By Austin Bay
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
So far, theatrical protests of the Beijing Olympics by Hollywood stars and sign-waving demonstrators have failed to stop the genocide in Sudan's Darfur region or restore Tibetan independence.
The sensationalist media love the fracas, since harassing Olympic torchbearers creates great video.
"Publicity politics" leveraging shame and moral outrage and calling for action can produce responsive change in those rare places where freedom is constitutionally or institutionally enshrined -- in other words, in democratic nations that practice open, responsive politics.
China is a curious, evolving dictatorship. As a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and a major importer of Sudanese oil, China can put diplomatic pressure on Sudan's Islamist government in Khartoum. The protests have embarrassed Beijing just enough to rhetorically nudge Sudan -- though in terms of getting on-the-ground results like stopping the genocide, the nudges have had little effect.
When it comes to fighting Sudan's multi-front war of which Darfur is currently the most genocidal theater, no nation exerts a decisive influence on Khartoum's Islamists. Why? Because Khartoum is waging a dictatorship's war on its own people, a war for the survival of Sudan's corrupt regime on the regime's preferred terms.
Despite Chinese criticism, the government-backed Muslim "janjaweed militias" continue to attack black African farmers and Sudanese aircraft continue to bomb rebel positions (sometimes) and the farmers' villages (frequently).
China did back the Security Council's creation of UNAMID, the U.N.-African Union "hybrid" peacekeeping and peace enforcement mission in Darfur that finally set up its headquarters in December 2007.
UNAMID's deployment, however, has become a sad joke. It will take a year before the mission is fully manned. UNAMID is short of helicopters. Transport helicopters give UNAMID the ability to quickly move observers and light infantry forces to threatened areas. Several nations (including Britain and Ethiopia) have promised to help provide helicopters, but until the force has them the Sudanese government will wage war on the non-Arab tribes with little interference.
Motivated people who really want to have an effect on the ground in Darfur should call for reform of the entire United Nations. Huge job? Yes. One that challenges the "politically correct" and "transnational" (usually anti-American) elites who always demand "international action" and look to the United Nations as a great "force for good"? Yes again. But reform needs to happen if effective peacekeeping is to occur.
The U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) has a rhetorical grasp of the problem. The DPKO Website will tell you that peacekeeping "defies simple definition" and that many peacekeeping missions are "multidimensional."
The Darfur conflict is definitely multidimensional. Sudan is clearly involved, as are various Sudanese rebel factions. Darfur tribes have kin living on the Chad side of the Chad-Sudan border, so Chad is involved. Sudan accuses Chad's government of supporting Darfur rebels groups, and it does. Sudan supports anti-Chad government rebels.
The United Nations has confronted similar situations in the past. Somalia and Bosnia ought to provide valuable and critically important lessons, which should organizationally and operationally inform and guide new missions. They do, though only in the most glancing sense. Every major U.N. peacekeeping operation remains a "shake and bake" exercise with personnel contingents assembled piecemeal, equipment a collective hodge-podge, supply a sometimes thing and airlift often supplied by the U.S. Air Force, since no one else can do it.
Recall that the Clinton administration got frustrated with United Nations fiddling in the Balkans and fought the 1999 Kosovo War using NATO as its "peace enforcement" instrument.
Perhaps the United Nations is just not institutionally capable of conducting "anti-genocide peacekeeping" in Darfur. Do the Hollywood stars and Olympic protestors favor a U.S.-British-French invasion of western Sudan? As it is, the Khartoum government paints UNAMID as an "imperialist invasion."
Khartoum's dictatorship is the fundamental problem. The celebrities and protestors ought to call for regime change, though wouldn't that sound uncomfortably like the Bush administration toppling Saddam Hussein's genocidal regime in Iraq?
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Looking for Mr. Wright
Obama’s gift to the McCain & Clinton campaigns.
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
God bless the Rev. Jeremiah Wright!
After Barack Obama gave his big race speech in mid-March, many critics noted that the Illinois senator had thrown his own grandmother under the bus to defend his controversial pastor. Well, Wright proved over the last few days that he would not be outdone. He not only threw Obama under the bus, he chucked much of the liberal and mainstream media under there with him. If this keeps up, to paraphrase Roy Scheider in Jaws, he’s gonna need a bigger bus.
For six weeks, Obama’s supporters have diligently argued that to so much as mention Wright is, in effect, racist. When Hillary Clinton said that Wright wouldn’t have been her pastor, Andrew Sullivan gasped on his Atlantic blog that this was “a new low” in the election. When Lanny J. Davis, Clinton’s consummate spinner, defended her on CNN by describing what Wright actually said, Anderson Cooper lambasted Davis for daring to repeat Wright’s comments. Time’s Joe Klein chimed in, “You’re spreading the poison right now.”
Obama and his defenders have insisted that the bits from Wright’s sermons that got wide circulation last month had been taken out of context. His infamous sound bites were grounded in concrete theological or factual foundations, they claim. He was quoting other people. He’s done good things. Nothing to see here, folks.
And so God bless Wright because he’s left all of these folks holding a giant, steaming bag of ... well, let’s just call it a bag of “context.”
Let’s start with the news out of his speeches Sunday and Monday: Wright, Obama’s mentor and former pastor, is worse than we thought. He’s a bigot, at least by the standards usually reserved for white people such as former Harvard president Lawrence Summers or The Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray.
Sunday in Detroit, Wright explained to 10,000 people at the Fight for Freedom Fund dinner of the NAACP — an organization adept at taking offense to far less racist comments from non-blacks — that black and white brains are simply wired differently. Whites are “left-brain cognitive” while blacks are “right-brain” oriented. Each has “different ways of learning.” One wonders why Wright opposes separate-but-equal education.
CNN carried the speech live, and anchor Soledad O’Brien reported from the scene that it was “a home run.”
Then, Monday morning at the National Press Club, Wright attempted to clear the air about all of the supposedly deceptive sound bites he’s been reduced to.
So, does he stand by his “God damn America” statement?
Well, yeah. He explained that until American leaders apologize to Japan for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as to black Americans for slavery and racism, we will remain a damnable nation.
What about that bit about America’s chickens coming home to roost on 9/11? Yep, we heard him right. “You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you; those are biblical principles,” he explained.
Asked whether he stood by his assertion that the U.S. government created HIV as part of a genocidal program to wipe out the black race, Wright mostly dodged but ultimately offered this nondenial denial: “I believe our government is capable of doing anything.” He also offered a zesty defense of Louis Farrakhan — “one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century” — and dismissed criticism of Farrakhan as an anti-Semite.
To cap it off, Wright threw Obama under the bus. First, the pastor explained, Obama himself had taken Wright out of context. Moreover, Obama neither denounced nor distanced himself from Wright. And, besides, anything that Obama says on such matters is just stuff “politicians say.” They “do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.” So much for Obama’s new politics.
On Friday, Wright appeared on Bill Moyers’s PBS show, in which Moyers all but shouted “Amen!” every time Wright took a breath. The impression viewers were supposed to take away: Wright is on the side of the angels, not like those Swift-boating crazies at Fox News.
But then Obama himself told Fox News Sunday that he considers Wright fair game — as long as you don’t quote him out of context.
It’s a deal.
Wright is every bit as radical as his detractors claimed and explodes Obama’s messianic rhetoric about standing foursquare against divisiveness. But, on Tuesday, Obama denounced Wright for repeating what the pastor had been saying all along, bolstering critics and diminishing himself even more. Which is why that chorus you hear rising up from the John McCain and Clinton campaigns sounds an awful lot like this: “God damn Jeremiah Wright? No, no, no: God bless Jeremiah Wright!”
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
God bless the Rev. Jeremiah Wright!
After Barack Obama gave his big race speech in mid-March, many critics noted that the Illinois senator had thrown his own grandmother under the bus to defend his controversial pastor. Well, Wright proved over the last few days that he would not be outdone. He not only threw Obama under the bus, he chucked much of the liberal and mainstream media under there with him. If this keeps up, to paraphrase Roy Scheider in Jaws, he’s gonna need a bigger bus.
For six weeks, Obama’s supporters have diligently argued that to so much as mention Wright is, in effect, racist. When Hillary Clinton said that Wright wouldn’t have been her pastor, Andrew Sullivan gasped on his Atlantic blog that this was “a new low” in the election. When Lanny J. Davis, Clinton’s consummate spinner, defended her on CNN by describing what Wright actually said, Anderson Cooper lambasted Davis for daring to repeat Wright’s comments. Time’s Joe Klein chimed in, “You’re spreading the poison right now.”
Obama and his defenders have insisted that the bits from Wright’s sermons that got wide circulation last month had been taken out of context. His infamous sound bites were grounded in concrete theological or factual foundations, they claim. He was quoting other people. He’s done good things. Nothing to see here, folks.
And so God bless Wright because he’s left all of these folks holding a giant, steaming bag of ... well, let’s just call it a bag of “context.”
Let’s start with the news out of his speeches Sunday and Monday: Wright, Obama’s mentor and former pastor, is worse than we thought. He’s a bigot, at least by the standards usually reserved for white people such as former Harvard president Lawrence Summers or The Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray.
Sunday in Detroit, Wright explained to 10,000 people at the Fight for Freedom Fund dinner of the NAACP — an organization adept at taking offense to far less racist comments from non-blacks — that black and white brains are simply wired differently. Whites are “left-brain cognitive” while blacks are “right-brain” oriented. Each has “different ways of learning.” One wonders why Wright opposes separate-but-equal education.
CNN carried the speech live, and anchor Soledad O’Brien reported from the scene that it was “a home run.”
Then, Monday morning at the National Press Club, Wright attempted to clear the air about all of the supposedly deceptive sound bites he’s been reduced to.
So, does he stand by his “God damn America” statement?
Well, yeah. He explained that until American leaders apologize to Japan for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as to black Americans for slavery and racism, we will remain a damnable nation.
What about that bit about America’s chickens coming home to roost on 9/11? Yep, we heard him right. “You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you; those are biblical principles,” he explained.
Asked whether he stood by his assertion that the U.S. government created HIV as part of a genocidal program to wipe out the black race, Wright mostly dodged but ultimately offered this nondenial denial: “I believe our government is capable of doing anything.” He also offered a zesty defense of Louis Farrakhan — “one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century” — and dismissed criticism of Farrakhan as an anti-Semite.
To cap it off, Wright threw Obama under the bus. First, the pastor explained, Obama himself had taken Wright out of context. Moreover, Obama neither denounced nor distanced himself from Wright. And, besides, anything that Obama says on such matters is just stuff “politicians say.” They “do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.” So much for Obama’s new politics.
On Friday, Wright appeared on Bill Moyers’s PBS show, in which Moyers all but shouted “Amen!” every time Wright took a breath. The impression viewers were supposed to take away: Wright is on the side of the angels, not like those Swift-boating crazies at Fox News.
But then Obama himself told Fox News Sunday that he considers Wright fair game — as long as you don’t quote him out of context.
It’s a deal.
Wright is every bit as radical as his detractors claimed and explodes Obama’s messianic rhetoric about standing foursquare against divisiveness. But, on Tuesday, Obama denounced Wright for repeating what the pastor had been saying all along, bolstering critics and diminishing himself even more. Which is why that chorus you hear rising up from the John McCain and Clinton campaigns sounds an awful lot like this: “God damn Jeremiah Wright? No, no, no: God bless Jeremiah Wright!”
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Durban II Double Standard
Discussions of anti-Semitism are silenced, while Iran's benevolence remains unquestioned.
By Anne Bayefsky
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The first week of preparations for the U.N.’s racist anti-racism bash, the “Durban Review Conference” (also known as Durban II) has drawn to a close. It now looks like the latest U.N. effort at painting Israel and America as the enemies of human rights — with Iran, Libya, Algeria, and Syria on the side of the angels — won’t be held in Durban, after all. On the list of prospective sites is New York: Apparently, considerations of the number of Jews in the neighborhood may be outweighed by the U.N. dollars that would pour in if it was held on U.N. premises. U.N. premises in places with fewer Jews, like Geneva and Vienna, are also in the running.
While the venue issue is winding down, the struggle for participation, substance, and financing is gearing up. Iran has scored a victory in keeping a Jewish NGO out of the first substantive session of the Durban II preparatory process. Iran objected to the accreditation or participation of the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy and then issued a list of demands that the NGO was required to answer. The long list was an intrusive fishing expedition designed to gather data on Jewish NGOs across Canada, including membership lists, identification of any possible dual Canadian-Israeli citizens, and a list of all “financial sources and contributions.” The decision deadline was set for Monday, April 28, but as soon as the NGO responses to the Iranian list were in hand, the EU agreed to postpone consideration in the face of continued Iranian “dissatisfaction” and rubber-stamped an Iranian demand for more answers. The formal decision has now been “delayed” until Wednesday midday, knowing Thursday is a U.N. holiday and Friday involves only the adoption of a report without NGO input. So right from the start Durban II has meant to treat Jewish NGOs differently than all others.
Last week, the Libyan member of the Security Council likened Israel’s bombing in Gaza to “what happened in the concentration camps.” With another Libyan in position of authority here in Geneva, the Durban PrepCom has also been vintage U.N. NGOs are permitted to speak during the proceedings, but acting as a representative of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, here’s a sample of what I encountered.
The Organization of the Islamic Conference has spent years dominating U.N. proceedings, and Durban II — the centerpiece of the U.N.’s alleged “anti-racism” crusade — is their progeny. By the end of the week, it was with genuine exasperation that the Egyptian representative coined a new word: “Durbanophobia.” A couple of days ago he came up with Arabophobia. And we already know about the worldwide plot hatched in the Oval Office, Downing Street, and the basements of evil Danish publishers, called Islamophobia. Now there is a plot against a harmless group of diplomats who just want to hang out together and shmooze about human rights.
In contrast to attempts to speak about anti-Semitism, nobody thought to interrupt Iran’s declaration that it plays a leadership role in the battle against discrimination. Did you know that the state whose president has advocated modern-day genocide by wiping out Israel “is fully committed to eradicate any policy based on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance and has actively struggled against this phenomena at national, regional and international levels”? In fact, “in order to promote access of all people to social justice and to eliminate discrimination” Iran has just created “a special committee to deal with cases of discrimination.” Presumably, the women stoned for alleged adultery, and the homosexuals hanged and strung up on cranes in public places need not apply.
Meanwhile Algeria had the neat idea of misrepresenting the language of a U.N. resolution in order to beat the anti-Semitism-is-us drum. They declared “resolution 64 of the Human Rights Council of February 1994 requests consideration of ‘discrimination against Blacks, anti-Semitism including discrimination against Arabs and Muslims, xenophobia, negrophobia and related intolerance.’ ” Actually, the resolution requests examination of “any form of discrimination against Blacks, Arabs and Muslims, xenophobia, negrophobia, anti-Semitism and related intolerance.”
The fabrication was particularly preposterous in light of the fact that back in 1994 — I was a member of Canada’s U.N. Human Rights Commission delegation at the time — it was an OIC member that insisted “anti-Arab and anti-Muslim” be added before the word “anti-Semitism” so as to create the appearance of a hierarchy. And every member of the OIC refused to vote for the paragraph that contained only a reference to anti-Semitism. But then historical revisionism at the U.N. is an old favorite.
A representative of Syria announced: “first of all, I should like to draw your attention to the fact that my country in general does not suffer from problems relating to racism.” It so happens that Syria has had a declaration of a state of emergency since 1963, which effectively suspends constitutional rights. But that didn’t stop the “distinguished representative” from announcing there is no racism in Syria because “the constitution Article 25 insists on the fact that freedom is a sacred right and guarantees individual freedoms for all citizens. It swears that it will protect their interests.” Durban II participants also learned that this conduit for Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon “has set up a national commission on international humanitarian law entrusted with the task of coordinating and sensitizing public opinion to human rights and humanitarian law principles.”
The nonstop campaign by Islamic states against freedom of expression has been most striking. Pakistan, on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic conference, claimed “the most serious manifestation of racism is the democratic legitimization of racism and xenophobia. . . . When it is expressed in the form of defamation of religion it takes cover behind the freedom of expression and opinion.” Algeria was “deeply alarmed by . . . a selective and politicized reading of human rights and fundamental freedom exemplified by the ideological preference given to freedom of expression to the detriment to other freedoms. . . . It is indispensible [sic] for these practices to be condemned and outlawed and their perpetrators no longer enjoy impunity by ideological use of freedom of opinion and expression. . . .” [Who knew Algeria supported the Fairness Doctrine?]
Durban II preparation is not just another U.N. opportunity to distort, fabricate, and confuse. The assault on the actual protection of human rights has left the station and is now barreling along with U.N. money on U.N. premises. A newly created “working group” will start to prepare an “outcome document” in a few weeks’ time.
Hope for a united Western front against this assault is now being placed on France’s ascension to the EU Presidency in July, raising the prospect of the EU joining Canada, the U.S., and Israel in the unambiguous rejection of Durban II. Judging from its gutless behavior to date, however, it will take an earthquake to move the EU from its beloved U.N. turf. The lessons for future American foreign policy are considerable.
By Anne Bayefsky
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The first week of preparations for the U.N.’s racist anti-racism bash, the “Durban Review Conference” (also known as Durban II) has drawn to a close. It now looks like the latest U.N. effort at painting Israel and America as the enemies of human rights — with Iran, Libya, Algeria, and Syria on the side of the angels — won’t be held in Durban, after all. On the list of prospective sites is New York: Apparently, considerations of the number of Jews in the neighborhood may be outweighed by the U.N. dollars that would pour in if it was held on U.N. premises. U.N. premises in places with fewer Jews, like Geneva and Vienna, are also in the running.
