By Mike Adams
Monday, January 31, 2011
William Irvine is a professor of philosophy at Wright State University. He is one of the most courageous and honest professors in the country. Recently, he wrote a column concerning Wright State’s decision to invite the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to speak on his campus. Although he disagrees with many of Reverend Wright’s views, he publicly welcomed him to the campus because he believes that a university should be a marketplace of ideas. That view alone makes Irvine exceptional among today’s professoriate.
Irvine calls out his university for being “curiously one-sided in the speakers it brings to campus.” He notes that liberal speakers are routinely invited and that ultra-liberal speakers including Wright and Angela Davis are occasionally invited. No one seems to think it strange that avowed communists and those with significant criminal backgrounds are paid to speak on campus at considerable expense to the taxpayer. But politically conservative speakers are scarce and in the case of John McCain and Sarah Palin pay for the privilege of using campus facilities.
William Irvine is the rare professor willing to confront his colleagues’ hypocrisy and to publicly quote their silly defenses of rigid ideological conformity. When he confronted another professor with the idea that the university should invite conservative speakers his colleague responded by asking “You mean someone like Glenn Beck?” This kind of reaction shows how off-center our universities have become. What educated person could consider Glen Beck to be more extreme than Angela Davis?
Another professor reacted to Irvine’s reasonable suggestion by saying that it wouldn’t be a good idea to bring any Holocaust deniers to campus. The statement is an odd one indeed. It suggests that most conservatives refuse to accept the Holocaust as fact. I think liberal supporters of abortion are today’s true Holocaust deniers.
Professor Irvine has discovered something I have also discovered about the liberal professoriate; namely, that they see no reason for debate. In their eyes, the debate is over on all the major issues of the day. Of course, in their eyes they won all the major debates. Now, the reward for winning these debates is that we can proceed into the implementation phase. Of course, professors rarely use the word “implantation.” They just mindlessly repeat the word “diversity” like catatonics in padded cells.
Professor Irvine has also discovered that suggestions of bringing people like Thomas Sowell to campus are met with one pretty serious problem: Most liberal professors have never heard of Thomas Sowell.
Many years ago I suggested that Sowell should be required reading for college students. The reaction was amazing. According to one of my left-leaning colleagues - one who actually knows who Thomas Sowell is - the students don’t need to read Sowell because they were raised in conservative homes where those ideas were regularly espoused.
Notice the intellectual sleight of hand my “liberal” colleague employed. His argument is against intellectual diversity. The $64,000 question: Why oppose intellectual diversity? The answer: Since parents do it for eighteen years it is only fair that professors be allowed to do it for four years.
Professor Irvine has accurately identified a big problem in saying that it is now possible for students to get a college “education” without ever encountering a conservative professor. But the problem is even bigger than that. Most professors now believe it is desirable for students to get a college “education” without ever encountering a conservative professor. Their idea of “liberal education” is nothing more than a poorly disguised war on conservatism. This anti-conservative mindset is so entrenched that one of my “liberal” colleagues wants to remove the entire Cameron School of Business from UNC-Wilmington (where I teach). He explicitly stated that a school of business has “no business at a liberal university.” Between his puerile and antiquated lectures on Marxism he denies the existence of any liberal bias. This is the personification of self-indulgence and anti-intellectualism.
Professor William Irvine says that we do not have a fair hearing of conservative views on campus but instead “liberal professors galore, who will be happy to tell you what they imagine the conservative viewpoint on various issues must be and why these viewpoints are wrongheaded.” This statement is bull’s-eye accurate. And his follow-up statement is brilliant: “This is a pale substitute for a genuine political debate, but it is, on many campuses, what students have to settle for.”
Good for him. This debate should remain focused on the shortchanged students. College is not becoming less expensive. But it is becoming less relevant.
The public challenge issued by Professor Irvine is one that every professor, conservative or liberal, should issue to his university. That challenge comes in two parts: 1) Hire at least a few conservative professors. (I’m open to this idea. What better way to remedy the historical oppression of conservatives!). 2) If you cannot stomach hiring conservative professors then at least hire some conservative speakers.
Of course, today’s “liberal” professor will agree to neither of those suggestions. He uses affirmative action to promote his self-esteem not to promote “a diversity of perspectives.” And he uses the word “diversity” only to hide his deep-seated intellectual insecurity.
Our universities are no longer committed to revealing the truth. They are committed to suppressing the truth. And among those truths is that tolerance is not the academy’s most enduring intellectual achievement. It is its most transparent moral weakness.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Can or Will Brown Fix This?
By Bruce Bialosky
Monday, January 31, 2011
Jerry Brown pitched Californians on the concept that he was the right person to heal California’s woes because of his experience. He admitted that at 72 years of age, this was the last stop of his political career and so he could fearlessly confront the state’s daunting challenges. Not only does Brown have to lasso an out-of-control budget, he must also straighten out a dysfunctional government.
Mark Neuman contacted me after reading my column, “California Demise,” which focused on the budget and other problems in the state. Mr. Neuman, a CPA in Southern California, has a tale to tell of just how inept state operations have become.
Neuman attempted to file a Statement of Information form with the Secretary of State for a California-based Limited Liability Company (LLC). Forms like these are routinely filed in every state for entities like corporations and LLCs in order to maintain a public database of current information. As a result, any resident of the state can look to see the company is properly registered and also to determine who might be hiding behind that entity’s name. Neuman files these forms for other companies with many states around the country, usually without any problems.
In early July, Mr. Neuman dutifully filed his company’s form with California’s Secretary of State. At the end of November, he received a letter from that office with his form and his check. It stated that his check was not honored by his bank. The reason it wasn’t honored was that the bank will not accept any checks older than 90 days. Incredibly, the state had not processed his paperwork within 90 days of receipt and now was asking him for a new check. Not only did the state want a new check, but this time they were insisting upon a cashier’s check.
Furthermore, while the original check was for $20, now they were demanding $30. Because the state cannot handle its business in a timely manner, it was forcing a taxpayer to pay a penalty as well as endure the time-consuming process of getting a cashier’s check -- for which his bank would charge him a fee. Neuman tried to contact the Secretary of State’s office, but no one answers the phone and the recording says you should not leave a message. In other states, he could have easily filed this form online, but Secretary of State Debra Bowen has not been able to get this simple procedure computerized yet. And she was reelected by 1.4 million votes.
There are so many things wrong with this scenario that we could be dumbfounded for weeks, but let’s just hit the high points. First, the brazenness of state employees to put the blame on Mr. Neuman because they cannot handle their responsibilities (and, incidentally, never apologizing) is indicative of why people hate government today. Second, that a flat-broke state sitting with thousands of envelopes containing checks (albeit minor amounts, but money nonetheless) cannot get a couple of employees to open the envelopes and log the payments is astonishing. Third, the fact that a new letter was prepared asking for an additional $10 -- which actually costs more than $10 to prepare and send --is literally mind-boggling. If they just did it right the first time this wouldn’t have happened.
The bigger picture is that this is part of an orchestrated effort by government at all levels in California and other states to demand more money from taxpayers. What does that mean? You are probably aware that whenever there is a potential cut in public services, politicians predictably threaten to impose reductions in police, EMTs or firemen. They never cut middle management or non-essential services. Near my home there is an abandoned car that’s been sitting on a particular street for over a month. I went through all the channels with no results until I called my Councilman, Paul Krekorian. The first thing his staff person said was “… because of all the cutbacks.” I replied, “You have a $4.4 billion budget. You should be able to pick up an abandoned vehicle. “ But they want you to think that they’re broke when they still spend endlessly in pointless conferences and on useless boards and politically-correct commissions.
In California, it is virtually impossible to get anyone on the line at any consumer-based agency. The Franchise Tax Board (which handles income tax) and the State Board of Equalization (which handles sales tax) are almost unreachable. You would think they would place a high priority on having people available at revenue-producing agencies, but they just don’t think that way.
They will tell you that there have been personnel cutbacks, which is true. What they will not tell you is that the level of personnel per 1,000 residents after the cutbacks is still higher than every year from 1985-1999. During those years, service agencies in California worked quite well, and you could actually speak with someone on the telephone. One might think that with the increase in population – along with the huge advances in technology in the last decade – we would need fewer personnel because of the economies of scale. Instead, we have an utterly dysfunctional government.
What now exists is a non-responsive government that is at war with its residents. Public employees receive inflated wages and absurdly-high benefits, and they are making life as difficult as possible for a citizenry that wants to reduce government compensation. If you think this situation is unique to California, you are seriously mistaken. Jerry Brown has no idea what he is facing when he becomes Governor. But then again, I recently heard stories about the chaotic state of the Attorney General’s office, which was his last gig. Maybe he should start there.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Jerry Brown pitched Californians on the concept that he was the right person to heal California’s woes because of his experience. He admitted that at 72 years of age, this was the last stop of his political career and so he could fearlessly confront the state’s daunting challenges. Not only does Brown have to lasso an out-of-control budget, he must also straighten out a dysfunctional government.
Mark Neuman contacted me after reading my column, “California Demise,” which focused on the budget and other problems in the state. Mr. Neuman, a CPA in Southern California, has a tale to tell of just how inept state operations have become.
Neuman attempted to file a Statement of Information form with the Secretary of State for a California-based Limited Liability Company (LLC). Forms like these are routinely filed in every state for entities like corporations and LLCs in order to maintain a public database of current information. As a result, any resident of the state can look to see the company is properly registered and also to determine who might be hiding behind that entity’s name. Neuman files these forms for other companies with many states around the country, usually without any problems.
In early July, Mr. Neuman dutifully filed his company’s form with California’s Secretary of State. At the end of November, he received a letter from that office with his form and his check. It stated that his check was not honored by his bank. The reason it wasn’t honored was that the bank will not accept any checks older than 90 days. Incredibly, the state had not processed his paperwork within 90 days of receipt and now was asking him for a new check. Not only did the state want a new check, but this time they were insisting upon a cashier’s check.
Furthermore, while the original check was for $20, now they were demanding $30. Because the state cannot handle its business in a timely manner, it was forcing a taxpayer to pay a penalty as well as endure the time-consuming process of getting a cashier’s check -- for which his bank would charge him a fee. Neuman tried to contact the Secretary of State’s office, but no one answers the phone and the recording says you should not leave a message. In other states, he could have easily filed this form online, but Secretary of State Debra Bowen has not been able to get this simple procedure computerized yet. And she was reelected by 1.4 million votes.
There are so many things wrong with this scenario that we could be dumbfounded for weeks, but let’s just hit the high points. First, the brazenness of state employees to put the blame on Mr. Neuman because they cannot handle their responsibilities (and, incidentally, never apologizing) is indicative of why people hate government today. Second, that a flat-broke state sitting with thousands of envelopes containing checks (albeit minor amounts, but money nonetheless) cannot get a couple of employees to open the envelopes and log the payments is astonishing. Third, the fact that a new letter was prepared asking for an additional $10 -- which actually costs more than $10 to prepare and send --is literally mind-boggling. If they just did it right the first time this wouldn’t have happened.
The bigger picture is that this is part of an orchestrated effort by government at all levels in California and other states to demand more money from taxpayers. What does that mean? You are probably aware that whenever there is a potential cut in public services, politicians predictably threaten to impose reductions in police, EMTs or firemen. They never cut middle management or non-essential services. Near my home there is an abandoned car that’s been sitting on a particular street for over a month. I went through all the channels with no results until I called my Councilman, Paul Krekorian. The first thing his staff person said was “… because of all the cutbacks.” I replied, “You have a $4.4 billion budget. You should be able to pick up an abandoned vehicle. “ But they want you to think that they’re broke when they still spend endlessly in pointless conferences and on useless boards and politically-correct commissions.
In California, it is virtually impossible to get anyone on the line at any consumer-based agency. The Franchise Tax Board (which handles income tax) and the State Board of Equalization (which handles sales tax) are almost unreachable. You would think they would place a high priority on having people available at revenue-producing agencies, but they just don’t think that way.
They will tell you that there have been personnel cutbacks, which is true. What they will not tell you is that the level of personnel per 1,000 residents after the cutbacks is still higher than every year from 1985-1999. During those years, service agencies in California worked quite well, and you could actually speak with someone on the telephone. One might think that with the increase in population – along with the huge advances in technology in the last decade – we would need fewer personnel because of the economies of scale. Instead, we have an utterly dysfunctional government.
What now exists is a non-responsive government that is at war with its residents. Public employees receive inflated wages and absurdly-high benefits, and they are making life as difficult as possible for a citizenry that wants to reduce government compensation. If you think this situation is unique to California, you are seriously mistaken. Jerry Brown has no idea what he is facing when he becomes Governor. But then again, I recently heard stories about the chaotic state of the Attorney General’s office, which was his last gig. Maybe he should start there.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Where Judicial Activism Morphs into Disregard
By Debra J. Saunders
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Four times this month, the U.S. Supreme Court has slapped down the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Four times the Big Bench unanimously reversed Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decisions. Unanimous is a big deal. It means that there's no left-right political divide in the Big Bench's findings -- just right on the law and wrong on the law.
I take unanimous seriously. When the California Supreme Court issued a ruling last year that stayed a scheduled execution, I feared yet another over-reaching judicial fiat. But then I saw that all the justices were on board. The law had to be unambiguous.
In the instances of the three criminal reversals this month, the Big Bench clearly was sending a message to the Ninth Circuit -- particularly to Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who had written the opinions. And the message is: Show some respect for the law.
Followers of the Ninth Circuit are painfully aware of its reputation as an activist court that flouts laws it doesn't like and bulldozes rulings that defy its left-leaning politics. The San Francisco-based judicial district serves as a textbook example of how judges should not behave.
Start with Randy Moore's case. In a plea bargain, Moore pleaded "no contest" to the 1995 Oregon murder of Kenneth Rogers, whom Moore and two confederates had kidnapped and Moore had shot in the head. Moore was facing a possible death sentence. Thanks to the plea deal, he got 25 years and the possibility of parole.
Now, this is a sore spot for me because I don't think courts should even consider the appeal of any plea bargain unless the defendant was severely mistreated. But Moore appealed, and the Ninth seized Moore's plea bargain as proof he was represented by ineffective counsel.
The court's logic was deficient. As Criminal Justice Legal Foundation President Michael Rushford observed, Moore "got a good deal."
But the court was flouting federal law. Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act precisely to prevent federal judges from issuing niggling orders that disregard court convictions and upend state appellate rulings.
In reversing Moore, Justice Anthony Kennedy had to remind the Ninth that its mandate is to follow the law.
Ditto the case of Joshua Richter, who was found guilty in a 1994 murder committed while he and an accomplice robbed a drug dealer. Once again, the Ninth found ineffective counsel.
In affirming the Richter conviction, Justice Kennedy wrote that the writ of habeas corpus stands as a safeguard against wrongful imprisonment. But the law is undermined "if there is judicial disregard for the sound and established principles that inform its proper issuance. That judicial disregard is inherent in" the Ninth's Richter decision.
Rushford found the unsigned "per-curiam" decision most damning because the Big Bench thought that the Ninth Circuit was so wrong that it "didn't even allow oral arguments."
Reinhardt and the majority had ordered the parole of Damon Cooke, who was convicted for attempted first-degree murder after he shot a friend in the head in 1991. The Ninth found that the parole board was wrong to consider the "cruel and callous" nature of the crime and wrong to ignore claims that Cooke was "an exemplary inmate."
The court also ordered the release of Elijah Clay, who was convicted of first-degree murder in 1978, because then-Gov. Gray Davis' refusal to heed a parole board recommendation for release was unreasonable.
Again, the Supremes ruled that federal judges have no dog in this fight: "There is no right under the federal Constitution to be conditionally released before the expiration of a valid sentence, and the states are under no duty to offer parole to prisoners."
(In a fourth reversal, this one written by Justice Sonya Sotomayor, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a ruling involving a banking regulation.)
Conservative court watcher John Elwood believes that Justice Kennedy has taken on the task of scolding the Ninth because, "as a Ninth Circuit alumnus," the justice takes the court's battered reputation "a little bit more to heart."
And well he should. There are judges in the Ninth who see the bench as a portfolio to overturn any policy they don't like -- and jurisdiction be damned.
In 2009, a three-judge (including Reinhardt) Ninth Circuit panel ordered the release of 40,000 California inmates. Not only did the trio seem to think they had authority reserved for state lawmakers, but also, they issued the pronouncement that the state could release 1 in 4 inmates "without a significant adverse impact on public safety." As if saying so makes it so.
Elwood told me he tries to presume good faith and see the Ninth's decision as part of a simple "disagreement about how you apply the law." I try to do the same, but the Ninth has crossed the line so many times, there's no ink left in that well.
It's odd. When there is an opening on the Supreme Court, the Senate examines in detail whether nominees have the proper respect for past Supreme Court rulings. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is quite particular on that score. But in San Francisco, the Ninth Circuit doesn't seem to care what the U.S. Supreme Court writes. And it's OK.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Four times this month, the U.S. Supreme Court has slapped down the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Four times the Big Bench unanimously reversed Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decisions. Unanimous is a big deal. It means that there's no left-right political divide in the Big Bench's findings -- just right on the law and wrong on the law.
