Updating strategy to fight the ideology.
By Mark Steyn
Saturday, November 29, 2009
When terrorists attack, media analysts go into Sherlock Holmes mode, metaphorically prowling the crime scene for footprints, as if the way to solve the mystery is to add up all the clues. The Bombay gunmen seized British and American tourists. Therefore, it must be an attack on Westerners!
Not so, said Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria. If they’d wanted to do that, they’d have hit the Hilton or the Marriott or some other target-rich chain hotel. The Taj and the Oberoi are both Indian owned, and popular watering holes with wealthy Indians.
Okay, how about this group that’s claimed credit for the attack? The Deccan Mujahideen. As a thousand TV anchors asked on Wednesday night, “What do we know about them?”
Er, well, nothing. Because they didn’t exist until they issued the press release. “Deccan” is the name of the vast plateau that covers most of the triangular peninsula that forms the lower half of the Indian sub-continent. It comes from the Prakrit word “dakkhin, which means “south.” Which means nothing at all. “Deccan Mujahideen” is like calling yourself the “Continental Shelf Liberation Front.”
Okay. So does that mean this operation was linked to al-Qaeda? Well, no. Not if by “linked to” you mean a wholly owned subsidiary coordinating its activities with the corporate head office.
It’s not an either/or scenario, it’s all of the above. Yes, the terrorists targeted locally owned hotels. But they singled out Britons and Americans as hostages. Yes, they attacked prestige city landmarks like the Victoria Terminus, one of the most splendid and historic railway stations in the world. But they also attacked an obscure Jewish community center. The Islamic imperialist project is a totalitarian ideology: It is at war with Hindus, Jews, Americans, Britons, everything that is other.
In the ten months before this week’s atrocity, Muslim terrorists killed over 200 people in India and no-one paid much attention. Just business as usual, alas. In Bombay, the perpetrators were cannier. They launched a multiple indiscriminate assault on soft targets, and then in the confusion began singling out A-list prey: Not just wealthy Western tourists, but local orthodox Jews, and municipal law enforcement. They drew prominent officials to selected sites, and then gunned down the head of the antiterrorism squad and two of his most senior lieutenants. They attacked a hospital, the place you’re supposed to take the victims to, thereby destabilizing the city’s emergency-response system.
And, aside from dozens of corpses, they were rewarded with instant, tangible, economic damage to India: the Bombay Stock Exchange was still closed on Friday, and the England cricket team canceled their tour (a shameful act).
What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan’s deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you’ll find local lads and wily outsiders: That’s pretty much a given.
But we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.
It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the “Deccan Mujahideen” or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and coopted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.
Many of us, including the incoming Obama administration, look at this as a law-enforcement matter. Bombay is a crime scene, so let’s surround the perimeter with yellow police tape, send in the forensics squad, and then wait for the DA to file charges. There was a photograph that appeared in many of the British papers, taken by a Reuters man and captioned by the news agency as follows: “A suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station.” The photo of the “suspected gunman” showed a man holding a gun. We don’t know much about him — he might be Muslim or Episcopalian, he might be an impoverished uneducated victim of western colonialist economic oppression or a former vice-president of Lehman Bros embarking on an exciting midlife career change — but one thing we ought to be able to say for certain is that a man pointing a gun is not a “suspected gunman” but a gunman. “This kind of silly political correctness infects reporters and news services world-wide,” wrote John Hinderaker of Powerline. “They think they’re being scrupulous — the man hasn’t been convicted of being a gunman yet! — when in fact they’re just being foolish. But the irrational conviction that nothing can be known unless it has been determined by a court and jury isn’t just silly, it’s dangerous.”
Just so. This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault — and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else.
So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don’t seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven’t yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn’t about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It’s bigger than that. And if you don’t have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you’ll lose.
Whoops, my apologies. I mean “suspected ideology.”
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Bolder Beats Bigger
Reining in rescue.
By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, November 28, 2008
The costs of Washington’s bailout fiesta are now so huge, you can see them from space.
The latest number, which includes the Citigroup rescue, is $7.7 trillion. That’s roughly half of America’s GDP.
In fairness, it’s impossible at this point to know the full costs of the various financial rescue efforts because, for example, some of them involve mere loan guarantees, which may cost nothing.
Still, any way you slice it, we are talking about really, really large amounts of money here. Barry Ritholtz, a financial blogger and Wall Street analyst, offers some perspective. Adjusting for inflation, the Marshall Plan cost $115.3 billion. The Louisiana Purchase: $217 billion. The race to the moon: $237 billion. The New Deal: $500 billion (estimated). The Korean War: $454 billion. The Iraq war: $597 billion.
You can add all of these things together and still not come close to what taxpayers are on the hook for already. You could even throw in the Savings and Loan bailout ($256 billion), the Vietnam War ($698 billion) and all of NASA ($851 billion) and still come up short.
Why the fire hose of cash? One reason is that Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke is a serious student of the Great Depression, and it’s his belief that the federal government should have thrown piles of money at the deflationary crisis of the 1930s. That’s in effect what he’s doing now.
But when you look at the pickle we’re in, a host of conclusions — never mind gripes, grievances and grumbles — come to mind. The first is that pretty much no one in Washington or on Wall Street can truly claim to deserve their job anymore. That goes for the Bush team, nearly everyone in Congress — particularly Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd and the rest of that motley crew — and also the Clinton-era all-stars Barack Obama is tapping for his administration.
George Will famously wrote of the 1988 Baltimore Orioles, who lost 107 games that season, “They were somewhat like today’s Congress — expensive and incompetent.” So, Will wrote, “Orioles’ management had a thought: Hey, we can lose 107 games with inexpensive rookies.”
One needn’t be a populist to think a similar principle applies now.
Indeed, one of the most astounding aspects of the gelling Obama administration is how completely it’s relying on the same old people Obama once said he was going to ignore in his pursuit of cosmic “change.”
As a conservative, I’m grateful that Obama isn’t picking the sorts of people I feared he would. Some of us half expected Che Guevara T-shirts to be the unofficial dress code of the Obama Cabinet. Yet, so far, with all of the Wall Street cronies, Clinton retreads, and Bush holdovers, it appears Obama’s far more of an agent of the status quo than an agent of change. That’s a relief compared with how bad it might have been, but it’s also a shame considering what could be.
For example, Obama says he doesn’t want spending as usual when it comes to formulating his impending mother of all stimulus packages. (Estimates vary from $500 billion to $700 billion, but who knows how high that number will go?)
So far, all we know for sure is that he wants massive increases in infrastructure “investment.” That’s fine with me, so long as it’s the infrastructure we need (though history shows such expenditures usually come on-line well after a recession is already over).
But rather than blow money on a lavish reenactment of the New Deal, or continue bailing out undeserving corporations, why not really think outside the box? Rep. Louie Gohmert (R., Texas) suggests an across-the-board reprieve on paying 2008 income taxes. This would leave an extra $1.2 trillion in the hands of Americans, who are the best stewards of their own money. Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell proposes a one-year moratorium on corporate income taxes in order to stimulate investment, job creation and the like. That wouldn’t be as popular, for understandable reasons.
The details can be negotiated, but this sort of approach would certainly create more jobs and spur more consumer demand than paying for a lot of asphalt. It would buy a lot more prosperity than any corporate bailout. Politically, it could buy Obama and Congress a year to formulate a serious tax-reform proposal. And — here’s the amazing part — it would be much cheaper than what we’ve spent already.
By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, November 28, 2008
The costs of Washington’s bailout fiesta are now so huge, you can see them from space.
The latest number, which includes the Citigroup rescue, is $7.7 trillion. That’s roughly half of America’s GDP.
In fairness, it’s impossible at this point to know the full costs of the various financial rescue efforts because, for example, some of them involve mere loan guarantees, which may cost nothing.
Still, any way you slice it, we are talking about really, really large amounts of money here. Barry Ritholtz, a financial blogger and Wall Street analyst, offers some perspective. Adjusting for inflation, the Marshall Plan cost $115.3 billion. The Louisiana Purchase: $217 billion. The race to the moon: $237 billion. The New Deal: $500 billion (estimated). The Korean War: $454 billion. The Iraq war: $597 billion.
You can add all of these things together and still not come close to what taxpayers are on the hook for already. You could even throw in the Savings and Loan bailout ($256 billion), the Vietnam War ($698 billion) and all of NASA ($851 billion) and still come up short.
Why the fire hose of cash? One reason is that Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke is a serious student of the Great Depression, and it’s his belief that the federal government should have thrown piles of money at the deflationary crisis of the 1930s. That’s in effect what he’s doing now.
But when you look at the pickle we’re in, a host of conclusions — never mind gripes, grievances and grumbles — come to mind. The first is that pretty much no one in Washington or on Wall Street can truly claim to deserve their job anymore. That goes for the Bush team, nearly everyone in Congress — particularly Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd and the rest of that motley crew — and also the Clinton-era all-stars Barack Obama is tapping for his administration.
George Will famously wrote of the 1988 Baltimore Orioles, who lost 107 games that season, “They were somewhat like today’s Congress — expensive and incompetent.” So, Will wrote, “Orioles’ management had a thought: Hey, we can lose 107 games with inexpensive rookies.”
One needn’t be a populist to think a similar principle applies now.
Indeed, one of the most astounding aspects of the gelling Obama administration is how completely it’s relying on the same old people Obama once said he was going to ignore in his pursuit of cosmic “change.”
As a conservative, I’m grateful that Obama isn’t picking the sorts of people I feared he would. Some of us half expected Che Guevara T-shirts to be the unofficial dress code of the Obama Cabinet. Yet, so far, with all of the Wall Street cronies, Clinton retreads, and Bush holdovers, it appears Obama’s far more of an agent of the status quo than an agent of change. That’s a relief compared with how bad it might have been, but it’s also a shame considering what could be.
For example, Obama says he doesn’t want spending as usual when it comes to formulating his impending mother of all stimulus packages. (Estimates vary from $500 billion to $700 billion, but who knows how high that number will go?)
So far, all we know for sure is that he wants massive increases in infrastructure “investment.” That’s fine with me, so long as it’s the infrastructure we need (though history shows such expenditures usually come on-line well after a recession is already over).
But rather than blow money on a lavish reenactment of the New Deal, or continue bailing out undeserving corporations, why not really think outside the box? Rep. Louie Gohmert (R., Texas) suggests an across-the-board reprieve on paying 2008 income taxes. This would leave an extra $1.2 trillion in the hands of Americans, who are the best stewards of their own money. Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell proposes a one-year moratorium on corporate income taxes in order to stimulate investment, job creation and the like. That wouldn’t be as popular, for understandable reasons.
The details can be negotiated, but this sort of approach would certainly create more jobs and spur more consumer demand than paying for a lot of asphalt. It would buy a lot more prosperity than any corporate bailout. Politically, it could buy Obama and Congress a year to formulate a serious tax-reform proposal. And — here’s the amazing part — it would be much cheaper than what we’ve spent already.
Old New Deal?
George Will
Sunday, November 30, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. "Yes," he replied, "it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years." It did take 25 years, until November 1954, for the Dow to return to the peak it reached in September 1929. So caution is sensible concerning calls for a new New Deal.
The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America's biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending -- President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt -- unemployment was 17.2 percent.
"I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started," lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.
In "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bloomberg News argues that government policies, beyond the Federal Reserve's tight money, deepened and prolonged the Depression. The policies included encouraging strong unions and wages higher than lagging productivity justified, on the theory that workers' spending would be stimulative. Instead, corporate profits -- prerequisites for job-creating investments -- were excessively drained into labor expenses that left many workers priced out of the market.
In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of UCLA and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries. These policies expressed the New Deal premise that the Depression was caused by excessive competition that first reduced prices and wages, and then employment and consumer demand. In a forthcoming paper, Ohanian argues that "much of the depth of the Depression" is explained by Hoover's policy -- a precursor of the New Deal mentality -- of pressuring businesses to keep nominal wages fixed.
Furthermore, Hoover's 1932 increase in the top income tax rate, from 25 percent to 63 percent, was unhelpful. And FDR's hyperkinetic New Deal created uncertainties that paralyzed private-sector decision-making. Which sounds familiar.
Bear Stearns? Broker a merger. Lehman Brothers? Death sentence. The $700 billion is for cleaning up toxic assets? Maybe not. Writes Russell Roberts of George Mason University:
"By acting without rhyme or reason, politicians have destroyed the rules of the game. There is no reason to invest, no reason to take risk, no reason to be prudent, no reason to look for buyers if your firm is failing. Everything is up in the air and as a result, the only prudent policy is to wait and see what the government will do next. The frenetic efforts of FDR had the same impact: Net investment was negative through much of the 1930s."
Barack Obama says the next stimulus should deliver a "jolt." His adviser Austan Goolsbee says it must be big enough to "startle the thing into submission." Their theory is that the crisis is largely psychological, requiring shock treatment. But shocks from government have been plentiful.
Unfortunately, one thing government can do quickly and efficiently -- distribute checks -- could fail to stimulate because Americans might do with the money what they have been rightly criticized for not doing nearly enough: save it. Because individual consumption is 70 percent of economic activity, St. Augustine's prayer ("Give me chastity and continence, but not yet") is echoed today: Make Americans thrifty, but not now.
Obama's "rescue plan for the middle class" includes a tax credit for businesses "for each new employee they hire" in America over the next two years. The assumption is that businesses will create jobs that would not have been created without the subsidy. If so, the subsidy will suffuse the economy with inefficiencies -- labor costs not justified by value added. Here we go again? A new New Deal would vindicate pessimists who say that history is not one damn thing after another, it is the same damn thing over and over.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. "Yes," he replied, "it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years." It did take 25 years, until November 1954, for the Dow to return to the peak it reached in September 1929. So caution is sensible concerning calls for a new New Deal.
The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America's biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending -- President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt -- unemployment was 17.2 percent.
"I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started," lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.
In "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bloomberg News argues that government policies, beyond the Federal Reserve's tight money, deepened and prolonged the Depression. The policies included encouraging strong unions and wages higher than lagging productivity justified, on the theory that workers' spending would be stimulative. Instead, corporate profits -- prerequisites for job-creating investments -- were excessively drained into labor expenses that left many workers priced out of the market.
In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of UCLA and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries. These policies expressed the New Deal premise that the Depression was caused by excessive competition that first reduced prices and wages, and then employment and consumer demand. In a forthcoming paper, Ohanian argues that "much of the depth of the Depression" is explained by Hoover's policy -- a precursor of the New Deal mentality -- of pressuring businesses to keep nominal wages fixed.
Furthermore, Hoover's 1932 increase in the top income tax rate, from 25 percent to 63 percent, was unhelpful. And FDR's hyperkinetic New Deal created uncertainties that paralyzed private-sector decision-making. Which sounds familiar.
Bear Stearns? Broker a merger. Lehman Brothers? Death sentence. The $700 billion is for cleaning up toxic assets? Maybe not. Writes Russell Roberts of George Mason University:
"By acting without rhyme or reason, politicians have destroyed the rules of the game. There is no reason to invest, no reason to take risk, no reason to be prudent, no reason to look for buyers if your firm is failing. Everything is up in the air and as a result, the only prudent policy is to wait and see what the government will do next. The frenetic efforts of FDR had the same impact: Net investment was negative through much of the 1930s."
Barack Obama says the next stimulus should deliver a "jolt." His adviser Austan Goolsbee says it must be big enough to "startle the thing into submission." Their theory is that the crisis is largely psychological, requiring shock treatment. But shocks from government have been plentiful.
Unfortunately, one thing government can do quickly and efficiently -- distribute checks -- could fail to stimulate because Americans might do with the money what they have been rightly criticized for not doing nearly enough: save it. Because individual consumption is 70 percent of economic activity, St. Augustine's prayer ("Give me chastity and continence, but not yet") is echoed today: Make Americans thrifty, but not now.
Obama's "rescue plan for the middle class" includes a tax credit for businesses "for each new employee they hire" in America over the next two years. The assumption is that businesses will create jobs that would not have been created without the subsidy. If so, the subsidy will suffuse the economy with inefficiencies -- labor costs not justified by value added. Here we go again? A new New Deal would vindicate pessimists who say that history is not one damn thing after another, it is the same damn thing over and over.
When the Warmest in History Isn't
Debra J. Saunders
Monday, December 01, 2008
Here's another reason why people don't trust newspapers. When science reporters write about, say, hormone therapy or drinking red wine, they report on studies that find that hormones or red wine can be good for you, as well as studies that suggest otherwise. Any science involving complex organisms is rarely black and white.
When it comes to global warming, newspapers play up stories that reinforce the prevalent the-sky-is-falling belief that global warming is human-caused and catastrophic. But if a study or scientist does not portend the end of the world as we know it, it rarely rates as news.
In that spirit, many papers (including The Chronicle) have reported on a UC San Diego science historian who reviewed 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003, and concluded, "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."
Over 10 years, not one study challenged the orthodoxy -- does that sound right to you? If that were true, it would strongly suggest that, despite conflicting evidence in this wide and changing world, no scientist dares challenge the politically correct position on the issue.