While the venue issue is winding down, the struggle for participation, substance, and financing is gearing up. Iran has scored a victory in keeping a Jewish NGO out of the first substantive session of the Durban II preparatory process. Iran objected to the accreditation or participation of the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy and then issued a list of demands that the NGO was required to answer. The long list was an intrusive fishing expedition designed to gather data on Jewish NGOs across Canada, including membership lists, identification of any possible dual Canadian-Israeli citizens, and a list of all “financial sources and contributions.” The decision deadline was set for Monday, April 28, but as soon as the NGO responses to the Iranian list were in hand, the EU agreed to postpone consideration in the face of continued Iranian “dissatisfaction” and rubber-stamped an Iranian demand for more answers. The formal decision has now been “delayed” until Wednesday midday, knowing Thursday is a U.N. holiday and Friday involves only the adoption of a report without NGO input. So right from the start Durban II has meant to treat Jewish NGOs differently than all others.
Last week, the Libyan member of the Security Council likened Israel’s bombing in Gaza to “what happened in the concentration camps.” With another Libyan in position of authority here in Geneva, the Durban PrepCom has also been vintage U.N. NGOs are permitted to speak during the proceedings, but acting as a representative of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, here’s a sample of what I encountered.
April 23, 2008 Morning SessionAnd so it went. Over three attempted statements, I was interrupted by the Libyan Chair repeatedly, with additional points of order coming from human rights paragons Egypt, Syria, and Algeria. It made no difference whether the agenda item was preparation, objectives, contemporary manifestations of racism, or the effectiveness of U.N. human rights mechanisms. Over and over, the Chair deemed my remarks not to be connected to the constantly mutating agenda item under discussion.
Anne Bayefsky, Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust… this Committee has heard from a number of U.N. members purporting to claim an interest in the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. Such statements must be clearly understood in context. The context is their simultaneous redefinition of anti-Semitism as directed against Arabs and Muslims. In the words of the Ambassador of Algeria yesterday, anti-Semitism targets Arabs because they are also Semites. Anything less, he said, would be a false dichotomy between Jews and Arabs. The dichotomy about which he speaks might be described somewhat differently. Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. This is anti-Semitism. It isn’t about Arabs. It isn’t about Muslims….
Chairperson, Najat Al-Hajjaji, (Libya) - POINT OF ORDER Distinguished Madame, distinguished representative of an NGO Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, please be committed to the item under consideration which is Item 5. Item 5 is entitled “Reports of preparatory meetings and activities at the international, regional and national levels.” …
Anne Bayefsky…To assess those preparatory meetings and to explain their appropriate activities it is necessary to talk about the substance of those activities. So to set the record straight for those preparatory purposes, the term anti-Semitism was coined by an anti-Semite in the 19th century to mean Jew hatred — not more, not less. Much has been said and written in the course of preparing for the conference about the need to address contemporary forms of racism and xenophobia. In this context there is an acid test of the genuineness of alleged concern for anti-Semitism. The major contemporary form of anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism, the rejection of the self-determination of the Jewish people realized in the state of Israel. . . .
Chairperson, Najat Al-Hajjaji, (Libya) — POINT OF ORDER
Distinguished Madame, you are still talking not under the item under consideration. …
The Organization of the Islamic Conference has spent years dominating U.N. proceedings, and Durban II — the centerpiece of the U.N.’s alleged “anti-racism” crusade — is their progeny. By the end of the week, it was with genuine exasperation that the Egyptian representative coined a new word: “Durbanophobia.” A couple of days ago he came up with Arabophobia. And we already know about the worldwide plot hatched in the Oval Office, Downing Street, and the basements of evil Danish publishers, called Islamophobia. Now there is a plot against a harmless group of diplomats who just want to hang out together and shmooze about human rights.
In contrast to attempts to speak about anti-Semitism, nobody thought to interrupt Iran’s declaration that it plays a leadership role in the battle against discrimination. Did you know that the state whose president has advocated modern-day genocide by wiping out Israel “is fully committed to eradicate any policy based on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance and has actively struggled against this phenomena at national, regional and international levels”? In fact, “in order to promote access of all people to social justice and to eliminate discrimination” Iran has just created “a special committee to deal with cases of discrimination.” Presumably, the women stoned for alleged adultery, and the homosexuals hanged and strung up on cranes in public places need not apply.
Meanwhile Algeria had the neat idea of misrepresenting the language of a U.N. resolution in order to beat the anti-Semitism-is-us drum. They declared “resolution 64 of the Human Rights Council of February 1994 requests consideration of ‘discrimination against Blacks, anti-Semitism including discrimination against Arabs and Muslims, xenophobia, negrophobia and related intolerance.’ ” Actually, the resolution requests examination of “any form of discrimination against Blacks, Arabs and Muslims, xenophobia, negrophobia, anti-Semitism and related intolerance.”
The fabrication was particularly preposterous in light of the fact that back in 1994 — I was a member of Canada’s U.N. Human Rights Commission delegation at the time — it was an OIC member that insisted “anti-Arab and anti-Muslim” be added before the word “anti-Semitism” so as to create the appearance of a hierarchy. And every member of the OIC refused to vote for the paragraph that contained only a reference to anti-Semitism. But then historical revisionism at the U.N. is an old favorite.
A representative of Syria announced: “first of all, I should like to draw your attention to the fact that my country in general does not suffer from problems relating to racism.” It so happens that Syria has had a declaration of a state of emergency since 1963, which effectively suspends constitutional rights. But that didn’t stop the “distinguished representative” from announcing there is no racism in Syria because “the constitution Article 25 insists on the fact that freedom is a sacred right and guarantees individual freedoms for all citizens. It swears that it will protect their interests.” Durban II participants also learned that this conduit for Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon “has set up a national commission on international humanitarian law entrusted with the task of coordinating and sensitizing public opinion to human rights and humanitarian law principles.”
The nonstop campaign by Islamic states against freedom of expression has been most striking. Pakistan, on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic conference, claimed “the most serious manifestation of racism is the democratic legitimization of racism and xenophobia. . . . When it is expressed in the form of defamation of religion it takes cover behind the freedom of expression and opinion.” Algeria was “deeply alarmed by . . . a selective and politicized reading of human rights and fundamental freedom exemplified by the ideological preference given to freedom of expression to the detriment to other freedoms. . . . It is indispensible [sic] for these practices to be condemned and outlawed and their perpetrators no longer enjoy impunity by ideological use of freedom of opinion and expression. . . .” [Who knew Algeria supported the Fairness Doctrine?]
Durban II preparation is not just another U.N. opportunity to distort, fabricate, and confuse. The assault on the actual protection of human rights has left the station and is now barreling along with U.N. money on U.N. premises. A newly created “working group” will start to prepare an “outcome document” in a few weeks’ time.
Hope for a united Western front against this assault is now being placed on France’s ascension to the EU Presidency in July, raising the prospect of the EU joining Canada, the U.S., and Israel in the unambiguous rejection of Durban II. Judging from its gutless behavior to date, however, it will take an earthquake to move the EU from its beloved U.N. turf. The lessons for future American foreign policy are considerable.
The Fed Must Strengthen the Dollar
By John L. Chapman
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
When Federal Reserve governors meet today, they should consider that solutions to their twin challenges – a flagging economy and systemic moral hazard in financial markets – have common roots in a stable dollar. One of the primordial lessons of economic history is that sound money is a necessary condition to promote long-run prosperity and maximal growth. Moreover, a stable currency and low inflation lessen the need for complex hedging vehicles which can be leveraged to harmful effect in volatile markets.
Unfortunately, with total first quarter job losses up to 232,000 and the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey at its lowest level since 1982, fed funds futures indicate a strong likelihood of a cut of 25 basis points in the fed funds rate. But will yet more interest rate cuts help the economy or lower the problem of moral hazard?
To understand why it may not, and why a different path should be taken, it must be recognized that Fed policy has long been guided by – or perhaps more accurately, yoked to – the alleged trade-off between unemployment and inflation: the so-called Phillips Curve.
A.W. Phillips's original 1958 paper dealt with wage rate changes and unemployment. But eventually it would become conventional policy wisdom to apply his insight more broadly to price level movements against the unemployment rate.
Over time, the Phillips Curve became conventional macroeconomic wisdom and an extension of Keynesian fine-tuning, i.e., a menu of choices along with a rationale for discretionary monetary policy to effect changes in employment levels.
Phillips's work is important and has been validated over short time frames when inflation and unemployment are low. But Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps showed that the relationship broke down in the long run, due to expectations and changing institutions and technologies. Over a long horizon, employment and growth are a function of real factors; inflation and unemployment often move in tandem, not as a trade-off.
Since 1948, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, inflation has averaged 3.7% per year, unemployment 5.6%, and real GDP growth 3.4%. But the 10 lowest inflation years (between 1949-62, and 1986) averaged 0.5% inflation and 5.2% unemployment, along with 3.5% GDP growth. And the 10 high inflation years (between 1973-81, 1969, and 1990) averaged 9.1% in consumer price increases, along with 6.2% unemployment and 2.6% in growth. In other words, low inflation was often associated with lower unemployment and stronger GDP growth than high-inflation years.
More strikingly, the years following the 10 lowest inflation years were even better in terms of performance (averaging 5.1% unemployment and 4.4% growth), and the years following the high inflation years were even worse (7% unemployment and 1.4% GDP growth). This record shows the importance of sound money, fostering an environment allowing the key growth drivers of entrepreneurship and capital investment to flourish under stable long-run expectations.
Why would the Fed base policy on a trade-off which does not hold beyond the short run, and is the underlying premise of the stop-go monetary strategies that have caused boom-and-bust instability? Partly because the Phillips Curve framework is so universally and deeply ingrained. Partly because until recently the Fed has held that inflation is not a threat, and that the economy now demands low short-term rates and unlimited liquidity.
In spite of Fed indifference, however, inflation warnings are ubiquitous. Commodity and consumer prices are soaring, and the dollar continues to weaken against the euro and other currencies. Broad measures of the money supply are expanding rapidly. One such measure, MZM ("Money of Zero Maturity"), has grown 16.3% in the last year, accelerating to a 30.3% annualized rate since the middle of January. MZM – equivalent to M2 minus time deposits, plus all money market funds – measures money or assets that can be quickly turned into money at par. Thus it captures the real level of liquidity and spending power in the financial system. Rapid growth in liquidity guarantees inflationary pressures.
Also, the U.S. dollar is the de facto international reserve currency; as the demand for dollar-denominated assets such as U.S. Treasurys bids up their price, the interest rate the Treasury has to pay to borrow declines. Without that demand, interest rates would rise and, with domestic savings diverted to service the debt, output would be lower and prices higher.
But exploding fiscal deficits, the housing correction, protectionist threats and $200 billion in tax hikes scheduled for 2011 are fueling loss of confidence in the U.S. dollar. If foreign holders of dollars or dollar-denominated assets sell them, all the good effects of being the de facto international reserve currency start operating in reverse. Until fiscal and monetary policies change, all this implies future inflation and higher interest rates.
The bottom line is this: the Fed should bury its errant Phillips Curve framework, and cease attempts to fine-tune perfect balance between inflation and recession. It should halt further rate cuts and soon begin a series of interest rate increases.
As for the risk of further credit-market blow-ups, the Fed's new lending facilities and the discount window are more appropriate tools for case-by-case illiquidity issues than blunt interest-rate mechanisms.
Neither current market imbalances nor the longer-term threat posed by moral hazard can be eradicated easily. And the considerable fiscal challenges facing the U.S. economy are not the responsibility of the central bank. But inflation and an unstable dollar are mortal enemies of prosperity. With inflation, millions are burdened by cost-of-living increases, real profit contraction, capital decumulation, and an inability to easily make contracts, calculate entrepreneurially, or invest.
By discarding the Phillips Curve blinders, the Fed would happily learn that economic growth and low inflation are not a mutually exclusive trade-off. A stable dollar promotes both, along with making fiscal and moral hazard problems easier to solve in the future.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
When Federal Reserve governors meet today, they should consider that solutions to their twin challenges – a flagging economy and systemic moral hazard in financial markets – have common roots in a stable dollar. One of the primordial lessons of economic history is that sound money is a necessary condition to promote long-run prosperity and maximal growth. Moreover, a stable currency and low inflation lessen the need for complex hedging vehicles which can be leveraged to harmful effect in volatile markets.
Unfortunately, with total first quarter job losses up to 232,000 and the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey at its lowest level since 1982, fed funds futures indicate a strong likelihood of a cut of 25 basis points in the fed funds rate. But will yet more interest rate cuts help the economy or lower the problem of moral hazard?
To understand why it may not, and why a different path should be taken, it must be recognized that Fed policy has long been guided by – or perhaps more accurately, yoked to – the alleged trade-off between unemployment and inflation: the so-called Phillips Curve.
A.W. Phillips's original 1958 paper dealt with wage rate changes and unemployment. But eventually it would become conventional policy wisdom to apply his insight more broadly to price level movements against the unemployment rate.
Over time, the Phillips Curve became conventional macroeconomic wisdom and an extension of Keynesian fine-tuning, i.e., a menu of choices along with a rationale for discretionary monetary policy to effect changes in employment levels.
Phillips's work is important and has been validated over short time frames when inflation and unemployment are low. But Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps showed that the relationship broke down in the long run, due to expectations and changing institutions and technologies. Over a long horizon, employment and growth are a function of real factors; inflation and unemployment often move in tandem, not as a trade-off.
Since 1948, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, inflation has averaged 3.7% per year, unemployment 5.6%, and real GDP growth 3.4%. But the 10 lowest inflation years (between 1949-62, and 1986) averaged 0.5% inflation and 5.2% unemployment, along with 3.5% GDP growth. And the 10 high inflation years (between 1973-81, 1969, and 1990) averaged 9.1% in consumer price increases, along with 6.2% unemployment and 2.6% in growth. In other words, low inflation was often associated with lower unemployment and stronger GDP growth than high-inflation years.
More strikingly, the years following the 10 lowest inflation years were even better in terms of performance (averaging 5.1% unemployment and 4.4% growth), and the years following the high inflation years were even worse (7% unemployment and 1.4% GDP growth). This record shows the importance of sound money, fostering an environment allowing the key growth drivers of entrepreneurship and capital investment to flourish under stable long-run expectations.
Why would the Fed base policy on a trade-off which does not hold beyond the short run, and is the underlying premise of the stop-go monetary strategies that have caused boom-and-bust instability? Partly because the Phillips Curve framework is so universally and deeply ingrained. Partly because until recently the Fed has held that inflation is not a threat, and that the economy now demands low short-term rates and unlimited liquidity.
In spite of Fed indifference, however, inflation warnings are ubiquitous. Commodity and consumer prices are soaring, and the dollar continues to weaken against the euro and other currencies. Broad measures of the money supply are expanding rapidly. One such measure, MZM ("Money of Zero Maturity"), has grown 16.3% in the last year, accelerating to a 30.3% annualized rate since the middle of January. MZM – equivalent to M2 minus time deposits, plus all money market funds – measures money or assets that can be quickly turned into money at par. Thus it captures the real level of liquidity and spending power in the financial system. Rapid growth in liquidity guarantees inflationary pressures.
Also, the U.S. dollar is the de facto international reserve currency; as the demand for dollar-denominated assets such as U.S. Treasurys bids up their price, the interest rate the Treasury has to pay to borrow declines. Without that demand, interest rates would rise and, with domestic savings diverted to service the debt, output would be lower and prices higher.
But exploding fiscal deficits, the housing correction, protectionist threats and $200 billion in tax hikes scheduled for 2011 are fueling loss of confidence in the U.S. dollar. If foreign holders of dollars or dollar-denominated assets sell them, all the good effects of being the de facto international reserve currency start operating in reverse. Until fiscal and monetary policies change, all this implies future inflation and higher interest rates.
The bottom line is this: the Fed should bury its errant Phillips Curve framework, and cease attempts to fine-tune perfect balance between inflation and recession. It should halt further rate cuts and soon begin a series of interest rate increases.
As for the risk of further credit-market blow-ups, the Fed's new lending facilities and the discount window are more appropriate tools for case-by-case illiquidity issues than blunt interest-rate mechanisms.
Neither current market imbalances nor the longer-term threat posed by moral hazard can be eradicated easily. And the considerable fiscal challenges facing the U.S. economy are not the responsibility of the central bank. But inflation and an unstable dollar are mortal enemies of prosperity. With inflation, millions are burdened by cost-of-living increases, real profit contraction, capital decumulation, and an inability to easily make contracts, calculate entrepreneurially, or invest.
By discarding the Phillips Curve blinders, the Fed would happily learn that economic growth and low inflation are not a mutually exclusive trade-off. A stable dollar promotes both, along with making fiscal and moral hazard problems easier to solve in the future.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Brown's Global Ideals Threaten U.S. Sovereignty
By Phyllis Schlafly
Monday, April 28, 2008
It's a good thing that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's U.S. visit was upstaged by the dramatic reception Americans gave Pope Benedict XVI. Brown might have been booed if he hadn't delivered what aides called his "signature" speech within the cloistered walls of Harvard's Kennedy Center.
Brown's tedious, hour-long speech impudently demanded that we issue a "Declaration of Interdependence" in order to submit to global governance. That's another way of calling on the United States to repeal the Declaration of Independence.
No thanks for the advice, Mr. Brown. Brave Americans rose up and rejected Britain's royalist rule in 1776, and we've gotten along mighty well without trans-Atlantic interference in our government for more than two centuries. We certainly don't want to reinstate any foreign supervision today.
The redundancy of Brown's outrageous semantics was oppressive. His speech used the word global 69 times, globalization 7 times, and interdependence 13 times. He referred to Kennedy 19 times, lavishing fulsome praise on John F. Kennedy ("his influence abides everywhere"), Robert Kennedy (he sent forth "ripples of hope"), and Edward "Ted" Kennedy ("one of the greatest senators in more than two centuries").
Brown rejected the traditional concept of national sovereignty, which means an independent nation not subservient to outside control, telling Americans to replace it with "responsible sovereignty," which he defined as accepting what he calls our global "obligations." Hold on to your pocketbook.