I take unanimous seriously. When the California Supreme Court issued a ruling last year that stayed a scheduled execution, I feared yet another over-reaching judicial fiat. But then I saw that all the justices were on board. The law had to be unambiguous.
In the instances of the three criminal reversals this month, the Big Bench clearly was sending a message to the Ninth Circuit -- particularly to Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who had written the opinions. And the message is: Show some respect for the law.
Followers of the Ninth Circuit are painfully aware of its reputation as an activist court that flouts laws it doesn't like and bulldozes rulings that defy its left-leaning politics. The San Francisco-based judicial district serves as a textbook example of how judges should not behave.
Start with Randy Moore's case. In a plea bargain, Moore pleaded "no contest" to the 1995 Oregon murder of Kenneth Rogers, whom Moore and two confederates had kidnapped and Moore had shot in the head. Moore was facing a possible death sentence. Thanks to the plea deal, he got 25 years and the possibility of parole.
Now, this is a sore spot for me because I don't think courts should even consider the appeal of any plea bargain unless the defendant was severely mistreated. But Moore appealed, and the Ninth seized Moore's plea bargain as proof he was represented by ineffective counsel.
The court's logic was deficient. As Criminal Justice Legal Foundation President Michael Rushford observed, Moore "got a good deal."
But the court was flouting federal law. Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act precisely to prevent federal judges from issuing niggling orders that disregard court convictions and upend state appellate rulings.
In reversing Moore, Justice Anthony Kennedy had to remind the Ninth that its mandate is to follow the law.
Ditto the case of Joshua Richter, who was found guilty in a 1994 murder committed while he and an accomplice robbed a drug dealer. Once again, the Ninth found ineffective counsel.
In affirming the Richter conviction, Justice Kennedy wrote that the writ of habeas corpus stands as a safeguard against wrongful imprisonment. But the law is undermined "if there is judicial disregard for the sound and established principles that inform its proper issuance. That judicial disregard is inherent in" the Ninth's Richter decision.
Rushford found the unsigned "per-curiam" decision most damning because the Big Bench thought that the Ninth Circuit was so wrong that it "didn't even allow oral arguments."
Reinhardt and the majority had ordered the parole of Damon Cooke, who was convicted for attempted first-degree murder after he shot a friend in the head in 1991. The Ninth found that the parole board was wrong to consider the "cruel and callous" nature of the crime and wrong to ignore claims that Cooke was "an exemplary inmate."
The court also ordered the release of Elijah Clay, who was convicted of first-degree murder in 1978, because then-Gov. Gray Davis' refusal to heed a parole board recommendation for release was unreasonable.
Again, the Supremes ruled that federal judges have no dog in this fight: "There is no right under the federal Constitution to be conditionally released before the expiration of a valid sentence, and the states are under no duty to offer parole to prisoners."
(In a fourth reversal, this one written by Justice Sonya Sotomayor, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a ruling involving a banking regulation.)
Conservative court watcher John Elwood believes that Justice Kennedy has taken on the task of scolding the Ninth because, "as a Ninth Circuit alumnus," the justice takes the court's battered reputation "a little bit more to heart."
And well he should. There are judges in the Ninth who see the bench as a portfolio to overturn any policy they don't like -- and jurisdiction be damned.
In 2009, a three-judge (including Reinhardt) Ninth Circuit panel ordered the release of 40,000 California inmates. Not only did the trio seem to think they had authority reserved for state lawmakers, but also, they issued the pronouncement that the state could release 1 in 4 inmates "without a significant adverse impact on public safety." As if saying so makes it so.
Elwood told me he tries to presume good faith and see the Ninth's decision as part of a simple "disagreement about how you apply the law." I try to do the same, but the Ninth has crossed the line so many times, there's no ink left in that well.
It's odd. When there is an opening on the Supreme Court, the Senate examines in detail whether nominees have the proper respect for past Supreme Court rulings. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is quite particular on that score. But in San Francisco, the Ninth Circuit doesn't seem to care what the U.S. Supreme Court writes. And it's OK.
Have American Teachers Moved “To The Left” Of President Obama?
By Austin Hill
Sunday, January 30, 2011
It seems like a strange time to “move to the left.”
But it seems to be happening nonetheless.
Since his self-confessed “shellacking” in last November’s election, much has been said about how President Obama’s rhetoric has shifted to the philosophical “right.” Gone are the pejorative remarks about how Americans must stop consuming more than their “fair share” of the earth’s resources, and the scolding of oil and pharmaceutical companies for earning “record profits” (the President would probably be thrilled if any American business were to set profit records today).
“In” are the kinds of comments that are typical of an American President. Mr. Obama recently announced that he wants to embrace “Thomas Edison’s principles,” and that he desires for Americans to “invent stuff” and “make stuff.” He has even stated that he wants to open-up more foreign markets so American companies can sell more of their products and services globally. Indeed, the past few weeks have seen a dramatic change in the President who spent two years bowing to foreign heads of state, and lamenting America’s superpower status.
But while the President and most of America have moved to the right, big labor doesn’t even seem willing to move the center. In fact, some unions that represent America’s public school teachers seem to have moved further towards the philosophical “left,” even as state and local governments struggle with debt and deficits, and in some cases, the threat of bankruptcy.
A disconnect between the President and the National Education Association is not new. Despite the undying allegiance of the NEA to the Democratic Party, Obama has still been a bit of an infidel for government school bureaucrats because of his support of charter schools.
It’s a concept that has become so popular with parents in recent years that presidential candidates can no longer politically afford to reject it. Still the concept of “charter schools” - schools that are publicly funded, yet managed by private sector individuals and organizations -creates market competition for conventional government-run schools and school districts, and the NEA rejects the idea outright. In fact, the NEA publicly denounced President Obama’s “Race To The Top” agenda at their annual convention last July, precisely because the agenda entailed support for charter schools.
Now, further evidence of a labor union moving starkly to the left of our President has emerged from the very “red” state of Idaho. While the Governor and Superintendent of Public Instruction have embarked on a effort to completely revolutionize public education in their state, the Idaho Education Association (the statewide chapter of the NEA) seems to have been caught flat-footed, and some of its members seem to have succumbed to brazenly Marxist responses.
On January 10th, Idaho Governor Butch Otter delivered the annual “State of the State” address, and on education funding he promised “a fundamental shift in emphasis from the adults who oversee the process and administration to the best interests of our students.” Two days later on January 12th, Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna addressed the state legislature announcing his “Students Come First” initiatives, a plan that would established what he refers to as “customer driven education.”
It’s an outrage that in the milieu of American public education, students often do not “come first” and that decisions are frequently made that serve the interests of employees and not the “customers.” Similarly, “success” is frequently defined by public education bureaucrats in terms of how much taxpayer money is spent (“per pupil spending” is the buzzword of choice), rather than by what is produced with those expenditures.
So in a state that is bound by its own constitution to balance its own budget, Superintendent Luna has vowed that public schools in Idaho will teach “more students at a higher level with limited resources.” To achieve this he proposes that school activity should “not be limited by walls, bell schedules, school calendars and geography,” but rather that students should be issued laptop computers with access to online, on-demand instructional content (Luna has already connected high school students this way with Idaho’s state colleges and universities). He also wants to incentivize more productivity from teachers by offering bonus pay opportunities and wants “full transparency” for how taxpayer money is spent (Luna has uncovered evidence of local school districts paying fulltime salaries to “teachers” who do nothing but organize union activity).
Responses from unionized teachers have been swift and visceral. Most noticeable is the opposition to the “bonus pay” proposals, with cries that it would simply be “unfair” if some received a bonus while others did not (note to teachers: Karl Marx would be thrilled with this “everybody deserves the same amount of everything” economic reasoning – but it’s not a “bonus” if everybody gets one). And while the private sector thrives in a world of online conferencing and “webinars” every day, some of Idaho’s public school teachers insist that such technology has no place in their profession.
It’s sad to see college-educated adult professionals clinging to such simplistic and selfish thinking, and it’s infuriating that children are held hostage to it. But for the moment it’s coming from “big labor” – and not so much from “big government.”
Sunday, January 30, 2011
It seems like a strange time to “move to the left.”
But it seems to be happening nonetheless.
Since his self-confessed “shellacking” in last November’s election, much has been said about how President Obama’s rhetoric has shifted to the philosophical “right.” Gone are the pejorative remarks about how Americans must stop consuming more than their “fair share” of the earth’s resources, and the scolding of oil and pharmaceutical companies for earning “record profits” (the President would probably be thrilled if any American business were to set profit records today).
“In” are the kinds of comments that are typical of an American President. Mr. Obama recently announced that he wants to embrace “Thomas Edison’s principles,” and that he desires for Americans to “invent stuff” and “make stuff.” He has even stated that he wants to open-up more foreign markets so American companies can sell more of their products and services globally. Indeed, the past few weeks have seen a dramatic change in the President who spent two years bowing to foreign heads of state, and lamenting America’s superpower status.
But while the President and most of America have moved to the right, big labor doesn’t even seem willing to move the center. In fact, some unions that represent America’s public school teachers seem to have moved further towards the philosophical “left,” even as state and local governments struggle with debt and deficits, and in some cases, the threat of bankruptcy.
A disconnect between the President and the National Education Association is not new. Despite the undying allegiance of the NEA to the Democratic Party, Obama has still been a bit of an infidel for government school bureaucrats because of his support of charter schools.
It’s a concept that has become so popular with parents in recent years that presidential candidates can no longer politically afford to reject it. Still the concept of “charter schools” - schools that are publicly funded, yet managed by private sector individuals and organizations -creates market competition for conventional government-run schools and school districts, and the NEA rejects the idea outright. In fact, the NEA publicly denounced President Obama’s “Race To The Top” agenda at their annual convention last July, precisely because the agenda entailed support for charter schools.
Now, further evidence of a labor union moving starkly to the left of our President has emerged from the very “red” state of Idaho. While the Governor and Superintendent of Public Instruction have embarked on a effort to completely revolutionize public education in their state, the Idaho Education Association (the statewide chapter of the NEA) seems to have been caught flat-footed, and some of its members seem to have succumbed to brazenly Marxist responses.
On January 10th, Idaho Governor Butch Otter delivered the annual “State of the State” address, and on education funding he promised “a fundamental shift in emphasis from the adults who oversee the process and administration to the best interests of our students.” Two days later on January 12th, Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna addressed the state legislature announcing his “Students Come First” initiatives, a plan that would established what he refers to as “customer driven education.”
It’s an outrage that in the milieu of American public education, students often do not “come first” and that decisions are frequently made that serve the interests of employees and not the “customers.” Similarly, “success” is frequently defined by public education bureaucrats in terms of how much taxpayer money is spent (“per pupil spending” is the buzzword of choice), rather than by what is produced with those expenditures.
So in a state that is bound by its own constitution to balance its own budget, Superintendent Luna has vowed that public schools in Idaho will teach “more students at a higher level with limited resources.” To achieve this he proposes that school activity should “not be limited by walls, bell schedules, school calendars and geography,” but rather that students should be issued laptop computers with access to online, on-demand instructional content (Luna has already connected high school students this way with Idaho’s state colleges and universities). He also wants to incentivize more productivity from teachers by offering bonus pay opportunities and wants “full transparency” for how taxpayer money is spent (Luna has uncovered evidence of local school districts paying fulltime salaries to “teachers” who do nothing but organize union activity).
Responses from unionized teachers have been swift and visceral. Most noticeable is the opposition to the “bonus pay” proposals, with cries that it would simply be “unfair” if some received a bonus while others did not (note to teachers: Karl Marx would be thrilled with this “everybody deserves the same amount of everything” economic reasoning – but it’s not a “bonus” if everybody gets one). And while the private sector thrives in a world of online conferencing and “webinars” every day, some of Idaho’s public school teachers insist that such technology has no place in their profession.
It’s sad to see college-educated adult professionals clinging to such simplistic and selfish thinking, and it’s infuriating that children are held hostage to it. But for the moment it’s coming from “big labor” – and not so much from “big government.”
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Games NPR Plays
By Paul Greenberg
Saturday, January 29, 2011
When it comes to bureaucracies, corporate or public, it's not just jobs that can be delegated but any sense of responsibility. This isn't just a familiar pattern, it's standard operating procedure by now. When the head of the outfit is confronted by a scandal that can no longer be ignored, and the public has grown more outraged than usual, protocol demands that the top exec submit ... somebody else's resignation.
It could almost be Washington's motto: The buck stops somewhere else. Now it's happened at NPR. Which is one of the many public-private hodgepodges that gets all kinds of funding from all kinds of sources -- and so is hard to pin down when things go embarrassingly wrong. There are more of those around than ever -- Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Government Motors, AIG, American health care in general ... you name it. Their structure tends to resemble that of a medieval chimera, only without the charm.
NPR never looked so much like the politically correct fraud it's long been than when it fired Juan Williams, one of its news commentators, for daring to comment on the news -- on FOX yet.
It took a while for the suits at national headquarters to come up with some transparent excuse. In this case, Mr. Williams was said to have been hired as an analyst, not a commentator, and so had overstepped his bounds. As if NPR standbys like Mara Liasson, Cokie Roberts and the late Daniel Schorr, who may have been the most party-lining of them all, never let an opinion escape their depoliticized lips. Even though they, too, were listed as "analysts" or "correspondents" rather than commentators.
The line between news and opinion isn't just hazy at NPR; it doesn't exist except in the official table of organization. And it's invoked only when a commentator violates not a code of ethics but NPR's unstated but always present political code.
All the usual excuses and evasions were rolled out in the not-so-mysterious case of Juan Williams. But it was clear he had to go because he'd violated NPR's political prejudices by commenting openly about how he felt when he saw someone wearing a hijab or burqa ("Muslim garb," as he put it) in an airport, though he also made it clear he wasn't proud of how nervous it made him. Mr. Williams is a candid and decent sort (a rare combination), which may be another reason he had to go.
A network that hides its political prejudices, calling subjective judgments news, makes me a lot more nervous than Muslim women going about their business, bless 'em. A friend of mine tends to turn on NPR in his car and wait till the first editorial comment is made in the guise of news. Then he changes to the classical music station. He usually doesn't have to wait long. Maybe between 10 and 30 seconds. What a blessing classical music can be at such annoying times, not to mention what it does for the mental health and heart rate. Mozart beats Michael Moore any time.
NPR had to do something after this mess broke. At last count, it had received some 23,000 e-mails protesting Juan Williams' firing. The natives were restless and NPR had little choice but to offer up one of its sacrificial vice presidents, who may be on the payroll for just such occasions. This time it was one Ellen Weiss, who went quietly, almost noncommitally. She knows the code.
The chief executive of the network is one Vivian Schiller, whose own reaction to Juan Williams' comment at the time was to suggest that he might want to consult a psychiatrist. Did she ever apologize for that crack? If not, she should have. And the sincerest form of apology remains resignation.
Besides, shrinks have more important things to do than tend to the well balanced, and if there's anything disturbing about Juan Williams, it's his eerie equanimity on air. (As a newspaper columnist, he'd be entirely too sane. The job requires a certain temperamental eccentricity for the copy to ring with the occasional Menckenesque outburst.)
Ms. Schiller remains NPR's CEO, to no one's surprise. How's that for justice? Which is one primitive concept that progressive NPR long ago outgrew. She was, however, denied her annual bonus. At NPR, the worst punishment high-ranking miscreants can expect is not to be rewarded for their bad decisions -- instead of just being fired. And this is called accountability. Which is how bureaucracies work, or rather don't. In NPR's case, public funding pretty much renders it immune to the discipline of the marketplace.
If the suits at NPR want the network to be just a classier version of MSNBC, they have every right to aim for that (lack of) distinction. But let 'em do it on their own dime, not the public's. Rather than have everybody in the country subsidize their politics, why not just cut off their water?
There'd be no better time to do that than now, when the federal budget needs to be not just trimmed but sheared. Let NPR find out what earning your keep in a free market is like. It might instill some new values, and news values, at National Political Radio -- like letting commentators comment and keeping the news the news, not opinion by another name.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
When it comes to bureaucracies, corporate or public, it's not just jobs that can be delegated but any sense of responsibility. This isn't just a familiar pattern, it's standard operating procedure by now. When the head of the outfit is confronted by a scandal that can no longer be ignored, and the public has grown more outraged than usual, protocol demands that the top exec submit ... somebody else's resignation.
It could almost be Washington's motto: The buck stops somewhere else. Now it's happened at NPR. Which is one of the many public-private hodgepodges that gets all kinds of funding from all kinds of sources -- and so is hard to pin down when things go embarrassingly wrong. There are more of those around than ever -- Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Government Motors, AIG, American health care in general ... you name it. Their structure tends to resemble that of a medieval chimera, only without the charm.
NPR never looked so much like the politically correct fraud it's long been than when it fired Juan Williams, one of its news commentators, for daring to comment on the news -- on FOX yet.
It took a while for the suits at national headquarters to come up with some transparent excuse. In this case, Mr. Williams was said to have been hired as an analyst, not a commentator, and so had overstepped his bounds. As if NPR standbys like Mara Liasson, Cokie Roberts and the late Daniel Schorr, who may have been the most party-lining of them all, never let an opinion escape their depoliticized lips. Even though they, too, were listed as "analysts" or "correspondents" rather than commentators.