No wonder, David Bellamy -- an Australian botanist who was involved in some 400 TV productions, only to see his TV career go south after he questioned global warming orthodoxy -- wrote in The Australian last week, "It's not even science anymore; it's anti-science." Bellamy notes that official data show that "in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased." Exhibit B: Richard S. Lindzen, the MIT Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, recently wrote, "There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995."
Such findings rarely are reported, even as, Marc Morano, communications director for the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee told me, "Scientists keep coming out of the woodwork" to challenge the so-called consensus. "It's almost like a bandwagon effect."
The Global Warming Petition Project urges Washington to reject the Kyoto international global warming pact as there is "no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." So far, The Politico reports, more than 31,000 scientists have signed it.
The latest skirmish in the global warming war -- barely reported in America -- occurred after two bloggers found that the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies data wrongly cast this October as the warmest in recorded history. It turns out that the mistake was due to an error that wrongly tapped September temperature records from Russia. Christopher Booker of The Sunday Telegraph of London found the mistake "startling" in light of other contrary climate statistics, including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration findings of 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month.
In an e-mail, Goddard researcher Gavin Schmidt explained, "The incorrect analysis was online for less than 24 hours." (Thank bloggers Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist, and Canadian computer analyst Steve McIntyre for catching the mistake.) The error occurred because a report "had the wrong month label attached. There is quality control at NOAA and GISS but this particular problem had not been noticed before and the existing QC procedures didn't catch it. These have now been amended."
As for the snowfall records and low temperatures cited by Booker, Schmidt chalked them up to "cherry picking" data. He added, "Far more important are the long-term trends."
Now, honest mistakes happen -- even in high-powered, well-funded research facilities. Just last year -- again thanks to the vigilance of Watts and McIntyre -- Goddard had to reconfigure its findings and recognize 1934 -- not 1998, as it had figured -- as the hottest year on record in American history.
Alas, it is hard to see Goddard as objective when its director, James Hansen, testified in a London court in September in support of six eco-vandals. A jury then acquitted the six Greenpeace activists on charges of vandalizing a British coal-fired power plant based on the "lawful excuse" defense that their use of force would prevent greater damage to the environment after Hansen predicted the one Kingsnorth plant could push "400 species" into extinction.
Of course, he could be wrong.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Here's another reason why people don't trust newspapers. When science reporters write about, say, hormone therapy or drinking red wine, they report on studies that find that hormones or red wine can be good for you, as well as studies that suggest otherwise. Any science involving complex organisms is rarely black and white.
When it comes to global warming, newspapers play up stories that reinforce the prevalent the-sky-is-falling belief that global warming is human-caused and catastrophic. But if a study or scientist does not portend the end of the world as we know it, it rarely rates as news.
In that spirit, many papers (including The Chronicle) have reported on a UC San Diego science historian who reviewed 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003, and concluded, "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."
Over 10 years, not one study challenged the orthodoxy -- does that sound right to you? If that were true, it would strongly suggest that, despite conflicting evidence in this wide and changing world, no scientist dares challenge the politically correct position on the issue.
No wonder, David Bellamy -- an Australian botanist who was involved in some 400 TV productions, only to see his TV career go south after he questioned global warming orthodoxy -- wrote in The Australian last week, "It's not even science anymore; it's anti-science." Bellamy notes that official data show that "in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased." Exhibit B: Richard S. Lindzen, the MIT Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, recently wrote, "There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995."
Such findings rarely are reported, even as, Marc Morano, communications director for the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee told me, "Scientists keep coming out of the woodwork" to challenge the so-called consensus. "It's almost like a bandwagon effect."
The Global Warming Petition Project urges Washington to reject the Kyoto international global warming pact as there is "no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." So far, The Politico reports, more than 31,000 scientists have signed it.
The latest skirmish in the global warming war -- barely reported in America -- occurred after two bloggers found that the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies data wrongly cast this October as the warmest in recorded history. It turns out that the mistake was due to an error that wrongly tapped September temperature records from Russia. Christopher Booker of The Sunday Telegraph of London found the mistake "startling" in light of other contrary climate statistics, including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration findings of 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month.
In an e-mail, Goddard researcher Gavin Schmidt explained, "The incorrect analysis was online for less than 24 hours." (Thank bloggers Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist, and Canadian computer analyst Steve McIntyre for catching the mistake.) The error occurred because a report "had the wrong month label attached. There is quality control at NOAA and GISS but this particular problem had not been noticed before and the existing QC procedures didn't catch it. These have now been amended."
As for the snowfall records and low temperatures cited by Booker, Schmidt chalked them up to "cherry picking" data. He added, "Far more important are the long-term trends."
Now, honest mistakes happen -- even in high-powered, well-funded research facilities. Just last year -- again thanks to the vigilance of Watts and McIntyre -- Goddard had to reconfigure its findings and recognize 1934 -- not 1998, as it had figured -- as the hottest year on record in American history.
Alas, it is hard to see Goddard as objective when its director, James Hansen, testified in a London court in September in support of six eco-vandals. A jury then acquitted the six Greenpeace activists on charges of vandalizing a British coal-fired power plant based on the "lawful excuse" defense that their use of force would prevent greater damage to the environment after Hansen predicted the one Kingsnorth plant could push "400 species" into extinction.
Of course, he could be wrong.
Letter to a Handcuffed Feminist
Mike S. Adams
Monday, December 01, 2008
Dear Handcuffed feminist:
I want to thank you, first of all, for taking the time to attend my recent speech at Duquesne University. I don’t know how you managed to handcuff yourself, gag yourself, and then place a sign across your lap saying, “Kick the feminist.” I’m just glad no one in the audience accepted your invitation.
I was concerned that you would jump up and interrupt me at some point during the speech. I was surprised that you did not. I was even more surprised that, at the end of the speech, someone came up and handed me a note saying “This is from the handcuffed chick. She wanted me to give it to you.”
Your note, indicating that you had to leave the speech early because you were working the late shift, was pleasant in tone. I hope you weren’t offended that I did not use the e-mail address you supplied in order to e-mail you the next day per your request. There’s just something about a handcuffed feminist that kind of scares me. So I decided to discard the message and go drink a few beers with a couple of chicks who came to my speech wearing black dresses (and no handcuffs).
I received your email message the day after my speech, which indicated that you agreed with the content of my speech and which offered your assistance should I ever be prevented from speaking on a college campus in the future. I noticed that you closed your note by stating that you hoped I did not mind your little protest outside the door of my speech.
I am writing to you today to let you know that I did mind your little protest outside the door of my speech. I really got nothing positive out of it. In fact, I was annoyed with it because it is part of a major problem on our college campus today; namely, the use of protest simply for the sake of protest.
It is my contention that the self-described college liberals of your generation are even more spoiled and less informed than the college liberals of the 1960s. Generally speaking, you (and your generation of liberals) are inclined to protest against things you don’t understand – basing your protests on vague emotions rather than specific facts. You come to protests completely unprepared to offer any kind of solution to the problems – the same ones you fail to understand. And, finally, you are most concerned with drawing attention to yourselves at speeches – as opposed to actually drawing information from the speaker.
Let me provide you with some examples I’ve observed at some of my speeches:
Protestors of my speech at The University of New Hampshire broke into glass cases and spray-painted swastikas on my picture. Then, when my speech was over, the protestors asked really pointed questions like “Do you want to bring back slavery?” and “Do you think it’s OK to beat a gay person with a baseball bat?” Remarkably, after the liberals had vandalized my posters, one liberal asked if I could learn to be a little more civil in my discourse. He went through the line three times to ask me that same question.
Like I said, the protestors have no idea what they are protesting – the speech wasn’t about legalizing slavery and the assault of gays. But the protestors do manage to draw a lot of attention. Indeed, UNH provided five armed police officers and a police escort (which I refused) to take me back to my hotel.
Protestors of my speech at Appalachian State University couldn’t think of a single objection to the substance of my points so (in the middle of the Q & A) they ran out of the room after shutting off the lights in the auditorium. The audience just sat there in the dark wondering why the un-bathed protestors were angry.
We never figured out their objections to the substance of the speech but they did manage to draw attention to themselves. People just scratched their heads – sort of like they did when they saw you sitting in the handcuffs.
Protestors of my speech at The University of Oregon sat on a row and talked audibly throughout a substantial proportion of the speech. One of them, who was very obviously gay, sat knitting a sock and talking to the guy to his right. The guy was so stoned you could blindfold him with dental floss. They also laughed audibly at inappropriate times in order to distract me during the speech.
But during the Q & A I didn’t get a single question from any one of them – nothing that could have helped me determine the basis of their protestations. They made no contribution to the debate. But they did draw a lot of attention to themselves. And a gay dude got himself one new sock. (Since he didn’t knit two I assumed he wasn’t a bi-soxual).
Protestors at my speech at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst seemed especially concerned about racism – or so I thought. During the Q & A there was a Planned Parenthood supporter arguing that the organization had no presence in the State of Mississippi. I argued that they did have a presence in all areas with high black populations. And I accused them of aiding and abetting the mass slaughter of black babies – with black abortion rates soaring high above white abortion rates nationwide.
Soon after I finished my defense of innocent black life protestors in the back of the room began screaming “Racist, sexist, anti-gay. Right wing bigots go away!” They did not seem to hear or understand the content of the speech. But they did draw attention to themselves and, eventually, they seized control of the microphone. I was escorted from the room by two undercover bodyguards as the event was ended prematurely.
A protestor at my speech at Agnes Scott College handed out literature for Amnesty International, seemingly unaware that the speech was on the rights of the unborn, not the rights of prisoners. But that didn’t stop her from ruining the Q & A with completely inane and irrelevant questions like “Dr. Adams, do you love yourself?” That question would have been more relevant at one of the feminist masturbation workshops.
I finally confronted the protestor at Agnes Scott pointing out that she hadn’t listened to or understood the speech. So she approached me after the speech asking for an apology for offending her. The speech, by the way, was about how feminists have started to use one imaginary constitutional right – the right to be un-offended – to keep people from trying to restrict another imaginary constitutional right – the right to murder innocent children. We never had an actual discussion about her problems with the content of my speech or any of her solutions. But she managed to get everyone in the room to focus their attention upon her. Like you, that was really her only objective.
I know that under the First Amendment you have a right to protest my speeches. But I would prefer it if you would not just protest for the sake of protesting without some sort of goal (other than just drawing attention to yourself). Even a dog can draw attention to himself by exercising his right to lick his genitals. But no one wants to watch him do it endlessly.
In conclusion, I would like to thank you for attending my speech. But I would respectfully ask you to refrain from protesting another one of my speeches until you are more informed on the subject matter, more willing to offer constructive solutions, and less in need of drawing attention to yourself.
In my next column, I’m going to respectfully ask you to quit voting.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Dear Handcuffed feminist:
I want to thank you, first of all, for taking the time to attend my recent speech at Duquesne University. I don’t know how you managed to handcuff yourself, gag yourself, and then place a sign across your lap saying, “Kick the feminist.” I’m just glad no one in the audience accepted your invitation.
I was concerned that you would jump up and interrupt me at some point during the speech. I was surprised that you did not. I was even more surprised that, at the end of the speech, someone came up and handed me a note saying “This is from the handcuffed chick. She wanted me to give it to you.”
Your note, indicating that you had to leave the speech early because you were working the late shift, was pleasant in tone. I hope you weren’t offended that I did not use the e-mail address you supplied in order to e-mail you the next day per your request. There’s just something about a handcuffed feminist that kind of scares me. So I decided to discard the message and go drink a few beers with a couple of chicks who came to my speech wearing black dresses (and no handcuffs).
I received your email message the day after my speech, which indicated that you agreed with the content of my speech and which offered your assistance should I ever be prevented from speaking on a college campus in the future. I noticed that you closed your note by stating that you hoped I did not mind your little protest outside the door of my speech.
I am writing to you today to let you know that I did mind your little protest outside the door of my speech. I really got nothing positive out of it. In fact, I was annoyed with it because it is part of a major problem on our college campus today; namely, the use of protest simply for the sake of protest.
It is my contention that the self-described college liberals of your generation are even more spoiled and less informed than the college liberals of the 1960s. Generally speaking, you (and your generation of liberals) are inclined to protest against things you don’t understand – basing your protests on vague emotions rather than specific facts. You come to protests completely unprepared to offer any kind of solution to the problems – the same ones you fail to understand. And, finally, you are most concerned with drawing attention to yourselves at speeches – as opposed to actually drawing information from the speaker.
Let me provide you with some examples I’ve observed at some of my speeches:
Protestors of my speech at The University of New Hampshire broke into glass cases and spray-painted swastikas on my picture. Then, when my speech was over, the protestors asked really pointed questions like “Do you want to bring back slavery?” and “Do you think it’s OK to beat a gay person with a baseball bat?” Remarkably, after the liberals had vandalized my posters, one liberal asked if I could learn to be a little more civil in my discourse. He went through the line three times to ask me that same question.
Like I said, the protestors have no idea what they are protesting – the speech wasn’t about legalizing slavery and the assault of gays. But the protestors do manage to draw a lot of attention. Indeed, UNH provided five armed police officers and a police escort (which I refused) to take me back to my hotel.
Protestors of my speech at Appalachian State University couldn’t think of a single objection to the substance of my points so (in the middle of the Q & A) they ran out of the room after shutting off the lights in the auditorium. The audience just sat there in the dark wondering why the un-bathed protestors were angry.
We never figured out their objections to the substance of the speech but they did manage to draw attention to themselves. People just scratched their heads – sort of like they did when they saw you sitting in the handcuffs.
Protestors of my speech at The University of Oregon sat on a row and talked audibly throughout a substantial proportion of the speech. One of them, who was very obviously gay, sat knitting a sock and talking to the guy to his right. The guy was so stoned you could blindfold him with dental floss. They also laughed audibly at inappropriate times in order to distract me during the speech.
But during the Q & A I didn’t get a single question from any one of them – nothing that could have helped me determine the basis of their protestations. They made no contribution to the debate. But they did draw a lot of attention to themselves. And a gay dude got himself one new sock. (Since he didn’t knit two I assumed he wasn’t a bi-soxual).
Protestors at my speech at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst seemed especially concerned about racism – or so I thought. During the Q & A there was a Planned Parenthood supporter arguing that the organization had no presence in the State of Mississippi. I argued that they did have a presence in all areas with high black populations. And I accused them of aiding and abetting the mass slaughter of black babies – with black abortion rates soaring high above white abortion rates nationwide.
Soon after I finished my defense of innocent black life protestors in the back of the room began screaming “Racist, sexist, anti-gay. Right wing bigots go away!” They did not seem to hear or understand the content of the speech. But they did draw attention to themselves and, eventually, they seized control of the microphone. I was escorted from the room by two undercover bodyguards as the event was ended prematurely.
A protestor at my speech at Agnes Scott College handed out literature for Amnesty International, seemingly unaware that the speech was on the rights of the unborn, not the rights of prisoners. But that didn’t stop her from ruining the Q & A with completely inane and irrelevant questions like “Dr. Adams, do you love yourself?” That question would have been more relevant at one of the feminist masturbation workshops.
I finally confronted the protestor at Agnes Scott pointing out that she hadn’t listened to or understood the speech. So she approached me after the speech asking for an apology for offending her. The speech, by the way, was about how feminists have started to use one imaginary constitutional right – the right to be un-offended – to keep people from trying to restrict another imaginary constitutional right – the right to murder innocent children. We never had an actual discussion about her problems with the content of my speech or any of her solutions. But she managed to get everyone in the room to focus their attention upon her. Like you, that was really her only objective.
I know that under the First Amendment you have a right to protest my speeches. But I would prefer it if you would not just protest for the sake of protesting without some sort of goal (other than just drawing attention to yourself). Even a dog can draw attention to himself by exercising his right to lick his genitals. But no one wants to watch him do it endlessly.
In conclusion, I would like to thank you for attending my speech. But I would respectfully ask you to refrain from protesting another one of my speeches until you are more informed on the subject matter, more willing to offer constructive solutions, and less in need of drawing attention to yourself.
In my next column, I’m going to respectfully ask you to quit voting.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Notice from a Navy SEAL
This was a notice posted outside a wounded Navy SEAL's hospital room. Click on picture for full size view.
The Death of Logic
Burt Prelutsky
Friday, November 28, 2008
The problem with being a logical human being is that every day, sometimes every hour, you get blind-sided like a quarterback cursed with an underachieving offensive line.
It’s bad enough when a movie or a mystery novel scores a big fat zero on the logic meter, but when it happens in real life, if you’re anything like me, you find yourself wondering if you have somehow followed Alice down the rabbit hole.
For instance, one day not too long ago, a headline in the sports section of my local daily, the Los Angeles Times, insisted that black players were underrepresented in major league baseball. On the face of it, that is one of the silliest examples of race-baiting that one could possibly come up with. That was the same day they ran 17 photos in the section, and all but four were of black athletes, and one of the four was a race horse. (I was moved to write a letter to the editor, asking if perhaps black athletes were over-represented in the paper.)
