and "defend American capitalism," Weaver was dismayed to discover a level of dysfunction that makes the cast of Dilbert seem like the Green Berets. Eager to rebut a largely bogus safety campaign against the Ford Pinto, Weaver suggested contacting a friend at the Wall Street Journal to see if they might run an editorial defending the company. To the pros at Ford, this was crazy talk. Better to just roll over for the lawsuits, issue a mealy-mouthed denial of wrongdoing, and hope that the whole controversy would go away. Alas, it wouldn't. Finally, the public-affairs chief held a contest for the best idea on how to deal with the controversy. The winning idea? Let's sponsor the PBS show Washington Week in Review! Why? Because everyone knows that funding smarmy PBS shows silences the Left. Just ask Bill Moyers.
I have a piece up at Forbes today talking about the strange alliance between Wal-Mart, SEIU, and the Center for American Progress on health-care reform. I agree with the gist of Mark Hemingway's Corner post on this subject yesterday, and add some additional pieces of information. For instance, Wal-Mart has given over $500,000 to CAP, and the SEIU website continues to criticize Wal-Mart on other issues. The bottom line is that Wal-Mart should not count on this deal buying them a lot of long-term credibility on the Left.
How many times have you said to yourself, What this country really needs is a time-travel love story movie set against the backdrop of the Holocaust and starring someone with the gravitas and chops of Britney Spears? For me, the answer is, Almost as many times as I've said America needs a screwball buddy movie involving Cheech and Chong pot humor, CHUDS and the Cambodian killing fields.
Question for whomever the resident Honduran constitutional law expert is out there in Cornerland. Channelling Ben Stein - Bueller, Bueller, Bueller...
Evidently the Honduran Supreme Court has the ability to give commands to the military - a role denied in our political system. Isn't it possible that this provision was put in there precisely to guard against a power hungry chief executive acting in a manner to destroy their Constitution & in so doing, the democratic foundations that their society is built upon. In other words, isn't the Supreme Court, acting in coordination with the Legislature (bipartisanship!), simply fulfilling their constitutional duty? The Supreme Court was given this authority for a reason. If not to prevent rogue demagogues from turning their nation into Venezuela, then why give them those powers?
If so, why are we threatening sanctions on a tiny country for acting in a manner consistent with their Constitution?
I am a DC based television writer and earlier today I turned to a thesaurus. I was looking for a good synonym for the word "advanced." (I am writing about dinosaurs.) I went to one of my usual sources, Thesaurus.com - - the on-line version of the esteemed Roget's Thesaurus.
So just what words are listed as synonyms for "advanced?" - - how about "liberal" or "progressive."
Main Entry: advanced Part of Speech: adjective Definition: ahead in position, time, manner Synonyms: avant-garde, breakthrough, excellent, exceptional, extreme, first, foremost, forward, higher, late, leading, liberal, precocious, progressive, radical, state-of-the-art*, unconventional, cutting-edge, leading-edge
Then, just for fun, I clicked on the word "liberal" - - and got such hits as "enlightened," "humanitarian," "intelligent," "rational," "unbiased," unprejudiced" and "unbigoted" - - as for antonyms try "conservative" and "narrow-minded."
Main Entry: liberal Part of Speech: adjective Definition: progressive Synonyms: advanced, avant-garde, broad, broad-minded, catholic, enlightened, flexible, free, general, high-minded, humanitarian, indulgent, intelligent, interested, left, lenient, loose, magnanimous, permissive, radical, rational, reasonable, receiving, receptive, tolerant, unbiased, unconventional, understanding, unorthodox, unprejudiced, humanistic, latitudinarian, libertarian, reformist, unbigoted Antonyms: conservative, narrow, narrow-minded
I am a great fan of your columns - - and maybe somewhere in the creeping leftism of something as supposedly benign as a thesaurus will give you some fodder for some future writings...
As we think about the "meaning" of Iraq's assumption of security control over its territory, we need to remind ourselves that Iraq is part of a regional war, and Obama's America is withdrawing from that war. General Odierno knows that, and calls our attention to it:
The top U.S. military commander in Iraq on Tuesday accused Iran of continuing to support and train militants who are carrying out attacks, including most of the ones in Baghdad. Gen. Ray Odierno said the attacks have fallen in number but are still a problem. He made the comments just after the U.S. relinquished security for Baghdad and other urban areas to Iraqi forces, part of a security agreement that will see all American soldiers out of the country by the end of 2011. ‘Iran is still supporting, funding and training surrogates who operate inside of Iraq. They have not stopped and I don't think they will stop,’ Odierno told reporters at the U.S. military headquarters outside Baghdad. ‘I think many of the attacks in Baghdad are from individuals that have been in fact funded or trained by the Iranians.’