The line between news and opinion isn't just hazy at NPR; it doesn't exist except in the official table of organization. And it's invoked only when a commentator violates not a code of ethics but NPR's unstated but always present political code.
All the usual excuses and evasions were rolled out in the not-so-mysterious case of Juan Williams. But it was clear he had to go because he'd violated NPR's political prejudices by commenting openly about how he felt when he saw someone wearing a hijab or burqa ("Muslim garb," as he put it) in an airport, though he also made it clear he wasn't proud of how nervous it made him. Mr. Williams is a candid and decent sort (a rare combination), which may be another reason he had to go.
A network that hides its political prejudices, calling subjective judgments news, makes me a lot more nervous than Muslim women going about their business, bless 'em. A friend of mine tends to turn on NPR in his car and wait till the first editorial comment is made in the guise of news. Then he changes to the classical music station. He usually doesn't have to wait long. Maybe between 10 and 30 seconds. What a blessing classical music can be at such annoying times, not to mention what it does for the mental health and heart rate. Mozart beats Michael Moore any time.
NPR had to do something after this mess broke. At last count, it had received some 23,000 e-mails protesting Juan Williams' firing. The natives were restless and NPR had little choice but to offer up one of its sacrificial vice presidents, who may be on the payroll for just such occasions. This time it was one Ellen Weiss, who went quietly, almost noncommitally. She knows the code.
The chief executive of the network is one Vivian Schiller, whose own reaction to Juan Williams' comment at the time was to suggest that he might want to consult a psychiatrist. Did she ever apologize for that crack? If not, she should have. And the sincerest form of apology remains resignation.
Besides, shrinks have more important things to do than tend to the well balanced, and if there's anything disturbing about Juan Williams, it's his eerie equanimity on air. (As a newspaper columnist, he'd be entirely too sane. The job requires a certain temperamental eccentricity for the copy to ring with the occasional Menckenesque outburst.)
Ms. Schiller remains NPR's CEO, to no one's surprise. How's that for justice? Which is one primitive concept that progressive NPR long ago outgrew. She was, however, denied her annual bonus. At NPR, the worst punishment high-ranking miscreants can expect is not to be rewarded for their bad decisions -- instead of just being fired. And this is called accountability. Which is how bureaucracies work, or rather don't. In NPR's case, public funding pretty much renders it immune to the discipline of the marketplace.
If the suits at NPR want the network to be just a classier version of MSNBC, they have every right to aim for that (lack of) distinction. But let 'em do it on their own dime, not the public's. Rather than have everybody in the country subsidize their politics, why not just cut off their water?
There'd be no better time to do that than now, when the federal budget needs to be not just trimmed but sheared. Let NPR find out what earning your keep in a free market is like. It might instill some new values, and news values, at National Political Radio -- like letting commentators comment and keeping the news the news, not opinion by another name.
Friday, January 28, 2011
The Sputnik Fallacy
False analogies can be costly.
Rich Lowry
Friday, January 28, 2011
Pres. Barack Obama made the “Sputnik moment” the organizing theme of his State of the Union address, and he chose wisely.
Not because the tiny Soviet satellite and the ensuing space race have any bearing on the challenges of today. They don’t, except perhaps in how the Sputnik panic of the 1950s tracks with today’s overwrought alarm over a rising China.
No, the Sputnik analogy is apt in what it says about Obama and his hubristic faith in the wisdom and powers of a technocratic elite. The Apollo program put a man on the moon, creating a shining moment of national pride. It also fed liberalism’s disastrously simplistic view of how progress happens — spend a lot of federal money, put a lot of experts in a room, and wait for the wondrous results.
From Lyndon Johnson on, this has been a central element in liberalism. Obama believes in it deep in his bones. His contribution in the State of the Union was to plug this vision yet again, although decked out in red, white, and blue bunting and accompanied by the joyful cacophony of a John Philip Sousa march. The patriotic rhetorical trappings don’t make it any less arrogant or foolish.
“If we can put a man on the moon, we can . . . ” is one of the more tiresome tropes in American public life. What putting a man on the moon proved is that we can put a man on the moon. It was a feat of engineering. With time, resources, and expertise, it could be done. But it tells us as much about our ability to reform society, cure diseases, or manage markets as building the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam did.
In the wake of the moon landing, liberalism failed to understand that society is not an enormous engineering project. As Walter McDougall documents in his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, one of the heroes of the Apollo project, NASA administrator James Webb, fed the misunderstanding. He thought the space program constituted a breakthrough in the management of large systems that could be widely replicated.
McDougall writes that “the James Webbs had, by their talent and energy, made command innovation look easy — and ‘American.’” In a letter to LBJ, Webb told the president, “The space program lies in your first area of building the Great Society.” And build it he did. “A new political symbolism had arisen,” McDougall notes, “to discredit the old verities about limited government, local initiative, balanced budgets, and individualism.”
LBJ himself remarked on the catalyzing effect of the space program. According to LBJ, people said, “‘Well, if you do that for space and send a man to the moon, why can’t we do something for grandma with Medicare?’ And so we passed the Medicare act, and we passed 40 other measures.”
Most of this didn’t end well. “It [had] become obvious in the 1960s and 1970s that ‘planned invention for the future’ through federal mobilization of technology and brainpower was failing everywhere from Vietnam to our inner cities,” McDougall writes.
Andrew J. Coulson of the Cato Institute reminds us that even the signature federal initiative of the post-Sputnik era, the National Defense Education Act, failed to improve math and science scores. Once it had achieved its important and inspiring propaganda coup against the Soviets, the space program itself sputtered into a line item in the federal budget searching for a mission. NASA’s follow-up act was the white elephant called the space shuttle.
This is the history President Obama has at his back as he promises the federal government will lead the way on innovation, pick winners and losers in the energy sector, and transform education. We have seen this future, and it doesn’t work.
A new cliché about the Apollo program deserves to get currency: “If we can send a man to the moon . . . we can waste lots of money based on false analogies.” It’s a Sputnik moment, indeed.
Rich Lowry
Friday, January 28, 2011
Pres. Barack Obama made the “Sputnik moment” the organizing theme of his State of the Union address, and he chose wisely.
Not because the tiny Soviet satellite and the ensuing space race have any bearing on the challenges of today. They don’t, except perhaps in how the Sputnik panic of the 1950s tracks with today’s overwrought alarm over a rising China.
No, the Sputnik analogy is apt in what it says about Obama and his hubristic faith in the wisdom and powers of a technocratic elite. The Apollo program put a man on the moon, creating a shining moment of national pride. It also fed liberalism’s disastrously simplistic view of how progress happens — spend a lot of federal money, put a lot of experts in a room, and wait for the wondrous results.
From Lyndon Johnson on, this has been a central element in liberalism. Obama believes in it deep in his bones. His contribution in the State of the Union was to plug this vision yet again, although decked out in red, white, and blue bunting and accompanied by the joyful cacophony of a John Philip Sousa march. The patriotic rhetorical trappings don’t make it any less arrogant or foolish.
“If we can put a man on the moon, we can . . . ” is one of the more tiresome tropes in American public life. What putting a man on the moon proved is that we can put a man on the moon. It was a feat of engineering. With time, resources, and expertise, it could be done. But it tells us as much about our ability to reform society, cure diseases, or manage markets as building the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam did.
In the wake of the moon landing, liberalism failed to understand that society is not an enormous engineering project. As Walter McDougall documents in his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, one of the heroes of the Apollo project, NASA administrator James Webb, fed the misunderstanding. He thought the space program constituted a breakthrough in the management of large systems that could be widely replicated.
McDougall writes that “the James Webbs had, by their talent and energy, made command innovation look easy — and ‘American.’” In a letter to LBJ, Webb told the president, “The space program lies in your first area of building the Great Society.” And build it he did. “A new political symbolism had arisen,” McDougall notes, “to discredit the old verities about limited government, local initiative, balanced budgets, and individualism.”
LBJ himself remarked on the catalyzing effect of the space program. According to LBJ, people said, “‘Well, if you do that for space and send a man to the moon, why can’t we do something for grandma with Medicare?’ And so we passed the Medicare act, and we passed 40 other measures.”
Most of this didn’t end well. “It [had] become obvious in the 1960s and 1970s that ‘planned invention for the future’ through federal mobilization of technology and brainpower was failing everywhere from Vietnam to our inner cities,” McDougall writes.
Andrew J. Coulson of the Cato Institute reminds us that even the signature federal initiative of the post-Sputnik era, the National Defense Education Act, failed to improve math and science scores. Once it had achieved its important and inspiring propaganda coup against the Soviets, the space program itself sputtered into a line item in the federal budget searching for a mission. NASA’s follow-up act was the white elephant called the space shuttle.
This is the history President Obama has at his back as he promises the federal government will lead the way on innovation, pick winners and losers in the energy sector, and transform education. We have seen this future, and it doesn’t work.
A new cliché about the Apollo program deserves to get currency: “If we can send a man to the moon . . . we can waste lots of money based on false analogies.” It’s a Sputnik moment, indeed.
Evil-Man Economics
National Review Online
Friday, January 28, 2011
Chairman Phil Angelides and the Democratic majority on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission have released their report, a textbook-worthy example of the “Evil Man School of Economics.” Something went wrong, and a villain must be identified. This is tediously familiar territory for those who have followed the political establishment’s years-long attempt to evade responsibility for the crisis of which it was a cause.
“We conclude this crisis was avoidable,” they write. “The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire.” That much is hardly objectionable. But which human actions? On that question, the commission’s report is both implausible and nakedly political: The Evil Men are greedy corporate executives and Wall Street moneymen, and the crisis might have been averted if only they had been endowed with sufficient moral fiber — or had an appropriately mindful policeman appointed over them, which is the real point of the Angelides report. Which is to say, the Democrats have produced an analysis that relies upon and reinforces the mythology of the Left, producing a document that may as well have been written by Rolling Stone’s Matt “Vampire Squid” Taibbi, minus the literary flair.
Yes, this crisis was avoidable. To avoid it, we would have had to do a number of things differently. The first is to alert the authorities, beginning in the 1930s, that federal policies designed to encourage homeownership — well-intentioned though they have been — would create, and today continue to sustain, a set of economic incentives driving vast amounts of capital from around the world into the U.S. residential real-estate market. From the Federal Housing Administration to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the mortgage-interest deduction, U.S. government policies distorted the market, creating a massive misallocation of capital under the naïve theory that housing prices only move in one direction: up.
The second action would be to prevent the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, of which the housing-market meltdown was both an echo and a consequence. Like the real-estate bubble, the dot-com bubble was cheered on by the American government, the American consumer, and the American banker, because nearly everybody likes appreciating asset prices and the illusion of wealth that accompanies them. When the dot-com bubble burst, Washington responded the way Washington always responds: by slashing interest rates, hoping that a sluice of cheap money and easy credit sloshing through the economy would stimulate productive economic activity, or the illusion of productive economic activity, sufficient to disguise the damage done by the bubble. Having been burned by unprofitable start-ups at home and disappointing emerging-market investments abroad, a great many Americans decided to invest that easy money in houses. Washington was keeping interest rates down and encouraging the loosening of mortgage-lending standards; at the same time, Washington’s creatures, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, helped give the mortgage market enough liquidity to alarm Noah. They were helped mightily in that endeavor by the rise of massive savings in China and elsewhere in the developing world, all of which went looking for somewhere to invest: Where better than the American mortgage market, where a great many of the underlying loans were insured by the government or its proxies?
Third, we would need to convince a great many Americans not to take out mortgages they could not afford should their houses fail to appreciate, and convince a great many financial managers not to make bad investments large enough to bring down their firms.
Mr. Angelides, formerly the treasurer of California, should know something about man-made financial disasters. And the truth is that Goldman Sachs did not cause this crisis, and neither did Barney Frank. Bad investments, economics, and well-meaning government policies caused it. There were, and are, bad actors in this story. But the main problems have been the natural limitations on human knowledge, including the knowledge of government officials and the managers of large financial institutions.
The dot-com bubble actually destroyed more wealth than did the decline in housing prices; the housing meltdown became a crisis because the related securities losses were concentrated in a small number of firms, and because those firms were dramatically over-leveraged. If there is a public-policy proposal to be extracted from this mess, it is that in a world of “too big to fail” banks — and, like it or not, that is the world in which we live — large financial institutions should be subject to tighter leverage controls, with higher standards for capital reserves and liquidity. That dry, technical reform would solve most of the problems that we might hope to solve with new financial regulation, but it would not provide any emotional satisfaction to those who wish to use this crisis to rail against executive bonuses, which had almost nothing to do with the problem, or to those who wish to sermonize about the alleged moral failings of capitalism. Still less would it offer any political opportunity to former real-estate developer Phil Angelides and his Wall Street–backed Democratic colleagues, who wish to use the crisis as an opportunity to expand the size and scope of the managerial state that did so much to create it.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Chairman Phil Angelides and the Democratic majority on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission have released their report, a textbook-worthy example of the “Evil Man School of Economics.” Something went wrong, and a villain must be identified. This is tediously familiar territory for those who have followed the political establishment’s years-long attempt to evade responsibility for the crisis of which it was a cause.
“We conclude this crisis was avoidable,” they write. “The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire.” That much is hardly objectionable. But which human actions? On that question, the commission’s report is both implausible and nakedly political: The Evil Men are greedy corporate executives and Wall Street moneymen, and the crisis might have been averted if only they had been endowed with sufficient moral fiber — or had an appropriately mindful policeman appointed over them, which is the real point of the Angelides report. Which is to say, the Democrats have produced an analysis that relies upon and reinforces the mythology of the Left, producing a document that may as well have been written by Rolling Stone’s Matt “Vampire Squid” Taibbi, minus the literary flair.
Yes, this crisis was avoidable. To avoid it, we would have had to do a number of things differently. The first is to alert the authorities, beginning in the 1930s, that federal policies designed to encourage homeownership — well-intentioned though they have been — would create, and today continue to sustain, a set of economic incentives driving vast amounts of capital from around the world into the U.S. residential real-estate market. From the Federal Housing Administration to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the mortgage-interest deduction, U.S. government policies distorted the market, creating a massive misallocation of capital under the naïve theory that housing prices only move in one direction: up.
The second action would be to prevent the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, of which the housing-market meltdown was both an echo and a consequence. Like the real-estate bubble, the dot-com bubble was cheered on by the American government, the American consumer, and the American banker, because nearly everybody likes appreciating asset prices and the illusion of wealth that accompanies them. When the dot-com bubble burst, Washington responded the way Washington always responds: by slashing interest rates, hoping that a sluice of cheap money and easy credit sloshing through the economy would stimulate productive economic activity, or the illusion of productive economic activity, sufficient to disguise the damage done by the bubble. Having been burned by unprofitable start-ups at home and disappointing emerging-market investments abroad, a great many Americans decided to invest that easy money in houses. Washington was keeping interest rates down and encouraging the loosening of mortgage-lending standards; at the same time, Washington’s creatures, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, helped give the mortgage market enough liquidity to alarm Noah. They were helped mightily in that endeavor by the rise of massive savings in China and elsewhere in the developing world, all of which went looking for somewhere to invest: Where better than the American mortgage market, where a great many of the underlying loans were insured by the government or its proxies?
Third, we would need to convince a great many Americans not to take out mortgages they could not afford should their houses fail to appreciate, and convince a great many financial managers not to make bad investments large enough to bring down their firms.
Mr. Angelides, formerly the treasurer of California, should know something about man-made financial disasters. And the truth is that Goldman Sachs did not cause this crisis, and neither did Barney Frank. Bad investments, economics, and well-meaning government policies caused it. There were, and are, bad actors in this story. But the main problems have been the natural limitations on human knowledge, including the knowledge of government officials and the managers of large financial institutions.
The dot-com bubble actually destroyed more wealth than did the decline in housing prices; the housing meltdown became a crisis because the related securities losses were concentrated in a small number of firms, and because those firms were dramatically over-leveraged. If there is a public-policy proposal to be extracted from this mess, it is that in a world of “too big to fail” banks — and, like it or not, that is the world in which we live — large financial institutions should be subject to tighter leverage controls, with higher standards for capital reserves and liquidity. That dry, technical reform would solve most of the problems that we might hope to solve with new financial regulation, but it would not provide any emotional satisfaction to those who wish to use this crisis to rail against executive bonuses, which had almost nothing to do with the problem, or to those who wish to sermonize about the alleged moral failings of capitalism. Still less would it offer any political opportunity to former real-estate developer Phil Angelides and his Wall Street–backed Democratic colleagues, who wish to use the crisis as an opportunity to expand the size and scope of the managerial state that did so much to create it.
Why History Matters
By Linda Chavez
Friday, January 28, 2011
For years, conservatives have rightly decried the distortion, misrepresentation and downright ignorance of American history that has sometimes infected left-wing rhetoric. We've complained that public schools do a poor job of teaching our history and an even worse job of transmitting American values. History matters; as the philosopher George Santayana famously said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
But what happens when a conservative gets it wrong? Last week, Rep. Michele Bachmann gave a speech to Iowans for Tax Relief in which she said that the Founders "worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." MSNBC host Chris Matthews called Bachmann a "balloon head" for her remarks, and others in the media and on the left were no less scathing. But some conservatives defended Bachmann's remarks -- even though she mangled her history.