The fact is, professional baseball is one of the only true meritocracies left in America. If you can hit, catch or throw a baseball better than 99.9999999% of the human race, the team owners want to make you an instant millionaire, and the folks signing your paycheck don’t care what color your skin is or whether your name is Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Ishiro Suzuki or Hideki Matsui.
Still, one can’t help but ponder how the Times would go about making things right. Would they begin by getting rid of all the Latino players from Mexico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic?
But as asinine as that article was, the Times sports section managed to out-do itself more recently. They ran a piece suggesting that racism was the reason that there were only four blacks coaching football at the major colleges. That particular story ran on November 5th, the day after a black man was elected president of the United States, garnering 66 million votes. But I guess the Times missed the news because they were so busy fretting about football coaches.
This kind of focusing on presumed racism is enough to give a person pause. While everyone, well perhaps not everyone, was celebrating the election of Barack Obama, I found myself wondering what happens in 2012 if Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal defeats Obama in his bid for re-election? Will that mean that we are back to being a racist society? I’m dead certain that will be the conclusion of the Times, and one shared by Chris Matthews, Alan Colmes and Michelle Obama.
Still, as absurd and illogical as my newspaper is, that’s nothing compared to the lunacy taking place in our courts. To take a recent example, 100 Somali Muslims sued Gold’n Plump, a meat processing outfit with plants in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the Work Connection, an employment agency, for $350,000…and, quite naturally, won. It seems the Muslims took five prayer breaks a day, which resulted in the non-Muslim workers complaining that it was unfair to them, while the employment agency had asked the Muslims to sign a form acknowledging that they might be required to handle pork.
The lawsuits, by the way, were filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Your tax dollars at work. It occurs to me that the motto at the EEOC, like that in Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” is that all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Why anyone in his right mind would hire people who feel entitled to five prayer breaks a day is beyond me, but clearly the folks at the EEOC have way too much time on their hands. Come to think of it, perhaps that would be a good place for the Somalis to go looking for new jobs. But I suppose Washington is not the place to settle if you can’t risk coming in contact with pork.
In conclusion, as most of you are aware, homosexuals have been rioting pretty much non-stop ever since California’s electorate once again put the kibosh on same-sex marriages. They have picketed and vandalized Catholic and Mormon churches to display their displeasure, which suggests to me that, instead of “gays” being their euphemism of choice, perhaps “cranks,” “louts” or “bigots” might be more appropriate.
The one group of churches they haven’t gone after are the black ones, even though 70% of blacks voted in favor of marriage being limited to one man and one woman. What’s more, blacks were very vocal about objecting to homosexual marriages being touted as a civil right. The fact that, in spite of all this, homosexuals have given black churches a wide berth suggests that while gays may not always practice safe sex, they certainly practice safe demonstrations.
Friday, November 28, 2008
The problem with being a logical human being is that every day, sometimes every hour, you get blind-sided like a quarterback cursed with an underachieving offensive line.
It’s bad enough when a movie or a mystery novel scores a big fat zero on the logic meter, but when it happens in real life, if you’re anything like me, you find yourself wondering if you have somehow followed Alice down the rabbit hole.
For instance, one day not too long ago, a headline in the sports section of my local daily, the Los Angeles Times, insisted that black players were underrepresented in major league baseball. On the face of it, that is one of the silliest examples of race-baiting that one could possibly come up with. That was the same day they ran 17 photos in the section, and all but four were of black athletes, and one of the four was a race horse. (I was moved to write a letter to the editor, asking if perhaps black athletes were over-represented in the paper.)
The fact is, professional baseball is one of the only true meritocracies left in America. If you can hit, catch or throw a baseball better than 99.9999999% of the human race, the team owners want to make you an instant millionaire, and the folks signing your paycheck don’t care what color your skin is or whether your name is Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Ishiro Suzuki or Hideki Matsui.
Still, one can’t help but ponder how the Times would go about making things right. Would they begin by getting rid of all the Latino players from Mexico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic?
But as asinine as that article was, the Times sports section managed to out-do itself more recently. They ran a piece suggesting that racism was the reason that there were only four blacks coaching football at the major colleges. That particular story ran on November 5th, the day after a black man was elected president of the United States, garnering 66 million votes. But I guess the Times missed the news because they were so busy fretting about football coaches.
This kind of focusing on presumed racism is enough to give a person pause. While everyone, well perhaps not everyone, was celebrating the election of Barack Obama, I found myself wondering what happens in 2012 if Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal defeats Obama in his bid for re-election? Will that mean that we are back to being a racist society? I’m dead certain that will be the conclusion of the Times, and one shared by Chris Matthews, Alan Colmes and Michelle Obama.
Still, as absurd and illogical as my newspaper is, that’s nothing compared to the lunacy taking place in our courts. To take a recent example, 100 Somali Muslims sued Gold’n Plump, a meat processing outfit with plants in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the Work Connection, an employment agency, for $350,000…and, quite naturally, won. It seems the Muslims took five prayer breaks a day, which resulted in the non-Muslim workers complaining that it was unfair to them, while the employment agency had asked the Muslims to sign a form acknowledging that they might be required to handle pork.
The lawsuits, by the way, were filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Your tax dollars at work. It occurs to me that the motto at the EEOC, like that in Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” is that all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Why anyone in his right mind would hire people who feel entitled to five prayer breaks a day is beyond me, but clearly the folks at the EEOC have way too much time on their hands. Come to think of it, perhaps that would be a good place for the Somalis to go looking for new jobs. But I suppose Washington is not the place to settle if you can’t risk coming in contact with pork.
In conclusion, as most of you are aware, homosexuals have been rioting pretty much non-stop ever since California’s electorate once again put the kibosh on same-sex marriages. They have picketed and vandalized Catholic and Mormon churches to display their displeasure, which suggests to me that, instead of “gays” being their euphemism of choice, perhaps “cranks,” “louts” or “bigots” might be more appropriate.
The one group of churches they haven’t gone after are the black ones, even though 70% of blacks voted in favor of marriage being limited to one man and one woman. What’s more, blacks were very vocal about objecting to homosexual marriages being touted as a civil right. The fact that, in spite of all this, homosexuals have given black churches a wide berth suggests that while gays may not always practice safe sex, they certainly practice safe demonstrations.
Giving Thanks for Self-Reliant Americans
Michelle Malkin
Friday, November 28, 2008
In the Year of Bottomless Bailouts, I am most grateful this Thanksgiving for Americans who refuse to abandon thrift, personal responsibility and self-reliance. When the moochers and entitlement-mongers drive you mad, remember that our nation still serves as home to millions of citizens who do for themselves. Like our Founding Fathers, they are God-fearing people -- the ones elitist pundits ridicule as "oogedy-boogedy" -- who will never put their faith in the Cult of You Owe Me.
They are people like my reader Jen, who runs a family farm called the Double Nickel in New Mexico. Tired of all the handwringing, "in times like these" rationalizations for unprecedented federal intervention in the financial markets to rescue beleaguered businesses and homeowners, Jen wrote me a letter this week about her own plight and triumph over adversity:
"I am writing to you to share my story of how one can survive hard times and land solidly on one's feet. … So here goes: My husband had an auto accident on Jan. 1, 2005, and our lives and finances changed dramatically. Our income was cut in half, as he has permanent injuries and went from being a field officer to a desk job in a less fast-paced career."
Instead of staying in a home they couldn't afford and waiting for a mortgage rescue from the savior Barack Obama, Jen, her husband and their four children moved to New Mexico because of the much lower cost of living and college tuition expenses. One of her sons is now a soldier -- the third generation in her family to serve, including Jen's father, who was killed in Vietnam. The other kids are home-schooled students (among a growing population of home-schooled kids, whom "The View's" condescending co-host Joy Behar recently derided on the show as being "demented"). Jen continues:
"We sold our lovely home, bought a rundown, fixer-up place and converted it into a farm that could provide garden vegetables to can and an area to have some animals to provide eggs, chickens, ducks, turkey, geese, sheep and goats. … Freecycle and Craigslist turned out to be wonderful assets, as most of our animals came for free or for barter -- and the children and I mucked out stalls on a ranch for sheep."
Yes, they raise turkeys and other animals, and sell them for profit. This enterprise makes them, in the eyes of The New York Times editorial board, which recently decried Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's visit to a turkey farm, "executioners." That's language the Times would never think of using to describe, say, the Weather Underground terrorists who targeted police officers in cold blood. But poultry farmers? Brand 'em with an "M" for murderers.
But I digress.
Instead of awaiting the next stimulus check from the Borrow-Spend-Repeat-Panic politicians in Washington, Jen explains how the family has cut costs:
"I learned how to make my own shampoo, toothpaste, soaps, cloth napkins, dish scrubbies, potholders, skirts (mend all clothes) and most meals from scratch. We heat our home exclusively with wood, and I am currently growing a winter garden. The spring garden will be in containers by the last week of December to prepare for spring planting. I do not see this as a downfall or a tragedy. For those worried about holiday spending: I spent only $100 for a family of six last Christmas, and most of that [on] underwear, socks and the meal."
And she adamantly rejects the victim card:
"This accident has been a blessing for my family. The pain that my husband has daily is not the blessing, but that he is alive and able to continue to watch his children grow into adulthood.
"It also has been wonderful to know that we live in a nation that affords us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves from suburbanites to a country-dwelling farm family. I am ashamed to see the American spirit that made our nation so great now turned into nothing."
Thanks to self-reliant Americans like Jen, that spirit lives. In times like these, they are our greatest blessing.
Friday, November 28, 2008
In the Year of Bottomless Bailouts, I am most grateful this Thanksgiving for Americans who refuse to abandon thrift, personal responsibility and self-reliance. When the moochers and entitlement-mongers drive you mad, remember that our nation still serves as home to millions of citizens who do for themselves. Like our Founding Fathers, they are God-fearing people -- the ones elitist pundits ridicule as "oogedy-boogedy" -- who will never put their faith in the Cult of You Owe Me.
They are people like my reader Jen, who runs a family farm called the Double Nickel in New Mexico. Tired of all the handwringing, "in times like these" rationalizations for unprecedented federal intervention in the financial markets to rescue beleaguered businesses and homeowners, Jen wrote me a letter this week about her own plight and triumph over adversity:
"I am writing to you to share my story of how one can survive hard times and land solidly on one's feet. … So here goes: My husband had an auto accident on Jan. 1, 2005, and our lives and finances changed dramatically. Our income was cut in half, as he has permanent injuries and went from being a field officer to a desk job in a less fast-paced career."
Instead of staying in a home they couldn't afford and waiting for a mortgage rescue from the savior Barack Obama, Jen, her husband and their four children moved to New Mexico because of the much lower cost of living and college tuition expenses. One of her sons is now a soldier -- the third generation in her family to serve, including Jen's father, who was killed in Vietnam. The other kids are home-schooled students (among a growing population of home-schooled kids, whom "The View's" condescending co-host Joy Behar recently derided on the show as being "demented"). Jen continues:
"We sold our lovely home, bought a rundown, fixer-up place and converted it into a farm that could provide garden vegetables to can and an area to have some animals to provide eggs, chickens, ducks, turkey, geese, sheep and goats. … Freecycle and Craigslist turned out to be wonderful assets, as most of our animals came for free or for barter -- and the children and I mucked out stalls on a ranch for sheep."
Yes, they raise turkeys and other animals, and sell them for profit. This enterprise makes them, in the eyes of The New York Times editorial board, which recently decried Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's visit to a turkey farm, "executioners." That's language the Times would never think of using to describe, say, the Weather Underground terrorists who targeted police officers in cold blood. But poultry farmers? Brand 'em with an "M" for murderers.
But I digress.
Instead of awaiting the next stimulus check from the Borrow-Spend-Repeat-Panic politicians in Washington, Jen explains how the family has cut costs:
"I learned how to make my own shampoo, toothpaste, soaps, cloth napkins, dish scrubbies, potholders, skirts (mend all clothes) and most meals from scratch. We heat our home exclusively with wood, and I am currently growing a winter garden. The spring garden will be in containers by the last week of December to prepare for spring planting. I do not see this as a downfall or a tragedy. For those worried about holiday spending: I spent only $100 for a family of six last Christmas, and most of that [on] underwear, socks and the meal."
And she adamantly rejects the victim card:
"This accident has been a blessing for my family. The pain that my husband has daily is not the blessing, but that he is alive and able to continue to watch his children grow into adulthood.
"It also has been wonderful to know that we live in a nation that affords us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves from suburbanites to a country-dwelling farm family. I am ashamed to see the American spirit that made our nation so great now turned into nothing."
Thanks to self-reliant Americans like Jen, that spirit lives. In times like these, they are our greatest blessing.
Al Qaeda to Obama: 'Welcome aboard'
Kevin McCullough
Sunday, November 30, 2008
One theme that has become noticeably absent from Barack Obama's recent press announcements, his weekly internet broadcasts, or his discussion of public policy from his imaginary "Office of the President Elect" (complete with its own seal) has been the discussion of immediately bringing the troops home.
The signs of Barack Obama going back on his biggest direct campaign promise are numerous. Secretary Gates is slated to stay on as his Defense Secretary. By extension that means that a number of items will likely not be touched. For starters it is likely the new administration will not revise Iraq policy given that the final regions to be turned over may even occur as he is being sworn in. He is also highly unlikely to interfere with the Gates/Petraeus combination that secured the victory in Iraq and are ready to transport that model to finish the business in Afghanistan.
This week's terror attacks in India however may be the most significant signal to date that Obama is willing to adapt to a much more Bushian doctrine than anything seen before. Late in the day on Wednesday of this past week the Obama camp also toughened their rhetoric in noticeable tone that looked nothing like what Obama campaigned on for the last two years.
If you want to see Google News or Lexis Nexis sputter and short-circuit look for the last time Barack Obama was ever on the record as wishing to "destroy" terrorists of any variety.
Maybe this change has been brought on by sheer pragmatism, complete hyprocrisy, or an outright deception to the far-left progressive wing-nuts that even this week had to finally admit that Obama's shift in direction, and specifically his naming of Gates as Defense Secretary means:
And the reason it is so vital that those groups never be coddled--as we saw play out on our television over Thanksgiving--is because their belief in America's weakness cannot be allowed to become the belief in secret or public of the new Commander in Chief.
Ayman Al Zawihiri in referring to Obama as a house negro one week before the attacks commenced would have followed an Al Qaeda pattern of engagement. Have a senior official make a publicly inflammatory audio or video tape, then according to the timing agreed upon the series of attacks get carried out. It is not surprising to me to now be hearing of ties to Al Qaeda by the suicide-minded terrorists in Mumbai that executed a plan of ten attacks. Couple that with the warnings of the plot planned on the northeast corridor train systems in the U.S. and the "office of the president elect" may have gone from Thanksgiving feast to massive indigestion.
The point is clear, Joe Biden was right, the terrorists are waiting to test the will, deliberation, and persistence of the new administration. There will be a continual hope by those who wish to kill us that an opening will appear. An opening of weakness on the part of the American vigilence that they can exploit and carry out murder and mayhem.
It may have been very politically expedient to continue to degrade the Bush administration on the final weeks of the campaign trail. It may have been very provocative and seemingly "enlightened"--or at least labeled so by the press--for Obama to run on a completely anti-War on Terror platform. But as the President-Elect began to receive his first intelligence briefings and the "Oh (expletive deleted)" factor began to set in. Obama seems to have recognized that what America faces in the world today is an opposition that is committed, persistant, and extremely sophisticated in how it must be dealt with.
So if the far left nutters are sitting in the pajamas today feeling a huge bit of buyers' remorse for electing a man who appears to be ready to continue to implement the Bush Doctrine as we move forward to defend ourselves, let's just all affirm those fears rather heartily.
And on this weekend following the holiday to do so, let's all give thanks that Barack Obama is reading the principles of Abraham Lincoln, and steeling himself for the defense of our citizens in a pattern that is fashioned far more closely to the Bush administration than any of us--right or left--ever saw coming.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
One theme that has become noticeably absent from Barack Obama's recent press announcements, his weekly internet broadcasts, or his discussion of public policy from his imaginary "Office of the President Elect" (complete with its own seal) has been the discussion of immediately bringing the troops home.
The signs of Barack Obama going back on his biggest direct campaign promise are numerous. Secretary Gates is slated to stay on as his Defense Secretary. By extension that means that a number of items will likely not be touched. For starters it is likely the new administration will not revise Iraq policy given that the final regions to be turned over may even occur as he is being sworn in. He is also highly unlikely to interfere with the Gates/Petraeus combination that secured the victory in Iraq and are ready to transport that model to finish the business in Afghanistan.
This week's terror attacks in India however may be the most significant signal to date that Obama is willing to adapt to a much more Bushian doctrine than anything seen before. Late in the day on Wednesday of this past week the Obama camp also toughened their rhetoric in noticeable tone that looked nothing like what Obama campaigned on for the last two years.