Brown admitted that his "main argument" is that the United States must accept "new global rules," "new global institutions" and "global networks." Brown's global rules include massive U.S. cash handouts and opening U.S. borders to the world.
Brown's use of well-known American political phrases was tacky. He tried to morph Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal into a "New Global Deal," and JFK's New Frontier into "the New Frontier is that there is no frontier."
Brown even slipped in an attempt at thought control: "Americans must learn to think inter-continentally." He declaimed, "We are all internationalists now."
Using the rhetorical device of inevitability, Brown warned Americans that his vision of the globalist future is "irreversible transformation." He wants to "transcend states" and "transcend borders" as he builds the "architecture of a global society."
Brown peddled the nonsense that the peoples of the world "subscribe to similar ideals." He tried to tell Americans that all religions (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists) have "common values" and "similar ideals." No, they certainly do not.
Brown wants to increase the power of the United Nations to become the source of "an international stand-by capacity of trained civilian experts, ready to go anywhere at any time," and even be able to exercise "military force." Americans do not intend to cede such authority to the corrupt United Nations.
The silliest part of Brown's ponderous speech was his claim that "a global society" is "advancing democracy widely across the world." In fact, he doesn't even practice democracy in his own country.
Brown refused to allow the British people to vote on whether or not they want to accept the constitution of the European Union. He acquiesced in the plot of the constitution's author, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, to put the EU constitution into effect by calling it a treaty so it did not have to be voted on by the people.
Brown was chicken about the treaty subterfuge and did not permit a photographic record of his participation. He sent his foreign secretary to perform the official treaty signing in front of cameras.
The EU constitution, now called the Treaty of Lisbon, requires all signers to surrender their sovereignty and democracy to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, Belgium, and judges in Strasbourg, France. The EU constitution takes away England's right to pass its own laws, forces England to surrender more than 60 United Kingdom vetoes of EU decisions, and gives the EU bureaucracy and tribunals total control over England's immigration policy.
Instead of a self-governing nation whose democratic system was developed over centuries, England is now ruled by what former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called "the paper-pushers in Brussels."
Brown made his globalism speech emphatic by repeatedly invoking the words "New World Order." The New World Order Brown tries to con the United States into accepting would mean taxing Americans for foreign handouts so immense they would make the Marshall Plan look puny, global warming rules to drastically reduce the U.S. standard of living, and putting American workers in a common labor pool with the world's billions who subsist on less than $2 a day.
Gordon Brown invited Americans to march forward to globalism "where there is no path." He's correct that there is no path on which we can expect globalism to lead the United States to a better world; in fact every path toward global government is a surrender of our liberty and our prosperity.
Gordon Brown should go back home and study how Americans refused to accept orders from King George III.
Monday, April 28, 2008
It's a good thing that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's U.S. visit was upstaged by the dramatic reception Americans gave Pope Benedict XVI. Brown might have been booed if he hadn't delivered what aides called his "signature" speech within the cloistered walls of Harvard's Kennedy Center.
Brown's tedious, hour-long speech impudently demanded that we issue a "Declaration of Interdependence" in order to submit to global governance. That's another way of calling on the United States to repeal the Declaration of Independence.
No thanks for the advice, Mr. Brown. Brave Americans rose up and rejected Britain's royalist rule in 1776, and we've gotten along mighty well without trans-Atlantic interference in our government for more than two centuries. We certainly don't want to reinstate any foreign supervision today.
The redundancy of Brown's outrageous semantics was oppressive. His speech used the word global 69 times, globalization 7 times, and interdependence 13 times. He referred to Kennedy 19 times, lavishing fulsome praise on John F. Kennedy ("his influence abides everywhere"), Robert Kennedy (he sent forth "ripples of hope"), and Edward "Ted" Kennedy ("one of the greatest senators in more than two centuries").
Brown rejected the traditional concept of national sovereignty, which means an independent nation not subservient to outside control, telling Americans to replace it with "responsible sovereignty," which he defined as accepting what he calls our global "obligations." Hold on to your pocketbook.
Brown admitted that his "main argument" is that the United States must accept "new global rules," "new global institutions" and "global networks." Brown's global rules include massive U.S. cash handouts and opening U.S. borders to the world.
Brown's use of well-known American political phrases was tacky. He tried to morph Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal into a "New Global Deal," and JFK's New Frontier into "the New Frontier is that there is no frontier."
Brown even slipped in an attempt at thought control: "Americans must learn to think inter-continentally." He declaimed, "We are all internationalists now."
Using the rhetorical device of inevitability, Brown warned Americans that his vision of the globalist future is "irreversible transformation." He wants to "transcend states" and "transcend borders" as he builds the "architecture of a global society."
Brown peddled the nonsense that the peoples of the world "subscribe to similar ideals." He tried to tell Americans that all religions (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists) have "common values" and "similar ideals." No, they certainly do not.
Brown wants to increase the power of the United Nations to become the source of "an international stand-by capacity of trained civilian experts, ready to go anywhere at any time," and even be able to exercise "military force." Americans do not intend to cede such authority to the corrupt United Nations.
The silliest part of Brown's ponderous speech was his claim that "a global society" is "advancing democracy widely across the world." In fact, he doesn't even practice democracy in his own country.
Brown refused to allow the British people to vote on whether or not they want to accept the constitution of the European Union. He acquiesced in the plot of the constitution's author, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, to put the EU constitution into effect by calling it a treaty so it did not have to be voted on by the people.
Brown was chicken about the treaty subterfuge and did not permit a photographic record of his participation. He sent his foreign secretary to perform the official treaty signing in front of cameras.
The EU constitution, now called the Treaty of Lisbon, requires all signers to surrender their sovereignty and democracy to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, Belgium, and judges in Strasbourg, France. The EU constitution takes away England's right to pass its own laws, forces England to surrender more than 60 United Kingdom vetoes of EU decisions, and gives the EU bureaucracy and tribunals total control over England's immigration policy.
Instead of a self-governing nation whose democratic system was developed over centuries, England is now ruled by what former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called "the paper-pushers in Brussels."
Brown made his globalism speech emphatic by repeatedly invoking the words "New World Order." The New World Order Brown tries to con the United States into accepting would mean taxing Americans for foreign handouts so immense they would make the Marshall Plan look puny, global warming rules to drastically reduce the U.S. standard of living, and putting American workers in a common labor pool with the world's billions who subsist on less than $2 a day.
Gordon Brown invited Americans to march forward to globalism "where there is no path." He's correct that there is no path on which we can expect globalism to lead the United States to a better world; in fact every path toward global government is a surrender of our liberty and our prosperity.
Gordon Brown should go back home and study how Americans refused to accept orders from King George III.
The Racial Thing
By Rich Galen
Monday, April 28, 2008
The Republican Party of North Carolina is running an ad which features that footage of Barack Obama's preacher, Jeremiah Wright uttering his now-infamous imprecation for God to damn America.
The ad is not in opposition to Barack Obama; nor is it an ad in favor of John McCain. It is an ad aimed at the two Democratic candidates for North Carolina Governor.
The ad (and there is a link to it on today's Secret Decoder Ring page) attempts to make this case:
- Wright was Obama's "spiritual advisor" for 20 years.
- Wright is on record of saying some fairly awful things.
- Obama is a Democrat.
- Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue and State Treasurer Richard Moore are Democrats running in the primary for Governor on May 6.
- Each has endorsed Barack Obama for President.
ERGO
- Perdue and Moore are "too extreme for North Carolina."
I have worked with State Parties off and on for more than three decades. This is the kind of ad which (a) seems like it was written over greasy cheeseburgers and cheap beer on a paper napkin, (b) sounded like a really good idea at the time, because (c) it would tie the North Carolina gubernatorial race to the Presidential primary, thus (d) providing a terrific fundraising opportunity, and (e) could be produced for $1.47.
John McCain immediately condemned it, which irritated the right wingers of the GOP but that was not enough for the main stream media. The New York Times, which has resolved to be the nation's decider of what is acceptable in this campaign and what is not (after spanking Hillary Clinton for the race she ran in Pennsylvania):
"Unless Mr. McCain quickly gets control of his party, we fear there will be worse to come."
Which caused Barack Obama, who would have been better off keeping away from anything having to do with Jeremiah Wright (but couldn't) to say: "I assume that if John McCain thinks that it's an inappropriate ad that he can get them to pull it down, since he's their nominee and standard bearer."
Which demonstrates, at a minimum, a willful ignorance of the way State Parties operate.
Let us not forget who was the first person to interject Race into this election cycle. It was not the North Carolina GOP. It was the once-sainted William Jefferson Clinton.
From ABC's Jake Tapper on January 26, 2008:
Said Bill Clinton today in Columbia, SC: "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here."
Boy, I can't understand why anyone would think the Clintons are running a race-baiting campaign to paint Obama as "the black candidate."
Not only that, but the Washington Post put Race on its front page this weekend in a piece headed:
Party Fears Racial Divide
Attacks Could Do Lasting Harm, Democrats Say
In the piece, reporters Jonathan Weisman and Matthew Mosk wrote that following the Pennsylvania primary:
[Clinton's] backers may be convinced that only she can win the white, working-class voters that the Democratic nominee will need in the general election, but many African American leaders say a Clinton nomination - handed to her by superdelegates - would result in a disastrous breach with black voters.
The House Majority Whip, James E. Clyburn (D-SC), who is Black, said in the WashPost article:
"We keep talking as if it doesn't matter that Obama gets 92 percent of the black vote, because since he only got 35 percent of the white vote, he's in trouble. Well, Hillary Clinton only got 8 percent of the black vote. . . . It's almost saying black people don't matter."
Oh, yeah. This is all the fault of the North Carolina GOP. They're the ones bringing Race into this deal.
Here's the short hand: Republicans have nothing in this. The Racial thing in this cycle is between a White woman and a Black man for the Democratic nomination.
John McCain was correct: It's the Democrats' mess and it is going to get worse before it gets better.
Monday, April 28, 2008
The Republican Party of North Carolina is running an ad which features that footage of Barack Obama's preacher, Jeremiah Wright uttering his now-infamous imprecation for God to damn America.
The ad is not in opposition to Barack Obama; nor is it an ad in favor of John McCain. It is an ad aimed at the two Democratic candidates for North Carolina Governor.
The ad (and there is a link to it on today's Secret Decoder Ring page) attempts to make this case:
- Wright was Obama's "spiritual advisor" for 20 years.
- Wright is on record of saying some fairly awful things.
- Obama is a Democrat.
- Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue and State Treasurer Richard Moore are Democrats running in the primary for Governor on May 6.
- Each has endorsed Barack Obama for President.
ERGO
- Perdue and Moore are "too extreme for North Carolina."
I have worked with State Parties off and on for more than three decades. This is the kind of ad which (a) seems like it was written over greasy cheeseburgers and cheap beer on a paper napkin, (b) sounded like a really good idea at the time, because (c) it would tie the North Carolina gubernatorial race to the Presidential primary, thus (d) providing a terrific fundraising opportunity, and (e) could be produced for $1.47.
John McCain immediately condemned it, which irritated the right wingers of the GOP but that was not enough for the main stream media. The New York Times, which has resolved to be the nation's decider of what is acceptable in this campaign and what is not (after spanking Hillary Clinton for the race she ran in Pennsylvania):
"Unless Mr. McCain quickly gets control of his party, we fear there will be worse to come."
Which caused Barack Obama, who would have been better off keeping away from anything having to do with Jeremiah Wright (but couldn't) to say: "I assume that if John McCain thinks that it's an inappropriate ad that he can get them to pull it down, since he's their nominee and standard bearer."
Which demonstrates, at a minimum, a willful ignorance of the way State Parties operate.
Let us not forget who was the first person to interject Race into this election cycle. It was not the North Carolina GOP. It was the once-sainted William Jefferson Clinton.
From ABC's Jake Tapper on January 26, 2008:
Said Bill Clinton today in Columbia, SC: "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here."
Boy, I can't understand why anyone would think the Clintons are running a race-baiting campaign to paint Obama as "the black candidate."
Not only that, but the Washington Post put Race on its front page this weekend in a piece headed:
Party Fears Racial Divide
Attacks Could Do Lasting Harm, Democrats Say
In the piece, reporters Jonathan Weisman and Matthew Mosk wrote that following the Pennsylvania primary:
[Clinton's] backers may be convinced that only she can win the white, working-class voters that the Democratic nominee will need in the general election, but many African American leaders say a Clinton nomination - handed to her by superdelegates - would result in a disastrous breach with black voters.
The House Majority Whip, James E. Clyburn (D-SC), who is Black, said in the WashPost article:
"We keep talking as if it doesn't matter that Obama gets 92 percent of the black vote, because since he only got 35 percent of the white vote, he's in trouble. Well, Hillary Clinton only got 8 percent of the black vote. . . . It's almost saying black people don't matter."
Oh, yeah. This is all the fault of the North Carolina GOP. They're the ones bringing Race into this deal.
Here's the short hand: Republicans have nothing in this. The Racial thing in this cycle is between a White woman and a Black man for the Democratic nomination.
John McCain was correct: It's the Democrats' mess and it is going to get worse before it gets better.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Placing Liberals Under a Microscope
By Burt Prelutsky
Monday, April 28, 2008
What makes liberals so endlessly fascinating isn’t just that they manage with a consistency that verges on the miraculous to be wrong on every important issue, but the latitude they extend to their political leaders to lie, cheat and steal.
For instance, has any liberal ever questioned Al Gore’s apocryphal pronouncements about climate change in light of the fact that the man continues to live in a mansion and gad about in private jets? Now, thanks to Mr. Gore, we are having those new, terribly ugly light bulbs shoved down our throats. And if you think dealing with nuclear waste is a headache, just wait until you try to dispose of light bulbs jam-packed with mercury! Frankly, in view of Gore’s success at creating mass hysteria, I, for one, won’t be too surprised if the ecology Nazis next begin demanding that we insulate our homes with asbestos.
Chelsea Clinton, while giving one of her recent speeches for Mother Clinton, was asked whether, like Hillary, she recalled running from gunfire at the Kosovo airfield in 1996. The audience, no doubt filled with true believers, first groaned at the impertinence of anyone daring to question the First Daughter, then rewarded Chelsea with an ovation for saying nothing more than “I was there.”
Now that Chelsea is all of 28, I suppose, like her parents, she is mastering the technique of avoiding direct questions as the all-important first step in carving out a political career. The fact is, by 2016, when Hillary expects to be winding up her second term, her daughter would be 36 and of an age to make a run for the White House herself. Heck, if things pan out, none of the Clintons might ever have to pay rent again.
Let us not overlook that grand old sot of the Democratic party, Ted Kennedy. Although he preaches clean energy from his pulpit in the Senate, nary a liberal called him a hypocrite when he prevented windmills from being erected near his home because they might interfere with his view. Although how much he can really see through the bottom of a shot glass is anybody’s guess.
More recently, oil was dumped from his boat into the nearby bay, but you can’t expect that the guy who was never indicted for dumping a woman in a body of water would be reprimanded over such a trifle. Of course, if he were a Republican, the Boston Globe would call for his resignation and the New York Times would call for his head.
This brings us to Barack Obama. Accused of attending a racist, anti-American church, he first claimed he never heard Rev. Wright make a single blasphemous remark from the pulpit. Then, when he was reminded that he’d been sitting there Sunday after Sunday for 20 years, soaking in the sewage, he made a speech in which he pretty much ignored the specific, hate-filled remarks spewed by his mentor, except to say that he understood where Jeremiah Wright was coming from. Only later did we all find out that the Obamas had dropped over $25,000 in Wright’s collection box last year.
When Trent Lott made a single stupid remark to a bigoted white senator on the occasion of Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday, Lott was made to walk the plank by the Republicans. But when a black Democrat who, along with his wife, has received every benefit that a guilt-ridden white society has to offer, tells us that he never once spoke up when his surrogate father damned our nation; accused white people of inflicting HIV on black people in order to exterminate the race; and claimed that 9/11 was a case of America’s chickens coming home to roost; the liberals don’t ride him out of the party on a rail. Instead, they insist he gave a great speech and opened an honest dialogue on race.
Frankly, I find the Obama phenomenon a total mystery. He has the most left-wing voting record in the U.S. Senate, but claims he’s the guy who can bring Republicans and Democrats together. In his books and in his church attendance, he proves that he sees everything through a prism of race, but he contends he’s the guy who can unite blacks and whites.
I find it absurd that his entire platform consists of two extremely vague words -- hope and change. That was pretty much the same thing the Democrats promised us before taking control of the House and Senate in 2006.
Well, recently, a friend of mine reminded me that just prior to the 2006 election, consumer confidence was unbelievably high; regular gasoline sold for about $2.25-a-gallon; and the unemployment rate was 4.5%.
Since then, consumer confidence has plummeted; gas now costs about a dollar-and-a-half-a-gallon more; unemployment stands at 5%; American homeowners have seen their home equity drop by over a trillion dollars, with one percent of our homes in foreclosure; and, for good measure, the liberals refuse to eliminate earmarks.
It wasn’t all bad news, though. The Democratic-controlled Congress, no doubt in appreciation for what they regarded as a job very well done, voted to increase their own salaries.
So, I can only assume that the change that Barack Obama longs for is to see the Republicans re-claim the House and Senate. If so, it’s the only thing the man has ever said or done with which I heartily agree.
Monday, April 28, 2008
What makes liberals so endlessly fascinating isn’t just that they manage with a consistency that verges on the miraculous to be wrong on every important issue, but the latitude they extend to their political leaders to lie, cheat and steal.
For instance, has any liberal ever questioned Al Gore’s apocryphal pronouncements about climate change in light of the fact that the man continues to live in a mansion and gad about in private jets? Now, thanks to Mr. Gore, we are having those new, terribly ugly light bulbs shoved down our throats. And if you think dealing with nuclear waste is a headache, just wait until you try to dispose of light bulbs jam-packed with mercury! Frankly, in view of Gore’s success at creating mass hysteria, I, for one, won’t be too surprised if the ecology Nazis next begin demanding that we insulate our homes with asbestos.