There is no question that a double standard exists -- the media is much quicker to draw attention to conservatives' faux pas than to liberals'. There's not a great deal we can do about that, so conservatives have to be especially careful when we speak -- especially on race. What's more, because conservatives care so much about history and tradition, we must be sure we have the facts right, and Bachmann didn't. And it wasn't just her specific reference to the Founders' efforts to end slavery but her understanding of the struggle for equal rights that went awry.
As every schoolchild should know, slavery was not abolished until the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, issued in the third year of the Civil War, freed only those slaves living in states that had seceded from the Union. And, of course, some of our Founders -- most notably George Washington and Thomas Jefferson -- not only did not "work tirelessly until slavery was no more" but owned slaves.
Washington's attitude toward slavery evolved during his lifetime and he asked in his will that the slaves he owned be emancipated after the death of his wife, Martha. Jefferson wrote eloquently about the abomination of slavery but freed only seven of the hundreds of slaves he owned, only two during his lifetime and five upon his death.
But even the abolition of slavery did not usher in an era of colorblind equal rights like that invoked by Bachmann in her Iowa speech. In speaking about the nation's founding principle of e pluribus unum -- out of many, one -- Bachmann said that "our ancestors when they arrived on these shores ... it didn't matter the color of their skin, it didn't matter their language ... it made no difference once you got here, we were all the same." But that was not the case through much of our history well into the latter half of the 20th Century.
The realization of colorblind equal opportunity came about through decades of struggle. It took not only a Civil War, the bloodiest in our nation's history, costing more than 600,000 lives, but a hundred-year campaign for civil rights that culminated in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Along the way, we often stumbled. Congress passed laws restricting immigration to the United States based on race and national origin. States denied basic rights to blacks and others by law, setting up state-required segregation, which the Supreme Court approved until its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Michele Bachmann should know this history; she aspires to be a conservative leader -- perhaps even a presidential candidate -- after all.
Conservatives should not sugarcoat our history any more than liberals sometimes denigrate it. The most remarkable fact of our history is not that we have fallen short of our ideal that all men are created equal but that we have made progress toward realizing that goal in our ongoing endeavor to secure equal rights.
Friday, January 28, 2011
For years, conservatives have rightly decried the distortion, misrepresentation and downright ignorance of American history that has sometimes infected left-wing rhetoric. We've complained that public schools do a poor job of teaching our history and an even worse job of transmitting American values. History matters; as the philosopher George Santayana famously said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
But what happens when a conservative gets it wrong? Last week, Rep. Michele Bachmann gave a speech to Iowans for Tax Relief in which she said that the Founders "worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." MSNBC host Chris Matthews called Bachmann a "balloon head" for her remarks, and others in the media and on the left were no less scathing. But some conservatives defended Bachmann's remarks -- even though she mangled her history.
There is no question that a double standard exists -- the media is much quicker to draw attention to conservatives' faux pas than to liberals'. There's not a great deal we can do about that, so conservatives have to be especially careful when we speak -- especially on race. What's more, because conservatives care so much about history and tradition, we must be sure we have the facts right, and Bachmann didn't. And it wasn't just her specific reference to the Founders' efforts to end slavery but her understanding of the struggle for equal rights that went awry.
As every schoolchild should know, slavery was not abolished until the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, issued in the third year of the Civil War, freed only those slaves living in states that had seceded from the Union. And, of course, some of our Founders -- most notably George Washington and Thomas Jefferson -- not only did not "work tirelessly until slavery was no more" but owned slaves.
Washington's attitude toward slavery evolved during his lifetime and he asked in his will that the slaves he owned be emancipated after the death of his wife, Martha. Jefferson wrote eloquently about the abomination of slavery but freed only seven of the hundreds of slaves he owned, only two during his lifetime and five upon his death.
But even the abolition of slavery did not usher in an era of colorblind equal rights like that invoked by Bachmann in her Iowa speech. In speaking about the nation's founding principle of e pluribus unum -- out of many, one -- Bachmann said that "our ancestors when they arrived on these shores ... it didn't matter the color of their skin, it didn't matter their language ... it made no difference once you got here, we were all the same." But that was not the case through much of our history well into the latter half of the 20th Century.
The realization of colorblind equal opportunity came about through decades of struggle. It took not only a Civil War, the bloodiest in our nation's history, costing more than 600,000 lives, but a hundred-year campaign for civil rights that culminated in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Along the way, we often stumbled. Congress passed laws restricting immigration to the United States based on race and national origin. States denied basic rights to blacks and others by law, setting up state-required segregation, which the Supreme Court approved until its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Michele Bachmann should know this history; she aspires to be a conservative leader -- perhaps even a presidential candidate -- after all.
Conservatives should not sugarcoat our history any more than liberals sometimes denigrate it. The most remarkable fact of our history is not that we have fallen short of our ideal that all men are created equal but that we have made progress toward realizing that goal in our ongoing endeavor to secure equal rights.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
The New Immigration Debate
Does the Constitution really say that children of illegal immigrants are automatic citizens?
Katrina Trinko
Thursday, January 27, 2011
While 2010’s immigration debate centered on the controversial Arizona law, 2011’s promises to be focused on a different — and even more explosive — topic: birthright citizenship.
Kris Kobach, the recently elected Kansas secretary of state, is a lawyer and professor of law who specializes in immigration issues. The architect of Arizona’s SB-1070, he is the legal mind behind two new proposals to challenge the automatic granting of citizenship to any child born in the United States, regardless of the legal status of his parents. The first proposal is state-level legislation that would not affect the federal citizenship of an illegal immigrant’s child, but would deny him citizenship of that state. The second is a state compact, which has to be adopted by at least two states and approved by Congress to be enacted, that would deny the children of illegal immigrants citizenship at both the state and the federal level.
“They’re two routes to the same destination,” says Kobach. “They attempt to restore the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Not everyone on the right is lauding these initiatives, although there are different grounds for opposition. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, is concerned that redefining birthright citizenship before securing the border could lead to “a large, multi-generational population of illegal aliens.” Linda Chavez, chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity, calls the efforts “a direct assault on the meaning of what it means to be an American.” Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Values, says the backers of the legislation are embracing a “constitutional-activist position.”
On the left, there is no interest in — and some horror at — the prospect. In August, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called efforts to change the Fourteenth Amendment “just wrong,” a position that reflected President Obama’s, according to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, Obama urged lawmakers to “take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration.” But the solutions he offered — secure borders, law enforcement, and some version of the DREAM Act – indicate that he continues to think that changing birthright citizenship is an inappropriate solution.
Joining Kobach in the effort is Pennsylvania state representative Daryl Metcalfe, who founded State Legislators for Legal Immigration. Metcalfe reports that lawmakers from 32 states have expressed interest in at least one of the initiatives, although he concedes he has “no idea” how many states will ultimately pass the legislation. Kobach estimates that ten or more states will pass at least one of the initiatives.
If even one state passes the law that denies state citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, there is likely to be a lawsuit. “Hopefully, it would eventually present the issue to the Supreme Court,” says Kobach, “so that we would have an authoritative statement from the court on whether ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ — whether those words have any meaning or not.”
To Kobach, it is “nonsensical” to understand “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” as meaning anything other than that at least one of the parents must be a citizen of, or at least legally residing in, the United States. Talking about United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court decision in 1898 that many view as having settled that all babies born in the U.S., regardless of parenthood, are citizens, Kobach points out that Wong Kim Ark was the son of Chinese immigrants legally living in this country at the time of his birth.
“There are two very powerful reasons why I think the majority of the Supreme Court would agree with us. And one is that every ounce of evidence of original intent says that our understanding is correct,” says Kobach, remarking that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment intended that birthright citizenship be given only to children whose parents had no allegiance to a different country.
“The other factor,” he adds, “is that there is a long-standing rule of interpreting the Constitution that says there are no surplus words in the Constitution. And the way the liberals want to read the Fourteenth Amendment, they treat ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ as if they are surplus words meaning nothing.”
Chavez argues that the position that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes the children of illegal immigrants “is clearly ahistorical and clearly conflicts with not just the historical debate, but consequent Supreme Court decisions.” Chavez compares today’s illegal immigrants to the gypsies present in this country when the Fourteenth Amendment was debated. Gypsies didn’t pay taxes, yet their children were considered citizens by the legislators.
While the state-citizenship legislation is likely to punt the question of birthright citizenship to the courts, Kobach says the state compact “tees up the issue for Congress.” State compacts must be approved by a majority of congressional lawmakers, although presidential approval is not necessary.
The futures of the initiatives are uncertain, but supporters see tackling the issue as crucial. For Metcalfe, ending birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants’ children is as necessary as securing the border. “The fact remains that we still have people within our borders who are here illegally,” he says. “We as a state have to deal with those individuals as far as jobs they’re taking away from our citizens, and the benefits they’re illegally tapping into.”
Roy Beck, executive director of the immigration-restriction group NumbersUSA, also stresses the importance of changing birthright citizenship in the effort to halt or slow illegal immigration. “It is an incentive,” he says. “It’s a moderate incentive for people to come here illegally, and it’s a major incentive for illegal aliens not to go home.”
Advocates also argue that those who view the issue as too controversial are ignoring the global perspective. Almost no advanced countries, with the exception of Canada, treat children born to non-citizen parents within their borders as automatic citizens.
Krikorian thinks that any push to change eligibility for birthright citizenship must be paired with “pro-immigrant elements,” such as increased English-language education and better bureaucratic processing for immigrants. “I think it’s important for immigration skeptics to make clear that they’re not immigrant skeptics,” he says.
Kobach brushes off concerns that the initiatives aren’t politically viable. “There are a lot of politicians and political advisers who think they know what is politically advantageous to say and what is not,” he acknowledges, but he points out that many supposedly knowledgeable political strategists advocated amnesty in 2004 — and then backed off the proposal when it was clear the public didn’t favor it.
But Aguilar is adamant that the initiatives will “antagonize Latino voters.” And that could have a long-term impact. “It’s pretty clear that if we don’t win 30 to 40 percent of the Latino vote in the next election,” he says, “we’re not going to win back the White House.”
Katrina Trinko
Thursday, January 27, 2011
While 2010’s immigration debate centered on the controversial Arizona law, 2011’s promises to be focused on a different — and even more explosive — topic: birthright citizenship.
Kris Kobach, the recently elected Kansas secretary of state, is a lawyer and professor of law who specializes in immigration issues. The architect of Arizona’s SB-1070, he is the legal mind behind two new proposals to challenge the automatic granting of citizenship to any child born in the United States, regardless of the legal status of his parents. The first proposal is state-level legislation that would not affect the federal citizenship of an illegal immigrant’s child, but would deny him citizenship of that state. The second is a state compact, which has to be adopted by at least two states and approved by Congress to be enacted, that would deny the children of illegal immigrants citizenship at both the state and the federal level.
“They’re two routes to the same destination,” says Kobach. “They attempt to restore the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Not everyone on the right is lauding these initiatives, although there are different grounds for opposition. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, is concerned that redefining birthright citizenship before securing the border could lead to “a large, multi-generational population of illegal aliens.” Linda Chavez, chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity, calls the efforts “a direct assault on the meaning of what it means to be an American.” Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Values, says the backers of the legislation are embracing a “constitutional-activist position.”
On the left, there is no interest in — and some horror at — the prospect. In August, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called efforts to change the Fourteenth Amendment “just wrong,” a position that reflected President Obama’s, according to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, Obama urged lawmakers to “take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration.” But the solutions he offered — secure borders, law enforcement, and some version of the DREAM Act – indicate that he continues to think that changing birthright citizenship is an inappropriate solution.
Joining Kobach in the effort is Pennsylvania state representative Daryl Metcalfe, who founded State Legislators for Legal Immigration. Metcalfe reports that lawmakers from 32 states have expressed interest in at least one of the initiatives, although he concedes he has “no idea” how many states will ultimately pass the legislation. Kobach estimates that ten or more states will pass at least one of the initiatives.
If even one state passes the law that denies state citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, there is likely to be a lawsuit. “Hopefully, it would eventually present the issue to the Supreme Court,” says Kobach, “so that we would have an authoritative statement from the court on whether ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ — whether those words have any meaning or not.”
To Kobach, it is “nonsensical” to understand “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” as meaning anything other than that at least one of the parents must be a citizen of, or at least legally residing in, the United States. Talking about United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court decision in 1898 that many view as having settled that all babies born in the U.S., regardless of parenthood, are citizens, Kobach points out that Wong Kim Ark was the son of Chinese immigrants legally living in this country at the time of his birth.
“There are two very powerful reasons why I think the majority of the Supreme Court would agree with us. And one is that every ounce of evidence of original intent says that our understanding is correct,” says Kobach, remarking that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment intended that birthright citizenship be given only to children whose parents had no allegiance to a different country.
“The other factor,” he adds, “is that there is a long-standing rule of interpreting the Constitution that says there are no surplus words in the Constitution. And the way the liberals want to read the Fourteenth Amendment, they treat ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ as if they are surplus words meaning nothing.”
Chavez argues that the position that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes the children of illegal immigrants “is clearly ahistorical and clearly conflicts with not just the historical debate, but consequent Supreme Court decisions.” Chavez compares today’s illegal immigrants to the gypsies present in this country when the Fourteenth Amendment was debated. Gypsies didn’t pay taxes, yet their children were considered citizens by the legislators.
While the state-citizenship legislation is likely to punt the question of birthright citizenship to the courts, Kobach says the state compact “tees up the issue for Congress.” State compacts must be approved by a majority of congressional lawmakers, although presidential approval is not necessary.
The futures of the initiatives are uncertain, but supporters see tackling the issue as crucial. For Metcalfe, ending birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants’ children is as necessary as securing the border. “The fact remains that we still have people within our borders who are here illegally,” he says. “We as a state have to deal with those individuals as far as jobs they’re taking away from our citizens, and the benefits they’re illegally tapping into.”
Roy Beck, executive director of the immigration-restriction group NumbersUSA, also stresses the importance of changing birthright citizenship in the effort to halt or slow illegal immigration. “It is an incentive,” he says. “It’s a moderate incentive for people to come here illegally, and it’s a major incentive for illegal aliens not to go home.”
Advocates also argue that those who view the issue as too controversial are ignoring the global perspective. Almost no advanced countries, with the exception of Canada, treat children born to non-citizen parents within their borders as automatic citizens.
Krikorian thinks that any push to change eligibility for birthright citizenship must be paired with “pro-immigrant elements,” such as increased English-language education and better bureaucratic processing for immigrants. “I think it’s important for immigration skeptics to make clear that they’re not immigrant skeptics,” he says.
Kobach brushes off concerns that the initiatives aren’t politically viable. “There are a lot of politicians and political advisers who think they know what is politically advantageous to say and what is not,” he acknowledges, but he points out that many supposedly knowledgeable political strategists advocated amnesty in 2004 — and then backed off the proposal when it was clear the public didn’t favor it.
But Aguilar is adamant that the initiatives will “antagonize Latino voters.” And that could have a long-term impact. “It’s pretty clear that if we don’t win 30 to 40 percent of the Latino vote in the next election,” he says, “we’re not going to win back the White House.”
Canada Stands Up to Iran
The theocrats do not succeed in intimidating our neighbor to the north.
Clifford D. May
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Last week, Canada’s Free Thinking Film Society — love that name — was scheduled to screen Iranium, a new documentary about the regime that has ruled Iran since 1979, its drive to acquire nuclear weapons, and the dangers that poses to the West. But then the Iranian embassy complained and — coincidently — threats and “suspicious letters” were received at the National Archives in Ottawa, where the event was to take place. The Archives cancelled the screening and shut the building. Archives spokeswoman Pauline Portelance explained: “We deemed the risk associated with the event was a little too high.”
Apparently, however, officials above her pay grade recognized that allowing Iranian theocrats to set the limits of free speech in Canada’s capital would run an even higher risk. It was given to Minister of Heritage James Moore to deliver a Churchillian response.“This movie will be shown, the agreement will be kept,” he said. “We will not be moving it to a different facility, we’re not bending to any pressure. People need to be kept safe, but we don’t back down to people who try to censor people by threats of violence. Canada does not accept attempts from the Iranian Embassy to dictate what films will and will not be shown in Canada.”
The Canadian screening of Iranium has now been rescheduled for early February. Will Iran’s rulers and supporters accept that decision? Or will they escalate the conflict? While we’re waiting for the answer, it’s worth recalling that the Islamic Republic has a long history of attempting to enforce its will extraterritorially. As early as 1989, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had led Iran’s revolution ten years earlier, issued a fatwa against a British subject, Salman Rushdie, because Khomeini considered Rushie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, blasphemous. The fatwa called for Rushdie to be executed by any Muslim who could manage the task.
That might have been expected: As Iranium makes clear, Khomeini’s revolution was not just against the Shah of Iran. It was intended for export — and not only to countries in which Muslims are in the majority.
Khomeini’s ambitious goal then, and his successors’ goal now, is “world revolution,” the creation of a universal and “holy” government and the downfall of all others. “Islam is good for you,” Khomeini said. “It is good for the world.” He said this even as — in Stalinist fashion — he was executing at home and assassinating abroad not just those who opposed him but also those who might one day oppose him.