“President-Elect Obama strongly condemns today's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and his thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and the people of India,” Obama spokesman Brooke Anderson said. “These coordinated attacks on innocent civilians demonstrate the grave and urgent threat of terrorism. The United States must continue to strengthen our partnerships with India and nations around the world to root out and destroy terrorist networks."Destroy terrorist networks?
If you want to see Google News or Lexis Nexis sputter and short-circuit look for the last time Barack Obama was ever on the record as wishing to "destroy" terrorists of any variety.
Maybe this change has been brought on by sheer pragmatism, complete hyprocrisy, or an outright deception to the far-left progressive wing-nuts that even this week had to finally admit that Obama's shift in direction, and specifically his naming of Gates as Defense Secretary means:
"The message would be clear: even Democrats agree that Democrats can't run the military."For someone who thought that Obama was more the wrong choice for America than McCain was the right one, I have to say these shifts impress me and give me some pause for thought. Obama's appointments have largely been Clinton retreads, a Reagen fed guy, and a George W. Bush defense secretary. These aren't the worst appointments that could be made by the man who held the hands of and personally nursed hopes and dreams of the Soros, MoveOn, and DailyKos constituency.
And the reason it is so vital that those groups never be coddled--as we saw play out on our television over Thanksgiving--is because their belief in America's weakness cannot be allowed to become the belief in secret or public of the new Commander in Chief.
Ayman Al Zawihiri in referring to Obama as a house negro one week before the attacks commenced would have followed an Al Qaeda pattern of engagement. Have a senior official make a publicly inflammatory audio or video tape, then according to the timing agreed upon the series of attacks get carried out. It is not surprising to me to now be hearing of ties to Al Qaeda by the suicide-minded terrorists in Mumbai that executed a plan of ten attacks. Couple that with the warnings of the plot planned on the northeast corridor train systems in the U.S. and the "office of the president elect" may have gone from Thanksgiving feast to massive indigestion.
The point is clear, Joe Biden was right, the terrorists are waiting to test the will, deliberation, and persistence of the new administration. There will be a continual hope by those who wish to kill us that an opening will appear. An opening of weakness on the part of the American vigilence that they can exploit and carry out murder and mayhem.
It may have been very politically expedient to continue to degrade the Bush administration on the final weeks of the campaign trail. It may have been very provocative and seemingly "enlightened"--or at least labeled so by the press--for Obama to run on a completely anti-War on Terror platform. But as the President-Elect began to receive his first intelligence briefings and the "Oh (expletive deleted)" factor began to set in. Obama seems to have recognized that what America faces in the world today is an opposition that is committed, persistant, and extremely sophisticated in how it must be dealt with.
So if the far left nutters are sitting in the pajamas today feeling a huge bit of buyers' remorse for electing a man who appears to be ready to continue to implement the Bush Doctrine as we move forward to defend ourselves, let's just all affirm those fears rather heartily.
And on this weekend following the holiday to do so, let's all give thanks that Barack Obama is reading the principles of Abraham Lincoln, and steeling himself for the defense of our citizens in a pattern that is fashioned far more closely to the Bush administration than any of us--right or left--ever saw coming.
Obama’s Grand Experiment: Global Warming Cap-and-Trade Policy
Tom Borelli
Saturday, November 29, 2008
The prospect that President-elect Barack Obama may keep the Bush tax cuts until 2011 has some clinging to hope he will postpone his liberal ideas for the economy’s sake.
There’s little chance of that when it comes to global warming, however, an issue on which Obama puts his ideology first and the nation’s economic growth second.
In a recent video statement to the Governors’ Global Climate Summit, Obama displayed unwavering support for strong federal action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Sounding like he was auditioning for a role in Al Gore’s next film, Obama said, “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”
Obama went on to promote his cap-and-trade policy, which, he said, “will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050.”
Through regulation, Obama hopes to transform our economy while “saving the planet.” He says he will accomplish his ambitious goals by investing in “solar power, wind power and next-generation biofuels. We will tap nuclear power, while making sure it’s safe. And we will develop clean coal technologies.”
Obama is creating his own version of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. In the middle of an economic crisis, Obama’s “Grand Experiment” is to build a federal bureaucracy to transform our economy by forcing it to run on costly unproven energy sources instead of established fossil fuels.
Under Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme, the government would set limits on industrial emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Companies that emit more than their allowance must buy “carbon credits” from businesses whose emissions are under their allotment. Over time, the government ratchets down the allowance for all industry, which will increase the cost of emissions.
Fossil fuels currently supply 85 percent of our energy needs, while non-greenhouse gas-emitting sources (such as nuclear, wind, solar and others) deliver only 15 percent. Since alternative energy supply is limited, emission reductions targets will be met by decreasing demand for fossil fuels by raising prices.
In short, Obama’s “Grand Experiment” will raise energy prices, slow economic growth and increase unemployment.
The coal industry will be the biggest casualty. Obama’s commitment to “develop clean coal” is questionable. During the presidential campaign he said, "[I]f somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted."
Obama’s attitude about coal is consistent with that of the Democratic leadership and its special interest allies.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has said, “That is coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick; it's global warming. It's ruining our country, it’s ruining our world. We’ve got to stop using fossil fuel.”
Vice President-elect Joe Biden has said, “We're not supporting clean coal” and “no coal plants here in America.”
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is a long-time coal industry foe. Activist groups like the Rainforest Action Network demand a ban on coal use because, “‘clean coal’ doesn't address the massive social and environmental costs of mining, transporting and refining coal.”
It’s clear that coal, clean or not, is not acceptable.
Since coal is used to generate 50 percent of our electricity, cap-and-trade will push utility bills higher.
The Congressional Budget Office found that investors and workers in the energy sector would suffer losses due to the decline in energy-intensive industries. Not surprisingly, since Obama’s victory, investors have punished coal stocks.
The CBO also says the cost of cap-and-trade will be “borne by consumers, who would face persistently higher prices for products like electricity and gasoline.” The CBO adds that these added costs would preferentially harm low-income households.
The cost to consumers in not unknown to Obama, who has acknowledged, "Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket..."
Despite overwhelming momentum for a ban on coal, some companies are in denial about the left’s war against coal. Recently, CEO Jim Rogers of Duke Energy – a coal dependent utility – participated in a press conference to voice his support of cap-and-trade legislation.
Rogers hopes a Congress run by Reid and Waxman and a President who promises to bankrupt his company will instead show mercy because he supported their cap-and-trade “solution.” Rogers’ fleeting effort is reminiscent of Neville Chamberlin’s failed appeasement strategy.
Obama’s steadfast support for cap-and-trade is increasingly putting him outside the mainstream, even the European mainstream Obama is said to greatly admire.
The European Union’s cap-and-trade experiment has been a resounding failure. At next week’s United Nations conference on climate change in Poland, nations will seriously discuss reducing commitments to limit greenhouse gas emissions because the price tag is too expensive, especially during a global economic crisis.
Will the economic crisis make Obama think twice about cap-and-trade? There’s no sign yet that it will.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
The prospect that President-elect Barack Obama may keep the Bush tax cuts until 2011 has some clinging to hope he will postpone his liberal ideas for the economy’s sake.
There’s little chance of that when it comes to global warming, however, an issue on which Obama puts his ideology first and the nation’s economic growth second.
In a recent video statement to the Governors’ Global Climate Summit, Obama displayed unwavering support for strong federal action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Sounding like he was auditioning for a role in Al Gore’s next film, Obama said, “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”
Obama went on to promote his cap-and-trade policy, which, he said, “will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050.”
Through regulation, Obama hopes to transform our economy while “saving the planet.” He says he will accomplish his ambitious goals by investing in “solar power, wind power and next-generation biofuels. We will tap nuclear power, while making sure it’s safe. And we will develop clean coal technologies.”
Obama is creating his own version of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. In the middle of an economic crisis, Obama’s “Grand Experiment” is to build a federal bureaucracy to transform our economy by forcing it to run on costly unproven energy sources instead of established fossil fuels.
Under Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme, the government would set limits on industrial emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Companies that emit more than their allowance must buy “carbon credits” from businesses whose emissions are under their allotment. Over time, the government ratchets down the allowance for all industry, which will increase the cost of emissions.
Fossil fuels currently supply 85 percent of our energy needs, while non-greenhouse gas-emitting sources (such as nuclear, wind, solar and others) deliver only 15 percent. Since alternative energy supply is limited, emission reductions targets will be met by decreasing demand for fossil fuels by raising prices.
In short, Obama’s “Grand Experiment” will raise energy prices, slow economic growth and increase unemployment.
The coal industry will be the biggest casualty. Obama’s commitment to “develop clean coal” is questionable. During the presidential campaign he said, "[I]f somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted."
Obama’s attitude about coal is consistent with that of the Democratic leadership and its special interest allies.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has said, “That is coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick; it's global warming. It's ruining our country, it’s ruining our world. We’ve got to stop using fossil fuel.”
Vice President-elect Joe Biden has said, “We're not supporting clean coal” and “no coal plants here in America.”
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is a long-time coal industry foe. Activist groups like the Rainforest Action Network demand a ban on coal use because, “‘clean coal’ doesn't address the massive social and environmental costs of mining, transporting and refining coal.”
It’s clear that coal, clean or not, is not acceptable.
Since coal is used to generate 50 percent of our electricity, cap-and-trade will push utility bills higher.
The Congressional Budget Office found that investors and workers in the energy sector would suffer losses due to the decline in energy-intensive industries. Not surprisingly, since Obama’s victory, investors have punished coal stocks.
The CBO also says the cost of cap-and-trade will be “borne by consumers, who would face persistently higher prices for products like electricity and gasoline.” The CBO adds that these added costs would preferentially harm low-income households.
The cost to consumers in not unknown to Obama, who has acknowledged, "Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket..."
Despite overwhelming momentum for a ban on coal, some companies are in denial about the left’s war against coal. Recently, CEO Jim Rogers of Duke Energy – a coal dependent utility – participated in a press conference to voice his support of cap-and-trade legislation.
Rogers hopes a Congress run by Reid and Waxman and a President who promises to bankrupt his company will instead show mercy because he supported their cap-and-trade “solution.” Rogers’ fleeting effort is reminiscent of Neville Chamberlin’s failed appeasement strategy.
Obama’s steadfast support for cap-and-trade is increasingly putting him outside the mainstream, even the European mainstream Obama is said to greatly admire.
The European Union’s cap-and-trade experiment has been a resounding failure. At next week’s United Nations conference on climate change in Poland, nations will seriously discuss reducing commitments to limit greenhouse gas emissions because the price tag is too expensive, especially during a global economic crisis.
Will the economic crisis make Obama think twice about cap-and-trade? There’s no sign yet that it will.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Meet the Taliban
Our enemy in Afghanistan is not sentimental.
By Clifford D. May
Thursday, November 27, 2008
‘Afghanistan is the most foreign country in the world,” says William Wood, the American ambassador in Kabul. I ask if I may quote him on that. He hesitates, then says it’s alright, then adds: “It’s a ferociously foreign country.”
Mountainous, landlocked and remote, populated by legendary warriors — Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek — historically rich but economically dirt poor, Afghanistan has been in a state of turmoil for almost 30 years, since the Soviet invasion of 1980. “People here are used to violence, Gen. David McKiernan, the U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, says. “But they also have been traumatized by violence.”
By 1989, the Afghans had defeated the Soviet invaders — a great and consequential victory, achieved with assistance from the U.S. But once the Russians were gone, Americans and Europeans lost interest in Afghanistan. Warlords fought among themselves for land, power and wealth — mostly in the form of the poppies from which heroin is made.
In 1994, a group of provincial vigilantes led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the administrator of a religious school, rose up against the chaos and corruption. He and his followers called themselves “the students” — the “Taliban” in the Pashto language.
The Taliban restored law and order. People welcomed that. The Taliban also had the support of Islamists entrenched in Pakistan’s intelligence service. The Saudis approved as well.
Before long, the Taliban’s ultra-radical agenda became apparent. Girls were no longer permitted to go to school. Women could not leave their homes unless covered from head to toe in a burqa and accompanied by a male. Singing, dancing, playing music, watching television, sports, even flying kites — an Afghan national pastime — were prohibited. Prayer five times a day became compulsory.
Those who transgressed were sentenced to amputations or executions — by the thousands, often in public. Traditional tribal leaders were murdered and replaced by fire-breathing mullahs who broke with Afghan tradition by combining religious and political power.
In March 2001, the Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan — giant statues, great works of religion and art, built in the sixth century. To the Taliban, these were pagan “idols” that deserved destruction — like all things not Islamic. “It is purely a religious issue,” then-Afghan Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawekel told a Japanese reporter.
The Taliban, wrote the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, represented a new kind of Islamic fundamentalist: “aggressive, expansionist and uncompromising in its purist demands to turn Afghan society back to an imagined model of seventh-century Arabia at the time of the Prophet Mohammed.”
At this same time, of course, the Taliban also was providing refuge to a Saudi exile by the name of Osama bin Laden. He was plotting another kind of assault against the despised infidels. In the wake of the slaughter of September 11, 2001, the Taliban remained loyal to bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The result was an American-led invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban.
Both bin Laden and Mullah Omar escaped, presumably to the wild reaches of western Pakistan.
Today, Taliban forces — bolstered by Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis, and other “foreign fighters” — are attempting to retake Afghanistan, using the same terrorist tactics that al-Qaeda used in Iraq: assassinations, roadside bombs, and — while I was in Afghanistan earlier this month — throwing acid in the faces of young girls walking to school. A European diplomat in Kabul notes that this year 900 Afghan policemen have been killed — an improvement over the 1,200 killed in 2007. “The Taliban are not sentimental people,” he says.
Like other militant Islamists groups — Hamas and Hezbollah, for example — the Taliban acts locally but thinks globally. “We want to eradicate Britain and America,” Ay’atulah Mahsoud, the emir of the Pakistani Taliban, has said, “and to shatter the arrogance and tyranny of the infidels. We pray that Allah will enable us to destroy the White House, New York and London.”
The available evidence suggests the vast majority of Afghans would not welcome the Taliban’s return to power. Indeed, the Taliban has not managed to regain a single city. But they have been stepping up the violence.
In past years, fighting has slowed during Afghanistan’s cold and snowy winter. This season, Gen. McKiernan plans to keep the pressure on. “If we allow enemy forces time to rest and relax over the winter,” explains one of his commanders, “they will be back with a bang in the spring.” The hope — one can’t yet say the expectation — is that Pakistan also will move aggressively against Taliban fighters within is borders.
“Do it right,” an American general in Kandahar says, “and we won’t have to come back here years from now.”
By Clifford D. May
Thursday, November 27, 2008
‘Afghanistan is the most foreign country in the world,” says William Wood, the American ambassador in Kabul. I ask if I may quote him on that. He hesitates, then says it’s alright, then adds: “It’s a ferociously foreign country.”
Mountainous, landlocked and remote, populated by legendary warriors — Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek — historically rich but economically dirt poor, Afghanistan has been in a state of turmoil for almost 30 years, since the Soviet invasion of 1980. “People here are used to violence, Gen. David McKiernan, the U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, says. “But they also have been traumatized by violence.”
By 1989, the Afghans had defeated the Soviet invaders — a great and consequential victory, achieved with assistance from the U.S. But once the Russians were gone, Americans and Europeans lost interest in Afghanistan. Warlords fought among themselves for land, power and wealth — mostly in the form of the poppies from which heroin is made.
In 1994, a group of provincial vigilantes led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the administrator of a religious school, rose up against the chaos and corruption. He and his followers called themselves “the students” — the “Taliban” in the Pashto language.
The Taliban restored law and order. People welcomed that. The Taliban also had the support of Islamists entrenched in Pakistan’s intelligence service. The Saudis approved as well.
Before long, the Taliban’s ultra-radical agenda became apparent. Girls were no longer permitted to go to school. Women could not leave their homes unless covered from head to toe in a burqa and accompanied by a male. Singing, dancing, playing music, watching television, sports, even flying kites — an Afghan national pastime — were prohibited. Prayer five times a day became compulsory.
Those who transgressed were sentenced to amputations or executions — by the thousands, often in public. Traditional tribal leaders were murdered and replaced by fire-breathing mullahs who broke with Afghan tradition by combining religious and political power.
In March 2001, the Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan — giant statues, great works of religion and art, built in the sixth century. To the Taliban, these were pagan “idols” that deserved destruction — like all things not Islamic. “It is purely a religious issue,” then-Afghan Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawekel told a Japanese reporter.
The Taliban, wrote the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, represented a new kind of Islamic fundamentalist: “aggressive, expansionist and uncompromising in its purist demands to turn Afghan society back to an imagined model of seventh-century Arabia at the time of the Prophet Mohammed.”
At this same time, of course, the Taliban also was providing refuge to a Saudi exile by the name of Osama bin Laden. He was plotting another kind of assault against the despised infidels. In the wake of the slaughter of September 11, 2001, the Taliban remained loyal to bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The result was an American-led invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban.
Both bin Laden and Mullah Omar escaped, presumably to the wild reaches of western Pakistan.