Chelsea Clinton, while giving one of her recent speeches for Mother Clinton, was asked whether, like Hillary, she recalled running from gunfire at the Kosovo airfield in 1996. The audience, no doubt filled with true believers, first groaned at the impertinence of anyone daring to question the First Daughter, then rewarded Chelsea with an ovation for saying nothing more than “I was there.”
Now that Chelsea is all of 28, I suppose, like her parents, she is mastering the technique of avoiding direct questions as the all-important first step in carving out a political career. The fact is, by 2016, when Hillary expects to be winding up her second term, her daughter would be 36 and of an age to make a run for the White House herself. Heck, if things pan out, none of the Clintons might ever have to pay rent again.
Let us not overlook that grand old sot of the Democratic party, Ted Kennedy. Although he preaches clean energy from his pulpit in the Senate, nary a liberal called him a hypocrite when he prevented windmills from being erected near his home because they might interfere with his view. Although how much he can really see through the bottom of a shot glass is anybody’s guess.
More recently, oil was dumped from his boat into the nearby bay, but you can’t expect that the guy who was never indicted for dumping a woman in a body of water would be reprimanded over such a trifle. Of course, if he were a Republican, the Boston Globe would call for his resignation and the New York Times would call for his head.
This brings us to Barack Obama. Accused of attending a racist, anti-American church, he first claimed he never heard Rev. Wright make a single blasphemous remark from the pulpit. Then, when he was reminded that he’d been sitting there Sunday after Sunday for 20 years, soaking in the sewage, he made a speech in which he pretty much ignored the specific, hate-filled remarks spewed by his mentor, except to say that he understood where Jeremiah Wright was coming from. Only later did we all find out that the Obamas had dropped over $25,000 in Wright’s collection box last year.
When Trent Lott made a single stupid remark to a bigoted white senator on the occasion of Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday, Lott was made to walk the plank by the Republicans. But when a black Democrat who, along with his wife, has received every benefit that a guilt-ridden white society has to offer, tells us that he never once spoke up when his surrogate father damned our nation; accused white people of inflicting HIV on black people in order to exterminate the race; and claimed that 9/11 was a case of America’s chickens coming home to roost; the liberals don’t ride him out of the party on a rail. Instead, they insist he gave a great speech and opened an honest dialogue on race.
Frankly, I find the Obama phenomenon a total mystery. He has the most left-wing voting record in the U.S. Senate, but claims he’s the guy who can bring Republicans and Democrats together. In his books and in his church attendance, he proves that he sees everything through a prism of race, but he contends he’s the guy who can unite blacks and whites.
I find it absurd that his entire platform consists of two extremely vague words -- hope and change. That was pretty much the same thing the Democrats promised us before taking control of the House and Senate in 2006.
Well, recently, a friend of mine reminded me that just prior to the 2006 election, consumer confidence was unbelievably high; regular gasoline sold for about $2.25-a-gallon; and the unemployment rate was 4.5%.
Since then, consumer confidence has plummeted; gas now costs about a dollar-and-a-half-a-gallon more; unemployment stands at 5%; American homeowners have seen their home equity drop by over a trillion dollars, with one percent of our homes in foreclosure; and, for good measure, the liberals refuse to eliminate earmarks.
It wasn’t all bad news, though. The Democratic-controlled Congress, no doubt in appreciation for what they regarded as a job very well done, voted to increase their own salaries.
So, I can only assume that the change that Barack Obama longs for is to see the Republicans re-claim the House and Senate. If so, it’s the only thing the man has ever said or done with which I heartily agree.
The Real Cost of Tackling Climate Change
By Steven F. Hayward
Monday, April 28, 2008
The usual chorus of environmentalists and editorial writers has chimed in to attack President Bush's recent speech on climate change. In his address of April 23, he put forth a goal of stopping the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2025.
"Way too little and way too late," runs the refrain, followed by the claim that nothing less than an 80% reduction in emissions by the year 2050 will suffice – what I call the "80 by 50" target. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have endorsed it. John McCain is not far behind, calling for a 65% reduction.
We all ought to reflect on what an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050 really means. When we do, it becomes clear that the president's target has one overwhelming virtue: Assuming emissions curbs are even necessary, his goal is at least realistic.
The same cannot be said for the carbon emissions targets espoused by the three presidential candidates and environmentalists. Indeed, these targets would send us back to emissions levels last witnessed when the cotton gin was in daily use.
Begin with the current inventory of carbon dioxide emissions – CO2 being the principal greenhouse gas generated almost entirely by energy use. According to the Department of Energy's most recent data on greenhouse gas emissions, in 2006 the U.S. emitted 5.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, or just under 20 tons per capita. An 80% reduction in these emissions from 1990 levels means that the U.S. cannot emit more than about one billion metric tons of CO2 in 2050.
Were man-made carbon dioxide emissions in this country ever that low? The answer is probably yes – from historical energy data it is possible to estimate that the U.S. last emitted one billion metric tons around 1910. But in 1910, the U.S. had 92 million people, and per capita income, in current dollars, was about $6,000.
By the year 2050, the Census Bureau projects that our population will be around 420 million. This means per capita emissions will have to fall to about 2.5 tons in order to meet the goal of 80% reduction.
It is likely that U.S. per capita emissions were never that low – even back in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood. The only nations in the world today that emit at this low level are all poor developing nations, such as Belize, Mauritius, Jordan, Haiti and Somalia.
If that comparison seems unfair, consider that even the least-CO2 emitting industrialized nations do not come close to the 2050 target. France and Switzerland, compact nations that generate almost all of their electricity from nonfossil fuel sources (nuclear for France, hydro for Switzerland) emit about 6.5 metric tons of CO2 per capita.
The daunting task of reaching one billion metric tons of CO2 emissions by 2050 comes into even greater relief when we look at the American economy, sector-by-sector. The Energy Department breaks down emissions into residential, commercial (office buildings, etc.), industrial, and transportation (planes, trains and automobiles); electricity consumption is apportioned to each.
Consider the residential sector. At the present time, American households emit 1.2 billion tons of CO2 – 20% higher than the entire nation's emissions must be in 2050. If households are to emit no more than their present share of CO2, emissions will have to be reduced to 204 million tons by 2050. But in 2050, there will be another 40 million residential households in the U.S.
Today, the average residence in the U.S. uses about 10,500 kilowatt hours of electricity and emits 11.4 tons of CO2 per year (much more if you are Al Gore or John Edwards and live in a mansion). To stay within the magic number, average household emissions will have to fall to no more than 1.5 tons per year. In our current electricity infrastructure, this would mean using no more than about 2,500 KwH per year. This is not enough juice to run the average hot water heater.
You can forget refrigerators, microwaves, clothes dryers and flat screen TVs. Even a house tricked out with all the latest high-efficiency EnergyStar appliances and compact fluorescent lights won't come close. The same daunting energy math applies to the industrial, commercial and transportation sectors as well. The clear implication is that we shall have to replace virtually the entire fossil fuel electricity infrastructure over the next four decades with CO2-free sources – a multitrillion dollar proposition, if it can be done at all.
Natural gas – the preferred coal substitute of the moment – won't come close. If we replaced every single existing coal plant with a natural gas plant, CO2 emissions from electric power generation alone would still be more than twice the 2050 target. Most environmentalists remain opposed to nuclear power, of course. It is unlikely that renewables – wind, solar, and biomass – can ever make up more than about 20% of our electricity supply.
Suppose, however, that a breakthrough in carbon sequestration, a revival of nuclear power, and a significant improvement in the cost and effectiveness of renewables were to enable us to reduce the carbon footprint of electricity production. That would still leave transportation.
Right now our cars and trucks consume about 180 billion gallons of motor fuel. To meet the 2050 target, we shall have to limit consumption of gasoline to about 31 billion gallons, unless a genuine carbon-neutral liquid fuel can be produced. (Ethanol isn't it.) To show how unrealistic this is, if the entire nation drove nothing but Toyota Priuses in 2050, we'd still overshoot the transportation emissions target by 40%.
The enthusiasm for an 80% reduction target is often justified on grounds that national policy should set an ambitious goal. However, claims on behalf of alternative energy sources – biofuels, hydrogen, windpower and so forth – either do not match up to the scale of the energy required, or are not cost-competitive in current form.
How on God's green earth will we make up the difference? Someone should put this question to the candidates. And not let them slide past it with glittering generalities.
Monday, April 28, 2008
The usual chorus of environmentalists and editorial writers has chimed in to attack President Bush's recent speech on climate change. In his address of April 23, he put forth a goal of stopping the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2025.
"Way too little and way too late," runs the refrain, followed by the claim that nothing less than an 80% reduction in emissions by the year 2050 will suffice – what I call the "80 by 50" target. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have endorsed it. John McCain is not far behind, calling for a 65% reduction.
We all ought to reflect on what an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050 really means. When we do, it becomes clear that the president's target has one overwhelming virtue: Assuming emissions curbs are even necessary, his goal is at least realistic.
The same cannot be said for the carbon emissions targets espoused by the three presidential candidates and environmentalists. Indeed, these targets would send us back to emissions levels last witnessed when the cotton gin was in daily use.
Begin with the current inventory of carbon dioxide emissions – CO2 being the principal greenhouse gas generated almost entirely by energy use. According to the Department of Energy's most recent data on greenhouse gas emissions, in 2006 the U.S. emitted 5.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, or just under 20 tons per capita. An 80% reduction in these emissions from 1990 levels means that the U.S. cannot emit more than about one billion metric tons of CO2 in 2050.
Were man-made carbon dioxide emissions in this country ever that low? The answer is probably yes – from historical energy data it is possible to estimate that the U.S. last emitted one billion metric tons around 1910. But in 1910, the U.S. had 92 million people, and per capita income, in current dollars, was about $6,000.
By the year 2050, the Census Bureau projects that our population will be around 420 million. This means per capita emissions will have to fall to about 2.5 tons in order to meet the goal of 80% reduction.
It is likely that U.S. per capita emissions were never that low – even back in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood. The only nations in the world today that emit at this low level are all poor developing nations, such as Belize, Mauritius, Jordan, Haiti and Somalia.
If that comparison seems unfair, consider that even the least-CO2 emitting industrialized nations do not come close to the 2050 target. France and Switzerland, compact nations that generate almost all of their electricity from nonfossil fuel sources (nuclear for France, hydro for Switzerland) emit about 6.5 metric tons of CO2 per capita.
The daunting task of reaching one billion metric tons of CO2 emissions by 2050 comes into even greater relief when we look at the American economy, sector-by-sector. The Energy Department breaks down emissions into residential, commercial (office buildings, etc.), industrial, and transportation (planes, trains and automobiles); electricity consumption is apportioned to each.
Consider the residential sector. At the present time, American households emit 1.2 billion tons of CO2 – 20% higher than the entire nation's emissions must be in 2050. If households are to emit no more than their present share of CO2, emissions will have to be reduced to 204 million tons by 2050. But in 2050, there will be another 40 million residential households in the U.S.
Today, the average residence in the U.S. uses about 10,500 kilowatt hours of electricity and emits 11.4 tons of CO2 per year (much more if you are Al Gore or John Edwards and live in a mansion). To stay within the magic number, average household emissions will have to fall to no more than 1.5 tons per year. In our current electricity infrastructure, this would mean using no more than about 2,500 KwH per year. This is not enough juice to run the average hot water heater.
You can forget refrigerators, microwaves, clothes dryers and flat screen TVs. Even a house tricked out with all the latest high-efficiency EnergyStar appliances and compact fluorescent lights won't come close. The same daunting energy math applies to the industrial, commercial and transportation sectors as well. The clear implication is that we shall have to replace virtually the entire fossil fuel electricity infrastructure over the next four decades with CO2-free sources – a multitrillion dollar proposition, if it can be done at all.
Natural gas – the preferred coal substitute of the moment – won't come close. If we replaced every single existing coal plant with a natural gas plant, CO2 emissions from electric power generation alone would still be more than twice the 2050 target. Most environmentalists remain opposed to nuclear power, of course. It is unlikely that renewables – wind, solar, and biomass – can ever make up more than about 20% of our electricity supply.
Suppose, however, that a breakthrough in carbon sequestration, a revival of nuclear power, and a significant improvement in the cost and effectiveness of renewables were to enable us to reduce the carbon footprint of electricity production. That would still leave transportation.
Right now our cars and trucks consume about 180 billion gallons of motor fuel. To meet the 2050 target, we shall have to limit consumption of gasoline to about 31 billion gallons, unless a genuine carbon-neutral liquid fuel can be produced. (Ethanol isn't it.) To show how unrealistic this is, if the entire nation drove nothing but Toyota Priuses in 2050, we'd still overshoot the transportation emissions target by 40%.
The enthusiasm for an 80% reduction target is often justified on grounds that national policy should set an ambitious goal. However, claims on behalf of alternative energy sources – biofuels, hydrogen, windpower and so forth – either do not match up to the scale of the energy required, or are not cost-competitive in current form.
How on God's green earth will we make up the difference? Someone should put this question to the candidates. And not let them slide past it with glittering generalities.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Muddy Multilateralism
By Michael Gerson
Friday, April 25, 2008
WASHINGTON -- In their total war for the right to be dubbed the peace candidate, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama propose a greater reliance on international institutions as an alternative to unilateralism and ad hoc "coalitions of the willing." Clinton talks of a "preference for multilateralism." Obama urges "more determined U.S. diplomacy at the United Nations." Even Republican John McCain reflects a pale version of this critique, calling for greater attentiveness to the "collective will of our democratic allies."
Multilateralism has become a political safe haven for politicians fleeing from the exertions of the Bush years. Their promise is implicit: Next time the use of force becomes unavoidable, the sacrifices will be broadly shared.
But a vague commitment to multilateralism obscures one of the most difficult challenges the next president will face: While international institutions have never been more needed, they have seldom been less effective. The U.N. Security Council -- where China and Russia have emerged as reliable protectors of the oppressive and irresponsible -- has done little to distinguish itself on Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur or Burma. And global nonproliferation efforts are about to shatter like a glass hammer on Iranian nuclear ambitions.
It is easy to blame the current administration -- or past administrations -- for lacking diplomatic magic that would somehow transform China or Iran into good global citizens. But many of the policies of the next administration are likely to be remarkably similar. On genocide or proliferation, the United States generally urges the international community to be more forceful and responsible. The international community generally engages in solemn discussions while avoiding sanctions or even the threat of force. Proliferators and genocidal regimes generally get the joke.
What could the next president do to make international responses to crimes and threats more credible?
One approach is to improve the United Nations. The U.S. could try to dilute Chinese and Russian influence by embracing an expansion of the Security Council to include Japan, India, Germany and Brazil as permanent members. The current composition, after all, is a faded snapshot of global influence from the 1940s.
Opening the membership question, however, would lead nearly every nation with a flag and a national anthem to ask "Why not me?" An expanded Security Council might be more cumbersome instead of more responsible. And a parallel effort to update the U.N. Human Rights Council has been a mess, with the "reformed" membership passing more than a dozen resolutions against Israel and refusing to confront the oppression practiced by Cuba or Belarus.
Another approach is to supplement the U.N. with a more capable and cohesive international organization such as NATO. But while NATO has helped with logistics on peacekeeping operations in Darfur, it is very unlikely to seek or accept greater global responsibilities.
At the White House, I watched President Bush ask NATO leaders to come to Darfur's rescue only to find his request roundly ignored. NATO seems fully occupied and completely exhausted by its limited exertions in Afghanistan. European militaries are dramatically underfunded for far-flung missions. And many Europeans seem fully prepared to accept the free ride of American security protection while contributing little to the security of others.
Another option is to bypass the United Nations. "We can have a league of democracies," argues McCain, "to impose sanctions and to cut off many of the things and benefits that the Iranians are now getting from other democracies. I think it's clear that the United Nations Security Council will not act effectively, with Russia and China behaving as they are." McCain is proposing, in essence, to create a new NATO that actually works.
But a new global alliance of 100 democratic nations (McCain's goal) that excludes Russia and China would naturally be viewed with open hostility by both. And it is hard to imagine timid nations such as Germany, or many Pacific nations living in China's immense shadow, offending Russia and China by joining up. Besides, democracies can also be craven and irresponsible. Japan and India, while seeking Burmese natural gas, have done little about Burmese oppression. South Africa has hardly been heroic on Zimbabwe.
So what realistic option will the next president have when the next genocide commences or the next proliferation threat arrives? Probably a coalition of the willing, led by America. It is the paradox of American influence: In a crisis, our power is irreplaceable -- and we want nothing more than to replace it.
Friday, April 25, 2008
WASHINGTON -- In their total war for the right to be dubbed the peace candidate, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama propose a greater reliance on international institutions as an alternative to unilateralism and ad hoc "coalitions of the willing." Clinton talks of a "preference for multilateralism." Obama urges "more determined U.S. diplomacy at the United Nations." Even Republican John McCain reflects a pale version of this critique, calling for greater attentiveness to the "collective will of our democratic allies."
Multilateralism has become a political safe haven for politicians fleeing from the exertions of the Bush years. Their promise is implicit: Next time the use of force becomes unavoidable, the sacrifices will be broadly shared.
But a vague commitment to multilateralism obscures one of the most difficult challenges the next president will face: While international institutions have never been more needed, they have seldom been less effective. The U.N. Security Council -- where China and Russia have emerged as reliable protectors of the oppressive and irresponsible -- has done little to distinguish itself on Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur or Burma. And global nonproliferation efforts are about to shatter like a glass hammer on Iranian nuclear ambitions.
It is easy to blame the current administration -- or past administrations -- for lacking diplomatic magic that would somehow transform China or Iran into good global citizens. But many of the policies of the next administration are likely to be remarkably similar. On genocide or proliferation, the United States generally urges the international community to be more forceful and responsible. The international community generally engages in solemn discussions while avoiding sanctions or even the threat of force. Proliferators and genocidal regimes generally get the joke.