I am among those interviewed in Iranium, along with several other Foundation for Defense of Democracies experts. Also providing analysis and insight: scholar Bernard Lewis, former CIA director Jim Woolsey, Sen. Jon Kyl, and former ambassador John Bolton. But it is really Iran’s despots who tell the story.
For example, in 1980, war broke out between Iran and Iraq. Khomeini sent Iranian children on foot to clear minefields so that regular troops and tanks could pass after. How could a man of faith justify that? He was guaranteeing their entry into Paradise. Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, finds poetry in such carnage. “No art is more beautiful,” he is seen in the film telling a group of his acolytes, “more divine and more everlasting” than “the art of martyrdom.”
Khomeini’s successor, the Supreme Leader — an audacious title — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is candid: America is not just Iran’s enemy; America is the “enemy of Allah” and “the Great Satan.”
It is difficult for us, for Westerners, children of the Enlightenment, to believe that there are rulers of great nations who take such ideas seriously. But if you watch and listen to them — not least in this documentary — it becomes clear that they do. What does that mean for policy? It means that diplomacy, outreach, engagement, and carefully crafted speeches showing respect and apologizing for “grievances” will have limited utility.
Truth be told, Americans have been reaching out to Iran’s theocrats for more than 30 years. Khomeini came to power on Jimmy Carter’s watch. Carter was by no means hostile to him and his revolution. On the contrary, Carter’s U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, called Khomeini “some kind of saint.” William Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador in Tehran, compared Khomeini to Gandhi. A State Department spokesman at that time worried about the possibility of a military coup against Khomeini, saying that would be “most dangerous for U.S. interests. It would blow away the moderates and invite the majority to unite behind a radical faction.”
In response, Khomeini and his followers, as seen in the film, chanted not only “Death to America!” but also “Death to Carter!” And, of course, less than a year after Khomeini came to power, his followers took over the U.S. embassy, which Khomeini called a “center for corruption,” holding its occupants hostage for 444 days — not exactly the kind of action Gandhi would have endorsed.
Seizing an embassy is an act of war. Carter’s response was, as Bernard Lewis characterized it, “feeble.” Khomeini was gratified to discover that “Americans cannot do a damn thing.”
Three years later, Khomeini tested that proposition again. He dispatched the Lebanese-based Hezbollah to suicide-bomb the barracks of U.S. peacekeepers in Beirut. Not since Iwo Jima had so many U.S. Marines been killed in a single attack. In response, President Reagan committed a grave error: He did not retaliate against Hezbollah or Iran. That taught a lesson: Hit Americans and Americans will retreat. They really “cannot do a damn thing.” (And, as I write this, Hezbollah is on the verge of taking over Lebanon. The American response? So far, it would be fair to characterize it as “feeble.”)
Islamic militants throughout the world were inspired by what happened in Tehran and Beirut. What Steve Simon and Daniel Benjamin, advisers to President Clinton, would call The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam’s War Against America had begun.
Iran has since collaborated with al-Qaeda and a long list of other terrorists groups — the evidence is overwhelming — while also training and equipping those fighting Americans in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The regime continues to repress its own people — dissidents, of course, but also ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals, and women. As noted in the film, virgins sentenced to capital punishment are routinely raped prior to execution. This practice also is based on theology: Virgins go to Paradise, a reward enemies of the regime do not deserve.
And now Ahmadinejad and Khameini are in hot pursuit of nuclear weapons. To what end? The destruction of Israel, which Khameini has called “a cancerous tumor.” The treatment he prescribes: “remove it.” But it is not Israel alone to which scalpels are to be applied. Ahmadinejad tells a crowd: “The arrogant powers of the world must be annihilated. The countdown of America’s sinister power has begun. Have no doubt: Islam will conquer all the mountaintops of the world.”
Iran’s Arab neighbors have at least as much to fear as Israel and America. As cables recently released by WikiLeaks make clear, they know that. They are looking to the U.S., and they are not reassured.
No sensible, rational person can watch this film, hear this evidence, and fail to come to the conclusion that the fanatics who rule Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.
That is the message Iranium — I like that title, too, by the way — conveys. That’s why the theocrats and their apologists don’t want you to see it. That’s why you really should.
Clifford D. May
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Last week, Canada’s Free Thinking Film Society — love that name — was scheduled to screen Iranium, a new documentary about the regime that has ruled Iran since 1979, its drive to acquire nuclear weapons, and the dangers that poses to the West. But then the Iranian embassy complained and — coincidently — threats and “suspicious letters” were received at the National Archives in Ottawa, where the event was to take place. The Archives cancelled the screening and shut the building. Archives spokeswoman Pauline Portelance explained: “We deemed the risk associated with the event was a little too high.”
Apparently, however, officials above her pay grade recognized that allowing Iranian theocrats to set the limits of free speech in Canada’s capital would run an even higher risk. It was given to Minister of Heritage James Moore to deliver a Churchillian response.“This movie will be shown, the agreement will be kept,” he said. “We will not be moving it to a different facility, we’re not bending to any pressure. People need to be kept safe, but we don’t back down to people who try to censor people by threats of violence. Canada does not accept attempts from the Iranian Embassy to dictate what films will and will not be shown in Canada.”
The Canadian screening of Iranium has now been rescheduled for early February. Will Iran’s rulers and supporters accept that decision? Or will they escalate the conflict? While we’re waiting for the answer, it’s worth recalling that the Islamic Republic has a long history of attempting to enforce its will extraterritorially. As early as 1989, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had led Iran’s revolution ten years earlier, issued a fatwa against a British subject, Salman Rushdie, because Khomeini considered Rushie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, blasphemous. The fatwa called for Rushdie to be executed by any Muslim who could manage the task.
That might have been expected: As Iranium makes clear, Khomeini’s revolution was not just against the Shah of Iran. It was intended for export — and not only to countries in which Muslims are in the majority.
Khomeini’s ambitious goal then, and his successors’ goal now, is “world revolution,” the creation of a universal and “holy” government and the downfall of all others. “Islam is good for you,” Khomeini said. “It is good for the world.” He said this even as — in Stalinist fashion — he was executing at home and assassinating abroad not just those who opposed him but also those who might one day oppose him.
I am among those interviewed in Iranium, along with several other Foundation for Defense of Democracies experts. Also providing analysis and insight: scholar Bernard Lewis, former CIA director Jim Woolsey, Sen. Jon Kyl, and former ambassador John Bolton. But it is really Iran’s despots who tell the story.
For example, in 1980, war broke out between Iran and Iraq. Khomeini sent Iranian children on foot to clear minefields so that regular troops and tanks could pass after. How could a man of faith justify that? He was guaranteeing their entry into Paradise. Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, finds poetry in such carnage. “No art is more beautiful,” he is seen in the film telling a group of his acolytes, “more divine and more everlasting” than “the art of martyrdom.”
Khomeini’s successor, the Supreme Leader — an audacious title — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is candid: America is not just Iran’s enemy; America is the “enemy of Allah” and “the Great Satan.”
It is difficult for us, for Westerners, children of the Enlightenment, to believe that there are rulers of great nations who take such ideas seriously. But if you watch and listen to them — not least in this documentary — it becomes clear that they do. What does that mean for policy? It means that diplomacy, outreach, engagement, and carefully crafted speeches showing respect and apologizing for “grievances” will have limited utility.
Truth be told, Americans have been reaching out to Iran’s theocrats for more than 30 years. Khomeini came to power on Jimmy Carter’s watch. Carter was by no means hostile to him and his revolution. On the contrary, Carter’s U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, called Khomeini “some kind of saint.” William Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador in Tehran, compared Khomeini to Gandhi. A State Department spokesman at that time worried about the possibility of a military coup against Khomeini, saying that would be “most dangerous for U.S. interests. It would blow away the moderates and invite the majority to unite behind a radical faction.”
In response, Khomeini and his followers, as seen in the film, chanted not only “Death to America!” but also “Death to Carter!” And, of course, less than a year after Khomeini came to power, his followers took over the U.S. embassy, which Khomeini called a “center for corruption,” holding its occupants hostage for 444 days — not exactly the kind of action Gandhi would have endorsed.
Seizing an embassy is an act of war. Carter’s response was, as Bernard Lewis characterized it, “feeble.” Khomeini was gratified to discover that “Americans cannot do a damn thing.”
Three years later, Khomeini tested that proposition again. He dispatched the Lebanese-based Hezbollah to suicide-bomb the barracks of U.S. peacekeepers in Beirut. Not since Iwo Jima had so many U.S. Marines been killed in a single attack. In response, President Reagan committed a grave error: He did not retaliate against Hezbollah or Iran. That taught a lesson: Hit Americans and Americans will retreat. They really “cannot do a damn thing.” (And, as I write this, Hezbollah is on the verge of taking over Lebanon. The American response? So far, it would be fair to characterize it as “feeble.”)
Islamic militants throughout the world were inspired by what happened in Tehran and Beirut. What Steve Simon and Daniel Benjamin, advisers to President Clinton, would call The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam’s War Against America had begun.
Iran has since collaborated with al-Qaeda and a long list of other terrorists groups — the evidence is overwhelming — while also training and equipping those fighting Americans in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The regime continues to repress its own people — dissidents, of course, but also ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals, and women. As noted in the film, virgins sentenced to capital punishment are routinely raped prior to execution. This practice also is based on theology: Virgins go to Paradise, a reward enemies of the regime do not deserve.
And now Ahmadinejad and Khameini are in hot pursuit of nuclear weapons. To what end? The destruction of Israel, which Khameini has called “a cancerous tumor.” The treatment he prescribes: “remove it.” But it is not Israel alone to which scalpels are to be applied. Ahmadinejad tells a crowd: “The arrogant powers of the world must be annihilated. The countdown of America’s sinister power has begun. Have no doubt: Islam will conquer all the mountaintops of the world.”
Iran’s Arab neighbors have at least as much to fear as Israel and America. As cables recently released by WikiLeaks make clear, they know that. They are looking to the U.S., and they are not reassured.
No sensible, rational person can watch this film, hear this evidence, and fail to come to the conclusion that the fanatics who rule Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.
That is the message Iranium — I like that title, too, by the way — conveys. That’s why the theocrats and their apologists don’t want you to see it. That’s why you really should.
Obama's Take on U.S. Innovation
By Debra J. Saunders
Thursday, January 27, 2011
The problem with left-leaning elites trying to run the U.S. economy from the top down is simple: They think the answer to America's economic woes is to create more jobs that replicate managers just like them.
They cannot comprehend that, to a good number of American voters, the theme of President Obama's State of the Union address -- government innovation -- is an oxymoron.
And so they nodded their heads in recognition of their own greater wisdom as the president intoned, "We'll invest in biomedical research, information technology and especially clean-energy technology -- an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet and create countless new jobs for our people." As if more of the same deficit spending is the answer.
They fail to recognize that so-called green jobs are the most over-hyped jobs in America. (After years of subsidies and special treatment, they represent 174,000 jobs -- less than 1 percent of the total -- in California, according to the public policy group Next 10.)
In light of the country's high unemployment rate, you would think it would make more sense for the administration to focus on creating jobs in industries that hire lots of workers. But many of those sectors -- manufacturing, energy production -- don't reflect liberal politics. So Obama is big on "jobs of the future."
Research and development -- who can argue with spending money on that?
Except that in this economy, technology and environmental research means funneling government money into high-profile projects staffed by like-minded college graduates, a group with an unemployment rate of about 5 percent. Then, if the project actually produces something commercially viable, the new gadgets can be manufactured by low-skilled workers in a sustenance-wage corner of the world. Think solar power and China.
This is not an anti-government rant. Washington has, and should have, the lead role in national defense, interstate transportation, public safety, a safety net for the truly needy and more.
But as Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., put it in the GOP response, "Limited government also means effective government. When government takes on too many tasks, it usually doesn't do any of them very well."
For his part, the president is supposed to take control of the federal budget. Yet in his speech, Obama recognized that the government spends more than it takes in -- which is "not sustainable." Then he let it be known that he would not push the painful proposals set forth by his own bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.
In effect, Obama passed on doing the toughest part of his job. Instead, having shirked the dirty work, the president prefers to choose which commercial enterprises deserve your tax dollars -- call them the winners who get money for endeavors they wouldn't do on their own dime -- and which businesses deserve only the honor of bankrolling his "jobs of the future" -- call them the losers.
I understand that compared to tackling the growing deficit, it's a lot easier to hand out grants and underwrite subsidies to like-minded venture capitalists, who are happy to soak up taxpayer dollars as they credit you for creating private-sector jobs.
But please, don't call it innovation.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
The problem with left-leaning elites trying to run the U.S. economy from the top down is simple: They think the answer to America's economic woes is to create more jobs that replicate managers just like them.
They cannot comprehend that, to a good number of American voters, the theme of President Obama's State of the Union address -- government innovation -- is an oxymoron.
And so they nodded their heads in recognition of their own greater wisdom as the president intoned, "We'll invest in biomedical research, information technology and especially clean-energy technology -- an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet and create countless new jobs for our people." As if more of the same deficit spending is the answer.
They fail to recognize that so-called green jobs are the most over-hyped jobs in America. (After years of subsidies and special treatment, they represent 174,000 jobs -- less than 1 percent of the total -- in California, according to the public policy group Next 10.)
In light of the country's high unemployment rate, you would think it would make more sense for the administration to focus on creating jobs in industries that hire lots of workers. But many of those sectors -- manufacturing, energy production -- don't reflect liberal politics. So Obama is big on "jobs of the future."
Research and development -- who can argue with spending money on that?
Except that in this economy, technology and environmental research means funneling government money into high-profile projects staffed by like-minded college graduates, a group with an unemployment rate of about 5 percent. Then, if the project actually produces something commercially viable, the new gadgets can be manufactured by low-skilled workers in a sustenance-wage corner of the world. Think solar power and China.
This is not an anti-government rant. Washington has, and should have, the lead role in national defense, interstate transportation, public safety, a safety net for the truly needy and more.
But as Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., put it in the GOP response, "Limited government also means effective government. When government takes on too many tasks, it usually doesn't do any of them very well."
For his part, the president is supposed to take control of the federal budget. Yet in his speech, Obama recognized that the government spends more than it takes in -- which is "not sustainable." Then he let it be known that he would not push the painful proposals set forth by his own bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.
In effect, Obama passed on doing the toughest part of his job. Instead, having shirked the dirty work, the president prefers to choose which commercial enterprises deserve your tax dollars -- call them the winners who get money for endeavors they wouldn't do on their own dime -- and which businesses deserve only the honor of bankrolling his "jobs of the future" -- call them the losers.
I understand that compared to tackling the growing deficit, it's a lot easier to hand out grants and underwrite subsidies to like-minded venture capitalists, who are happy to soak up taxpayer dollars as they credit you for creating private-sector jobs.
But please, don't call it innovation.
Olbermann's Last Supper at MSNBC: What Happened?
By Larry Elder
Thursday, January 27, 2011
"This will be the last edition of your show," MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, on the air, claimed he was told by management. What to make of Olbermann's abrupt departure, an apparent firing?
Did post-Tucson concern over "vitriolic rhetoric" cause Comcast, MSNBC's new owner, to recoil at Olbermann's greatest hits? They include, but are by no means limited to:
Calling opposition to ObamaCare the equivalent of "terrorists ... killing 45,000 people every year"; blaming Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing; calling the tea party-backed Republicans racists who would bring back "Jim Crow ... bread lines ... robber barons" and "hanging union organizers"; calling now-Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., a "homophobic, racist, reactionary ... teabagging supporter of violence against women"; accusing columnist and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin of engaging in "morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred without which (she) would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it"; accusing President George W. Bush of "urinating on the Constitution" and of committing "panoramic and murderous deceit"; exclaiming about Bush, "You're a fascist!"; asserting that Bush "lied us into a war and, in so doing, needlessly killed 3,584"; calling Fox News' Chris Wallace "a monkey posing as a newscaster"; and saying of the then-Whitewater prosecutor, "It finally dawned on me that the person Ken Starr has reminded me of facially all this time was Heinrich Himmler ... a persecutor as opposed to a prosecutor."
Whew!
Whatever version Comcast puts out -- "We don't interfere with the businesses we just paid a boatload of money to take over" -- is likely to be crap, mostly crap or partially crap. And whatever version Olbermann or his supporters/defenders put out -- "He's not in it for the money" or "He wouldn't stand for any control over his show" -- is likely to be crap, mostly crap or partially crap.
Maybe it's as simple as this. Lawrence O'Donnell, who held down MSNBC's 10 p.m. slot and who frequently and ably guest-hosted for Olbermann, now takes over. O'Donnell once repeatedly screamed "liar!" at Swift boat veteran John O'Neill and had a shouting match with a former Bush speechwriter over O'Donnell's accusation that Bush condoned "torture." O'Donnell is a self-described "socialist" who wants to "ban all guns in America" and "make Medicare available to all."
Olbermann reportedly made $7 mil a year. It's a safe bet that O'Donnell earns a fraction of $7 mil and that the new management foresees no appreciable drop in ratings. Addition by subtraction -- with no change in content or volatility.
Olbermann's show, for years, kind of bumped along at the bottom of the aquarium, with ratings below CNN's fare and well below that of Fox News. Then came "Olbermann's Moment," a seven-minute verbal beat-down of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Overnight the ratings shot up. Olbermann soon climbed over CNN and settled in at the rear of Fox News opinionators. Not bad -- for MSNBC.