The Politico has a very gossipy piece today on the fights between the McCain and Palin camps over Todd Purdum’s Palin piece in Vanity Fair. Apparently, Bill Kristol and Randy Scheuenemann are blaming Steve Schmidt for many of the anti-Palin stories, including suggestions that the governor was mentally unstable. Schmidt, for his part, denies this, but says he did have a hand in initiating a search of outgoing e-mails from the campaign that led to Schuenemann’s reported dismissal. Schuenemann, however, denies being dismissed. Got all that? Kristol and Purdum also go tête à tête in the Politico article, which is more interesting than the Vanity Fair piece that launched it.
A long time NRO reader and former Bushie at EPA. I can't tell you how many times among my conservative friends, I have argued the merits of promoting conservation as a conservative cause, including the construction of "fish ladders." I cringe when I hear Eric Cantor and other GOP leaders railing against this and a handful of other conservation projects as "wasteful" government spending. Not only are the hook'n bullet crowd one of the largest voting constituences in the hinterlands, they spend billions of dollars every year on hunting and fishing and helping to support local communities. This is a wise investment not only for the fish but for the voting and recreating public.
On Obama’s remarks as U.S. troops withdrew from Iraqi cities yesterday:
He referred to what we have achieved as a "sovereign, stable, self-reliant" Iraq. He left out one word, and he left it out because it was a George Bush word—democracy. That was a Bush idea—to implant a democracy in Iraq.
If we had wanted to have merely a sovereign, stable, self-reliant Iraq, we could have chosen a Saddamist general to succeed Saddam after the war and gotten out.
It's true that the democracy established here is a fragile one. It's still struggling, and we will argue for decades over whether it was worth the 4,000 American lives, as we still argue half a century later whether or not it was worth 36,000 lives to salvage a democracy in half of the Korean Peninsula.
Nonetheless, it [Iraq] is a democracy, and that's what makes it unique and distinctive, and an amazing achievement in a sea of autocracies and dictatorships—having an effect, by example, on Lebanon, on the Gulf states, and even on Iran, where Iranians look to their west and see a country which is also Shiite, Arab, (which the Persians consider culturally inferior), and yet it has a democracy, it has elections, it has an Ayatollah Sistani who says the clerics ought to stay out of politics, and the Iranians are living under a sixth-century dictatorship run by mullahs.
So it's a remarkable achievement, and we ought to emphasize what we have achieved in terms of democracy.
And it's a pity that the president ignores that because the democratic nature of Iraq will establish the basis for a strategic alliance between America and Iraq in the future.
On Al Franken’s ascension to the Senate:
I think it will be refreshing having at least one senator who admits he is a comedian.
As for the number 60, you know, the really important number is 50. That's a one-time majority. If you have the vice president, you get control of the Senate and control of the committees.
Sixty, as Mort indicated, is a floating number—on different issues, you will have around 60. So it's incrementally a help to Democrats, but it's not in any way a fixed super-majority.
We Track Tweets So You Don't Have Too [Rich Lowry]
We've added a tweet aggregator to NRO. The top item on the Web Briefing is the latest tweet that caught our eye and links to a page where we accumulate the best tweets of the day (with links back to Twitter). Hope you find it useful.
President Obama thinks we should see California as an energy-efficient role model. I have to say, it takes some guts to use California as a role model for anything these days considering the disastrous state of the Golden State. What's more, the Examiner editors remind us that:
Obama might want to rethink his choice of a model state because it is easy to understand how California has curbed its energy use. Between 2000 and 2007, before the current recession, the state shed nearly 21 percent of its manufacturing jobs, driving down its industrial electrical consumption by 21 percent. California's industrial users pay electric rates twice as high as their Midwestern counterparts - which helps explain why so much heavy industry has fled the state. In addition to alienating its industry, California has also curbed energy use through exorbitant residential electric rates (50 percent higher than the national average) and massive net out-migration. Between 2005 and 2007, 2.14 million Californians moved to other states, while only 1.44 million people from elsewhere moved to the Golden State, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Don't be surprised when the 2010 Census finds even more people leaving to escape California's 11.5 percent unemployment. And, as jobs and residents fled California, its tax revenues have declined, while its politicians went on a spending binge, creating a severe budget crisis.