What could the next president do to make international responses to crimes and threats more credible?
One approach is to improve the United Nations. The U.S. could try to dilute Chinese and Russian influence by embracing an expansion of the Security Council to include Japan, India, Germany and Brazil as permanent members. The current composition, after all, is a faded snapshot of global influence from the 1940s.
Opening the membership question, however, would lead nearly every nation with a flag and a national anthem to ask "Why not me?" An expanded Security Council might be more cumbersome instead of more responsible. And a parallel effort to update the U.N. Human Rights Council has been a mess, with the "reformed" membership passing more than a dozen resolutions against Israel and refusing to confront the oppression practiced by Cuba or Belarus.
Another approach is to supplement the U.N. with a more capable and cohesive international organization such as NATO. But while NATO has helped with logistics on peacekeeping operations in Darfur, it is very unlikely to seek or accept greater global responsibilities.
At the White House, I watched President Bush ask NATO leaders to come to Darfur's rescue only to find his request roundly ignored. NATO seems fully occupied and completely exhausted by its limited exertions in Afghanistan. European militaries are dramatically underfunded for far-flung missions. And many Europeans seem fully prepared to accept the free ride of American security protection while contributing little to the security of others.
Another option is to bypass the United Nations. "We can have a league of democracies," argues McCain, "to impose sanctions and to cut off many of the things and benefits that the Iranians are now getting from other democracies. I think it's clear that the United Nations Security Council will not act effectively, with Russia and China behaving as they are." McCain is proposing, in essence, to create a new NATO that actually works.
But a new global alliance of 100 democratic nations (McCain's goal) that excludes Russia and China would naturally be viewed with open hostility by both. And it is hard to imagine timid nations such as Germany, or many Pacific nations living in China's immense shadow, offending Russia and China by joining up. Besides, democracies can also be craven and irresponsible. Japan and India, while seeking Burmese natural gas, have done little about Burmese oppression. South Africa has hardly been heroic on Zimbabwe.
So what realistic option will the next president have when the next genocide commences or the next proliferation threat arrives? Probably a coalition of the willing, led by America. It is the paradox of American influence: In a crisis, our power is irreplaceable -- and we want nothing more than to replace it.
Enron, the CSR Poster Child
By Robert Murphy
Saturday, April 26, 2008
For most Americans, Enron was the poster child of unfettered capitalism. After its fraudulent activities led to the company’s collapse, business ethicist Marjorie Kelly proclaimed, “The ideal of the unregulated market is flawed and it’s time we said goodbye to the invisible hand.” But as Rob Bradley argues in a provocative new essay (pdf), Enron was the epitome not of capitalism, but rather of the environmental Left and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement.
Bradley should know. He spent sixteen years at Enron, ultimately serving as a corporate director in public policy analysis, and even wrote speeches for none other than Enron chairman Ken Lay. (Bradley is also the founder of the Institute for Energy Research, a free market think tank with which I am affiliated.) Yet as a believer in capitalism—true capitalism, where consumers determine winners and losers, not the politicians—Bradley didn’t fit in so well with his peers. It seems the “smartest guys in the room” running the company decided that the best way to ensure profits was to put in the fix, courtesy of the government, and all sold to the public under the guise of CSR and “green” energy.
Enron’s key to (politically assisted) success was to lobby for “farsighted” government policies that just so happened to give the company an advantage over its competitors. For example, because it was heavily invested in natural gas production, transmission, and electricity generation, Enron would benefit from regulations on carbon dioxide emissions. (Natural gas is less carbon intensive than oil and especially coal.) Enron also was far ahead of the curve in investing in alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power.
Given its business position, it’s not so surprising that Enron supported the Clinton administration’s 1993 proposal for a Btu tax, spearheaded the nation’s strictest renewable energy mandate in Texas in 1999, and lobbied the Bush administration to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Its actions on these fronts were as self-serving as those of domestic manufacturers who petition Congress with their concerns over “unsafe” Chinese imports.
In addition to its green initiatives, Enron was a model for the CSR movement. In 2001 its CSR task force listed some of its accomplishments, some of which are reproduced below from Bradley’s essay:
· Secured board oversight of social/environmental performance
· Expressed support for Universal Declaration of Human Rights
· Established formal partnerships with WBCSD [World Business Council on Sustainable Development], IBLF [International Business Leaders Forum], and CI [Conservation International]
· Responding to stakeholder concerns on an ongoing basis
Now at this point, advocates of CSR and so-called sustainable energy policies might object. “No kidding,” they might say, “that the lying Enron also lied about its socially responsible policies. What else do you expect from greedy capitalists?” But there are two problems with this objection.
First, Enron really did engage in all of the “sustainable” practices that the environmental movement champions. Enron really did invest in wind and solar power, and really did lobby for renewable mandates and carbon dioxide emissions. So at the very least, Enron’s leftist critics should concede that it unwittingly did “the right thing,” though for ignoble reasons.
Second and more important, it wasn’t just Enron brochures that touted its green credentials. On the contrary, Enron received a climate protection award from the EPA, and a corporate conscience award from the Council on Economic Priorities. During the Kyoto meetings in 1997, Enron’s representative received an award from the Climate Institute on behalf of the company and CEO Ken Lay. To reiterate, the point isn’t that Enron fooled the genuine environmentalists, just as it had fooled investors. No, Enron really was doing everything that these activists desired from responsible businesses. Given their stated recommendations, these groups were correct to lavish praise on Enron.
Guilt-by-association is always a weak charge. Obviously, just because the best representative of corporate social responsibility and sustainable development also happened to be the most notoriously corrupt company in business history, doesn’t actually prove that CSR or modern environmentalism are bankrupt movements. But it certainly doesn’t help their cause.
American liberals should rethink their obituary of Enron. Far from representing true laissez-faire capitalism, the company instead showed the corrupting influence of government favoritism. Rather than conjuring up visions of Adam Smith, the name of Enron should remind us of the memo its representative sent from Kyoto that concluded, “This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!”
Saturday, April 26, 2008
For most Americans, Enron was the poster child of unfettered capitalism. After its fraudulent activities led to the company’s collapse, business ethicist Marjorie Kelly proclaimed, “The ideal of the unregulated market is flawed and it’s time we said goodbye to the invisible hand.” But as Rob Bradley argues in a provocative new essay (pdf), Enron was the epitome not of capitalism, but rather of the environmental Left and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement.
Bradley should know. He spent sixteen years at Enron, ultimately serving as a corporate director in public policy analysis, and even wrote speeches for none other than Enron chairman Ken Lay. (Bradley is also the founder of the Institute for Energy Research, a free market think tank with which I am affiliated.) Yet as a believer in capitalism—true capitalism, where consumers determine winners and losers, not the politicians—Bradley didn’t fit in so well with his peers. It seems the “smartest guys in the room” running the company decided that the best way to ensure profits was to put in the fix, courtesy of the government, and all sold to the public under the guise of CSR and “green” energy.
Enron’s key to (politically assisted) success was to lobby for “farsighted” government policies that just so happened to give the company an advantage over its competitors. For example, because it was heavily invested in natural gas production, transmission, and electricity generation, Enron would benefit from regulations on carbon dioxide emissions. (Natural gas is less carbon intensive than oil and especially coal.) Enron also was far ahead of the curve in investing in alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power.
Given its business position, it’s not so surprising that Enron supported the Clinton administration’s 1993 proposal for a Btu tax, spearheaded the nation’s strictest renewable energy mandate in Texas in 1999, and lobbied the Bush administration to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Its actions on these fronts were as self-serving as those of domestic manufacturers who petition Congress with their concerns over “unsafe” Chinese imports.
In addition to its green initiatives, Enron was a model for the CSR movement. In 2001 its CSR task force listed some of its accomplishments, some of which are reproduced below from Bradley’s essay:
· Secured board oversight of social/environmental performance
· Expressed support for Universal Declaration of Human Rights
· Established formal partnerships with WBCSD [World Business Council on Sustainable Development], IBLF [International Business Leaders Forum], and CI [Conservation International]
· Responding to stakeholder concerns on an ongoing basis
Now at this point, advocates of CSR and so-called sustainable energy policies might object. “No kidding,” they might say, “that the lying Enron also lied about its socially responsible policies. What else do you expect from greedy capitalists?” But there are two problems with this objection.
First, Enron really did engage in all of the “sustainable” practices that the environmental movement champions. Enron really did invest in wind and solar power, and really did lobby for renewable mandates and carbon dioxide emissions. So at the very least, Enron’s leftist critics should concede that it unwittingly did “the right thing,” though for ignoble reasons.
Second and more important, it wasn’t just Enron brochures that touted its green credentials. On the contrary, Enron received a climate protection award from the EPA, and a corporate conscience award from the Council on Economic Priorities. During the Kyoto meetings in 1997, Enron’s representative received an award from the Climate Institute on behalf of the company and CEO Ken Lay. To reiterate, the point isn’t that Enron fooled the genuine environmentalists, just as it had fooled investors. No, Enron really was doing everything that these activists desired from responsible businesses. Given their stated recommendations, these groups were correct to lavish praise on Enron.
Guilt-by-association is always a weak charge. Obviously, just because the best representative of corporate social responsibility and sustainable development also happened to be the most notoriously corrupt company in business history, doesn’t actually prove that CSR or modern environmentalism are bankrupt movements. But it certainly doesn’t help their cause.
American liberals should rethink their obituary of Enron. Far from representing true laissez-faire capitalism, the company instead showed the corrupting influence of government favoritism. Rather than conjuring up visions of Adam Smith, the name of Enron should remind us of the memo its representative sent from Kyoto that concluded, “This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!”
Friday, April 25, 2008
When In Pain, Find Someone to Blame: NAFTA!
By Terry Paulson
Thursday, April 24, 2008
It’s an election year again, and protectionist policies are again being played to a populist drumbeat in Democrat primaries. Facing difficult economic times and a painful housing market downturn, too many Americans are taking the wrong lessons. NAFTA is not the problem!
America has been getting a wakeup call from the world, but far too many are whining and clamoring for more government support instead of responding to the challenge. Many feel that they are entitled to a good standard of living, increasing salaries and increasing benefits. Most workers thought they could learn a skill, find a comfortable career, and work comfortably into retirement. Unfortunately, the world has changed, and too many Americans are desperately trying to hold on to jobs that are rapidly becoming unnecessary.
For the first time in history, anything can be made almost anywhere and sold everywhere. Talented and motivated workforces in India, South Korea and China are just a mouse-click away! These changes aren’t just taking American jobs; they’re also creating jobs. Most of those foreign workers are using American software. Most are drinking Cokes. They watch our TV shows, and they want the brands that we have. As other countries become more successful, they can afford to buy more American goods and services. The weakening dollar has already accelerated our export numbers.
It is true that when manufacturers in the U.S. can’t compete because of high labor costs, some move operations offshore while still others innovate more efficient manufacturing processes. Both strategies can eliminate U.S. jobs. But such changes bring down the cost of the products so more can afford them.
The expanded market for cheaper goods means more people need training to use what they buy, so trainers are hired. Anything purchased must be maintained locally; people are hired to repair and service the new products.
Such changes are painful for people unwilling to learn new skills. Economists call it “churning,” and it has happened over and over again throughout the history of capitalism. Its playing field is now global, and the speed of the churn is faster.
A few years back, Lee Kuan Yew, called by many the “Father of modern Singapore,” made some eye-opening observations about the global economy and America’s role in the world: “I see a very troubling and at the same time exciting new world in which international boundaries can be penetrated without difficulty. The flow of information, of capital cannot be stopped. ... Whether we like it or not, technology has made this a one-world market for labor. Jobs can leapfrog boundaries. But good minds in the world will command very high salaries, very high fees.”
“In the same way, jobs at the lower end of the scale can also be transferred across the globe, and will be,” Yew continued. “And so, whether Americans like it or not, whether Singaporeans like it or not, our lower-end jobs are going to be taken over by our neighbors because they will be able to do these jobs for one-half, sometimes one-quarter the price.... Unions will try to protect themselves and their members’ interests, but their jobs will run out because their companies will be beaten in the international marketplace unless they can make use of cheaper labor elsewhere. … There’s no use perceiving this as a threat because it’s going to happen…either with your participation...or against your wishes.... Ride it. You can’t fight it.”
The American dream is not dead! Wealth is still out there; it is just on the move. Instead of throwing up protectionist walls, we must help Americans meet the challenge of change. As my great uncle on the farms of Illinois used to say, “It’s easiest to ride a horse in the direction it is going.” In short, it’s wise to develop skills that will produce what customers are going to need. If you’re good at something someone needs done, you will do well!
His second advice: “If the horse is dead, get off it!” In practical terms, don’t send around resumes for skills that are no longer needed. Instead, master new competencies or lose out to those who are willing to refocus and retool to take advantage of change.
Instead of whining about the economic cards you have been dealt or waiting for the government to save you from becoming obsolete, develop your own recovery program. In fact, always invest time in your Plan B, a “What I could do next” Plan.
Let me add to my great uncle’s shared wisdom: “Since it’s hard to know if your horse is dying, have at least two horses.” Don’t wait for a career disaster, an economic downturn or a prolonged strike to hit your family! Americans should be investing 5% of their time in their next career at all times. It could mean starting a small business on the side, looking for cross-training opportunities or volunteering to work on a key strategic project. There will always be a need for people who can make a difference where it counts for customers willing to pay!
Many have said, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks!” Well, you become an old dog when you stop doing new tricks. Welcome to the challenge of lifelong learning, your best insurance policy for the 21st century! Be thankful that in America, there are great educational institutions ready to help you meet that challenge.
When one young woman complained that to do what she wanted to do would require going back to school, I challenged her to take it one course at a time. She complained that if she took it once course at a time, “she’d be 45 by the time she got the degree she needed.”
Having already passed that milestone, I responded, “Optimistically, you will be 45 anyway. You’re either 45 with a degree or you’re 45 without one.” I asked her how long she had been thinking about her decision. When she confided she had been considering it for three years, I said, “You could have been 42! Get on with it!”
Don’t wait for Washington politicians to produce on their empty promises. In these difficult economic times, ensure your own success the old-fashioned American way—by earning it yourself one day at a time.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
It’s an election year again, and protectionist policies are again being played to a populist drumbeat in Democrat primaries. Facing difficult economic times and a painful housing market downturn, too many Americans are taking the wrong lessons. NAFTA is not the problem!
America has been getting a wakeup call from the world, but far too many are whining and clamoring for more government support instead of responding to the challenge. Many feel that they are entitled to a good standard of living, increasing salaries and increasing benefits. Most workers thought they could learn a skill, find a comfortable career, and work comfortably into retirement. Unfortunately, the world has changed, and too many Americans are desperately trying to hold on to jobs that are rapidly becoming unnecessary.
For the first time in history, anything can be made almost anywhere and sold everywhere. Talented and motivated workforces in India, South Korea and China are just a mouse-click away! These changes aren’t just taking American jobs; they’re also creating jobs. Most of those foreign workers are using American software. Most are drinking Cokes. They watch our TV shows, and they want the brands that we have. As other countries become more successful, they can afford to buy more American goods and services. The weakening dollar has already accelerated our export numbers.
It is true that when manufacturers in the U.S. can’t compete because of high labor costs, some move operations offshore while still others innovate more efficient manufacturing processes. Both strategies can eliminate U.S. jobs. But such changes bring down the cost of the products so more can afford them.
The expanded market for cheaper goods means more people need training to use what they buy, so trainers are hired. Anything purchased must be maintained locally; people are hired to repair and service the new products.
Such changes are painful for people unwilling to learn new skills. Economists call it “churning,” and it has happened over and over again throughout the history of capitalism. Its playing field is now global, and the speed of the churn is faster.
A few years back, Lee Kuan Yew, called by many the “Father of modern Singapore,” made some eye-opening observations about the global economy and America’s role in the world: “I see a very troubling and at the same time exciting new world in which international boundaries can be penetrated without difficulty. The flow of information, of capital cannot be stopped. ... Whether we like it or not, technology has made this a one-world market for labor. Jobs can leapfrog boundaries. But good minds in the world will command very high salaries, very high fees.”
“In the same way, jobs at the lower end of the scale can also be transferred across the globe, and will be,” Yew continued. “And so, whether Americans like it or not, whether Singaporeans like it or not, our lower-end jobs are going to be taken over by our neighbors because they will be able to do these jobs for one-half, sometimes one-quarter the price.... Unions will try to protect themselves and their members’ interests, but their jobs will run out because their companies will be beaten in the international marketplace unless they can make use of cheaper labor elsewhere. … There’s no use perceiving this as a threat because it’s going to happen…either with your participation...or against your wishes.... Ride it. You can’t fight it.”
The American dream is not dead! Wealth is still out there; it is just on the move. Instead of throwing up protectionist walls, we must help Americans meet the challenge of change. As my great uncle on the farms of Illinois used to say, “It’s easiest to ride a horse in the direction it is going.” In short, it’s wise to develop skills that will produce what customers are going to need. If you’re good at something someone needs done, you will do well!
His second advice: “If the horse is dead, get off it!” In practical terms, don’t send around resumes for skills that are no longer needed. Instead, master new competencies or lose out to those who are willing to refocus and retool to take advantage of change.
Instead of whining about the economic cards you have been dealt or waiting for the government to save you from becoming obsolete, develop your own recovery program. In fact, always invest time in your Plan B, a “What I could do next” Plan.
Let me add to my great uncle’s shared wisdom: “Since it’s hard to know if your horse is dying, have at least two horses.” Don’t wait for a career disaster, an economic downturn or a prolonged strike to hit your family! Americans should be investing 5% of their time in their next career at all times. It could mean starting a small business on the side, looking for cross-training opportunities or volunteering to work on a key strategic project. There will always be a need for people who can make a difference where it counts for customers willing to pay!
Many have said, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks!” Well, you become an old dog when you stop doing new tricks. Welcome to the challenge of lifelong learning, your best insurance policy for the 21st century! Be thankful that in America, there are great educational institutions ready to help you meet that challenge.