Olbermann's rants encouraged an MSNBC cohort, "Hardball's" Chris Matthews, to dial it up even more. Eureka! The network found its mojo: "We shall be the anti-Fox Fox!" This begat Rachel Maddow, a double-leftist from Air America radio. And MSNBC added Ed Schultz, a double-leftist radio host from North Dakota.
Olbermann thus pushed MSNBC's management into a new business plan. Pre-Olbermann, it was a network in search of an identity -- and ratings. More than anyone, he led the cabler out of the wilderness and into the bottom of the middle tier. After all, MSNBC once gave shows to the decidedly non-liberal Laura Ingraham, Alan Keyes and ... Michael Savage!
When Olbermann signed off for the last time, he thanked "the late Tim Russert," who, he claimed, had his back. This is dubious. It's far more likely that Russert, who took pride in his role as a nonpartisan, tough-on-both-sides newsman, deeply resented the post-Rumsfeld Olbermann makeover.
Would Russert have cheered MSNBC's bizarre election-night 2010 coverage, manned by Matthews, Maddow and Olbermann -- all going full-throttle Howard Beale? Russert's son, Luke, works at NBC News. Somebody should ask him.
At my dentist's office a few weeks ago, a woman in the waiting room said: "I never agree with you. My husband told me to stop listening. But of the guys who think like you, you're the only one I can stand." She named the usual names, and ripped them. "They're so hateful!"
"Don't you feel there's a lot of what you call 'hate' on the left?"
"Oh, yes, and I don't like them, either."
"How do you feel about Bill Maher?"
"Love him!"
"Chris Matthews?"
"Love him!!"
"Keith Olbermann?"
"LOVE, LOVE, LOVE HIM!!!"
Now, post-MSNBC, the double-left will adore Olbermann more than ever. He becomes the "man who spoke truth to power and suffered its wrath." With this rabid, decent-sized following, and after his non-compete is up, Olbermann can quickly resurface.
Maybe he'll get an HBO Maher-type show -- where he even gets to cuss.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
"This will be the last edition of your show," MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, on the air, claimed he was told by management. What to make of Olbermann's abrupt departure, an apparent firing?
Did post-Tucson concern over "vitriolic rhetoric" cause Comcast, MSNBC's new owner, to recoil at Olbermann's greatest hits? They include, but are by no means limited to:
Calling opposition to ObamaCare the equivalent of "terrorists ... killing 45,000 people every year"; blaming Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing; calling the tea party-backed Republicans racists who would bring back "Jim Crow ... bread lines ... robber barons" and "hanging union organizers"; calling now-Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., a "homophobic, racist, reactionary ... teabagging supporter of violence against women"; accusing columnist and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin of engaging in "morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred without which (she) would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it"; accusing President George W. Bush of "urinating on the Constitution" and of committing "panoramic and murderous deceit"; exclaiming about Bush, "You're a fascist!"; asserting that Bush "lied us into a war and, in so doing, needlessly killed 3,584"; calling Fox News' Chris Wallace "a monkey posing as a newscaster"; and saying of the then-Whitewater prosecutor, "It finally dawned on me that the person Ken Starr has reminded me of facially all this time was Heinrich Himmler ... a persecutor as opposed to a prosecutor."
Whew!
Whatever version Comcast puts out -- "We don't interfere with the businesses we just paid a boatload of money to take over" -- is likely to be crap, mostly crap or partially crap. And whatever version Olbermann or his supporters/defenders put out -- "He's not in it for the money" or "He wouldn't stand for any control over his show" -- is likely to be crap, mostly crap or partially crap.
Maybe it's as simple as this. Lawrence O'Donnell, who held down MSNBC's 10 p.m. slot and who frequently and ably guest-hosted for Olbermann, now takes over. O'Donnell once repeatedly screamed "liar!" at Swift boat veteran John O'Neill and had a shouting match with a former Bush speechwriter over O'Donnell's accusation that Bush condoned "torture." O'Donnell is a self-described "socialist" who wants to "ban all guns in America" and "make Medicare available to all."
Olbermann reportedly made $7 mil a year. It's a safe bet that O'Donnell earns a fraction of $7 mil and that the new management foresees no appreciable drop in ratings. Addition by subtraction -- with no change in content or volatility.
Olbermann's show, for years, kind of bumped along at the bottom of the aquarium, with ratings below CNN's fare and well below that of Fox News. Then came "Olbermann's Moment," a seven-minute verbal beat-down of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Overnight the ratings shot up. Olbermann soon climbed over CNN and settled in at the rear of Fox News opinionators. Not bad -- for MSNBC.
Olbermann's rants encouraged an MSNBC cohort, "Hardball's" Chris Matthews, to dial it up even more. Eureka! The network found its mojo: "We shall be the anti-Fox Fox!" This begat Rachel Maddow, a double-leftist from Air America radio. And MSNBC added Ed Schultz, a double-leftist radio host from North Dakota.
Olbermann thus pushed MSNBC's management into a new business plan. Pre-Olbermann, it was a network in search of an identity -- and ratings. More than anyone, he led the cabler out of the wilderness and into the bottom of the middle tier. After all, MSNBC once gave shows to the decidedly non-liberal Laura Ingraham, Alan Keyes and ... Michael Savage!
When Olbermann signed off for the last time, he thanked "the late Tim Russert," who, he claimed, had his back. This is dubious. It's far more likely that Russert, who took pride in his role as a nonpartisan, tough-on-both-sides newsman, deeply resented the post-Rumsfeld Olbermann makeover.
Would Russert have cheered MSNBC's bizarre election-night 2010 coverage, manned by Matthews, Maddow and Olbermann -- all going full-throttle Howard Beale? Russert's son, Luke, works at NBC News. Somebody should ask him.
At my dentist's office a few weeks ago, a woman in the waiting room said: "I never agree with you. My husband told me to stop listening. But of the guys who think like you, you're the only one I can stand." She named the usual names, and ripped them. "They're so hateful!"
"Don't you feel there's a lot of what you call 'hate' on the left?"
"Oh, yes, and I don't like them, either."
"How do you feel about Bill Maher?"
"Love him!"
"Chris Matthews?"
"Love him!!"
"Keith Olbermann?"
"LOVE, LOVE, LOVE HIM!!!"
Now, post-MSNBC, the double-left will adore Olbermann more than ever. He becomes the "man who spoke truth to power and suffered its wrath." With this rabid, decent-sized following, and after his non-compete is up, Olbermann can quickly resurface.
Maybe he'll get an HBO Maher-type show -- where he even gets to cuss.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Contested Ground, Not Common Ground
Obama is wrong about the role of government.
Michael Tanner
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
President Obama spoke eloquently during his State of the Union address last night about civility and the search for common ground. And certainly a bit more civility would be a welcome change. Yet, at the same time, the president’s speech showed just how little common ground there is between two distinctly different views on the role of government.
The president clearly believes in using government broadly as a force for good in society. Despite the lip service paid to the need to put our fiscal house in order, the president’s answer to the problems facing this country is for government to do more and spend more. The president may call these new initiatives “targeted investments,” but what he means is “more expensive government programs.”
In calling for more government action, the president’s attitude reminds one of Samuel Johnson’s description of second marriages: the triumph of hope over experience.
For example, the president wants to spend more on education. That sounds good — who could be against education? But the federal government has increased education spending by 188 percent in real terms since 1970 without seeing any substantial improvement in test scores.
The president’s answer to unemployment is for the government to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, “investing” in infrastructure and “green technology.” The president sees government as the engine of economic growth, as a force that “creates jobs.” He says he wants that job growth to be in the private sector; it’s just that he doesn’t believe that the private sector can do much unless it acts in “partnership” with the government. Yet from Hoover and Roosevelt during the Great Depression to the anti-recession policies of Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, government efforts to fight unemployment by “creating jobs” have been unsuccessful. And we have the experience of hundreds of billions of dollars spent by President Obama in stimulus programs with little evidence of job creation.
Nor should we forget that the president’s “investment” must be financed through either taxes or debt (meaning future taxes). Thus the president is simply moving money around, taking it from those people and businesses he deems less worthy and giving it to those he believes will “win the future.” That’s a recipe for redistribution, not competitiveness.
As the economist F. A. Hayek noted, government’s ability to manage the economy is premised on a “fatal conceit” — politicians’ inability to recognize their own limitations. For example, studies show that not only do government “green jobs” policies create few jobs, but the ones they do create often come at the expense of existing jobs. To cite just one finding: A study by Gabriel Calzada of the Juan Carlos University of Madrid found that every green job created by the Spanish government destroyed an average of 2.2 other jobs, and that only one in ten of the “green jobs” created was permanent. The fact is, if these industries were viable and profitable, the private sector would be rushing to invest in them. The very fact that they require government subsidies demonstrates that they are not the road to future economic growth.
But the president continues to insist that the right mix of government spending will work better than the invisible hand of the market to restore a growing economy.
Naturally, the president defended his health-care bill despite all the evidence that it has failed to control medical costs and is actually driving up the price of insurance, limiting consumer choice, and making it more difficult for businesses to hire new workers. The government health plans we have now, Medicare and Medicaid, are spiraling into insolvency even as the quality of care they provide deteriorates. In fact, most of the problems facing our health-care system can be traced to government policies designed to fix it. But the president insists that more government mandates, subsidies, and regulations are the answer.
On the other side of this grand political divide are those who believe that government is already too big, too intrusive, and too costly. Rather than “invest” in new programs, they want to cut back the programs we already have. Rather than seeing Washington as the font of all wisdom, they see the 50 states as, in Louis Brandeis’s immortal phrase, “the laboratories of democracy,” and seek to devolve more authority and responsibility to state governments. Rather than federal money and regulation, they see increased competition and parental choice as the answer to failing schools. Rather than a government industrial policy, they see the free market as the route to economic growth, and call for lower taxes and less regulation to unleash that market. And rather than increased government control of our health-care system, they seek a consumer-centered health reform.
That is not a divide that can be bridged by civil rhetoric or rearranging congressional seating.
Michael Tanner
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
President Obama spoke eloquently during his State of the Union address last night about civility and the search for common ground. And certainly a bit more civility would be a welcome change. Yet, at the same time, the president’s speech showed just how little common ground there is between two distinctly different views on the role of government.
The president clearly believes in using government broadly as a force for good in society. Despite the lip service paid to the need to put our fiscal house in order, the president’s answer to the problems facing this country is for government to do more and spend more. The president may call these new initiatives “targeted investments,” but what he means is “more expensive government programs.”
In calling for more government action, the president’s attitude reminds one of Samuel Johnson’s description of second marriages: the triumph of hope over experience.
For example, the president wants to spend more on education. That sounds good — who could be against education? But the federal government has increased education spending by 188 percent in real terms since 1970 without seeing any substantial improvement in test scores.
The president’s answer to unemployment is for the government to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, “investing” in infrastructure and “green technology.” The president sees government as the engine of economic growth, as a force that “creates jobs.” He says he wants that job growth to be in the private sector; it’s just that he doesn’t believe that the private sector can do much unless it acts in “partnership” with the government. Yet from Hoover and Roosevelt during the Great Depression to the anti-recession policies of Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, government efforts to fight unemployment by “creating jobs” have been unsuccessful. And we have the experience of hundreds of billions of dollars spent by President Obama in stimulus programs with little evidence of job creation.
Nor should we forget that the president’s “investment” must be financed through either taxes or debt (meaning future taxes). Thus the president is simply moving money around, taking it from those people and businesses he deems less worthy and giving it to those he believes will “win the future.” That’s a recipe for redistribution, not competitiveness.
As the economist F. A. Hayek noted, government’s ability to manage the economy is premised on a “fatal conceit” — politicians’ inability to recognize their own limitations. For example, studies show that not only do government “green jobs” policies create few jobs, but the ones they do create often come at the expense of existing jobs. To cite just one finding: A study by Gabriel Calzada of the Juan Carlos University of Madrid found that every green job created by the Spanish government destroyed an average of 2.2 other jobs, and that only one in ten of the “green jobs” created was permanent. The fact is, if these industries were viable and profitable, the private sector would be rushing to invest in them. The very fact that they require government subsidies demonstrates that they are not the road to future economic growth.
But the president continues to insist that the right mix of government spending will work better than the invisible hand of the market to restore a growing economy.
Naturally, the president defended his health-care bill despite all the evidence that it has failed to control medical costs and is actually driving up the price of insurance, limiting consumer choice, and making it more difficult for businesses to hire new workers. The government health plans we have now, Medicare and Medicaid, are spiraling into insolvency even as the quality of care they provide deteriorates. In fact, most of the problems facing our health-care system can be traced to government policies designed to fix it. But the president insists that more government mandates, subsidies, and regulations are the answer.
On the other side of this grand political divide are those who believe that government is already too big, too intrusive, and too costly. Rather than “invest” in new programs, they want to cut back the programs we already have. Rather than seeing Washington as the font of all wisdom, they see the 50 states as, in Louis Brandeis’s immortal phrase, “the laboratories of democracy,” and seek to devolve more authority and responsibility to state governments. Rather than federal money and regulation, they see increased competition and parental choice as the answer to failing schools. Rather than a government industrial policy, they see the free market as the route to economic growth, and call for lower taxes and less regulation to unleash that market. And rather than increased government control of our health-care system, they seek a consumer-centered health reform.
That is not a divide that can be bridged by civil rhetoric or rearranging congressional seating.
Dumpnik
Pima County Republicans hope to ride Sheriff Dupnik out of town.
Daniel Foster
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
At a time when most of America was looking for answers in the Tucson shootings, trying to understand what mix of privation and perversion could drive an individual to shoot indiscriminately into a crowd of innocent bystanders, longtime Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik had his answers prepackaged and ready for prime time.
It was the right-wing rhetoric, Dupnik told the crowds at his press conferences — along with Fox News, MSNBC, and anybody else who would listen. It was the violent rhetoric of tea partiers, talk-show hosts, and Sarah Palin who had turned Arizona into a “mecca for racism and bigotry,” and the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others was but “the fruit of” their irresponsible statements.
And as if there were any doubt about whether the sheriff’s pronouncements represented the measured judgment of a criminal investigator or the shameless opportunism of a political hack, he told Fox’s Megyn Kelly that not only was the Right complicit in the crimes of Jared Lee Loughner, but — and perhaps even worse — it was standing athwart the hope-and-change express. “I grew up in a country that was totally different than the country we have today,” he said. “We see one party trying to block the attempts of another party to make this a better country.”
When National Review Online asked Pima County GOP chairman Brian Miller whether there was any doubt in his mind that Dupnik, a vocal liberal in a state with comparably few, had used his office to score political points in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, an almost incredulous Miller responded: “No doubt at all. It’s inarguable. It’s been videotaped.”
And now, Pima County Republicans are more determined than ever to do something about it. They’ve launched dumpsheriffdupnik.com, the virtual locus of a money-bomb that hopes to raise $100,000 to oust the 30-year, seven-term incumbent.
While the election isn’t until 2012 and the $100,000 figure is being called just “an initial goal,” Miller says his party is intent on keeping its foot on the gas and doing all it can to retire Dupnik.
Miller calls Dupnik’s public appearances in the wake of the Tucson shootings merely “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“We just want to be able to hold him accountable for what he’s done professionally — or more accurately, unprofessionally,” he says.
“He has continuously come out, very unprofessionally, as the chief law-enforcement officer in the county,” Miller elaborates, adding that in the Loughner case Dupnik has “corrupted the investigation” and “potentially made the prosecution’s case more difficult” with his speculations.
Still, Republicans will have their work cut out for them. In 2008, Republican sheriff nominee Harry Shaw garnered just 35.2 percent of the vote against Dupnik’s 64.6 percent. Miller says that there are “a couple of prospects” on the Republican side of the ticket for 2012, but that it is too soon to expect any public declarations.
This time, however, they’ll have the help of local Tea Party groups. The Pima County Tea Party Patriots plan to hold a “Dump Dupnik” rally in front of the sheriff’s headquarters on Friday, January 28. According to event literature, tea partiers will protest in front of Dupnik’s office for choosing “to politicize a tragedy” instead of “conducting an investigation and providing a voice of calm for our City.”
There is also a separate effort by local volunteers to collect signatures for a recall petition.
Does Miller think Republicans and tea partiers are exploiting events in their own right, using Dupnik’s new found infamy as a fund-raising hook? No.
“He has made himself into a national issue by what he has been doing, and we will use his words against him. That is very fair and we will continue to do it,” Miller says.
Daniel Foster
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
At a time when most of America was looking for answers in the Tucson shootings, trying to understand what mix of privation and perversion could drive an individual to shoot indiscriminately into a crowd of innocent bystanders, longtime Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik had his answers prepackaged and ready for prime time.
It was the right-wing rhetoric, Dupnik told the crowds at his press conferences — along with Fox News, MSNBC, and anybody else who would listen. It was the violent rhetoric of tea partiers, talk-show hosts, and Sarah Palin who had turned Arizona into a “mecca for racism and bigotry,” and the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others was but “the fruit of” their irresponsible statements.