Today, Taliban forces — bolstered by Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis, and other “foreign fighters” — are attempting to retake Afghanistan, using the same terrorist tactics that al-Qaeda used in Iraq: assassinations, roadside bombs, and — while I was in Afghanistan earlier this month — throwing acid in the faces of young girls walking to school. A European diplomat in Kabul notes that this year 900 Afghan policemen have been killed — an improvement over the 1,200 killed in 2007. “The Taliban are not sentimental people,” he says.
Like other militant Islamists groups — Hamas and Hezbollah, for example — the Taliban acts locally but thinks globally. “We want to eradicate Britain and America,” Ay’atulah Mahsoud, the emir of the Pakistani Taliban, has said, “and to shatter the arrogance and tyranny of the infidels. We pray that Allah will enable us to destroy the White House, New York and London.”
The available evidence suggests the vast majority of Afghans would not welcome the Taliban’s return to power. Indeed, the Taliban has not managed to regain a single city. But they have been stepping up the violence.
In past years, fighting has slowed during Afghanistan’s cold and snowy winter. This season, Gen. McKiernan plans to keep the pressure on. “If we allow enemy forces time to rest and relax over the winter,” explains one of his commanders, “they will be back with a bang in the spring.” The hope — one can’t yet say the expectation — is that Pakistan also will move aggressively against Taliban fighters within is borders.
“Do it right,” an American general in Kandahar says, “and we won’t have to come back here years from now.”
The Hysterical Style
Baby Boomers — the ungrateful-est generation — can’t help swinging from panic to frenzy.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Politicians now predict the implosion of the U.S. auto industry. Headlines warn that the entire banking system is on the verge of utter collapse. The all-day/all-night cable news shows and op-ed columnists talk of another Dark Age on the horizon, as each day another corporation lines up for its me-too bailout.
News magazines depict President-Elect Obama as the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, facing a crisis akin to the Great Depression. Columnists for the New York Times even dream that George Bush might just resign now to allow the savior Obama a two-month head start on his presidency.
We are witnessing a new hysterical style, in which the Baby Boomer “me generation” that now runs America jettisons knowledge of the past and daily proclaims that each new development requires both a radical solution and another bogeyman to blame for being mean or unfair to them.
We haven’t seen such frenzy since the Y2K sham, when we were warned to stock up on flashlights and bottled water as our nation’s computers would simply shut down on January 1, 2000 — and with them the country itself.
Get a grip. Much of our current panic is psychological, and hyped by instantaneous electronic communications and second-by-second 24-hour news blasts. There has not been a nationwide plague that felled our workers. No earthquake has destroyed American infrastructure. The material United States before the September 2008 financial panic is largely the same as the one after. Once we tighten our belts and pay off the debts run up by Wall Street speculators and millions of borrowers who walked away from what they owed others — and we can do this in a $13 trillion annual economy — sanity will return.
Gas, now below $2 a gallon, is still falling — saving Americans hundreds of billions of dollars. As housing prices settle, millions of young Americans will buy homes that just recently were said to be out of reach of a new generation.
If it was once considered a sign of economic robustness that homes doubled in value in just a few years, why is it seen as a disaster that they now sell on the way down for what they did recently on the way up? If we were recently terrified that gas would reach $5 a gallon, why do we now just shrug that it might fall to $1.50?
Unemployment is still below 7 percent; it was around 25 percent when Franklin Roosevelt became president. Less than 20 banks have failed, not the 4,000 that went under in the first part of 1933.
We all wish Barack Obama to succeed as president. But there is no more reason to panic and circumvent the Constitution for his early assumption of office than there was for Bill Clinton to prematurely step aside in November 2000 in favor of then President-Elect George W. Bush.
We have now forgotten that by the end of the year 2000, the American economy was sliding into recession. Lame-duck President Clinton had been impeached. Vice President Al Gore had ostracized him from his presidential-election campaign. In the presidential transition, Clinton was considering pardons for Puerto Rican terrorists and most-wanted fugitive Mark Rich.
George Bush is neither the source of all our ills nor the “worst” president in our history. He will leave office with about the same dismal approval rating as the once-despised Harry Truman. By 1953, the country loathed the departing Truman as much as they were ecstatic about newly elected national hero Dwight Eisenhower — who had previously never been elected to anything.
As for Bush’s legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven years, the now increasingly likely victory in Iraq, AIDS relief abroad, new expansions for Medicare, and federal support for schools versus the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the error-plagued 2004-2007 occupation of Iraq, and out-of-control federal spending. As in the case of the once-unpopular Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry Truman, Bush’s supposedly “worst” presidency could one day not look so bad in comparison with the various administrations that followed.
But these days even that modest assessment that things aren’t that bad — or all that different from the past — may well elicit a hysterical reaction from an increasingly hysterical generation.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Politicians now predict the implosion of the U.S. auto industry. Headlines warn that the entire banking system is on the verge of utter collapse. The all-day/all-night cable news shows and op-ed columnists talk of another Dark Age on the horizon, as each day another corporation lines up for its me-too bailout.
News magazines depict President-Elect Obama as the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, facing a crisis akin to the Great Depression. Columnists for the New York Times even dream that George Bush might just resign now to allow the savior Obama a two-month head start on his presidency.
We are witnessing a new hysterical style, in which the Baby Boomer “me generation” that now runs America jettisons knowledge of the past and daily proclaims that each new development requires both a radical solution and another bogeyman to blame for being mean or unfair to them.
We haven’t seen such frenzy since the Y2K sham, when we were warned to stock up on flashlights and bottled water as our nation’s computers would simply shut down on January 1, 2000 — and with them the country itself.
Get a grip. Much of our current panic is psychological, and hyped by instantaneous electronic communications and second-by-second 24-hour news blasts. There has not been a nationwide plague that felled our workers. No earthquake has destroyed American infrastructure. The material United States before the September 2008 financial panic is largely the same as the one after. Once we tighten our belts and pay off the debts run up by Wall Street speculators and millions of borrowers who walked away from what they owed others — and we can do this in a $13 trillion annual economy — sanity will return.
Gas, now below $2 a gallon, is still falling — saving Americans hundreds of billions of dollars. As housing prices settle, millions of young Americans will buy homes that just recently were said to be out of reach of a new generation.
If it was once considered a sign of economic robustness that homes doubled in value in just a few years, why is it seen as a disaster that they now sell on the way down for what they did recently on the way up? If we were recently terrified that gas would reach $5 a gallon, why do we now just shrug that it might fall to $1.50?
Unemployment is still below 7 percent; it was around 25 percent when Franklin Roosevelt became president. Less than 20 banks have failed, not the 4,000 that went under in the first part of 1933.
We all wish Barack Obama to succeed as president. But there is no more reason to panic and circumvent the Constitution for his early assumption of office than there was for Bill Clinton to prematurely step aside in November 2000 in favor of then President-Elect George W. Bush.
We have now forgotten that by the end of the year 2000, the American economy was sliding into recession. Lame-duck President Clinton had been impeached. Vice President Al Gore had ostracized him from his presidential-election campaign. In the presidential transition, Clinton was considering pardons for Puerto Rican terrorists and most-wanted fugitive Mark Rich.
George Bush is neither the source of all our ills nor the “worst” president in our history. He will leave office with about the same dismal approval rating as the once-despised Harry Truman. By 1953, the country loathed the departing Truman as much as they were ecstatic about newly elected national hero Dwight Eisenhower — who had previously never been elected to anything.
As for Bush’s legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven years, the now increasingly likely victory in Iraq, AIDS relief abroad, new expansions for Medicare, and federal support for schools versus the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the error-plagued 2004-2007 occupation of Iraq, and out-of-control federal spending. As in the case of the once-unpopular Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry Truman, Bush’s supposedly “worst” presidency could one day not look so bad in comparison with the various administrations that followed.
But these days even that modest assessment that things aren’t that bad — or all that different from the past — may well elicit a hysterical reaction from an increasingly hysterical generation.
Americans on Health Care: The Bad, the Ugly and … the Good?
Amy Menefee
Thursday, November 27, 2008
As Americans reflect on their blessings this Thanksgiving, will they count the U.S. health care system among them?
Politicians, the media, and probably most people would say no. But if we alter the question, directing it toward the individual and away from the system, the answer changes drastically.
A startling majority of Americans – 77 percent – said the quality of their own health care was “excellent” or “good” in a recent study.
The Council for Excellence in Government, in coordination with the Institute of Medicine, Accenture and Gallup, conducted the study to find out what real Americans think about health care. “The American Public on Health Care: The Missing Perspective” was released in October.
The “missing perspective,” indeed.
Though we hear of nothing but a “broken” system in need of an overhaul, a lot of people seem to favor that overhaul for the benefit of others.
Another survey, in March 2008 by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, revealed a combined 82 percent rating their own medical care “excellent” or “good,” for those who had received care in the past year.
What politician can claim approval ratings in the high 70s to lower 80s?
That doesn’t mean the vast majority of people love the structure of the U.S. system. But it does highlight something missing in our dialogue: Americans are saying they’re receiving good health care. Elected officials focused on reform should find out why. The aspects of care that people like are the ones we should keep if we’re going to have an overhaul.
Unfortunately, “The Missing Perspective” didn’t report why people felt positively about their care. It could have been people’s doctors, nurses, access to care, recovery from disease – we don’t know. That data point was overshadowed by an emphasis on survey respondents’ concerns and desires for the future, as expected for an election-focused release.
So let’s take a look at what the people want.
They favor portable health insurance policies. A full 78 percent said they want to be able to take their coverage with them from job to job. With one in four Americans changing jobs every year, this is necessary to modernize insurance and health care delivery.
Americans want price transparency and competition in the health sector. They said they wanted to see performance ratings for doctors and hospitals as well as openly published prices for health services – both tools that would allow the patient to compare and choose. We have these for other service industries, including hotels and restaurants. The Internet makes it quick and easy for people to report and rate their experiences, or to compare costs before selecting a provider.
A majority – 71 percent – also said they want competition in the insurance market. Specifically, they want to be able to buy coverage across state lines. Ballooning numbers of coverage mandates have driven up the cost of care and trapped consumers, who are required to purchase policies in their own states. The latest statistics from eHealth, Inc., which operates eHealthInsurance.com, show average monthly premiums in 2007 for individual insurance plans ranging from $83 in North Dakota to $388 for New York residents. That’s a difference of $3,660 per year.
As one might guess, the study showed most Americans are enthusiastic about covering the uninsured, and many agree with getting the government involved in that process. But that enthusiasm vanished when higher taxes were mentioned.
A resounding 57 percent said no, they would not be “willing to pay more in taxes to cover the uninsured.” That finding jibed with a September survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, where a total of 57 percent said it was “most important” or “very important” that a new “health care proposal not raise taxes.”
The Council for Excellence in Government took note of a bias against government control.
“It’s noteworthy that one proposal for expanding coverage for the uninsured – allowing anyone to buy Medicare coverage at group rates, regardless of age – gets significantly less strong agreement than any other policy prescription surveyed,” the CEG study said. “This is consistent with Gallup poll results over many years which show that the public has a preference for maintaining a system based on private insurance rather than a government-run health care system.”
The American people are demanding competition and patient control of their health care. They want private insurance options, and they don’t want tax hikes. The new Congress must listen. And before embarking on a massive overhaul, elected officials also must learn what people like about their care, instead of insisting that everything is broken.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
As Americans reflect on their blessings this Thanksgiving, will they count the U.S. health care system among them?
Politicians, the media, and probably most people would say no. But if we alter the question, directing it toward the individual and away from the system, the answer changes drastically.
A startling majority of Americans – 77 percent – said the quality of their own health care was “excellent” or “good” in a recent study.
The Council for Excellence in Government, in coordination with the Institute of Medicine, Accenture and Gallup, conducted the study to find out what real Americans think about health care. “The American Public on Health Care: The Missing Perspective” was released in October.
The “missing perspective,” indeed.
Though we hear of nothing but a “broken” system in need of an overhaul, a lot of people seem to favor that overhaul for the benefit of others.
Another survey, in March 2008 by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, revealed a combined 82 percent rating their own medical care “excellent” or “good,” for those who had received care in the past year.
What politician can claim approval ratings in the high 70s to lower 80s?
That doesn’t mean the vast majority of people love the structure of the U.S. system. But it does highlight something missing in our dialogue: Americans are saying they’re receiving good health care. Elected officials focused on reform should find out why. The aspects of care that people like are the ones we should keep if we’re going to have an overhaul.
Unfortunately, “The Missing Perspective” didn’t report why people felt positively about their care. It could have been people’s doctors, nurses, access to care, recovery from disease – we don’t know. That data point was overshadowed by an emphasis on survey respondents’ concerns and desires for the future, as expected for an election-focused release.
So let’s take a look at what the people want.
They favor portable health insurance policies. A full 78 percent said they want to be able to take their coverage with them from job to job. With one in four Americans changing jobs every year, this is necessary to modernize insurance and health care delivery.
Americans want price transparency and competition in the health sector. They said they wanted to see performance ratings for doctors and hospitals as well as openly published prices for health services – both tools that would allow the patient to compare and choose. We have these for other service industries, including hotels and restaurants. The Internet makes it quick and easy for people to report and rate their experiences, or to compare costs before selecting a provider.
A majority – 71 percent – also said they want competition in the insurance market. Specifically, they want to be able to buy coverage across state lines. Ballooning numbers of coverage mandates have driven up the cost of care and trapped consumers, who are required to purchase policies in their own states. The latest statistics from eHealth, Inc., which operates eHealthInsurance.com, show average monthly premiums in 2007 for individual insurance plans ranging from $83 in North Dakota to $388 for New York residents. That’s a difference of $3,660 per year.
As one might guess, the study showed most Americans are enthusiastic about covering the uninsured, and many agree with getting the government involved in that process. But that enthusiasm vanished when higher taxes were mentioned.
A resounding 57 percent said no, they would not be “willing to pay more in taxes to cover the uninsured.” That finding jibed with a September survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, where a total of 57 percent said it was “most important” or “very important” that a new “health care proposal not raise taxes.”
The Council for Excellence in Government took note of a bias against government control.
“It’s noteworthy that one proposal for expanding coverage for the uninsured – allowing anyone to buy Medicare coverage at group rates, regardless of age – gets significantly less strong agreement than any other policy prescription surveyed,” the CEG study said. “This is consistent with Gallup poll results over many years which show that the public has a preference for maintaining a system based on private insurance rather than a government-run health care system.”
The American people are demanding competition and patient control of their health care. They want private insurance options, and they don’t want tax hikes. The new Congress must listen. And before embarking on a massive overhaul, elected officials also must learn what people like about their care, instead of insisting that everything is broken.
Giving Thanks for Genocide?
Mona Charen
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Thanksgiving is coming -- a time to participate in the great American tradition of maligning and abusing our ancestors. Last year, Seattle public school administrators warned teachers that "Thanksgiving can be a particularly difficult time for many of our Native students." Accordingly, teachers were advised to consult a list of 11 Thanksgiving "myths." No. 11 read as follows: "Myth: Thanksgiving is a happy time. Fact: For many Indian people, 'Thanksgiving' is a time of mourning, of remembering how a gift of generosity was rewarded by theft of land and seed corn, extermination of many from disease and gun, and near total destruction of many more from forced assimilation. As currently celebrated in this country, 'Thanksgiving' is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship."
In his new book, The 10 Big Lies About America film critic and radio talk show host Michael Medved recalls the Seattle episode, as well as many other examples of self-flagellation that now characterize many of our national observances. Columbus Day? The start of a vicious subjugation. A Denver Columbus Day parade was marred last year by protesters who threw fake blood and dismembered dolls along the parade route. Plymouth Rock? Weren't the Native Americans here first after all? The 400th anniversary of the landing at Jamestown was renamed from celebration to "commemoration" in 2007 because "so many facets of Jamestown's history are not cause for celebration."
Medved, a passionate but not blind patriot, argues that our kids and the rest of us are being fed a tendentious history that wildly exaggerates the offenses of European settlers. The notion that "America Was Founded on Genocide Against Native Americans" cannot withstand scrutiny.
Like racism, genocide is a word that has lost its meaning through promiscuous overuse. Medved reminds us that the international "Genocide Convention" defines genocide as an act or acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such." In the clash of civilizations between European settlers and Native Americans, millions died. But the overwhelming majority of those deaths were attributable to diseases carried involuntarily by Europeans and spread to natives who had no natural immunities to these pathogens. That is a tragedy, but not a crime.
What of those smallpox-infested blankets that have received so much press? Medved examines the evidence and concludes "The endlessly recycled charges of biological warfare rest solely on controversial interpretations of two unconnected and inconclusive incidents 74 years apart." The first was in response to Pontiac's Rebellion (1763), a ferocious small war undertaken by the Great Lakes Indians (who had been allied with the defeated French in the French and Indian War) against British settlements. The Ottawa leader Pontiac told his followers to "exterminate" the whites. They did their best. Hundreds of settlers were tortured, scalped, cannibalized, dismembered, or burned at the stake. As the Indians were besieging Fort Pitt, Field Marshal Lord Jeffery Amherst wrote to a subordinate, "Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among the disaffected tribes of Indians?" But nothing seems to have come from this correspondence. The other episode is alleged by fired professor Ward Churchill (yes, the one who invented his Creek and Muscogee heritage and fabricated his academic research), and concerns an outbreak of smallpox among the Mandan tribe in 1837. There is no evidence that the whites intentionally infected the Indians in that case, and considerable evidence that the settlers attempted to prevent the outbreak.