When one young woman complained that to do what she wanted to do would require going back to school, I challenged her to take it one course at a time. She complained that if she took it once course at a time, “she’d be 45 by the time she got the degree she needed.”
Having already passed that milestone, I responded, “Optimistically, you will be 45 anyway. You’re either 45 with a degree or you’re 45 without one.” I asked her how long she had been thinking about her decision. When she confided she had been considering it for three years, I said, “You could have been 42! Get on with it!”
Don’t wait for Washington politicians to produce on their empty promises. In these difficult economic times, ensure your own success the old-fashioned American way—by earning it yourself one day at a time.
Brown Takes From the Poor
Wall Street Journal
Friday, April 25, 2008
This was another bad week for Gordon Brown. Not even a year in office, the Prime Minister has already been in the soup for mishandling a banking crisis and for chickening out on early elections and an EU Constitution referendum. Now the Tories are taunting the Labour leader – who had made fighting poverty his No. 1 issue – as a tax oppressor of the poor. The charge has stuck and stung.
Mr. Brown was forced Wednesday by backbenchers in his own party to mollify more than five million low-wage earners and pensioners who have seen their income taxes double to 20% this month. Even worse for a Labour leader, the tax hikes, which he passed last year when he was still Chancellor of the Exchequer but which came into force only this month, coincided with tax cuts for the middle class.
Raising taxes for one income group to finance tax cuts for another was not only bad electoral policy for Labour, which famously has favored redistribution of another kind. More significantly, it betrays a lack of understanding of how lower marginal taxes can encourage growth and tax revenues. Raising the minimum tax is certainly not a good way to move people from welfare to work.
Flooded with angry letters from voters ahead of local elections on May 1, party members pleaded with Mr. Brown to reconsider the tax plan. He caved as MPs in revolt threatened to vote down the budget. And so the government came up with the following fudge: Lower income earners will still have to pay the higher taxes but the government will look into ways to compensate them later through direct payments, tax credits and perhaps higher minimum wages. The Prime Minister taketh away, the Prime Minister giveth.
This means that the government first collects the taxes only to ask people to fill out complicated forms to reclaim their money later, and has bureaucrats oversee this pointless revenue flow from and to taxpayers. Goodness knows how Mr. Brown will try to raise the hundreds of millions in revenues to fund this bureaucratic make-work and the taxpayer compensations.
The government has already suggested a higher minimum wage as one way of doing it. This misguided idea would amount to a tax on employers that they'd have to pay directly to employees to make up for their lost income as a result of the tax hike. That is unless the higher wages force them to reduce their workforce, which would make the whole affair even more expensive because the state would then have to pay unemployment benefits.
Such a muddled outcome would be par for the course for Mr. Brown's economic policy as Chancellor over the previous decade. During this time, Mr. Brown has increased spending to pay for public services that have become more costly but not necessarily better.
As the nearby chart shows, in his first two years as Chancellor, Mr. Brown kept Labour's election promise to follow the prudent budget guidelines of his Conservative predecessor. In the 1999-2000 budget year, he reduced public spending as a ratio of GDP to 37% from 40.6% in 1996-1997. But then fiscal discipline went out the window. In the 2007-2008 budget year that just ended, public spending ate up a whopping 41.7% of the nation's GDP. Mr. Brown filled the state coffers largely through a range of stealth or indirect taxes on tobacco, alcohol, energy and other items. He was usually careful not to raise direct taxes – until now.
Mr. Brown's tax hike and subsequent U-turn led to a tumultuous debate in parliament Wednesday. What it lacked in customary wit, it made up for with some fine venom. "Do you have any idea what a pathetic figure you cut today?" Tory leader David Cameron challenged the Prime Minister. "The Labour Party have finally worked out that they've got a loser, not a leader," Mr. Cameron charged.
"I don't think I have been pushed about at all," the Prime Minister feebly pleaded. Actually, there has been some severe pushing. But Mr. Brown's floundering on the tax issue is not what will concern voters the most. More likely, they will be questioning the economic judgment that got Mr. Brown into this mess in the first place.
Friday, April 25, 2008
This was another bad week for Gordon Brown. Not even a year in office, the Prime Minister has already been in the soup for mishandling a banking crisis and for chickening out on early elections and an EU Constitution referendum. Now the Tories are taunting the Labour leader – who had made fighting poverty his No. 1 issue – as a tax oppressor of the poor. The charge has stuck and stung.
Mr. Brown was forced Wednesday by backbenchers in his own party to mollify more than five million low-wage earners and pensioners who have seen their income taxes double to 20% this month. Even worse for a Labour leader, the tax hikes, which he passed last year when he was still Chancellor of the Exchequer but which came into force only this month, coincided with tax cuts for the middle class.
Raising taxes for one income group to finance tax cuts for another was not only bad electoral policy for Labour, which famously has favored redistribution of another kind. More significantly, it betrays a lack of understanding of how lower marginal taxes can encourage growth and tax revenues. Raising the minimum tax is certainly not a good way to move people from welfare to work.
Flooded with angry letters from voters ahead of local elections on May 1, party members pleaded with Mr. Brown to reconsider the tax plan. He caved as MPs in revolt threatened to vote down the budget. And so the government came up with the following fudge: Lower income earners will still have to pay the higher taxes but the government will look into ways to compensate them later through direct payments, tax credits and perhaps higher minimum wages. The Prime Minister taketh away, the Prime Minister giveth.
This means that the government first collects the taxes only to ask people to fill out complicated forms to reclaim their money later, and has bureaucrats oversee this pointless revenue flow from and to taxpayers. Goodness knows how Mr. Brown will try to raise the hundreds of millions in revenues to fund this bureaucratic make-work and the taxpayer compensations.
The government has already suggested a higher minimum wage as one way of doing it. This misguided idea would amount to a tax on employers that they'd have to pay directly to employees to make up for their lost income as a result of the tax hike. That is unless the higher wages force them to reduce their workforce, which would make the whole affair even more expensive because the state would then have to pay unemployment benefits.
Such a muddled outcome would be par for the course for Mr. Brown's economic policy as Chancellor over the previous decade. During this time, Mr. Brown has increased spending to pay for public services that have become more costly but not necessarily better.
As the nearby chart shows, in his first two years as Chancellor, Mr. Brown kept Labour's election promise to follow the prudent budget guidelines of his Conservative predecessor. In the 1999-2000 budget year, he reduced public spending as a ratio of GDP to 37% from 40.6% in 1996-1997. But then fiscal discipline went out the window. In the 2007-2008 budget year that just ended, public spending ate up a whopping 41.7% of the nation's GDP. Mr. Brown filled the state coffers largely through a range of stealth or indirect taxes on tobacco, alcohol, energy and other items. He was usually careful not to raise direct taxes – until now.Mr. Brown's tax hike and subsequent U-turn led to a tumultuous debate in parliament Wednesday. What it lacked in customary wit, it made up for with some fine venom. "Do you have any idea what a pathetic figure you cut today?" Tory leader David Cameron challenged the Prime Minister. "The Labour Party have finally worked out that they've got a loser, not a leader," Mr. Cameron charged.
"I don't think I have been pushed about at all," the Prime Minister feebly pleaded. Actually, there has been some severe pushing. But Mr. Brown's floundering on the tax issue is not what will concern voters the most. More likely, they will be questioning the economic judgment that got Mr. Brown into this mess in the first place.
Time's Environmental-War Whoop
"Green is the new red, white and blue"?
By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, April 25, 2008
Time magazine recently doctored the iconic photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima in order to “celebrate” Earth Day. Instead of Marines valiantly struggling to lift the stars and stripes, they are depicted planting a
tree.
No doubt Time’s editors think they will be celebrated in poetry and song for generations to come for their high-minded cleverness. Still, if the symbolism wasn’t clear enough, Time writer Bryan Walsh spells it out: “Green is the new red, white and blue.”
There are any number of problems here, starting with the fact that this is simply a lie. Green is not the new red, white, and blue. Concern over climate change may be the most honorable and vital thing imaginable. But if “the red, white and blue” means anything, it means patriotism or love of country. Patriotism and environmentalism simply aren’t synonymous terms. Two things can be good without being the same. Fatherhood and all-you-can-eat chicken wings, for example, don’t describe identical phenomena.
Even if Walsh and his bosses at Time were merely trying to be descriptive of American attitudes, they’d still be flat-out wrong. If Americans saw environmentalism as the purest expression of patriotic sentiment — like, say, buying Liberty Bonds during WWI — Time’s declaration might be defensible. But Americans don’t think any such thing.
The latest Gallup environmental survey shows that only 37 percent of Americans worry about global warming “a great deal,” a drop from 41 percent last year. Indeed, the share of Americans greatly concerned with climate change is about the same as it was a decade ago, which still sounds a bit high since the globe pretty much stopped getting warmer in 1998. Even among environmental concerns, climate change isn’t priority No. 1 for most Americans.
The editors of Time surely know this, which explains their real motive: They want to persuade Americans otherwise. And they are honest about it. Richard Stengel, Time’s managing editor, who recently admitted that he doesn’t much care about “objective” journalism, insists that “there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change.”
“The U.S. produces nearly a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases,” Time reports, “... and has stubbornly made it clear that it doesn’t intend to so a whole lot about it.” And thus we see the new patriotism wheeling around to identify the real villain. In World War II, we fought an epic battle for freedom, democracy, decency and capitalism. In the new moral equivalent of World War II, the trinitarian evil of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo is replaced with One True Satan, and he is . . . us.
Rather than wade into the science and economics of global warming yet again, let us instead dissipate the hot air of the liberal obsession with the moral equivalent of war. In brief: There is no such thing as the moral equivalent of war. Whatever war is, it is war. The good that comes from war is unique to war. The evil that comes from war is unique to war, too. Even natural disasters that require citizens to drop what they are doing to help those in need cannot truly be compared to war because natural disasters are never evil in intent. (If they were, we would call tornados “acts of Satan,” not “acts of God.”)
Ever since philosopher William James coined the phrase “moral equivalent of war,” self-described progressives have sought to galvanize the masses for collective purposes. They have loved the idea of war-without-war precisely because they want a public that follows in lockstep and individuals who will sacrifice their personal ambitions for the “greater good.” This is what John Dewey, James’s disciple, called the “social benefits of war.” Dewey, later a famous pacifist, supported WWI because he believed it would usher in an age of collectivism and crush laissez-faire capitalism.
The yearning for a moral equivalent of war is an understandable desire, perhaps even noble in its intent. But it is not democratic. It is fundamentally authoritarian, which might explain why so many environmentalists envy China’s ability to ban plastic bags without reference to a vote or a court or anything other than the will of the China’s technocratic rulers. Indeed, the authors of “The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy” openly question whether the crisis of climate change should render liberal democracy obsolete. For some it seems the moral equivalent of war requires the moral equivalent of a police state.
This is the atmosphere Time is helping to poison, with pollutants far worse than mere greenhouse gasses.
By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, April 25, 2008
Time magazine recently doctored the iconic photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima in order to “celebrate” Earth Day. Instead of Marines valiantly struggling to lift the stars and stripes, they are depicted planting a
tree.
No doubt Time’s editors think they will be celebrated in poetry and song for generations to come for their high-minded cleverness. Still, if the symbolism wasn’t clear enough, Time writer Bryan Walsh spells it out: “Green is the new red, white and blue.”
There are any number of problems here, starting with the fact that this is simply a lie. Green is not the new red, white, and blue. Concern over climate change may be the most honorable and vital thing imaginable. But if “the red, white and blue” means anything, it means patriotism or love of country. Patriotism and environmentalism simply aren’t synonymous terms. Two things can be good without being the same. Fatherhood and all-you-can-eat chicken wings, for example, don’t describe identical phenomena.
Even if Walsh and his bosses at Time were merely trying to be descriptive of American attitudes, they’d still be flat-out wrong. If Americans saw environmentalism as the purest expression of patriotic sentiment — like, say, buying Liberty Bonds during WWI — Time’s declaration might be defensible. But Americans don’t think any such thing.
The latest Gallup environmental survey shows that only 37 percent of Americans worry about global warming “a great deal,” a drop from 41 percent last year. Indeed, the share of Americans greatly concerned with climate change is about the same as it was a decade ago, which still sounds a bit high since the globe pretty much stopped getting warmer in 1998. Even among environmental concerns, climate change isn’t priority No. 1 for most Americans.
The editors of Time surely know this, which explains their real motive: They want to persuade Americans otherwise. And they are honest about it. Richard Stengel, Time’s managing editor, who recently admitted that he doesn’t much care about “objective” journalism, insists that “there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change.”
“The U.S. produces nearly a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases,” Time reports, “... and has stubbornly made it clear that it doesn’t intend to so a whole lot about it.” And thus we see the new patriotism wheeling around to identify the real villain. In World War II, we fought an epic battle for freedom, democracy, decency and capitalism. In the new moral equivalent of World War II, the trinitarian evil of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo is replaced with One True Satan, and he is . . . us.
Rather than wade into the science and economics of global warming yet again, let us instead dissipate the hot air of the liberal obsession with the moral equivalent of war. In brief: There is no such thing as the moral equivalent of war. Whatever war is, it is war. The good that comes from war is unique to war. The evil that comes from war is unique to war, too. Even natural disasters that require citizens to drop what they are doing to help those in need cannot truly be compared to war because natural disasters are never evil in intent. (If they were, we would call tornados “acts of Satan,” not “acts of God.”)
Ever since philosopher William James coined the phrase “moral equivalent of war,” self-described progressives have sought to galvanize the masses for collective purposes. They have loved the idea of war-without-war precisely because they want a public that follows in lockstep and individuals who will sacrifice their personal ambitions for the “greater good.” This is what John Dewey, James’s disciple, called the “social benefits of war.” Dewey, later a famous pacifist, supported WWI because he believed it would usher in an age of collectivism and crush laissez-faire capitalism.
The yearning for a moral equivalent of war is an understandable desire, perhaps even noble in its intent. But it is not democratic. It is fundamentally authoritarian, which might explain why so many environmentalists envy China’s ability to ban plastic bags without reference to a vote or a court or anything other than the will of the China’s technocratic rulers. Indeed, the authors of “The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy” openly question whether the crisis of climate change should render liberal democracy obsolete. For some it seems the moral equivalent of war requires the moral equivalent of a police state.
This is the atmosphere Time is helping to poison, with pollutants far worse than mere greenhouse gasses.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Obama's America
He promises higher taxes, more regulation, less trade and less opportunity.
By Pete De Pont
Thursday, April 23, 2008
Nine months from now, the 44th president will be inaugurated. Looking at the debates, votes cast and money raised in this year's presidential primary races, the next president may not only be a Democrat, but Barack Obama, the most liberal of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate.
Add the announced retirement of six Republican senators and 29 Republican House members (compared with just seven House Democrats) and the Democrats are likely to control both the House and the Senate with much bigger majorities than they do today.
So both the next president and the new congressional majorities will be much more liberal than the officeholders they have replaced, and that will result in a broad-reaching, socialist-leaning, greatly expanded American government.
* * *
Four significant public policy changes are certain: the size, scope and spending of the federal government will substantially expand; income taxes will go up; protectionism will replace free trade; and a commitment to global internationalism will saddle America with a broad Kyoto global warming agreement that, according to the U.N. Climate Treaty Secretariat, should exempt China and India.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have proposed increasing annual federal spending, respectively, by $226 billion and $303 billion – the Obama total being about a 10% increase. Neither of them as president would likely limit any spending – not entitlements, not earmarks, not farm subsidies.
In the past four years, income tax cuts have been good for the American economy, raising government tax revenues by $785 billion, reducing the deficit, and helping to create more than eight million new jobs and 52 consecutive months of job growth prior to the slowdown at the beginning of this year. A Democratic administration's tax increases are likely to be substantial: Mr. Obama proposes raising top income tax rates to 39.6% from 35%, capital gains tax rates to perhaps 28% from the current 15%, dividend tax to 39.6% from 15%, and top estate tax rates back up to 55%. And he wants to raise substantially or abolish the $102,000 cap on wages subject to the Social Security payroll tax. "He is indeed a redistributionist," said blogger and Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan after watching Mr. Obama's answer to a tax question in last week's presidential debate.
Protectionism will replace free trade as American policy, even though trade creates domestic jobs. Foreign-owned companies operating in the U.S. employ five million people (think Honda's 16,000 or Nokia's 6,000), and America's exports of goods and services employs another 11 million. But earlier this month Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked a vote on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement by suspending the requirement that Congress vote up or down for such a treaty. Both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama want to repeal or significantly modify Nafta, which Mr. Obama says has never "been good for America." Their protectionist America would limit international trade agreements, likely leading to anti-American protectionism by other nations.
Of course higher taxes and broad protectionism are not new ideas, they were tried by Herbert Hoover and led to the Great Depression.
* * *
Then will come dramatic public policy changes in the areas of labor law, free speech, election laws and national energy policy.
Significant labor law changes will likely start with the elimination of secret ballots for union organizing elections, so that unions can verbally "ask" workers if they would like to join (read: intimidate them into saying yes). Then may come repeal of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act provision that allows states to enact "right to work" laws – 22 of them have done so – that allow workers to take jobs even if they decide not to join a union.
Next would come some free-speech changes, like the reinstitution of the "fairness doctrine" that requires broadcast radio and television stations to give equal time to both sides of any public policy on-air discussions. There was such a Federal Communications Commission rule that was abandoned 20 years ago, but liberals want it back in order to stifle conservative talk radio. Such a return of government regulation of free speech would create a very different First Amendment America.
* * *
Finally would come a vast energy and global-warming-oriented policy that would begin limiting the energy resources America needs to prosper. U.S. domestic crude oil field production has fallen by nearly half since 1970, but additional offshore oil and gas drilling would continue to be prohibited, for Mr. Obama even opposes existing Gulf of Mexico oil drilling. Off the east and west coasts there is a 19-year supply of natural gas and enough oil to replace our oil imports for 25 years, but access to it will not be permitted. No new nuclear power plants have been approved since the 1970s, and liberalism's antinuclear sentiment bodes ill for any significant new ones.