And as if there were any doubt about whether the sheriff’s pronouncements represented the measured judgment of a criminal investigator or the shameless opportunism of a political hack, he told Fox’s Megyn Kelly that not only was the Right complicit in the crimes of Jared Lee Loughner, but — and perhaps even worse — it was standing athwart the hope-and-change express. “I grew up in a country that was totally different than the country we have today,” he said. “We see one party trying to block the attempts of another party to make this a better country.”
When National Review Online asked Pima County GOP chairman Brian Miller whether there was any doubt in his mind that Dupnik, a vocal liberal in a state with comparably few, had used his office to score political points in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, an almost incredulous Miller responded: “No doubt at all. It’s inarguable. It’s been videotaped.”
And now, Pima County Republicans are more determined than ever to do something about it. They’ve launched dumpsheriffdupnik.com, the virtual locus of a money-bomb that hopes to raise $100,000 to oust the 30-year, seven-term incumbent.
While the election isn’t until 2012 and the $100,000 figure is being called just “an initial goal,” Miller says his party is intent on keeping its foot on the gas and doing all it can to retire Dupnik.
Miller calls Dupnik’s public appearances in the wake of the Tucson shootings merely “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“We just want to be able to hold him accountable for what he’s done professionally — or more accurately, unprofessionally,” he says.
“He has continuously come out, very unprofessionally, as the chief law-enforcement officer in the county,” Miller elaborates, adding that in the Loughner case Dupnik has “corrupted the investigation” and “potentially made the prosecution’s case more difficult” with his speculations.
Still, Republicans will have their work cut out for them. In 2008, Republican sheriff nominee Harry Shaw garnered just 35.2 percent of the vote against Dupnik’s 64.6 percent. Miller says that there are “a couple of prospects” on the Republican side of the ticket for 2012, but that it is too soon to expect any public declarations.
This time, however, they’ll have the help of local Tea Party groups. The Pima County Tea Party Patriots plan to hold a “Dump Dupnik” rally in front of the sheriff’s headquarters on Friday, January 28. According to event literature, tea partiers will protest in front of Dupnik’s office for choosing “to politicize a tragedy” instead of “conducting an investigation and providing a voice of calm for our City.”
There is also a separate effort by local volunteers to collect signatures for a recall petition.
Does Miller think Republicans and tea partiers are exploiting events in their own right, using Dupnik’s new found infamy as a fund-raising hook? No.
“He has made himself into a national issue by what he has been doing, and we will use his words against him. That is very fair and we will continue to do it,” Miller says.
Can Our Nation Be Saved?
By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
National debt is over $14 trillion, the federal budget deficit is $1.4 trillion and, depending on whose estimates are used, the unfunded liability or indebtedness of the federal government (mostly in the form of obligations for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and prescription drugs) is estimated to be between $60 and $100 trillion.
Those entitlements along with others account for nearly 60 percent of federal spending. They are what Congress calls mandatory or non-discretionary spending. Then there's discretionary spending, half of which is for national defense. Each year, non-discretionary spending consumes a higher and higher percent of the federal budget.
The spending path that Congress has chosen for the last half-century is unsustainable and will end up with economic collapse but little or nothing can be done about it unless I'm grossly wrong about the American people. Americans who detest our country and those who love our country are hell-bent, wittingly or unwittingly, on destroying it.
You say, "Williams, that's not only insulting but shows little trust as well. Explain yourself!"
For the past 30 years, federal tax revenues have averaged 18 percent of the GDP. Federal spending, nearing 30 percent of our GDP, is the problem. To get our economic house in order, there must be large spending cuts, not only in so-called discretionary spending but in non-discretionary spending as well.
To put this in perspective: Defense spending is called discretionary and totals $685 billion. Our deficit is $1.4 trillion. Defense spending could be entirely eliminated and we'd still have a massive deficit. Any congressman unwilling to make cuts in entitlement spending is not to be taken seriously about sparing our nation from economic collapse.
Millions of Americans don't want their entitlement touched, many of whom are senior citizens. Seniors will tell you that they were forced into Social Security and Medicare, and any congressman talking about cutting those and other entitlements will face their wrath at the ballot box. By the way, according to one study, "Until recent years, Social Security recipients received more, often far more, than the value of the Social Security taxes they paid. For workers who earned average wages and retired in 1980 at age 65, it took 2.8 years to recover the value of the retirement portion of the combined employee and employer shares of their Social Security taxes plus interest."
Seniors are not the only group who can put the fear of God into politicians. There are massive corporate handouts through programs like the Export-Import Bank, Agriculture Department business and farm subsidies, and the Small Business Administration. Then there's massive Department of Education spending on K-12 education and higher education. The list of federal programs, described as taking the earnings of one American and giving them to another, numbers in the thousands.
Everyone who receives government largesse and special favors deems his needs as vital, deserving, proper and in the national interest. It is entirely unreasonable to expect a politician to honor and obey our Constitution and in the process commit political suicide. What's even worse for our nation is that voters ousting a politician who'd refuse to bring, say, aid to higher education back to his constituents is perfectly rational. If, for example, he's a Virginia politician and doesn't bring higher education grants back to his constituents, it doesn't mean Virginian taxpayers will pay a lower income tax. All that it means is that Marylanders will get the money instead. Once legalized theft begins, it pays for everyone to participate. Those who don't will be losers.
That's the nation's dilemma. The most important job for people who want to spare our nation from economic collapse is not that of persuading politicians to do the right thing but to convince our fellow Americans to respect the limits of our Constitution. In his speech to Virginia's ratifying convention, James Madison said, "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it."
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
National debt is over $14 trillion, the federal budget deficit is $1.4 trillion and, depending on whose estimates are used, the unfunded liability or indebtedness of the federal government (mostly in the form of obligations for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and prescription drugs) is estimated to be between $60 and $100 trillion.
Those entitlements along with others account for nearly 60 percent of federal spending. They are what Congress calls mandatory or non-discretionary spending. Then there's discretionary spending, half of which is for national defense. Each year, non-discretionary spending consumes a higher and higher percent of the federal budget.
The spending path that Congress has chosen for the last half-century is unsustainable and will end up with economic collapse but little or nothing can be done about it unless I'm grossly wrong about the American people. Americans who detest our country and those who love our country are hell-bent, wittingly or unwittingly, on destroying it.
You say, "Williams, that's not only insulting but shows little trust as well. Explain yourself!"
For the past 30 years, federal tax revenues have averaged 18 percent of the GDP. Federal spending, nearing 30 percent of our GDP, is the problem. To get our economic house in order, there must be large spending cuts, not only in so-called discretionary spending but in non-discretionary spending as well.
To put this in perspective: Defense spending is called discretionary and totals $685 billion. Our deficit is $1.4 trillion. Defense spending could be entirely eliminated and we'd still have a massive deficit. Any congressman unwilling to make cuts in entitlement spending is not to be taken seriously about sparing our nation from economic collapse.
Millions of Americans don't want their entitlement touched, many of whom are senior citizens. Seniors will tell you that they were forced into Social Security and Medicare, and any congressman talking about cutting those and other entitlements will face their wrath at the ballot box. By the way, according to one study, "Until recent years, Social Security recipients received more, often far more, than the value of the Social Security taxes they paid. For workers who earned average wages and retired in 1980 at age 65, it took 2.8 years to recover the value of the retirement portion of the combined employee and employer shares of their Social Security taxes plus interest."
Seniors are not the only group who can put the fear of God into politicians. There are massive corporate handouts through programs like the Export-Import Bank, Agriculture Department business and farm subsidies, and the Small Business Administration. Then there's massive Department of Education spending on K-12 education and higher education. The list of federal programs, described as taking the earnings of one American and giving them to another, numbers in the thousands.
Everyone who receives government largesse and special favors deems his needs as vital, deserving, proper and in the national interest. It is entirely unreasonable to expect a politician to honor and obey our Constitution and in the process commit political suicide. What's even worse for our nation is that voters ousting a politician who'd refuse to bring, say, aid to higher education back to his constituents is perfectly rational. If, for example, he's a Virginia politician and doesn't bring higher education grants back to his constituents, it doesn't mean Virginian taxpayers will pay a lower income tax. All that it means is that Marylanders will get the money instead. Once legalized theft begins, it pays for everyone to participate. Those who don't will be losers.
That's the nation's dilemma. The most important job for people who want to spare our nation from economic collapse is not that of persuading politicians to do the right thing but to convince our fellow Americans to respect the limits of our Constitution. In his speech to Virginia's ratifying convention, James Madison said, "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it."
Forget the Past Two Years
By Donald Lambro
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
WASHINGTON -- Over the past two years, President Obama has blamed big banks, Wall Street, corporate executives, trade deals, tax cuts and deregulation for all the nation's ills, while presiding over $3.4 trillion in additional debt. Now, after two years of a sluggish economy and unemployment still hovering between 9 and 10 percent, he's talking like a born-again free trader, calling for a new approach to job creation (and possibly a lower corporate tax rate), announcing a mission to root out bad regulations, and a plan to put business executives in the White House.
Gone is the far-left, inflammatory anti-business, anti-Wall Street rhetoric and class warfare attacks on "millionaires and billionaires" and, really, anyone making more than $250,000 a year.
He has made William Daley, a J.P. Morgan bank executive, who championed the North American Free Trade Agreement under the Clinton administration, his chief of staff. He made one of Clinton's top economic advisers, Gene Sperling -- who backed a GOP-crafted capital gains tax cut that sent stocks soaring in the late '90s -- his top White House economic adviser. He brought in GE's chief executive Jeffery Immelt, a titan of industry, to advise him on how to get the economy growing again.
Is this for real? Or this a case of survival politics pushing aside long-held liberal principles to boost the start of his bid for a second term -- knowing full well that he's not going to win re-election if the jobless rate remains above 9 percent?
After two years of the biggest government expansion in decades, the suddenness of Obama's flip-flop message shift suggests the latter.
For half his term, he has presided over a regulatory expansion of the economy that has turned the business community against him. Last week, in a rather transparent move, he ordered an official review to "root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or are just plain dumb." Sure.
Last year he held an economic summit and did not invite the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation's largest business association. This week, he will go to their headquarters just two blocks away to address them.
For two years, he waged war against an extension of the Bush tax cuts, only to agree last month, after a "shellacking" in the elections, to keep them through 2012, and claimed they would indeed be good for the economy and job creation. Even the Washington Post now calls them "the Obama tax cuts."
For two years, against the better judgment of his advisers, his principal focus was enacting sweeping, federally dictated health care reform, expanding the welfare state, boosting spending, establishing dozens of agencies, bureaus and other regulatory bureaucracies, and re-regulating the financial sector from top to bottom, while the economy languished.
In a video preview of Tuesday night's state of the union address, he said "My principal focus ... is going to be making sure that we are competitive, that we are growing and we are creating jobs."
After signing waste-ridden budget bills loaded with pork, and after his Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner asked Congress to raise the debt ceiling to unprecedented new levels, Obama now says he wants "to reform government so that it's leaner and smarter for the 21st century." Where was that message when he and his party went on a two-year spending binge?
It was reportedly said that Obama's Christmas vacation reading included a book about Ronald Reagan and that he was especially interested in how Reagan led the economy out of a deep, two-year recession with tax cut incentives to spur growth and investment that created hundreds of thousands of jobs per month and sent the U.S. economy soaring in the last half of his presidency. After his midterm election thrashing, Obama is clearly changing his tune to save his presidency.
Administration insiders say that Obama's focus will be on cutting the unemployment rate over the next two years by emphasizing trade expansion, passing pending free trade pacts that have been on the shelf since 2009, and reforming the tax code to bring down the 35 percent top corporate tax rate. That rate leaves U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy. Only Japan's rate is higher in the industrialized world.
"We have to be creative. For example, do we need to do something to our tax structure to make U.S. companies more competitive? That's a conversation the president has already had with Immelt," White House presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett told the Washington Post last week.
Immelt is in fact pushing new trade deals, as is Daley, to open up wider markets for U.S. manufacturers, and initiating corporate tax cuts among other growth incentives.
But exactly how much influence Immelt will have is in question. He, after all, will chair just an advisory panel, not a high-level post, but he has the president's ear and they've met frequently.
Then there is the liberal base of his party, which is still in rebellion over the Bush tax cuts extension and his newest business advisors.
Obama's got a political balancing act ahead of him that may not work out as well a it did for Clinton, a master negotiator. In the end, though, it will come down to the unemployment rate that shows little or no sign of falling below 8 to 9 percent by the 2012 election.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
WASHINGTON -- Over the past two years, President Obama has blamed big banks, Wall Street, corporate executives, trade deals, tax cuts and deregulation for all the nation's ills, while presiding over $3.4 trillion in additional debt. Now, after two years of a sluggish economy and unemployment still hovering between 9 and 10 percent, he's talking like a born-again free trader, calling for a new approach to job creation (and possibly a lower corporate tax rate), announcing a mission to root out bad regulations, and a plan to put business executives in the White House.
Gone is the far-left, inflammatory anti-business, anti-Wall Street rhetoric and class warfare attacks on "millionaires and billionaires" and, really, anyone making more than $250,000 a year.
He has made William Daley, a J.P. Morgan bank executive, who championed the North American Free Trade Agreement under the Clinton administration, his chief of staff. He made one of Clinton's top economic advisers, Gene Sperling -- who backed a GOP-crafted capital gains tax cut that sent stocks soaring in the late '90s -- his top White House economic adviser. He brought in GE's chief executive Jeffery Immelt, a titan of industry, to advise him on how to get the economy growing again.
Is this for real? Or this a case of survival politics pushing aside long-held liberal principles to boost the start of his bid for a second term -- knowing full well that he's not going to win re-election if the jobless rate remains above 9 percent?
After two years of the biggest government expansion in decades, the suddenness of Obama's flip-flop message shift suggests the latter.
For half his term, he has presided over a regulatory expansion of the economy that has turned the business community against him. Last week, in a rather transparent move, he ordered an official review to "root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or are just plain dumb." Sure.
Last year he held an economic summit and did not invite the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation's largest business association. This week, he will go to their headquarters just two blocks away to address them.
For two years, he waged war against an extension of the Bush tax cuts, only to agree last month, after a "shellacking" in the elections, to keep them through 2012, and claimed they would indeed be good for the economy and job creation. Even the Washington Post now calls them "the Obama tax cuts."
For two years, against the better judgment of his advisers, his principal focus was enacting sweeping, federally dictated health care reform, expanding the welfare state, boosting spending, establishing dozens of agencies, bureaus and other regulatory bureaucracies, and re-regulating the financial sector from top to bottom, while the economy languished.
In a video preview of Tuesday night's state of the union address, he said "My principal focus ... is going to be making sure that we are competitive, that we are growing and we are creating jobs."
After signing waste-ridden budget bills loaded with pork, and after his Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner asked Congress to raise the debt ceiling to unprecedented new levels, Obama now says he wants "to reform government so that it's leaner and smarter for the 21st century." Where was that message when he and his party went on a two-year spending binge?
It was reportedly said that Obama's Christmas vacation reading included a book about Ronald Reagan and that he was especially interested in how Reagan led the economy out of a deep, two-year recession with tax cut incentives to spur growth and investment that created hundreds of thousands of jobs per month and sent the U.S. economy soaring in the last half of his presidency. After his midterm election thrashing, Obama is clearly changing his tune to save his presidency.
Administration insiders say that Obama's focus will be on cutting the unemployment rate over the next two years by emphasizing trade expansion, passing pending free trade pacts that have been on the shelf since 2009, and reforming the tax code to bring down the 35 percent top corporate tax rate. That rate leaves U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy. Only Japan's rate is higher in the industrialized world.
"We have to be creative. For example, do we need to do something to our tax structure to make U.S. companies more competitive? That's a conversation the president has already had with Immelt," White House presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett told the Washington Post last week.
Immelt is in fact pushing new trade deals, as is Daley, to open up wider markets for U.S. manufacturers, and initiating corporate tax cuts among other growth incentives.
But exactly how much influence Immelt will have is in question. He, after all, will chair just an advisory panel, not a high-level post, but he has the president's ear and they've met frequently.
Then there is the liberal base of his party, which is still in rebellion over the Bush tax cuts extension and his newest business advisors.
Obama's got a political balancing act ahead of him that may not work out as well a it did for Clinton, a master negotiator. In the end, though, it will come down to the unemployment rate that shows little or no sign of falling below 8 to 9 percent by the 2012 election.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Hands Off My Dishes
Environmentalists lower our quality of life by government fiat.
Mona Charen
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
I began noticing the white coating, dull film, and simply unclean dishes a few weeks ago. Naturally, I suspected that other members of my clan were failing to place dishes on the racks of the dishwasher properly. “If the water can’t reach it, it won’t get clean,” I lectured (not, ahem, for the first time), ostentatiously removing a small bowl that had been slipped under a larger one, no doubt by a person who clings to the discredited idea that dishwashers should be loaded to the gills. And those little separators in the utensil caddy — they are there for a reason, gentlemen.
But the crisis persisted. And, as the days passed, it became clear that the matter was beyond poor placement. Bits of spaghetti — stiff and stubborn — stuck like stalactites to bowls. The walls and doors of the machine emerged waxy and coated from each wash, in contrast to the gleaming surfaces of the past. Between the tines of forks, ugly bits of hardened remains resembled something you’d see on NCIS — if not quite repellent, then certainly unwelcome in what should have been a disinfected, pristine dishwasher.