There were terrible injustices and massacres committed by Europeans against Native Americans and some running the other way as well. The more technologically advanced civilization prevailed -- which is the usual course in human affairs. But the current fashion to distort that history into something like a war crime is, to say the least, overstated.
The Thanksgiving story is a strange one to protest. It is recalled, every year, as a time when newly arrived Europeans and Native Americans cooperated and learned from one another and then joined together for a festive meal to celebrate their joint harvest. This week, millions of schoolchildren will don tall paper hats and Indian fringes and feathers. They will recall the peaceful start of the not always peaceful history of the greatest nation on earth. And so they should -- without guilt or shame.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Thanksgiving is coming -- a time to participate in the great American tradition of maligning and abusing our ancestors. Last year, Seattle public school administrators warned teachers that "Thanksgiving can be a particularly difficult time for many of our Native students." Accordingly, teachers were advised to consult a list of 11 Thanksgiving "myths." No. 11 read as follows: "Myth: Thanksgiving is a happy time. Fact: For many Indian people, 'Thanksgiving' is a time of mourning, of remembering how a gift of generosity was rewarded by theft of land and seed corn, extermination of many from disease and gun, and near total destruction of many more from forced assimilation. As currently celebrated in this country, 'Thanksgiving' is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship."
In his new book, The 10 Big Lies About America film critic and radio talk show host Michael Medved recalls the Seattle episode, as well as many other examples of self-flagellation that now characterize many of our national observances. Columbus Day? The start of a vicious subjugation. A Denver Columbus Day parade was marred last year by protesters who threw fake blood and dismembered dolls along the parade route. Plymouth Rock? Weren't the Native Americans here first after all? The 400th anniversary of the landing at Jamestown was renamed from celebration to "commemoration" in 2007 because "so many facets of Jamestown's history are not cause for celebration."
Medved, a passionate but not blind patriot, argues that our kids and the rest of us are being fed a tendentious history that wildly exaggerates the offenses of European settlers. The notion that "America Was Founded on Genocide Against Native Americans" cannot withstand scrutiny.
Like racism, genocide is a word that has lost its meaning through promiscuous overuse. Medved reminds us that the international "Genocide Convention" defines genocide as an act or acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such." In the clash of civilizations between European settlers and Native Americans, millions died. But the overwhelming majority of those deaths were attributable to diseases carried involuntarily by Europeans and spread to natives who had no natural immunities to these pathogens. That is a tragedy, but not a crime.
What of those smallpox-infested blankets that have received so much press? Medved examines the evidence and concludes "The endlessly recycled charges of biological warfare rest solely on controversial interpretations of two unconnected and inconclusive incidents 74 years apart." The first was in response to Pontiac's Rebellion (1763), a ferocious small war undertaken by the Great Lakes Indians (who had been allied with the defeated French in the French and Indian War) against British settlements. The Ottawa leader Pontiac told his followers to "exterminate" the whites. They did their best. Hundreds of settlers were tortured, scalped, cannibalized, dismembered, or burned at the stake. As the Indians were besieging Fort Pitt, Field Marshal Lord Jeffery Amherst wrote to a subordinate, "Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among the disaffected tribes of Indians?" But nothing seems to have come from this correspondence. The other episode is alleged by fired professor Ward Churchill (yes, the one who invented his Creek and Muscogee heritage and fabricated his academic research), and concerns an outbreak of smallpox among the Mandan tribe in 1837. There is no evidence that the whites intentionally infected the Indians in that case, and considerable evidence that the settlers attempted to prevent the outbreak.
There were terrible injustices and massacres committed by Europeans against Native Americans and some running the other way as well. The more technologically advanced civilization prevailed -- which is the usual course in human affairs. But the current fashion to distort that history into something like a war crime is, to say the least, overstated.
The Thanksgiving story is a strange one to protest. It is recalled, every year, as a time when newly arrived Europeans and Native Americans cooperated and learned from one another and then joined together for a festive meal to celebrate their joint harvest. This week, millions of schoolchildren will don tall paper hats and Indian fringes and feathers. They will recall the peaceful start of the not always peaceful history of the greatest nation on earth. And so they should -- without guilt or shame.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Playing Games at Gitmo
Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
The human rights crowd is right: Life is hard for a Guantanamo Bay detainee. The deprivation is unspeakable. According to the facility's "cultural adviser," their brains have not been "stimulated" enough. So this Thanksgiving, America is drawing up plans to provide the 250 or so suspected jihadists at the "notoriously Spartan" detention camp with basic sustenance including, as reported by the Miami Herald, movie nights, art classes, English language lessons and "Game Boy-like" electronic devices.
Next up: Wii Fit, Guitar Hero, Sudoku, People magazine and macrame. Anything less would be uncivilized.
On a deadly serious note, the detainees aren't the only ones playing games at Gitmo. Some top legal advisers and supporters of Barack Obama, whose name detainees chanted on election night, are now rethinking the president-elect's absolutist campaign position on shutting the center down and flooding our mainland courts with every last enemy combatant designee. Yes, reality bites. And Democrats must now grapple with the very real possibility that an Obama administration could potentially release a Gitmo denizen who would turn around and commit mass terrorist acts on American soil or abroad.
Nothing clarifies the mind like a jihadi boomerang. Never before have an administration and its followers matured so quickly in office -- and they haven't even taken office yet.
While Obama paid lip service to the "Close the Gitmo gulag!" agenda on "60 Minutes" over the weekend, his kitchen cabinet is proceeding more pragmatically. Believe it or not, the Obama crowd is now contemplating a preventive detention law and an alternative judicial system for the most sensitive national security cases involving the most highly classified information -- information that has no place being aired in the civilian courts for public consumption.
Listen to relentless Bush critic David Cole, who told The New York Times last week: "You can't be a purist and say there's never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone." Added Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution: "I'm afraid of people getting released in the name of human rights and doing terrible things."
Moreover, Obama transition team members have suggested to The Wall Street Journal that despite his campaign season CIA-bashing, "Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight."
Next thing you know, they'll start arguing that the world has been fooled by years of sob-story propaganda about the Gitmo detainees -- funded by Kuwaiti government-subsidized lawyers who cast them all as innocent potato farmers and schmucks dazed and confused on battlefields.
Next thing you know, they'll rediscover the facts that detainees have systematically lied and exaggerated stories about mistreatment at Gitmo, and that interrogators and military personnel have bent over backward to accommodate their personal and religious needs and wants.
Next thing you know, they'll start reminding us that dozens of former Gitmo detainees have been released and recaptured on the battlefield while committing acts of terrorism.
Funny, when President Bush and his homeland security team realized these very realities seven years ago, they were branded terrorists and hounded relentlessly by Congress, the media and the left. When Attorney General Michael Mukasey eloquently defended the administration's counterterrorism policies at the Federalist Society before he collapsed, he was heckled as a "tyrant." And when I wrote my second book expounding on this very thesis, I was labeled a racist and fascist whose ideas exploring the proper balance between security and civil liberties had no place in public discourse.
Now, at long last, some liberals have realized that the sacred goal of "regaining America's moral stature in the world," as Obama put it, may be less important than ensuring that al-Qaida killers don't strike on American ground again.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
The human rights crowd is right: Life is hard for a Guantanamo Bay detainee. The deprivation is unspeakable. According to the facility's "cultural adviser," their brains have not been "stimulated" enough. So this Thanksgiving, America is drawing up plans to provide the 250 or so suspected jihadists at the "notoriously Spartan" detention camp with basic sustenance including, as reported by the Miami Herald, movie nights, art classes, English language lessons and "Game Boy-like" electronic devices.
Next up: Wii Fit, Guitar Hero, Sudoku, People magazine and macrame. Anything less would be uncivilized.
On a deadly serious note, the detainees aren't the only ones playing games at Gitmo. Some top legal advisers and supporters of Barack Obama, whose name detainees chanted on election night, are now rethinking the president-elect's absolutist campaign position on shutting the center down and flooding our mainland courts with every last enemy combatant designee. Yes, reality bites. And Democrats must now grapple with the very real possibility that an Obama administration could potentially release a Gitmo denizen who would turn around and commit mass terrorist acts on American soil or abroad.
Nothing clarifies the mind like a jihadi boomerang. Never before have an administration and its followers matured so quickly in office -- and they haven't even taken office yet.
While Obama paid lip service to the "Close the Gitmo gulag!" agenda on "60 Minutes" over the weekend, his kitchen cabinet is proceeding more pragmatically. Believe it or not, the Obama crowd is now contemplating a preventive detention law and an alternative judicial system for the most sensitive national security cases involving the most highly classified information -- information that has no place being aired in the civilian courts for public consumption.
Listen to relentless Bush critic David Cole, who told The New York Times last week: "You can't be a purist and say there's never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone." Added Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution: "I'm afraid of people getting released in the name of human rights and doing terrible things."
Moreover, Obama transition team members have suggested to The Wall Street Journal that despite his campaign season CIA-bashing, "Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight."
Next thing you know, they'll start arguing that the world has been fooled by years of sob-story propaganda about the Gitmo detainees -- funded by Kuwaiti government-subsidized lawyers who cast them all as innocent potato farmers and schmucks dazed and confused on battlefields.
Next thing you know, they'll rediscover the facts that detainees have systematically lied and exaggerated stories about mistreatment at Gitmo, and that interrogators and military personnel have bent over backward to accommodate their personal and religious needs and wants.
Next thing you know, they'll start reminding us that dozens of former Gitmo detainees have been released and recaptured on the battlefield while committing acts of terrorism.
Funny, when President Bush and his homeland security team realized these very realities seven years ago, they were branded terrorists and hounded relentlessly by Congress, the media and the left. When Attorney General Michael Mukasey eloquently defended the administration's counterterrorism policies at the Federalist Society before he collapsed, he was heckled as a "tyrant." And when I wrote my second book expounding on this very thesis, I was labeled a racist and fascist whose ideas exploring the proper balance between security and civil liberties had no place in public discourse.
Now, at long last, some liberals have realized that the sacred goal of "regaining America's moral stature in the world," as Obama put it, may be less important than ensuring that al-Qaida killers don't strike on American ground again.
Trade versus Protectionism
Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
There's a growing anti-trade sentiment in our country. Much of the dialogue is grossly misinformed. Let's try to untangle it a bit with a few questions and observations. First, does the U.S. trade with Japan and England? Put another way, is it members of the U.S. Congress trading with their counterparts in the Japanese Diet or the English Parliament? An affirmative answer is pure nonsense. When I purchased my Lexus, I had nothing to do with either the Japanese Diet or the U.S. Congress. Through an intermediary, a Lexus dealer, I dealt with Toyota Motor Corporation.
While it might be convenient to speak of one country trading with another, such aggregation can conceal a lot of evil, particularly when people call for trade barriers. For example, what would be a moral case for third-party interference, by either the Japanese Diet or the U.S. Congress, with an exchange between me and Toyota Motor Corporation? Some might reason that since Japan places restrictions on U.S. products entering their country, an appropriate retaliatory measure is not to allow Japanese products to freely enter the U.S. By the way, Japanese protectionist restrictions on rice imports force Japanese consumers to pay three or four times the world price for rice. How much sense does it make for Congress to retaliate against Japan by imposing restrictions on their products thereby forcing American consumers, say Lexus buyers, to pay higher prices? Should our rule be: If one country screws its citizens we should retaliate by screwing our citizens?
Since there is no moral argument for preventing one person from trading with another, anti-traders shift their argument to a patriotic appeal such as suggesting that we're losing our manufacturing sector. That doesn't square with the facts. According to a report given by Dr. William Strauss, senior economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, titled "Is U.S. Losing Its Manufacturing Base?" the answer is no. In each of the past 60 years, U.S. manufacturing output growth has averaged 4 percent and productivity growth has averaged 3 percent. Manufacturing is going through the same process as agriculture. In 1900, 41 percent of American workers were employed in agriculture; today, only 2 percent are and agricultural output is greater. In 1940, 35 percent of workers were employed in manufacturing jobs; today, it's about 10 percent. Again, because of huge productivity gains, manufacturing output is greater.
The decline in manufacturing employment is not limited to the U.S. Since 2000, China has lost over 4.5 million manufacturing jobs. In fact, nine of the top 10 manufacturing countries, which produce 75 percent of the world's manufacturing output (the U.S., Japan, Germany, China, Britain, France, Italy, Korea, Canada, and Mexico), have lost manufacturing jobs but their manufacturing output has risen.
Despite the pretense of being a free trade nation, the U.S. has significant barriers to trade that come in the form of tariffs, quotas and steep regulatory barriers. Our restrictions are just not as onerous as many other countries but there's a push to make them so. It's simple politics. The people who face foreign competition, say management and workers in the auto industry, are well organized, have narrowly shared interests and the resources to have considerable clout in Washington to get Congress to enact trade barriers. Restricting foreign competition means higher prices for their products, and hence higher profits and fuller employment in their industry. The people who are benefited by foreign competition, say auto consumers, have widely dispersed interests; they are not organized at all and have little clout in Washington. You never see consumers descending on Washington complaining about cheap prices for foreign products; it's always domestic producers who do the complaining.
The relationship between prosperity and economic freedom, including free trade, is a no-brainer. But if you need hard evidence, check out the Heritage Foundation's "Index of Economic Freedom". You'll find that nations having the greatest measure of economic freedom are the most prosperous and peaceful.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
There's a growing anti-trade sentiment in our country. Much of the dialogue is grossly misinformed. Let's try to untangle it a bit with a few questions and observations. First, does the U.S. trade with Japan and England? Put another way, is it members of the U.S. Congress trading with their counterparts in the Japanese Diet or the English Parliament? An affirmative answer is pure nonsense. When I purchased my Lexus, I had nothing to do with either the Japanese Diet or the U.S. Congress. Through an intermediary, a Lexus dealer, I dealt with Toyota Motor Corporation.
While it might be convenient to speak of one country trading with another, such aggregation can conceal a lot of evil, particularly when people call for trade barriers. For example, what would be a moral case for third-party interference, by either the Japanese Diet or the U.S. Congress, with an exchange between me and Toyota Motor Corporation? Some might reason that since Japan places restrictions on U.S. products entering their country, an appropriate retaliatory measure is not to allow Japanese products to freely enter the U.S. By the way, Japanese protectionist restrictions on rice imports force Japanese consumers to pay three or four times the world price for rice. How much sense does it make for Congress to retaliate against Japan by imposing restrictions on their products thereby forcing American consumers, say Lexus buyers, to pay higher prices? Should our rule be: If one country screws its citizens we should retaliate by screwing our citizens?
Since there is no moral argument for preventing one person from trading with another, anti-traders shift their argument to a patriotic appeal such as suggesting that we're losing our manufacturing sector. That doesn't square with the facts. According to a report given by Dr. William Strauss, senior economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, titled "Is U.S. Losing Its Manufacturing Base?" the answer is no. In each of the past 60 years, U.S. manufacturing output growth has averaged 4 percent and productivity growth has averaged 3 percent. Manufacturing is going through the same process as agriculture. In 1900, 41 percent of American workers were employed in agriculture; today, only 2 percent are and agricultural output is greater. In 1940, 35 percent of workers were employed in manufacturing jobs; today, it's about 10 percent. Again, because of huge productivity gains, manufacturing output is greater.
The decline in manufacturing employment is not limited to the U.S. Since 2000, China has lost over 4.5 million manufacturing jobs. In fact, nine of the top 10 manufacturing countries, which produce 75 percent of the world's manufacturing output (the U.S., Japan, Germany, China, Britain, France, Italy, Korea, Canada, and Mexico), have lost manufacturing jobs but their manufacturing output has risen.
Despite the pretense of being a free trade nation, the U.S. has significant barriers to trade that come in the form of tariffs, quotas and steep regulatory barriers. Our restrictions are just not as onerous as many other countries but there's a push to make them so. It's simple politics. The people who face foreign competition, say management and workers in the auto industry, are well organized, have narrowly shared interests and the resources to have considerable clout in Washington to get Congress to enact trade barriers. Restricting foreign competition means higher prices for their products, and hence higher profits and fuller employment in their industry. The people who are benefited by foreign competition, say auto consumers, have widely dispersed interests; they are not organized at all and have little clout in Washington. You never see consumers descending on Washington complaining about cheap prices for foreign products; it's always domestic producers who do the complaining.
The relationship between prosperity and economic freedom, including free trade, is a no-brainer. But if you need hard evidence, check out the Heritage Foundation's "Index of Economic Freedom". You'll find that nations having the greatest measure of economic freedom are the most prosperous and peaceful.
Failure Is Not an Option
Today it seems the grossly incompetent and inefficient must be preserved at all costs.