Perhaps the best example of the new energy liberalism is its attitude toward coal. Kansas needs additional electricity, but the state government recently banned the construction of two new electricity generators in an existing coal fired plant, the reason being the additional greenhouse gasses the plant would emit. The state Legislature overrode the ban, but Gov. Kathleen Sibelius, a Democrat, vetoed the bill, thereby validating America's first substantial step to stop the use of the coal-based power that supplies about half of our electricity.
So America's energy policy in the new administration may be no additional nuclear, coal, or oil and natural gas power generation, which leaves us with only windmill, solar, biomass, and geothermal for additional power needs. Those sources combined provide about 2.4% of our electrical generation sources.
* * *
With such policies, we would be a far more regulated, far less prosperous nation offering far less opportunity. The 23% of Americans who identify themselves as liberals may applaud, but for the rest of us it would be an unfortunate outcome.
By Pete De Pont
Thursday, April 23, 2008
Nine months from now, the 44th president will be inaugurated. Looking at the debates, votes cast and money raised in this year's presidential primary races, the next president may not only be a Democrat, but Barack Obama, the most liberal of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate.
Add the announced retirement of six Republican senators and 29 Republican House members (compared with just seven House Democrats) and the Democrats are likely to control both the House and the Senate with much bigger majorities than they do today.
So both the next president and the new congressional majorities will be much more liberal than the officeholders they have replaced, and that will result in a broad-reaching, socialist-leaning, greatly expanded American government.
* * *
Four significant public policy changes are certain: the size, scope and spending of the federal government will substantially expand; income taxes will go up; protectionism will replace free trade; and a commitment to global internationalism will saddle America with a broad Kyoto global warming agreement that, according to the U.N. Climate Treaty Secretariat, should exempt China and India.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have proposed increasing annual federal spending, respectively, by $226 billion and $303 billion – the Obama total being about a 10% increase. Neither of them as president would likely limit any spending – not entitlements, not earmarks, not farm subsidies.
In the past four years, income tax cuts have been good for the American economy, raising government tax revenues by $785 billion, reducing the deficit, and helping to create more than eight million new jobs and 52 consecutive months of job growth prior to the slowdown at the beginning of this year. A Democratic administration's tax increases are likely to be substantial: Mr. Obama proposes raising top income tax rates to 39.6% from 35%, capital gains tax rates to perhaps 28% from the current 15%, dividend tax to 39.6% from 15%, and top estate tax rates back up to 55%. And he wants to raise substantially or abolish the $102,000 cap on wages subject to the Social Security payroll tax. "He is indeed a redistributionist," said blogger and Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan after watching Mr. Obama's answer to a tax question in last week's presidential debate.
Protectionism will replace free trade as American policy, even though trade creates domestic jobs. Foreign-owned companies operating in the U.S. employ five million people (think Honda's 16,000 or Nokia's 6,000), and America's exports of goods and services employs another 11 million. But earlier this month Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked a vote on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement by suspending the requirement that Congress vote up or down for such a treaty. Both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama want to repeal or significantly modify Nafta, which Mr. Obama says has never "been good for America." Their protectionist America would limit international trade agreements, likely leading to anti-American protectionism by other nations.
Of course higher taxes and broad protectionism are not new ideas, they were tried by Herbert Hoover and led to the Great Depression.
* * *
Then will come dramatic public policy changes in the areas of labor law, free speech, election laws and national energy policy.
Significant labor law changes will likely start with the elimination of secret ballots for union organizing elections, so that unions can verbally "ask" workers if they would like to join (read: intimidate them into saying yes). Then may come repeal of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act provision that allows states to enact "right to work" laws – 22 of them have done so – that allow workers to take jobs even if they decide not to join a union.
Next would come some free-speech changes, like the reinstitution of the "fairness doctrine" that requires broadcast radio and television stations to give equal time to both sides of any public policy on-air discussions. There was such a Federal Communications Commission rule that was abandoned 20 years ago, but liberals want it back in order to stifle conservative talk radio. Such a return of government regulation of free speech would create a very different First Amendment America.
* * *
Finally would come a vast energy and global-warming-oriented policy that would begin limiting the energy resources America needs to prosper. U.S. domestic crude oil field production has fallen by nearly half since 1970, but additional offshore oil and gas drilling would continue to be prohibited, for Mr. Obama even opposes existing Gulf of Mexico oil drilling. Off the east and west coasts there is a 19-year supply of natural gas and enough oil to replace our oil imports for 25 years, but access to it will not be permitted. No new nuclear power plants have been approved since the 1970s, and liberalism's antinuclear sentiment bodes ill for any significant new ones.
Perhaps the best example of the new energy liberalism is its attitude toward coal. Kansas needs additional electricity, but the state government recently banned the construction of two new electricity generators in an existing coal fired plant, the reason being the additional greenhouse gasses the plant would emit. The state Legislature overrode the ban, but Gov. Kathleen Sibelius, a Democrat, vetoed the bill, thereby validating America's first substantial step to stop the use of the coal-based power that supplies about half of our electricity.
So America's energy policy in the new administration may be no additional nuclear, coal, or oil and natural gas power generation, which leaves us with only windmill, solar, biomass, and geothermal for additional power needs. Those sources combined provide about 2.4% of our electrical generation sources.
* * *
With such policies, we would be a far more regulated, far less prosperous nation offering far less opportunity. The 23% of Americans who identify themselves as liberals may applaud, but for the rest of us it would be an unfortunate outcome.
Jimmy Carter Doesn't Get It
By Cal Thomas
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Just what about total annihilation of the Jews by Palestinian, Arab and Muslim people does Jimmy Carter not understand? Carter's latest leap into the foreign policy breach resulted in his declaration that the terrorist organization Hamas had accepted Israel's "right to exist," if Israel occupied a Palestinian state on Palestinian territories and retreated to pre-1967 Arab-Israeli war borders, borders changed after Israel was attacked by some of the very people who still want the nation's elimination. The working strategy of Israel's enemies is: if at first you don't succeed in killing enough Jews, then try, try again.
Hamas immediately denied Carter's claim it is willing to recognize Israel and introduced the usual caveats about Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, "right of return" for "Palestinian refugees" and so forth. We've heard it all before. Israel's and our enemies tell us what we want to hear while continuing their terrorist and murderous acts in order to achieve their objectives.
Carter has a history of believing (and smooching) murderous thugs. He's kissed and/or met with the late Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev (Carter expressed surprise that Brezhnev had lied to him about invading Afghanistan in 1979. Memo to Carter: dictators lie and so do totalitarian groups like Hamas); the late Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, Hamas' political leader, Khalid Mashaal and North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, who he falsely claimed had agreed to suspend his nuclear weapons program. In each of these meetings, Carter has served the interests, not of peace, or of his own country, but the interests of the dictatorial regimes whose prestige has been elevated by the visit of an American ex-president.
The false premise on which all negotiations with Islamic terrorists have been based is that the terrorists lack something that, if they got it, would bring about instant peace, reconciliation and the study of war no more. This is wishful thinking bordering on self-delusion. Despite multiple concessions over many years, peace overtures, goodwill gestures and offering up of land captured from the very people who have tried before and will try again to destroy Israel, many on the political left in Israel, Europe and America cling to the fiction that it is only Israel that is an impediment to "peace."
People who are not fully aware of the poison forced on Muslim and Arab people by their religious and political leaders would do well to take some time and inform themselves. The level of hatred and vilification for all things Jewish, Christian and Western sounds like the stuff out of a Ku Klux Klan handbook. Young children are radicalized in their first school year with appeals that they become martyrs in order to expunge Jewish "filth" from the region and do Allah's will. This is what we and the Jewish people face. If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, all our good intentions will produce is a superhighway.
Jimmy Carter thinks he is doing God's will by "loving" his enemies. The expectation behind that biblical instruction is that such an act will soften the heart of the enemy. But evil does not respond this way. What evil does is to take these acts (evil people know the commands, too, because they have studied us more than we have studied them) and use such notions to achieve their objectives. They will tell us whatever we want to hear in order to get their way. They believe the Koran allows them to lie to "infidels."
Why won't we understand this? Converts from Islam regularly warn us. Why do we persist in believing their lies when the only thing they have been consistent at is lying? If Carter trusts Hamas, whom else would he trust?
Nothing stinks as badly as a perishable item that has passed its "sell-by" date. That describes Jimmy Carter. His foreign policy was a failure when he was president, most notably his approach to Iran, which toppled that regime and gave us what we face now. Now, as ex-president, he continues to cause damage and undermine his country's foreign policy.
It is said we only have one president at a time. Apparently, Jimmy Carter thinks otherwise.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Just what about total annihilation of the Jews by Palestinian, Arab and Muslim people does Jimmy Carter not understand? Carter's latest leap into the foreign policy breach resulted in his declaration that the terrorist organization Hamas had accepted Israel's "right to exist," if Israel occupied a Palestinian state on Palestinian territories and retreated to pre-1967 Arab-Israeli war borders, borders changed after Israel was attacked by some of the very people who still want the nation's elimination. The working strategy of Israel's enemies is: if at first you don't succeed in killing enough Jews, then try, try again.
Hamas immediately denied Carter's claim it is willing to recognize Israel and introduced the usual caveats about Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, "right of return" for "Palestinian refugees" and so forth. We've heard it all before. Israel's and our enemies tell us what we want to hear while continuing their terrorist and murderous acts in order to achieve their objectives.
Carter has a history of believing (and smooching) murderous thugs. He's kissed and/or met with the late Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev (Carter expressed surprise that Brezhnev had lied to him about invading Afghanistan in 1979. Memo to Carter: dictators lie and so do totalitarian groups like Hamas); the late Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, Hamas' political leader, Khalid Mashaal and North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, who he falsely claimed had agreed to suspend his nuclear weapons program. In each of these meetings, Carter has served the interests, not of peace, or of his own country, but the interests of the dictatorial regimes whose prestige has been elevated by the visit of an American ex-president.
The false premise on which all negotiations with Islamic terrorists have been based is that the terrorists lack something that, if they got it, would bring about instant peace, reconciliation and the study of war no more. This is wishful thinking bordering on self-delusion. Despite multiple concessions over many years, peace overtures, goodwill gestures and offering up of land captured from the very people who have tried before and will try again to destroy Israel, many on the political left in Israel, Europe and America cling to the fiction that it is only Israel that is an impediment to "peace."
People who are not fully aware of the poison forced on Muslim and Arab people by their religious and political leaders would do well to take some time and inform themselves. The level of hatred and vilification for all things Jewish, Christian and Western sounds like the stuff out of a Ku Klux Klan handbook. Young children are radicalized in their first school year with appeals that they become martyrs in order to expunge Jewish "filth" from the region and do Allah's will. This is what we and the Jewish people face. If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, all our good intentions will produce is a superhighway.
Jimmy Carter thinks he is doing God's will by "loving" his enemies. The expectation behind that biblical instruction is that such an act will soften the heart of the enemy. But evil does not respond this way. What evil does is to take these acts (evil people know the commands, too, because they have studied us more than we have studied them) and use such notions to achieve their objectives. They will tell us whatever we want to hear in order to get their way. They believe the Koran allows them to lie to "infidels."
Why won't we understand this? Converts from Islam regularly warn us. Why do we persist in believing their lies when the only thing they have been consistent at is lying? If Carter trusts Hamas, whom else would he trust?
Nothing stinks as badly as a perishable item that has passed its "sell-by" date. That describes Jimmy Carter. His foreign policy was a failure when he was president, most notably his approach to Iran, which toppled that regime and gave us what we face now. Now, as ex-president, he continues to cause damage and undermine his country's foreign policy.
It is said we only have one president at a time. Apparently, Jimmy Carter thinks otherwise.
Censorious Left-Wing Bloggers
By Brent Bozell III
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
ABC generously offered the Democrats a gift that the Republicans were not given in this electoral cycle -- a two-hour debate, in primetime, on a weeknight. Not only that, it was hosted by former Democratic aide George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson. Left-wing bloggers promptly greeted this gift by smacking ABC in the mouth. Like an abused spouse, ABC responded by repeating all the leftist complaints on its airwaves and supinely saluting the impressive dexterity of the Obama campaign.
Question: What did ABC do wrong? Answer: For once it veered from liberal orthodoxy.
Question: Why did ABC feel the need to atone? Answer: Because it veered from liberal orthodoxy.
The Politico newspaper recently acknowledged the obvious point that the nation's political press is deeply intoxicated at the thought of President Obama, and sometimes needs "detox" after being on the trail with him. But they also noted that the press in this political cycle is more sensitive to the New Media -- the hard-left bloggers from the Huffington Post to Keith Olbermann, who often comes across as either the script reader for Media Matters or the anchor of Daily Kos TV.
These forces once again are proving that the media don't mind being seen as unfair to their reactionary enemies, but are sickened at the thought of being unfair to their progressive friends.
The left has watched conservatives make a national issue of the media's liberal bias, and they see the surveys that show overwhelming national sympathy for this concern. So they decided to get organized and started complaining about how conservative and Republican-enabling the media are -- no matter how ridiculous this argument sounds. Their platform is unequivocal: You can never be enough of a Democratic Party man for the left. You have to prove your loyalty with in-kind contributions in each news cycle.
Seeing the storm of response underlines one obvious fact. Liberals are censorious. They expect the liberal media to dwell only on matters that advance the liberal agenda. Any issue that challenges liberal orthodoxy, or in any way might paint a liberal in a negative light becomes a "phony" issue, and bringing those up is embarrassingly unprofessional. Any hostile question is an egregious naked pyramid of surrender to Republican talking points.
Thus Obama-loving leftists hated the "trivia" and "distractions" that emerged in the debate's first 45 minutes. ABC began by asking the tired question of whether Clinton or Obama would select the other contender as a running mate. They also pressed Hillary on whether she really thinks Obama can win in the fall. But that's not the trivia that offended.
ABC disgusted the Obama-ogling bloggers by dwelling on Obama's developing vulnerabilities. Gibson questioned Obama's remarks about the bitterness of poorer voters to cling to their guns and their religion, and their antipathy to immigrants (instead of voting for liberals). They asked several questions about Obama's longtime minister, the inflammatory Reverend Jeremiah Wright. And they asked if it wasn't a "major vulnerability" that he won't wear a flag pin.
(This last issue is a bit comical, coming from ABC News, whose president, David Westin, banned all ABC News employees from wearing a flag pin on the air so they could remain "independent and objective." Westin also resembled Obama's mysterious sense of patriotism in suggesting he didn't think it was his role to decide whether the Pentagon was a legitimate target for terrorists. The candidate could have proclaimed that he has demonstrated all the patriotism of your average ABC News reporter.)
But the biggest surprise was Stephanopoulos raising the case of "a gentleman named William Ayers," the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist, who in a poetic lightning strike of bad timing for the left, was quoted on the front page of the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001, expressing regret, sort of: "I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough." Obama had held an early organizing meeting for his state Senate campaign at the Ayers house, and the Obama campaign had described their relationship as friendly.
Heresy! Olbermann took to the MSNBC airwaves and denounced Stephanopoulos, the closet Republican, for asking this vile question suggested by conservatives. This would have never happened on Olbermann's cockeyed "Countdown" show, since he avoids conservatives as if they'd infect him with scurvy, rickets and dengue fever.
Leftists seem to have a medical approach to public debates. "Republican talking points" are treated like a fatal bacteria and the media are supposed to sterilize all public forums to avoid infection. But as much as the bloggers might intimidate the TV-news stars from uncomfortable anti-Obama stories, they will still be distributed far and wide through the Internet, talk radio and political ads. Ultimately, their horror at any hostile questions to Obama doesn't project much confidence in Obama's ability to withstand the heated kitchens of the presidency.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
ABC generously offered the Democrats a gift that the Republicans were not given in this electoral cycle -- a two-hour debate, in primetime, on a weeknight. Not only that, it was hosted by former Democratic aide George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson. Left-wing bloggers promptly greeted this gift by smacking ABC in the mouth. Like an abused spouse, ABC responded by repeating all the leftist complaints on its airwaves and supinely saluting the impressive dexterity of the Obama campaign.
Question: What did ABC do wrong? Answer: For once it veered from liberal orthodoxy.
Question: Why did ABC feel the need to atone? Answer: Because it veered from liberal orthodoxy.
The Politico newspaper recently acknowledged the obvious point that the nation's political press is deeply intoxicated at the thought of President Obama, and sometimes needs "detox" after being on the trail with him. But they also noted that the press in this political cycle is more sensitive to the New Media -- the hard-left bloggers from the Huffington Post to Keith Olbermann, who often comes across as either the script reader for Media Matters or the anchor of Daily Kos TV.
These forces once again are proving that the media don't mind being seen as unfair to their reactionary enemies, but are sickened at the thought of being unfair to their progressive friends.
The left has watched conservatives make a national issue of the media's liberal bias, and they see the surveys that show overwhelming national sympathy for this concern. So they decided to get organized and started complaining about how conservative and Republican-enabling the media are -- no matter how ridiculous this argument sounds. Their platform is unequivocal: You can never be enough of a Democratic Party man for the left. You have to prove your loyalty with in-kind contributions in each news cycle.
Seeing the storm of response underlines one obvious fact. Liberals are censorious. They expect the liberal media to dwell only on matters that advance the liberal agenda. Any issue that challenges liberal orthodoxy, or in any way might paint a liberal in a negative light becomes a "phony" issue, and bringing those up is embarrassingly unprofessional. Any hostile question is an egregious naked pyramid of surrender to Republican talking points.
Thus Obama-loving leftists hated the "trivia" and "distractions" that emerged in the debate's first 45 minutes. ABC began by asking the tired question of whether Clinton or Obama would select the other contender as a running mate. They also pressed Hillary on whether she really thinks Obama can win in the fall. But that's not the trivia that offended.