Over at The American, Michael Barone has a very good article about the real problems faced by the GOP in the next presidential election. First, he disagrees that the recent confessions of adultery by two potential presidential candidates are the source of the GOP's difficulties:
The Democratic party is surviving the confessions of adultery by 2004 vice presidential nominee John Edwards and former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, and the Republican party will survive the confessions of Ensign, who never seemed likely to be a serious presidential candidate, and Sanford, who seemed to have the potential to be an attractive candidate but whose quirkiness and eccentricity made him seem unlikely ever to be a successful one.
He then has an interesting analysis of what went wrong for each one of the Republicans campaigning for the 2008 nomination and draws implications for the 2012 campaign.
In the scope of my employment I deal with Medicare reimbursements. Monday I got a call from a client whose case was closed FOUR YEARS AGO. Medicare still hasn't finalized his account and needed update information.
More: I got a "please provide us with the status" letter from Medicare regarding a former client who died years ago.
There’s an old joke about a fantastic three-legged pig and a farmer. It comes in many versions. In some tellings, the pig saves the farmer’s life. In another, it can talk. The punch line always comes after a visitor asks, “So how come he only has three legs?”
“Because,” the farmer explains, “you don’t want to eat a pig like that all at once.”
More and more, it seems the Obama administration has just that attitude toward the economic crisis: doling out pork for as long as possible.
The idea behind the government's economic stimulus package was to get money flowing through the system, boost economic activity and create jobs. But an msnbc.com review of the latest federal spending data shows that the money is flowing at a trickle.....
As of mid-June, for example, spending by the Transportation Deptartment for so-called "shovel ready" projects represented barely 2 percent of available funds. The EPA has barely touched its $4.4 billion in stimulus spending. Same for the Defense Department.
According to our calculations, roughly $53 billion or one-third of the $150 billion in fiscal stimulus money available for this year has been spent as of June 19. As a percentage of the $479 billion in total stimulus funds, that represents only 11.1 percent.
As a senior citizen, I am privy to arcana that you youngsters are not. Namely, I recently obtained my very own personal Medicare card. Listen up.
Your wallet is stuffed with sturdy plastic credit cards or laminated identification cards, many with photographs and lots of encoded data. Even the basic cards you might get from your county (library card) or state (driver’s license) are probably close to state-of-the-art. You want to know what a Medicare identification card is like? It is a little larger than the standard size for credit cards and driver’s licenses. (Of course. Couldn’t have the federal government make a card that will fit in a stack with all the other cards you use.) It has no magnetic strip. It is plain vanilla text and fonts—no security features whatsoever. It could be counterfeited by a sixth-grader with a scanner. It is made out of flimsy paper that would barely qualify for a really cheap business card. This, for Medicare benefits, for Pete’s sake. It’s pathetic.
Actually, it is shoddy and incompetent, as are so many things that the federal government does.
Indeed, had Franken been in the Senate then, you could have probably added some $30-$50 billion to the size of the $787 billion stimulus; that was the cost of getting one more GOP vote, Susan Collins. But Democrats jumping for joy right now might want to temper their enthusiasm a bit. For one thing, conservative/moderate Democrats haven’t always been easy votes to get. In fact, in the health-care debate, Dem senators like Max Baucus and Kent Conrad have been cool towards a public/government insurance option. Second, given the health problems of reliable Democratic votes like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, it will be a challenge for Democrats to make sure they have 60 votes at a particular time. Yesterday's Franken news ironically coincided with Byrd’s release from the hospital, and it’s been more than a year since all 100 senators voted on a bill. So forget Harry Reid; getting to 60 is the hands of medical professionals, not political ones.
Thomas Friedman writes on cap-and-trade too. He says despite its myriad flaws, Congress should just pass it.
Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.
Why? Because, for all its flaws, this bill is the first comprehensive attempt by America to mitigate climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Rejecting this bill would have been read in the world as America voting against the reality and urgency of climate change and would have undermined clean energy initiatives everywhere.
More important, my gut tells me that if the U.S. government puts a price on carbon, even a weak one, it will usher in a new mind-set among consumers, investors, farmers, innovators and entrepreneurs that in time will make a big difference — much like the first warnings that cigarettes could cause cancer. The morning after that warning no one ever looked at smoking the same again.
And then there's Friedman's version of a St. Crispin's Day speech to American youth. (Does Friedman think he has a following among the young? He often sounds like it.)