By Victor Davis Hanson
We all remember the advice about failure we received from our parents and teachers. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” “Learn from your mistakes.” “Failure breeds success.”
The common theme was that some sort of failure in life is inevitable. It is a wake-up call for reflection — and should prompt needed change. Our character is not just built from success, but during setbacks as well.
But now Americans seem to think such folk wisdom is obsolete. First came the $700-billion bailout of the financial industry. Such a one-time federal guarantee was perhaps necessary to restore liquidity for the failed banking system, but it sent a terrible message.
Those who caused the mess — greedy traders, corrupt politicians, incompetent CEOs, and gullible stockbrokers — got a collective reprieve. Most inside the rescued Bear Stearns, American International Group, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are either quiet about their failure or are blaming others rather than showing contrition. So far, few have admitted that their managers were both incompetent and far too highly paid.
The teetering U.S. auto industry is now next in line for a multi-billion-dollar federal bailout. But for decades, Detroit made gas-guzzling automobiles that the public believed were not as well built as the Japanese competition — despite being made by unionized workers who were paid far more than those somehow building better cars. Will overpaid auto executives and workers worry about the consequences of their ongoing mistakes when the government has assured them that failing is not an option?
States and cities are lining up as well for fail-safe cash. California is nearly bankrupt; the state was just projected to have a deficit of $28 billion through June 2010. The state has vastly increased its public spending over the rate of inflation. Californians pay among the highest sales and income taxes in the nation.
But what they see in return are bloated bureaucracies, poor schools, congested highways, and dysfunctional community hospitals. With a bailout, California’s governor and legislators won’t worry too much that their constituents are some of the most taxed and least served of any in America.
All sorts of promises are proposed to bail out mortgage holders who have defaulted or owe more than their homes are worth. Apparently, no debtor is really culpable. And apparently, no one took out second or third mortgages for optional consumer purchases, or bought homes too large for their incomes.
What is the lesson here for other pinched families who will not default and will somehow meet their mortgage obligations, even on homes with negative equity? Is it that those who pay what they owe are punished while those who fail to do so are excused?
President-Elect Barack Obama promised over $1 trillion in new entitlements at a time when the Bush administration may well run a $500 billion annual deficit, only adding to a $10 trillion national debt. We also have $50 trillion in federal unfunded liabilities, ranging from long-term promises to Medicare and Social Security to payouts for government bonds and guaranteed loans.
Such massive borrowing and guarantees all offer cover for insolvent or poorly run programs (that face no worry of running out of money — and thus have no incentive to change). Corporate farmers just learned that the current $288-billion farm bill will once again provide government subsidies to ensure that it won’t matter much whether they plant the wrong crop at the wrong time.
Universities raise tuition rates that exceed the rate of inflation. But in our brave, new no-failure world, why worry when more promised federal-guaranteed student loans and credits will ensure steady paying enrollment? With guaranteed federal money, why be concerned that colleges and universities are overstaffed with administrators, replete with centers and programs that have nothing to do with undergraduate education, and erecting Las Vegas—-like student unions and colossal recreation centers?
Americans are creating a therapeutic society in which none of us need fail. No one loses in T-ball anymore. Schools honor a dozen valedictorians. In universities, a “C” passing grade is now the understood kinder and gentler version of the old and now-rare “F.”
Our culture forgot that there was once a utility in failure. Failing reminded us of what works and what doesn’t — and how we must learn to avoid the latter. Instead, in our new economic purgatory, no firm, company, state, city, or individual ever quite goes to financial heaven or hell. A Bear Stearns or Chrysler neither succeeds nor fails but just sort of endlessly exists.
By Victor Davis Hanson
We all remember the advice about failure we received from our parents and teachers. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” “Learn from your mistakes.” “Failure breeds success.”
The common theme was that some sort of failure in life is inevitable. It is a wake-up call for reflection — and should prompt needed change. Our character is not just built from success, but during setbacks as well.
But now Americans seem to think such folk wisdom is obsolete. First came the $700-billion bailout of the financial industry. Such a one-time federal guarantee was perhaps necessary to restore liquidity for the failed banking system, but it sent a terrible message.
Those who caused the mess — greedy traders, corrupt politicians, incompetent CEOs, and gullible stockbrokers — got a collective reprieve. Most inside the rescued Bear Stearns, American International Group, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are either quiet about their failure or are blaming others rather than showing contrition. So far, few have admitted that their managers were both incompetent and far too highly paid.
The teetering U.S. auto industry is now next in line for a multi-billion-dollar federal bailout. But for decades, Detroit made gas-guzzling automobiles that the public believed were not as well built as the Japanese competition — despite being made by unionized workers who were paid far more than those somehow building better cars. Will overpaid auto executives and workers worry about the consequences of their ongoing mistakes when the government has assured them that failing is not an option?
States and cities are lining up as well for fail-safe cash. California is nearly bankrupt; the state was just projected to have a deficit of $28 billion through June 2010. The state has vastly increased its public spending over the rate of inflation. Californians pay among the highest sales and income taxes in the nation.
But what they see in return are bloated bureaucracies, poor schools, congested highways, and dysfunctional community hospitals. With a bailout, California’s governor and legislators won’t worry too much that their constituents are some of the most taxed and least served of any in America.
All sorts of promises are proposed to bail out mortgage holders who have defaulted or owe more than their homes are worth. Apparently, no debtor is really culpable. And apparently, no one took out second or third mortgages for optional consumer purchases, or bought homes too large for their incomes.
What is the lesson here for other pinched families who will not default and will somehow meet their mortgage obligations, even on homes with negative equity? Is it that those who pay what they owe are punished while those who fail to do so are excused?
President-Elect Barack Obama promised over $1 trillion in new entitlements at a time when the Bush administration may well run a $500 billion annual deficit, only adding to a $10 trillion national debt. We also have $50 trillion in federal unfunded liabilities, ranging from long-term promises to Medicare and Social Security to payouts for government bonds and guaranteed loans.
Such massive borrowing and guarantees all offer cover for insolvent or poorly run programs (that face no worry of running out of money — and thus have no incentive to change). Corporate farmers just learned that the current $288-billion farm bill will once again provide government subsidies to ensure that it won’t matter much whether they plant the wrong crop at the wrong time.
Universities raise tuition rates that exceed the rate of inflation. But in our brave, new no-failure world, why worry when more promised federal-guaranteed student loans and credits will ensure steady paying enrollment? With guaranteed federal money, why be concerned that colleges and universities are overstaffed with administrators, replete with centers and programs that have nothing to do with undergraduate education, and erecting Las Vegas—-like student unions and colossal recreation centers?
Americans are creating a therapeutic society in which none of us need fail. No one loses in T-ball anymore. Schools honor a dozen valedictorians. In universities, a “C” passing grade is now the understood kinder and gentler version of the old and now-rare “F.”
Our culture forgot that there was once a utility in failure. Failing reminded us of what works and what doesn’t — and how we must learn to avoid the latter. Instead, in our new economic purgatory, no firm, company, state, city, or individual ever quite goes to financial heaven or hell. A Bear Stearns or Chrysler neither succeeds nor fails but just sort of endlessly exists.
Bailing Out Ignorance
Civic malpractice.
By Kathleen Parker
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
So much for the wisdom of The People.
A new report from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) on the nation’s civic literacy finds that most Americans are too ignorant to vote. Out of 2,500 American quiz-takers, including college students, elected officials and other randomly selected citizens, nearly 1,800 flunked a 33-question test on basic civics. In fact, elected officials scored slightly lower than the general public with an average score of 44 percent compared to 49 percent.
Only 0.8 percent of all test-takers scored an “A.”
America’s report card may come as little surprise to fans of Jay Leno’s man-on-the-street interviews, which reveal that most people don’t know diddly about doohickey. Still, it’s disheartening in the wake of a populist-driven election celebrating joes-of-all-trades to be reminded that the voting public is dumber than ever.
The multiple-choice ISI quiz wouldn’t deepen the creases in most brains, but the questions do require a basic knowledge of how the U.S. government works. Think fast: In what document do the words “government of the people, by the people, for the people” appear? More than twice as many people (56 percent) knew that Paula Abdul was a judge on American Idol than knew that those words come from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (21 percent).
In good news, more than 80 percent of college graduates gave correct answers about Susan B. Anthony, the identity of the commander in chief of the U.S. military, and the content of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
But don’t pop the cork yet. Only 17 percent of college grads understood the difference between free markets and centralized planning.
Then again, we can’t blame the children for what they haven’t been taught. Civics courses, once a staple of junior and high school education, are no longer considered important in our quantitative, leave-no-child-behind world. And college adds little civic knowledge, the ISI study found. The average grade for those holding a bachelor’s degree was just 57 percent — only 13 points higher than the average score of those with only a high school diploma.
Most bracing: Only 27 percent of elected officeholders in the survey could identify a right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment. Forty-three percent didn’t know what the Electoral College does. And 46 percent didn’t know that the Constitution gives Congress power to declare war.
What’s behind the dumbing down of America? ISI found that passive activities, such as watching television (including TV news) and talking on the phone, diminish civic literacy. Actively pursuing information through print media and participating in high-level conversations — even, potentially, blogging — makes one smarter.
The ISI insists that higher-education reforms aimed at civic literacy are urgently needed. Who could argue otherwise? But historian Rick Shenkman, author of Just How Stupid Are We? thinks reform needs to start in high school. His strategy is both poetic (to certain ears) and pragmatic: Require students to read newspapers, and give college freshman weekly quizzes on current events.
Did he say newspapers?! Shenkman even suggests government subsidies for newspaper subscriptions, as well as federal tuition subsidies for students who perform well on civics tests. They could be paid from a special fund created by, say, a “Too Many Stupid Voters Act.”
Not only would citizens be smarter, but also newspapers might be saved. Announcements of newsroom cuts, which ultimately hurt quality, have become routine. Just this week, USA Today announced the elimination of about 20 positions, while the Newark Star-Ledger, as it cuts its news staff by 40 percent, lost almost its entire editorial board in a single day.
In his book, Shenkman, founder of George Mason University’s History News Network, is tough on everyday Americans. Why, he asks, do we value polls when clearly The People don’t know enough to make a reasoned judgment?
The Founding Fathers, Shenkman points out, weren’t so enamored of The People, whom they distrusted. Hence a Republic, not a Democracy. They understood that an ignorant electorate was susceptible to emotional manipulation and feared the tyranny of the masses.
Both Shenkman and the ISI pose a bedeviling question, as crucial as any to the nation’s health: Who will govern a free nation if no one understands the mechanics and instruments of that freedom?
Answer: Maybe one day, a demagogue.
By Kathleen Parker
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
So much for the wisdom of The People.
A new report from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) on the nation’s civic literacy finds that most Americans are too ignorant to vote. Out of 2,500 American quiz-takers, including college students, elected officials and other randomly selected citizens, nearly 1,800 flunked a 33-question test on basic civics. In fact, elected officials scored slightly lower than the general public with an average score of 44 percent compared to 49 percent.
Only 0.8 percent of all test-takers scored an “A.”
America’s report card may come as little surprise to fans of Jay Leno’s man-on-the-street interviews, which reveal that most people don’t know diddly about doohickey. Still, it’s disheartening in the wake of a populist-driven election celebrating joes-of-all-trades to be reminded that the voting public is dumber than ever.
The multiple-choice ISI quiz wouldn’t deepen the creases in most brains, but the questions do require a basic knowledge of how the U.S. government works. Think fast: In what document do the words “government of the people, by the people, for the people” appear? More than twice as many people (56 percent) knew that Paula Abdul was a judge on American Idol than knew that those words come from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (21 percent).
In good news, more than 80 percent of college graduates gave correct answers about Susan B. Anthony, the identity of the commander in chief of the U.S. military, and the content of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
But don’t pop the cork yet. Only 17 percent of college grads understood the difference between free markets and centralized planning.
Then again, we can’t blame the children for what they haven’t been taught. Civics courses, once a staple of junior and high school education, are no longer considered important in our quantitative, leave-no-child-behind world. And college adds little civic knowledge, the ISI study found. The average grade for those holding a bachelor’s degree was just 57 percent — only 13 points higher than the average score of those with only a high school diploma.
Most bracing: Only 27 percent of elected officeholders in the survey could identify a right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment. Forty-three percent didn’t know what the Electoral College does. And 46 percent didn’t know that the Constitution gives Congress power to declare war.
What’s behind the dumbing down of America? ISI found that passive activities, such as watching television (including TV news) and talking on the phone, diminish civic literacy. Actively pursuing information through print media and participating in high-level conversations — even, potentially, blogging — makes one smarter.
The ISI insists that higher-education reforms aimed at civic literacy are urgently needed. Who could argue otherwise? But historian Rick Shenkman, author of Just How Stupid Are We? thinks reform needs to start in high school. His strategy is both poetic (to certain ears) and pragmatic: Require students to read newspapers, and give college freshman weekly quizzes on current events.
Did he say newspapers?! Shenkman even suggests government subsidies for newspaper subscriptions, as well as federal tuition subsidies for students who perform well on civics tests. They could be paid from a special fund created by, say, a “Too Many Stupid Voters Act.”
Not only would citizens be smarter, but also newspapers might be saved. Announcements of newsroom cuts, which ultimately hurt quality, have become routine. Just this week, USA Today announced the elimination of about 20 positions, while the Newark Star-Ledger, as it cuts its news staff by 40 percent, lost almost its entire editorial board in a single day.
In his book, Shenkman, founder of George Mason University’s History News Network, is tough on everyday Americans. Why, he asks, do we value polls when clearly The People don’t know enough to make a reasoned judgment?
The Founding Fathers, Shenkman points out, weren’t so enamored of The People, whom they distrusted. Hence a Republic, not a Democracy. They understood that an ignorant electorate was susceptible to emotional manipulation and feared the tyranny of the masses.
Both Shenkman and the ISI pose a bedeviling question, as crucial as any to the nation’s health: Who will govern a free nation if no one understands the mechanics and instruments of that freedom?
Answer: Maybe one day, a demagogue.
Obama's War
Cliff May
Thursday, November 20, 2008
American troops in Afghanistan are fighting what will soon become Barack Obama's war - not just because he will inherit it, but also because he has claimed it. This is "the right battlefield," Obama has said. The war in Afghanistan "has to be won."
How can that mission be accomplished? Extensive interviews with American military commanders, European diplomats, and Afghan officials lead to this conclusion: Although we are not currently defeating the Taliban and other belligerent groups in Afghanistan, we can prevail - if the incoming administration is prepared to fully resource a sophisticated counter-insurgency strategy similar to that implemented by General David Petraeus in Iraq.
A subtle and often misunderstood point: The war in Iraq was not turned around by "surging" more troops into the country to do more of the same. Rather, the key was transitioning to counterinsurgency - COIN - a form of warfare that requires many boots on the ground.
Before Petraeus took command in Iraq in early 2007, most American troops there were cooped up in large Forward Operating Bases - FOBs - that had to be supplied, maintained, operated and, of course, guarded. Meanwhile, outside the wire, terrorists were taking over neighborhoods and towns - killing, exploiting, coercing, and intimidating the locals.
A small number of elite troops would "commute" to this war - going out from the FOBs, often at night, to look for terrorist leaders, kicking down doors, arresting suspects, killing those who resisted, sometimes getting themselves blown up by bombs planted along roads the insurgents knew the Americans would have to travel. Reliable, actionable intelligence was scarce, so sometimes troops kicked down the wrong doors and killed the wrong people, stoking Iraqi resentment of the American "occupiers." In sum, this was a flawed and failing strategy.
Petraeus initiated dramatic changes. He moved troops out of the FOBs and into Iraq's mean streets. He brought in reinforcements and stationed them in Iraqi communities as well. Yes, that gave the terrorists more targets in more vulnerable postures. But once Iraqis understood that these warriors were there to provide security for them, their attitudes underwent a transformation.
They began work with the Americans, supplying them with intelligence no satellite or drone could produce: identifying the bad guys and pointing out the houses, schools, and mosques in which they were hiding, storing weapons, and holding prisoners. Before long, al-Qaeda terrorists and Iranian-backed militias were on the run.
As COIN experts in Afghanistan explain, successful counter-insurgency requires four discrete steps: shaping, clearing, holding, and building. Shaping implies such tasks as sitting down with local leaders to ask their consent before bringing in troops. Clearing is the "kinetic" part - eliminating the enemy through the application of lethal force. Cleared areas must then be held - security forces need to stay on to prevent the bad guys from returning. Short-term, these forces can be foreign, but - as soon as possible - responsibility should be transferred to indigenous authorities whom our troops have trained for the task and whom we advise as long as necessary. Finally, there is a development component: building the local economy and helping establishing governance so that communities liberated from terrorists can stand on their own two feet.
This is a long and arduous process. But it has worked against tough insurgencies - while other approaches have not. For that reason, American officers and troops are working hard to master the range of skills needed and to adapt what has been learned in Iraq to the different - and in many ways more difficult - conditions in Afghanistan.