ABC disgusted the Obama-ogling bloggers by dwelling on Obama's developing vulnerabilities. Gibson questioned Obama's remarks about the bitterness of poorer voters to cling to their guns and their religion, and their antipathy to immigrants (instead of voting for liberals). They asked several questions about Obama's longtime minister, the inflammatory Reverend Jeremiah Wright. And they asked if it wasn't a "major vulnerability" that he won't wear a flag pin.
(This last issue is a bit comical, coming from ABC News, whose president, David Westin, banned all ABC News employees from wearing a flag pin on the air so they could remain "independent and objective." Westin also resembled Obama's mysterious sense of patriotism in suggesting he didn't think it was his role to decide whether the Pentagon was a legitimate target for terrorists. The candidate could have proclaimed that he has demonstrated all the patriotism of your average ABC News reporter.)
But the biggest surprise was Stephanopoulos raising the case of "a gentleman named William Ayers," the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist, who in a poetic lightning strike of bad timing for the left, was quoted on the front page of the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001, expressing regret, sort of: "I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough." Obama had held an early organizing meeting for his state Senate campaign at the Ayers house, and the Obama campaign had described their relationship as friendly.
Heresy! Olbermann took to the MSNBC airwaves and denounced Stephanopoulos, the closet Republican, for asking this vile question suggested by conservatives. This would have never happened on Olbermann's cockeyed "Countdown" show, since he avoids conservatives as if they'd infect him with scurvy, rickets and dengue fever.
Leftists seem to have a medical approach to public debates. "Republican talking points" are treated like a fatal bacteria and the media are supposed to sterilize all public forums to avoid infection. But as much as the bloggers might intimidate the TV-news stars from uncomfortable anti-Obama stories, they will still be distributed far and wide through the Internet, talk radio and political ads. Ultimately, their horror at any hostile questions to Obama doesn't project much confidence in Obama's ability to withstand the heated kitchens of the presidency.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
An Environmental Failure: Restrictions on DDT
By Ashley Herzog
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
I might take the environmental movement seriously if it weren’t responsible for millions of deaths. On Tuesday, the world observed Earth Day—a celebration of the movement’s alleged successes, one of which is worldwide restrictions on the insecticide DDT.
Environmentalists in the U.S. and Europe might be congratulating themselves for nearly ridding the Earth of DDT, but the people of South America, Asia and Africa are not celebrating. They need DDT to ward off malaria, a mosquito-borne infection that thrives in tropical climates and is often lethal, especially to children and pregnant women. One million inhabitants of third-world countries die of malaria every year thanks to environmentalist junk science.
When DDT was first mass-produced in 1939, it was regarded as a miraculous life-saver on the level of penicillin. Malaria—which had once plagued Europe and the U.S. as well as the tropics—was well on its way to being eradicated. During World War II, soldiers and concentration camp survivors were doused with it. DDT was considered so essential that its first producer, Dr. Paul Muller, won the Nobel Prize in 1948. As the National Academy of Sciences declared, "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT...In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable."
But this life-saving chemical had yet to face the environmental movement. In 1962, Rachel Carson (whom Al Gore counts among his inspirations), wrote a book titled Silent Spring, which blamed DDT for killing birds and causing human diseases. The book launched a massive propaganda campaign against DDT.
The environmentalists were determined not to let facts stand in their way. Although several studies showed that DDT had no harmful effects on humans and was not responsible for wildlife deaths (in fact, several endangered bird populations flourished during the years when DDT was most widely used), an EPA bureaucrat who had not attended a single hearing on DDT decided to ban it anyway. Environmental groups then pressured the government to ban exports from countries that continued to use DDT—which has brought about a malaria epidemic in the third world, especially in Africa, where 90 percent of infections occur. These countries are facing mass death and economic devastation because environmentalists in the West are worried that DDT will cause cancer and kill the birds.
Under threat of trade sanctions from the West, African nations have been forced to use less effective and more expensive methods to fight the malaria epidemic, such as mosquito-repellent bed nets—which, according to World Health Organization estimates, have about a 50 percent success rate. (Countries that have reintroduced DDT, such as South Africa, have found it has a 90 percent success rate.) In any event, the DDT alternatives don’t seem to be doing much good: Every year, up to 300 million Africans get malaria, and it costs the continent’s economies billions in medical expenses and lost work days.
The situation was so dire that, in 2006, the World Health Organization announced its support for indoor DDT spraying in countries ravaged by malaria, saying the chemical had “a clean bill of health” and any possible negative effects of DDT did not outweigh its benefits. The usual suspects went nuts. As the environmentalist group the Sierra Club whined, “Studies have linked widespread reproductive disorders in animals to DDT exposure—including reproductive failure in the American Bald Eagle.” This is what happens when people start rating wildlife more worthwhile than human life.
As for DDT’s effect on humans, the claim that it causes cancer has never been proven. Some studies show a link, especially in agricultural workers who were exposed to large amounts of DDT as well as other chemicals. Others, such as one conducted by Dr. David J. Hunter of the Harvard Medical School, have found none at all. One study by the National Cancer Institute found that DDT actually reduced tumors in animals.
Others, such as writer Paul Driessen, describe the fear of DDT as a “country club anxiety,” a luxury of rich Westerners who can afford organic foods and all-natural cosmetics and clothing. They will never contract malaria. Meanwhile, Africans—many of whom are lucky to afford any food at all—have made it clear that they’re willing to accept the risk of potential side effects if it means avoiding the very real threat of malaria. Two weeks ago, Uganda initiated a program to spray houses with DDT, even though it will probably hurt their trade with the U.S. and the European Union. As Ugandan businesswoman Fiona Kobusingye told reporters, “I lost my son, two sisters and two nephews to malaria. Don’t talk to me about birds. And don’t tell me a little DDT in our bodies is worse than the risk of losing more children to this disease. African mothers would be overjoyed if that were their biggest worry.”
I’m not saying the environmental movement is entirely without merit. Nor am I a “global warming denier” or a person who believes in messing up the environment just for fun. But a movement that values a bird’s life over a human life is hard to accept and even harder to respect.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
I might take the environmental movement seriously if it weren’t responsible for millions of deaths. On Tuesday, the world observed Earth Day—a celebration of the movement’s alleged successes, one of which is worldwide restrictions on the insecticide DDT.
Environmentalists in the U.S. and Europe might be congratulating themselves for nearly ridding the Earth of DDT, but the people of South America, Asia and Africa are not celebrating. They need DDT to ward off malaria, a mosquito-borne infection that thrives in tropical climates and is often lethal, especially to children and pregnant women. One million inhabitants of third-world countries die of malaria every year thanks to environmentalist junk science.
When DDT was first mass-produced in 1939, it was regarded as a miraculous life-saver on the level of penicillin. Malaria—which had once plagued Europe and the U.S. as well as the tropics—was well on its way to being eradicated. During World War II, soldiers and concentration camp survivors were doused with it. DDT was considered so essential that its first producer, Dr. Paul Muller, won the Nobel Prize in 1948. As the National Academy of Sciences declared, "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT...In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable."
But this life-saving chemical had yet to face the environmental movement. In 1962, Rachel Carson (whom Al Gore counts among his inspirations), wrote a book titled Silent Spring, which blamed DDT for killing birds and causing human diseases. The book launched a massive propaganda campaign against DDT.
The environmentalists were determined not to let facts stand in their way. Although several studies showed that DDT had no harmful effects on humans and was not responsible for wildlife deaths (in fact, several endangered bird populations flourished during the years when DDT was most widely used), an EPA bureaucrat who had not attended a single hearing on DDT decided to ban it anyway. Environmental groups then pressured the government to ban exports from countries that continued to use DDT—which has brought about a malaria epidemic in the third world, especially in Africa, where 90 percent of infections occur. These countries are facing mass death and economic devastation because environmentalists in the West are worried that DDT will cause cancer and kill the birds.
Under threat of trade sanctions from the West, African nations have been forced to use less effective and more expensive methods to fight the malaria epidemic, such as mosquito-repellent bed nets—which, according to World Health Organization estimates, have about a 50 percent success rate. (Countries that have reintroduced DDT, such as South Africa, have found it has a 90 percent success rate.) In any event, the DDT alternatives don’t seem to be doing much good: Every year, up to 300 million Africans get malaria, and it costs the continent’s economies billions in medical expenses and lost work days.
The situation was so dire that, in 2006, the World Health Organization announced its support for indoor DDT spraying in countries ravaged by malaria, saying the chemical had “a clean bill of health” and any possible negative effects of DDT did not outweigh its benefits. The usual suspects went nuts. As the environmentalist group the Sierra Club whined, “Studies have linked widespread reproductive disorders in animals to DDT exposure—including reproductive failure in the American Bald Eagle.” This is what happens when people start rating wildlife more worthwhile than human life.
As for DDT’s effect on humans, the claim that it causes cancer has never been proven. Some studies show a link, especially in agricultural workers who were exposed to large amounts of DDT as well as other chemicals. Others, such as one conducted by Dr. David J. Hunter of the Harvard Medical School, have found none at all. One study by the National Cancer Institute found that DDT actually reduced tumors in animals.
Others, such as writer Paul Driessen, describe the fear of DDT as a “country club anxiety,” a luxury of rich Westerners who can afford organic foods and all-natural cosmetics and clothing. They will never contract malaria. Meanwhile, Africans—many of whom are lucky to afford any food at all—have made it clear that they’re willing to accept the risk of potential side effects if it means avoiding the very real threat of malaria. Two weeks ago, Uganda initiated a program to spray houses with DDT, even though it will probably hurt their trade with the U.S. and the European Union. As Ugandan businesswoman Fiona Kobusingye told reporters, “I lost my son, two sisters and two nephews to malaria. Don’t talk to me about birds. And don’t tell me a little DDT in our bodies is worse than the risk of losing more children to this disease. African mothers would be overjoyed if that were their biggest worry.”
I’m not saying the environmental movement is entirely without merit. Nor am I a “global warming denier” or a person who believes in messing up the environment just for fun. But a movement that values a bird’s life over a human life is hard to accept and even harder to respect.
Obama's Media Army
By Dorothy Rabinowitz
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Nothing in the hysteria over last week's Democratic debate – including the unprecedented opprobrium press critics heaped on the ABC moderators – should have come as any surprise. That doesn't make it any less fascinating a guide to current strange notions of what is and is not a substantive issue in a presidential contest, or any less striking an indicator of the delicate treatment Mr. Obama's media following have come to consider his just due.
Moderators Charles Gibson's and George Stephanopoulos's offense was to ask questions Mr. Obama didn't want to address. Worse, they'd continued to press them even when the displeased candidate assured them these were old and tired questions.
- "Akin to a federal crime . . . new benchmarks of degradation," The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg declared, of the debate.
- "Despicable. . . . slanted against Obama," Washington Post critic Tom Shales charged.
- A "disgusting spectacle," the New York Times's David Carr opined.
- The questions had "disgraced democracy itself," according to columnist Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News.
The uproar is the latest confirmation of the special place Mr. Obama holds in the hearts of a good part of the media, a status ensured by their shared political sympathies and his star power. That status has in turn given rise to a tendency to provide generous explanations, and put the best possible gloss on missteps and utterances seriously embarrassing to Mr. Obama.
The effort and intensity various CNN panelists, for instance, expended on explaining what Mr. Obama really meant by that awkward San Francisco speech about bitter small towners clinging to their guns and religion – it seems he'd been making an important point if one not evident to anyone listening – exceeded that of the Obama campaign itself.
Still, no effort in helpful explanations was more distinguished than that of David Gergen, senior CNN commentator, who weighed in just after the first explosion of reports on Mr. Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright. About this spiritual leader – whose sermons declared the September 11 attacks to be America's just desserts, who instructed his flock that the United States had set forth on a genocidal program to kill black Americans with the AIDS virus, who held forth as gospel every paranoid fantasy espoused by the lunatic fringe about America's crimes – Mr. Gergen said, "Actually, Rev. Wright may love this country more than many of us . . . but we've fallen short."
It was an attempt at exculpation, as regards Rev. Wright, that no one has equalled, though many have come close. Not least Mr. Obama, who spends considerable time arguing that the press has focused on a few "snippets" taken from years of sermons.
Mr. Obama's apparent inability to confront, forthrightly, the pastor's poisonous pronouncements and his own relationship with him is, of course, the cause of all the continuing questions on the subject. It had not been in him, for instance, to say publicly that for a pastor to have preached that the U.S. government had embarked on a project to inject blacks with AIDS was an outrage on truth and decency. He delivered a celebrated speech on race, one generally hailed as a masterwork, that was supposed to have explained it all. It was a work masterly, above all, in its evasiveness. Even its admirers, prepared to swallow his repeated resort to descriptions like "controversial" for the pastor's hate-filled rants, couldn't quite give Sen. Obama a pass when it came to his beloved white grandmother, or to the not so beloved Geraldine Ferraro, both of whom he suggested were racists in their own right.
These issues – the unanswered, the suspect – which outraged press partisans have for days attempted to dismiss as trivia and gossip, largely forgotten by the public, are unlikely to be forgotten, either today or in the general election, nor are they trivial. This, Messrs. Gibson and Stephanopoulos clearly understood when they chose their questions. Mr. Obama's answers told far more than he or his managers wished.
Offered a chance to explain the meaning of his remarks about the reasons people living in small towns cling to guns and religion, he went on to repeat them all over again in different words. What there was in those remarks, what attitudes shown, that had offended people, he had still not grasped. In short, what he had said that day he'd meant to say. "What you are, picks its way," as Walt Whitman told us.
The way has been a long one for the candidates, and what they are is, indeed, picking its way on the campaign trail and during events like that instructive debate. About which, we now learn, there is to be a protest campaign against ABC and the moderators, mounted by assorted journalists and bloggers.
We are at the beginning of a contest likely to repeat itself through November: between that part of the press prepared to put hard questions equally, and all the rest, including those who'll mount the barricades when their candidate is threatened with discomfiture. Let the wars begin.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Nothing in the hysteria over last week's Democratic debate – including the unprecedented opprobrium press critics heaped on the ABC moderators – should have come as any surprise. That doesn't make it any less fascinating a guide to current strange notions of what is and is not a substantive issue in a presidential contest, or any less striking an indicator of the delicate treatment Mr. Obama's media following have come to consider his just due.
Moderators Charles Gibson's and George Stephanopoulos's offense was to ask questions Mr. Obama didn't want to address. Worse, they'd continued to press them even when the displeased candidate assured them these were old and tired questions.
- "Akin to a federal crime . . . new benchmarks of degradation," The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg declared, of the debate.
- "Despicable. . . . slanted against Obama," Washington Post critic Tom Shales charged.
- A "disgusting spectacle," the New York Times's David Carr opined.
- The questions had "disgraced democracy itself," according to columnist Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News.
The uproar is the latest confirmation of the special place Mr. Obama holds in the hearts of a good part of the media, a status ensured by their shared political sympathies and his star power. That status has in turn given rise to a tendency to provide generous explanations, and put the best possible gloss on missteps and utterances seriously embarrassing to Mr. Obama.
The effort and intensity various CNN panelists, for instance, expended on explaining what Mr. Obama really meant by that awkward San Francisco speech about bitter small towners clinging to their guns and religion – it seems he'd been making an important point if one not evident to anyone listening – exceeded that of the Obama campaign itself.
Still, no effort in helpful explanations was more distinguished than that of David Gergen, senior CNN commentator, who weighed in just after the first explosion of reports on Mr. Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright. About this spiritual leader – whose sermons declared the September 11 attacks to be America's just desserts, who instructed his flock that the United States had set forth on a genocidal program to kill black Americans with the AIDS virus, who held forth as gospel every paranoid fantasy espoused by the lunatic fringe about America's crimes – Mr. Gergen said, "Actually, Rev. Wright may love this country more than many of us . . . but we've fallen short."
It was an attempt at exculpation, as regards Rev. Wright, that no one has equalled, though many have come close. Not least Mr. Obama, who spends considerable time arguing that the press has focused on a few "snippets" taken from years of sermons.
Mr. Obama's apparent inability to confront, forthrightly, the pastor's poisonous pronouncements and his own relationship with him is, of course, the cause of all the continuing questions on the subject. It had not been in him, for instance, to say publicly that for a pastor to have preached that the U.S. government had embarked on a project to inject blacks with AIDS was an outrage on truth and decency. He delivered a celebrated speech on race, one generally hailed as a masterwork, that was supposed to have explained it all. It was a work masterly, above all, in its evasiveness. Even its admirers, prepared to swallow his repeated resort to descriptions like "controversial" for the pastor's hate-filled rants, couldn't quite give Sen. Obama a pass when it came to his beloved white grandmother, or to the not so beloved Geraldine Ferraro, both of whom he suggested were racists in their own right.
These issues – the unanswered, the suspect – which outraged press partisans have for days attempted to dismiss as trivia and gossip, largely forgotten by the public, are unlikely to be forgotten, either today or in the general election, nor are they trivial. This, Messrs. Gibson and Stephanopoulos clearly understood when they chose their questions. Mr. Obama's answers told far more than he or his managers wished.
Offered a chance to explain the meaning of his remarks about the reasons people living in small towns cling to guns and religion, he went on to repeat them all over again in different words. What there was in those remarks, what attitudes shown, that had offended people, he had still not grasped. In short, what he had said that day he'd meant to say. "What you are, picks its way," as Walt Whitman told us.
The way has been a long one for the candidates, and what they are is, indeed, picking its way on the campaign trail and during events like that instructive debate. About which, we now learn, there is to be a protest campaign against ABC and the moderators, mounted by assorted journalists and bloggers.
We are at the beginning of a contest likely to repeat itself through November: between that part of the press prepared to put hard questions equally, and all the rest, including those who'll mount the barricades when their candidate is threatened with discomfiture. Let the wars begin.
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