And then there is We the People. Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway. You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon. That will get the Senate’s attention. Play hardball or don’t play at all.
Carrot Lib: They're More Than Just Food Objects [Denis Boyles]
The shelves of EU greengrocers look uglier this morning than they have in 20 years. As the FT reports, Brussels has finally relaxed regulations on the appearance of fruits and vegetables permitted to be sold in Europe. From today, you can buy lumpy cukes and carrots that look like wee, hairy voodoo dolls. "J Sainsbury said consumers could save up to 40 per cent." Forty percent off the average European's grocery bill, and it only took them 20 years — and a zillion blog-jibes and late-night Euro-TV jokes — to get there.
Here's how the BBC covers the news. Maybe Brussels should have gone the other way and extended the regulations to include the beaches in the south of France. Or better, British prime ministers.
Michael Gerson's column today plays into every criticism of him. After a lot of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand stuff, it confuses political action and/or posturing for substance. It pay no serious attention to criticisms of his preferred course of action and it basically paints the mainstream conservative position as regretably dogmatic while casting the me-too Republican view as bold and admirable.
Oh, the column is on cap-and-trade, in case you're interested.
A reader reminds us that William Shakespeare, longtime columnist of The Stratford-on-Avon Herald, has some thoughts on Mark Sanford's recent Twittering:
This is the excellent foppery of the world: that when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeits of our own behavior — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!
With the looming holiday, we posted this week's Between the Covers podcasts a little early. Today's is with Brad Thor, the best-selling writer of thrillers. His new novel is The Apostle, which takes place largely in Afghanistan. Americans are good guys and al-Qaeda terrorists are bad guys — you know, elements that never would make it into a movie from Hollywood. I've long thought that if a studio wants to sell tickets rather than score ideological points, it should film a gritty Black Hawk Down-like treatment of Marines in Fallujah. Interestingly, the book-publishing industry has shown no such reluctance, even though it, too, is full of liberals. Authors such as Brad Thor and Vince Flynn are becoming the Tom Clancys of our time. Publishers are putting out their books and readers are buying them in droves. Moviemakers should think about the market opportunity they're currently missing. Now that the moratorium on patriotism is presumably over, wouldn't a book by one of these authors make a great film?
For years, a consortium of government agencies and advocacy groups has struggled for funding to knock down dams and build fish ladders to help restore local fish migrations. That work was jump-started on Tuesday when the federal government came forward with $3 million in stimulus money for six projects on the Ten Mile and Pawcatuck rivers.
When the work is done, fish will be able to migrate all the way up the Pawcatuck from Watch Hill, in Westerly, to Worden Pond, in South Kingstown.
In East Providence, the 30-year campaign by volunteers to lift spawning herring one bucket at a time over the Omega Dam may finally come to an end. A fish ladder will be built there and at two other locations upstream.
In all, the money will open up 13 miles of rivers and streams and 1,640 acres of spawning habitat, including Worden, the state’s largest freshwater pond.
The grants, announced by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, were among awards totaling $167 million for habitat restoration work around the country. They were welcomed warmly in Rhode Island.
“Some people have been waiting for 12 years for Omega Pond,” said Keith Gonsalves, president of the Ten Mile River Watershed Council. “Anything positive is good news.”
Lucy, last week I thought Mark Sanford could survive the adultery. But I don't think he can survive his weirdly exhibitionist public meditations on the adultery. I doubt many of his constituents share his view of the gubernatorial office as a personal growth experience the entire state can benefit from, and he might at least run some of the talking points of his thrice-daily confessionals past the staffers:
South Carolina's Governor Mark Sanford may be sleeping in the doghouse permenantly after telling the AP that his mistress is his soulmate, but that he'll try to fall back in love with his wife.
As Lisa said the other day, put not your trust in princes. I support the governor on limited government, spending, and taxes, but sorry, his talents are not so unique that it's worth putting up with a narcissist buffoon.
My column at the weekend suggested that celebrity politics and big government — ie, putting your trust in princes and putting the prince in "the bubble" — all but guarantee rule by creeps and misfits. In support of that thesis, we now have John Edwards — The Movie:
Former Edwards aide Andrew Young says the ex-senator and his former mistress, Rielle Hunter, once made a sex tape. . . .
Of course. What else would a presidential candidate do to unwind after a hard day on the stump? But the line that caught my eye was this, from Mrs. Edwards:
Elizabeth also suspects Young stole the baseball card collection of her late son, Wade. . . .
Is politics some kind of affirmative-action program for sociopaths?