However, to achieve success will require additional manpower and equipment: everything from helicopters to body armor. Obama, during the campaign, pledged to provide such resources. Gen. Petraeus and the commanders on the ground in Afghanistan should tell the President-Elect exactly what they need. Obama should listen. If he does, Republicans as well as Democrats should support him.
Afghanistan will be Obama's war but it also will be America's war - just as Iraq was both Bush's war and America's war (though many people refused to acknowledge that). A robust COIN is the change we need to win it.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
American troops in Afghanistan are fighting what will soon become Barack Obama's war - not just because he will inherit it, but also because he has claimed it. This is "the right battlefield," Obama has said. The war in Afghanistan "has to be won."
How can that mission be accomplished? Extensive interviews with American military commanders, European diplomats, and Afghan officials lead to this conclusion: Although we are not currently defeating the Taliban and other belligerent groups in Afghanistan, we can prevail - if the incoming administration is prepared to fully resource a sophisticated counter-insurgency strategy similar to that implemented by General David Petraeus in Iraq.
A subtle and often misunderstood point: The war in Iraq was not turned around by "surging" more troops into the country to do more of the same. Rather, the key was transitioning to counterinsurgency - COIN - a form of warfare that requires many boots on the ground.
Before Petraeus took command in Iraq in early 2007, most American troops there were cooped up in large Forward Operating Bases - FOBs - that had to be supplied, maintained, operated and, of course, guarded. Meanwhile, outside the wire, terrorists were taking over neighborhoods and towns - killing, exploiting, coercing, and intimidating the locals.
A small number of elite troops would "commute" to this war - going out from the FOBs, often at night, to look for terrorist leaders, kicking down doors, arresting suspects, killing those who resisted, sometimes getting themselves blown up by bombs planted along roads the insurgents knew the Americans would have to travel. Reliable, actionable intelligence was scarce, so sometimes troops kicked down the wrong doors and killed the wrong people, stoking Iraqi resentment of the American "occupiers." In sum, this was a flawed and failing strategy.
Petraeus initiated dramatic changes. He moved troops out of the FOBs and into Iraq's mean streets. He brought in reinforcements and stationed them in Iraqi communities as well. Yes, that gave the terrorists more targets in more vulnerable postures. But once Iraqis understood that these warriors were there to provide security for them, their attitudes underwent a transformation.
They began work with the Americans, supplying them with intelligence no satellite or drone could produce: identifying the bad guys and pointing out the houses, schools, and mosques in which they were hiding, storing weapons, and holding prisoners. Before long, al-Qaeda terrorists and Iranian-backed militias were on the run.
As COIN experts in Afghanistan explain, successful counter-insurgency requires four discrete steps: shaping, clearing, holding, and building. Shaping implies such tasks as sitting down with local leaders to ask their consent before bringing in troops. Clearing is the "kinetic" part - eliminating the enemy through the application of lethal force. Cleared areas must then be held - security forces need to stay on to prevent the bad guys from returning. Short-term, these forces can be foreign, but - as soon as possible - responsibility should be transferred to indigenous authorities whom our troops have trained for the task and whom we advise as long as necessary. Finally, there is a development component: building the local economy and helping establishing governance so that communities liberated from terrorists can stand on their own two feet.
This is a long and arduous process. But it has worked against tough insurgencies - while other approaches have not. For that reason, American officers and troops are working hard to master the range of skills needed and to adapt what has been learned in Iraq to the different - and in many ways more difficult - conditions in Afghanistan.
However, to achieve success will require additional manpower and equipment: everything from helicopters to body armor. Obama, during the campaign, pledged to provide such resources. Gen. Petraeus and the commanders on the ground in Afghanistan should tell the President-Elect exactly what they need. Obama should listen. If he does, Republicans as well as Democrats should support him.
Afghanistan will be Obama's war but it also will be America's war - just as Iraq was both Bush's war and America's war (though many people refused to acknowledge that). A robust COIN is the change we need to win it.
Obama Upsets French, Arabs
Rachel Marsden
Friday, November 21, 2008
Up until Barack Obama’s victory, much of America – and the rest of the world – was deeply in love with the idea of being in love. The problem with any such relationship is always that, one day, the spell wears off, and you start getting annoyed at little things like your soul mate (in this case, Barack Obama – America’s soul mate) leaving the toilet seat up. Some media people won’t care – they’ll blame George Bush for having used the same bathroom months earlier. Others, like the mainstream media, will fall into Obama’s toilet and splash around like it’s holy water.
Last week, French philosopher Andre Glucksmann lamented in France’s Le Figaro newspaper that Barack Obama’s election victory was already a big letdown, if only because he’s not leftist enough – and with center-right leaders now in France, Germany, Italy and likely soon in the UK, Eurolibs were desperate for a victory, anywhere.
Translated from the article’s original French: “[It was] as if the Messiah had appeared, not in Washington but between Paris and Rome, Berlin and Brussels, as if he extended his conciliatory wing over the planet. We Europeans have blithely erased all asperities of the candidate. He supports the death penalty which we are so proud to have abolished. He does not prohibit the free sale of weapons which seemed to us, up until yesterday, the fateful sign American barbarism and this cowboy mentality which we, refined people of quality, vomit.”
Obama hasn’t even done anything yet – except name a Jewish Chief of Staff, upsetting a bunch of Arabs - and disappointment is already setting in. And the problem with having to do work is that it risks generating even more disappointment.
The Democrats were elected to a congressional majority in 2006, and subsequently proceeded to whittle their approval rating down to almost single digits when it came time to start doing something besides criticizing President Bush. Not that many have noticed this ineptitude recently, because they’ve been distracted by the phenomenon of a black guy running for president.
Obama knows that “doing things” could make him less popular, which is why he wants George Bush to save him the trouble and get a few more “failures” under his belt while still in office – like bail out the auto industry. Bush pinned the tail right back on the donkeys, saying that any new bailout can’t come out of the $700 billion one he orchestrated for the financial industry.
Liberal Democrats, now keen to throw a bone to their auto worker union pals who risk getting sacked, got their comrades into this mess in the first place. That’s often what happens when liberals get down to “work”. Government regulations mandating things like environmental controls as a result of liberal pet-cause lobbying have accounted for 1/3 of US vehicle price increases, according to a study at the University of California, Davis. Another study by the Brookings Institution found that regulatory costs are absorbed by the manufacturers. Meanwhile, foreign auto companies are allowed to slap high tariffs on competing foreign imports. It really isn’t Bush’s mess to fix.
The New York Times knows that it will soon come time for Obama to get things done, and that means there’s more than a fair chance of disappointment. So they’re inoculating their boy, in case he changes his mind about closing Gitmo: “You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone,” says a Georgetown law professor “who has been a critic of the Bush administration,” in a Times piece.
Obama may find it easier to just get a permission slip from the Democratic congress to keep Gitmo open. No matter how much your liberal friends count on you to be true to your leftist record now, it’s still far more appealing to maintain the liberal default position of “doing nothing” – especially when the alternative isn’t palatable to anyone except radical leftists who have a tenuous relationship with reality.
Imagine Jihad Johnny in the US court system! The soldiers who pulled these suspects over for running while jihading in the Afghan desert can testify to what they saw, and have their procedures and methods from the heat of battle held up against those used to bust potheads in California. The various spook agencies could testify about how they failed to inform the suspects of their right to remain silent before shooting water up their nose for the purpose of extracting information.
When the judge closes his eyes and picks a technicality as the basis for acquittal from a hat, they would be free to roam the streets of America with full access to backpacks, fertilizer and “social networking” www.JihadIsSoRad.com type websites. It would be like springing Charles Manson into a room full of yuppies.
It’s not like they could be deported! As we saw recently when Chinese Muslims at Gitmo were released by the federal court, officials couldn’t find a country that would take them without wanting to kill them. To Obama’s voting base, it would be like sending puppies to slaughter.
Barack Obama is bound to find out that George Bush’s job is a lot easier when you’re not doing it.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Up until Barack Obama’s victory, much of America – and the rest of the world – was deeply in love with the idea of being in love. The problem with any such relationship is always that, one day, the spell wears off, and you start getting annoyed at little things like your soul mate (in this case, Barack Obama – America’s soul mate) leaving the toilet seat up. Some media people won’t care – they’ll blame George Bush for having used the same bathroom months earlier. Others, like the mainstream media, will fall into Obama’s toilet and splash around like it’s holy water.
Last week, French philosopher Andre Glucksmann lamented in France’s Le Figaro newspaper that Barack Obama’s election victory was already a big letdown, if only because he’s not leftist enough – and with center-right leaders now in France, Germany, Italy and likely soon in the UK, Eurolibs were desperate for a victory, anywhere.
Translated from the article’s original French: “[It was] as if the Messiah had appeared, not in Washington but between Paris and Rome, Berlin and Brussels, as if he extended his conciliatory wing over the planet. We Europeans have blithely erased all asperities of the candidate. He supports the death penalty which we are so proud to have abolished. He does not prohibit the free sale of weapons which seemed to us, up until yesterday, the fateful sign American barbarism and this cowboy mentality which we, refined people of quality, vomit.”
Obama hasn’t even done anything yet – except name a Jewish Chief of Staff, upsetting a bunch of Arabs - and disappointment is already setting in. And the problem with having to do work is that it risks generating even more disappointment.
The Democrats were elected to a congressional majority in 2006, and subsequently proceeded to whittle their approval rating down to almost single digits when it came time to start doing something besides criticizing President Bush. Not that many have noticed this ineptitude recently, because they’ve been distracted by the phenomenon of a black guy running for president.
Obama knows that “doing things” could make him less popular, which is why he wants George Bush to save him the trouble and get a few more “failures” under his belt while still in office – like bail out the auto industry. Bush pinned the tail right back on the donkeys, saying that any new bailout can’t come out of the $700 billion one he orchestrated for the financial industry.
Liberal Democrats, now keen to throw a bone to their auto worker union pals who risk getting sacked, got their comrades into this mess in the first place. That’s often what happens when liberals get down to “work”. Government regulations mandating things like environmental controls as a result of liberal pet-cause lobbying have accounted for 1/3 of US vehicle price increases, according to a study at the University of California, Davis. Another study by the Brookings Institution found that regulatory costs are absorbed by the manufacturers. Meanwhile, foreign auto companies are allowed to slap high tariffs on competing foreign imports. It really isn’t Bush’s mess to fix.
The New York Times knows that it will soon come time for Obama to get things done, and that means there’s more than a fair chance of disappointment. So they’re inoculating their boy, in case he changes his mind about closing Gitmo: “You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone,” says a Georgetown law professor “who has been a critic of the Bush administration,” in a Times piece.
Obama may find it easier to just get a permission slip from the Democratic congress to keep Gitmo open. No matter how much your liberal friends count on you to be true to your leftist record now, it’s still far more appealing to maintain the liberal default position of “doing nothing” – especially when the alternative isn’t palatable to anyone except radical leftists who have a tenuous relationship with reality.
Imagine Jihad Johnny in the US court system! The soldiers who pulled these suspects over for running while jihading in the Afghan desert can testify to what they saw, and have their procedures and methods from the heat of battle held up against those used to bust potheads in California. The various spook agencies could testify about how they failed to inform the suspects of their right to remain silent before shooting water up their nose for the purpose of extracting information.
When the judge closes his eyes and picks a technicality as the basis for acquittal from a hat, they would be free to roam the streets of America with full access to backpacks, fertilizer and “social networking” www.JihadIsSoRad.com type websites. It would be like springing Charles Manson into a room full of yuppies.
It’s not like they could be deported! As we saw recently when Chinese Muslims at Gitmo were released by the federal court, officials couldn’t find a country that would take them without wanting to kill them. To Obama’s voting base, it would be like sending puppies to slaughter.
Barack Obama is bound to find out that George Bush’s job is a lot easier when you’re not doing it.
Beware of the 'Fairness Doctrine'
William Rusher
Monday, November 24, 2008
There are ominous signs that certain forces on the left are gearing up for a new attempt to impose a "fairness doctrine" on American television and radio commentary.
Incredible as it may sound in retrospect, there actually was a so-called "Fairness Doctrine" in force in the United States from 1949 to 1987. Its ostensible purpose was to compel radio and TV stations to broadcast statements of opinion that "balanced" those being expressed voluntarily. Since a substantial majority of the statements being broadcast voluntarily were more or less conservative, the effect was to force broadcasters to air comparable programs expressing liberal sentiments.
If that strikes you as a violation of the First Amendment, go to the head of the class. It is, of course, exactly that -- as Congress recognized in 1987, when it eliminated it. At the time, even powerful liberal voices endorsed its demise. A Washington Post editorial of June 24, 1987, put it this way: "The truth is ... that there is no 'fairness' whatever in the 'fairness' doctrine. On the contrary, it is a chilling federal attempt to compel some undefined 'balance' of what ideas radio and television new programs are to include. ... The 'fairness doctrine' undercuts free, independent, sound and responsive journalism -- substituting governmental dictates. That is deceptive, dangerous and, in a democracy, repulsive."
But not, in the opinion of some liberals, as repulsive as the relatively small number of liberal opinions being expressed. So now some of them seem to be getting ready to readjust the situation to make it more to their liking.
Thus, last year Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif, told Fox News Sunday that she was "looking at" a new Fairness Doctrine. Talk radio, she complained, "tends to be one-sided. It's explosive. It pushes people to, I think, extreme views without a lot of information." Apparently, she doesn't want them to hold such views without first getting a heavy dose of what she regards as the correct information.
And on Election Day this month, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., argued that people who oppose the Fairness Doctrine "want the FCC to limit pornography on the air," and are therefore inconsistent. "You can't say 'government hands off in one area' to a commercial enterprise, but you're allowed to intervene in another. That's not consistent." To Schumer, if you are willing to limit pornography on the air, you must (to be consistent) be ready to demand the expression of liberal views on political topics.
Whether Feinstein and Schumer will get their way is another matter. The "fairness doctrine" was abolished in 1987 amid a good deal of bipartisan self-congratulation, and it seems likely that it still retains most of its unpopularity. Logically, it simply cannot withstand analysis. It certainly doesn't follow that every political viewpoint that manages to get expressed must be accompanied, or followed, by an equivalent expression of the opposite viewpoint. One can support laws against murder without necessarily insisting on equal time for the arguments in favor of it.
What those who support the "fairness doctrine" are really saying is that they don't enjoy the fact that their views have so little support. And while that's perfectly understandable, it is no justification for the proposition that society must artificially create a situation in which unpopular views receive the same attention and respect as others that have more.
Monday, November 24, 2008
There are ominous signs that certain forces on the left are gearing up for a new attempt to impose a "fairness doctrine" on American television and radio commentary.
Incredible as it may sound in retrospect, there actually was a so-called "Fairness Doctrine" in force in the United States from 1949 to 1987. Its ostensible purpose was to compel radio and TV stations to broadcast statements of opinion that "balanced" those being expressed voluntarily. Since a substantial majority of the statements being broadcast voluntarily were more or less conservative, the effect was to force broadcasters to air comparable programs expressing liberal sentiments.
If that strikes you as a violation of the First Amendment, go to the head of the class. It is, of course, exactly that -- as Congress recognized in 1987, when it eliminated it. At the time, even powerful liberal voices endorsed its demise. A Washington Post editorial of June 24, 1987, put it this way: "The truth is ... that there is no 'fairness' whatever in the 'fairness' doctrine. On the contrary, it is a chilling federal attempt to compel some undefined 'balance' of what ideas radio and television new programs are to include. ... The 'fairness doctrine' undercuts free, independent, sound and responsive journalism -- substituting governmental dictates. That is deceptive, dangerous and, in a democracy, repulsive."
But not, in the opinion of some liberals, as repulsive as the relatively small number of liberal opinions being expressed. So now some of them seem to be getting ready to readjust the situation to make it more to their liking.
Thus, last year Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif, told Fox News Sunday that she was "looking at" a new Fairness Doctrine. Talk radio, she complained, "tends to be one-sided. It's explosive. It pushes people to, I think, extreme views without a lot of information." Apparently, she doesn't want them to hold such views without first getting a heavy dose of what she regards as the correct information.
And on Election Day this month, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., argued that people who oppose the Fairness Doctrine "want the FCC to limit pornography on the air," and are therefore inconsistent. "You can't say 'government hands off in one area' to a commercial enterprise, but you're allowed to intervene in another. That's not consistent." To Schumer, if you are willing to limit pornography on the air, you must (to be consistent) be ready to demand the expression of liberal views on political topics.
Whether Feinstein and Schumer will get their way is another matter. The "fairness doctrine" was abolished in 1987 amid a good deal of bipartisan self-congratulation, and it seems likely that it still retains most of its unpopularity. Logically, it simply cannot withstand analysis. It certainly doesn't follow that every political viewpoint that manages to get expressed must be accompanied, or followed, by an equivalent expression of the opposite viewpoint. One can support laws against murder without necessarily insisting on equal time for the arguments in favor of it.
What those who support the "fairness doctrine" are really saying is that they don't enjoy the fact that their views have so little support. And while that's perfectly understandable, it is no justification for the proposition that society must artificially create a situation in which unpopular views receive the same attention and respect as others that have more.
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