I switched brands of dishwashing liquid. No change. Topped off the rinse-aid reservoir. No change. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the thought of buying a new machine flitted through my consciousness. Sparkling, squeaky-clean dishes are a necessary part of our quality of life. But our dishwasher is only three years old.
And then I learned that I don’t have a personal problem. I have a political problem. Jonathan V. Last of The Weekly Standard explains that, all across the nation, innocent Americans are grappling with the identical scourge. Our dishwashers are fine. The reason our dishes are dirty is that the environmentalists have succeeded in banning phosphates from dishwashing soap.
Until recently, dishwashing soap contained about 8 percent elemental phosphorus. That’s the magic element that “strips food and grease off dirty dishes and breaks down calcium-based stains.” It also prevents food from reattaching to the dishes. Or at least it used to. As of July 2010, the nation’s detergent manufacturers, bowing to laws regulating phosphorus in 17 states, reconfigured the formula for all dishwashing soap to contain less than 0.5 percent phosphorus. It’s taken till now for most of us to notice, as we used up the old (wonderful) soap and unwittingly made the switch.
Environmentalists argue that phosphorus winds up in our lakes and streams, causing algae blooms, which in turn reduce the oxygen available for other life. They admit that the amount of phosphorus coming from dishwasher soap is small, but, according to Jani Gilbert, a spokeswoman for the Department of Ecology in Washington State, “Anything we can do is good.”
Well, hang on. According to a 2003 Minnesota study, only 1.9 percent of the phosphorus in that state came from dishwashing detergent. And even the New York Times acknowledges that fertilizer and manure are the big culprits, with dishwashing soap contributing only “a fraction” of phosphates in the water.
Besides, removing phosphorus has other environmental consequences. People may run their dishwashers twice (guilty), causing more greenhouse gases to be created, or they may hand-wash their dishes, using more hot water than machines do (there are studies that show that hand washers tend to run the hot water too long — really).
This stealth attack on our dishes happened with little public debate. If there really is a serious problem with phosphates in our rivers and streams (and from my quick inquiries it seems to vary considerably around the nation), then voters should be offered alternatives. We can reduce our use of lawn fertilizers, for example. I’d prefer a yellow lawn to grimy dishes if it came to that.
But I need to be convinced. Remember those compact fluorescent light bulbs that were supposed to save billions of kilowatts of energy? California was an early adopter, and is spending $548 million over seven years to subsidize the sale of the bulbs (the rest of us will see incandescent bulbs disappear from shelves by 2014). But now it seems the CFL bulbs don’t last 9.4 years, but more like 6.3 years. They don’t work well when they’re cold. They’re very expensive. They cast a garish light. And if they break, you have to don a Hazmat suit to dispose of them. Meanwhile, LED lights are coming on fast, making the whole CFL thing seem as fresh as pet rocks.
In other words, environmentalists may not know what they’re talking about. In any case, something as intimate and critical as the cleanliness of our dishes ought not to be decided through stealth or back-room deals. Arise! A cascade of complaints — to the companies and to governments — is our best hope.
Mona Charen
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
I began noticing the white coating, dull film, and simply unclean dishes a few weeks ago. Naturally, I suspected that other members of my clan were failing to place dishes on the racks of the dishwasher properly. “If the water can’t reach it, it won’t get clean,” I lectured (not, ahem, for the first time), ostentatiously removing a small bowl that had been slipped under a larger one, no doubt by a person who clings to the discredited idea that dishwashers should be loaded to the gills. And those little separators in the utensil caddy — they are there for a reason, gentlemen.
But the crisis persisted. And, as the days passed, it became clear that the matter was beyond poor placement. Bits of spaghetti — stiff and stubborn — stuck like stalactites to bowls. The walls and doors of the machine emerged waxy and coated from each wash, in contrast to the gleaming surfaces of the past. Between the tines of forks, ugly bits of hardened remains resembled something you’d see on NCIS — if not quite repellent, then certainly unwelcome in what should have been a disinfected, pristine dishwasher.
I switched brands of dishwashing liquid. No change. Topped off the rinse-aid reservoir. No change. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the thought of buying a new machine flitted through my consciousness. Sparkling, squeaky-clean dishes are a necessary part of our quality of life. But our dishwasher is only three years old.
And then I learned that I don’t have a personal problem. I have a political problem. Jonathan V. Last of The Weekly Standard explains that, all across the nation, innocent Americans are grappling with the identical scourge. Our dishwashers are fine. The reason our dishes are dirty is that the environmentalists have succeeded in banning phosphates from dishwashing soap.
Until recently, dishwashing soap contained about 8 percent elemental phosphorus. That’s the magic element that “strips food and grease off dirty dishes and breaks down calcium-based stains.” It also prevents food from reattaching to the dishes. Or at least it used to. As of July 2010, the nation’s detergent manufacturers, bowing to laws regulating phosphorus in 17 states, reconfigured the formula for all dishwashing soap to contain less than 0.5 percent phosphorus. It’s taken till now for most of us to notice, as we used up the old (wonderful) soap and unwittingly made the switch.
Environmentalists argue that phosphorus winds up in our lakes and streams, causing algae blooms, which in turn reduce the oxygen available for other life. They admit that the amount of phosphorus coming from dishwasher soap is small, but, according to Jani Gilbert, a spokeswoman for the Department of Ecology in Washington State, “Anything we can do is good.”
Well, hang on. According to a 2003 Minnesota study, only 1.9 percent of the phosphorus in that state came from dishwashing detergent. And even the New York Times acknowledges that fertilizer and manure are the big culprits, with dishwashing soap contributing only “a fraction” of phosphates in the water.
Besides, removing phosphorus has other environmental consequences. People may run their dishwashers twice (guilty), causing more greenhouse gases to be created, or they may hand-wash their dishes, using more hot water than machines do (there are studies that show that hand washers tend to run the hot water too long — really).
This stealth attack on our dishes happened with little public debate. If there really is a serious problem with phosphates in our rivers and streams (and from my quick inquiries it seems to vary considerably around the nation), then voters should be offered alternatives. We can reduce our use of lawn fertilizers, for example. I’d prefer a yellow lawn to grimy dishes if it came to that.
But I need to be convinced. Remember those compact fluorescent light bulbs that were supposed to save billions of kilowatts of energy? California was an early adopter, and is spending $548 million over seven years to subsidize the sale of the bulbs (the rest of us will see incandescent bulbs disappear from shelves by 2014). But now it seems the CFL bulbs don’t last 9.4 years, but more like 6.3 years. They don’t work well when they’re cold. They’re very expensive. They cast a garish light. And if they break, you have to don a Hazmat suit to dispose of them. Meanwhile, LED lights are coming on fast, making the whole CFL thing seem as fresh as pet rocks.
In other words, environmentalists may not know what they’re talking about. In any case, something as intimate and critical as the cleanliness of our dishes ought not to be decided through stealth or back-room deals. Arise! A cascade of complaints — to the companies and to governments — is our best hope.
Cheers for Repeal of ObamaCare
By Phyllis Schlafly
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The U.S. House did what its candidates had promised and the voters expected: The House passed 245 to 189 a repeal of ObamaCare, the centerpiece of socialism. Three Democrats joined every single Republican, with Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Steve King, R-Iowa, spearheading the charge.
According to public opinion polls, support for repeal remains strong among the American people despite President Obama's prediction that once his favorite bill was enacted into law we would like it. In addition, 200 distinguished economics experts, mostly professors of economics, signed a letter predicting that an implementation of ObamaCare will be a barrier to job growth and inflict us with a crushing debt burden, and is not real health care reform.
The House should keep up its momentum by specifically repealing the most obnoxious section, which 26 states are now trying to get the courts to rule unconstitutional: the mandate on individuals to buy insurance. How can President Obama veto that repeal? When he campaigned against Hillary Clinton, he accused her of supporting such a mandate and promised to oppose it.
The representatives who voted for repeal should keep reminding the public why it is a bad, dictatorial and offensively expensive law. They should taunt the Senate into having a vote so we will know who is on which side of this issue.
When repeal is finally achieved, either through a change of U.S. president in 2012 or a Supreme Court ruling that ObamaCare's crucial provision is unconstitutional, Americans will enjoy some rights that ObamaCare will otherwise take away.
For example, you won't be hit with a big fine by the government for not buying the insurance the government orders you to buy. You will retain your right to buy health insurance that includes the benefits you need instead of a more costly policy mandated by the bureaucrats.
When the repeal of ObamaCare is final, you won't lose your job because your employer struggles to comply with this expensive mandate. Your children and grandchildren won't be hit with $1 trillion of new debt to burden their future.
If you are young, you won't be forced to pay higher premiums for mandatory health insurance to subsidize people who are older and sicker. If you are a senior, you won't suffer a half a trillion dollars taken out of Medicare to pay for new health entitlements.
You won't be standing in long lines as you try to see a doctor. You won't be put on a two-year waiting list for surgery you need.
The Center for Health Transformation just issued 1,968 reasons to repeal ObamaCare. A chart reveals the ways in which the 2,700-page law grants 1,968 powers to the secretary of health and human services, along with control over 18 percent of our entire economy.
For example, the regulators will decide what clinical drugs seniors will be allowed to get. The regulators will instruct doctors whether or not to give a drug to patients in long-term care.
The regulators are empowered to use "comparative effectiveness research" to determine whether seniors get care. That's code for the authority of bureaucrats to decide whether (based on your age and condition) you are worth spending any money on -- aka death panels that will decide whether you live or die.
House members should remember that some promised repeal AND replace. Their task is to detach health care from bureaucrats and appropriators because that's the only way to get health care costs under control.
We should also detach health care from the unfortunate link between jobs and health insurance that created the present system of third-party payers. That process began as a tax loophole during World War II wage and price control, and it now traps millions of Americans in a tough compromise between an unproductive job and unsuitable high-cost health insurance.
This can be done by allowing us to make our own decisions by paying for smaller, routine expenses from our own tax-deductible health savings account, instead of relying on third-party payers whose rates constantly escalate. Employee group health insurance plans, with higher deductibles, should pay the major costs.
The House should hold weekly hearings in order to dispel the misinformation we are fed by the liberals, such as the foolish notion that government health care in other countries is more efficient and less costly. Tens of thousands of foreigners come to the U.S. every year for medical treatment because they know they have a better survival rate here.
Compare these statistics between the U.S. and United Kingdom released by the United Nations International Health Organization. The percentage of people who survived cancer five years after diagnosis: U.S. 65 percent, U.K. 46 percent; diagnosed with diabetes who received treatment within six months: U.S. 93 percent, U.K. 15 percent; seniors needing hip replacement who received it within six months: U.S. 90 percent, U.K. 15 percent; getting to see a medical specialist within one month: U.S. 77 percent, U.K. 40 percent.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The U.S. House did what its candidates had promised and the voters expected: The House passed 245 to 189 a repeal of ObamaCare, the centerpiece of socialism. Three Democrats joined every single Republican, with Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Steve King, R-Iowa, spearheading the charge.
According to public opinion polls, support for repeal remains strong among the American people despite President Obama's prediction that once his favorite bill was enacted into law we would like it. In addition, 200 distinguished economics experts, mostly professors of economics, signed a letter predicting that an implementation of ObamaCare will be a barrier to job growth and inflict us with a crushing debt burden, and is not real health care reform.
The House should keep up its momentum by specifically repealing the most obnoxious section, which 26 states are now trying to get the courts to rule unconstitutional: the mandate on individuals to buy insurance. How can President Obama veto that repeal? When he campaigned against Hillary Clinton, he accused her of supporting such a mandate and promised to oppose it.
The representatives who voted for repeal should keep reminding the public why it is a bad, dictatorial and offensively expensive law. They should taunt the Senate into having a vote so we will know who is on which side of this issue.
When repeal is finally achieved, either through a change of U.S. president in 2012 or a Supreme Court ruling that ObamaCare's crucial provision is unconstitutional, Americans will enjoy some rights that ObamaCare will otherwise take away.
For example, you won't be hit with a big fine by the government for not buying the insurance the government orders you to buy. You will retain your right to buy health insurance that includes the benefits you need instead of a more costly policy mandated by the bureaucrats.
When the repeal of ObamaCare is final, you won't lose your job because your employer struggles to comply with this expensive mandate. Your children and grandchildren won't be hit with $1 trillion of new debt to burden their future.
If you are young, you won't be forced to pay higher premiums for mandatory health insurance to subsidize people who are older and sicker. If you are a senior, you won't suffer a half a trillion dollars taken out of Medicare to pay for new health entitlements.
You won't be standing in long lines as you try to see a doctor. You won't be put on a two-year waiting list for surgery you need.
The Center for Health Transformation just issued 1,968 reasons to repeal ObamaCare. A chart reveals the ways in which the 2,700-page law grants 1,968 powers to the secretary of health and human services, along with control over 18 percent of our entire economy.
For example, the regulators will decide what clinical drugs seniors will be allowed to get. The regulators will instruct doctors whether or not to give a drug to patients in long-term care.
The regulators are empowered to use "comparative effectiveness research" to determine whether seniors get care. That's code for the authority of bureaucrats to decide whether (based on your age and condition) you are worth spending any money on -- aka death panels that will decide whether you live or die.
House members should remember that some promised repeal AND replace. Their task is to detach health care from bureaucrats and appropriators because that's the only way to get health care costs under control.
We should also detach health care from the unfortunate link between jobs and health insurance that created the present system of third-party payers. That process began as a tax loophole during World War II wage and price control, and it now traps millions of Americans in a tough compromise between an unproductive job and unsuitable high-cost health insurance.
This can be done by allowing us to make our own decisions by paying for smaller, routine expenses from our own tax-deductible health savings account, instead of relying on third-party payers whose rates constantly escalate. Employee group health insurance plans, with higher deductibles, should pay the major costs.
The House should hold weekly hearings in order to dispel the misinformation we are fed by the liberals, such as the foolish notion that government health care in other countries is more efficient and less costly. Tens of thousands of foreigners come to the U.S. every year for medical treatment because they know they have a better survival rate here.
Compare these statistics between the U.S. and United Kingdom released by the United Nations International Health Organization. The percentage of people who survived cancer five years after diagnosis: U.S. 65 percent, U.K. 46 percent; diagnosed with diabetes who received treatment within six months: U.S. 93 percent, U.K. 15 percent; seniors needing hip replacement who received it within six months: U.S. 90 percent, U.K. 15 percent; getting to see a medical specialist within one month: U.S. 77 percent, U.K. 40 percent.
Necessary State Budget Cuts Can Be a Boon to Education
By Romina Boccia
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The budget crisis confronting states is severe and will persist even as the economy rebounds. Most states have substantial shortfalls projected not just this year, but into the future, unless governors and legislators make fundamental changes to the budget. Public education, as the single largest category of all state and local government expenditures, has to be on the table for reductions. The good news is this process offers a great opportunity to consider meaningful education reforms that allow states to do more with less.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, states are in the red for about $130 billion, or 20 percent of budgets in 46 states, for 2011 and 2012. State revenues shrank significantly during the recession and federal stimulus money that propped up state budgets is now drying up as well. States cannot responsibly put off making tough decisions about how to shrink government and bring their budgets back into balance.
Not all budget cuts have to be bad news though. The need to reduce spending on public education should stimulate a serious discussion of what works and what doesn't in American education.
A review of the statistics shows that despite spending on public education growing steadily over the past century, America’s primary and secondary education achievements are mediocre. According to White House data, state-level spending on primary and secondary education totaled $235 billion in 2009/2010, while the latest PISA scores place the U.S. among average achievers. This international education survey, which assesses the knowledge and problem-solving abilities of 15-year-olds, shows that the U.S. is lagging far behind several Asian and European countries, all of which, besides Luxembourg, spend less on average per student on education.
The good news is that there are proven ways to reform education which can ease budget pressures while simultaneously raising student achievement.
Many private and charter schools outperform public schools in terms of both costs and performance. Vouchers’ dollar amounts are significantly lower than the amounts public schools spend per-student and yet voucher programs often achieve better results. A 2010 assessment of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program showed that the 3,300 low-income D.C. children improved their academic achievement significantly under the program. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which is the oldest voucher program in the nation, also bested Milwaukee public school graduation rates by 11 to 13 percent. The success of these programs provides a clue to the root problem of low achievement in so many urban areas: Poverty didn’t keep these children from performing better, failing schools did.
Furthermore, school choice can have a positive impact on public school reform. By introducing more competition for education dollars and students, school choice provides incentives to public schools to improve their academic performance. Studies show that when public schools find themselves in competition with private school vouchers and charter schools, public school student performance improves.
Increased school choice also means more parental empowerment. Empowering parents to choose the best schools for their children is the most promising step to reform America’s education system. When public schools are shielded from competition with better performing private and charter schools, school administrators can succumb to pressures from teachers’ unions rather than from parents who demand superior performance.
Worse, parents who have little say in how tax dollars flowing to public education are spent become discouraged from being actively involved in their children’s academic development. Education is most effective when the learning that takes place in schools and homes is mutually reinforcing. When both structures fail, it’s the children who are left in the dark.
Another important tool for cash-strapped states to get more education for their limited tax dollars is to embrace innovative approaches to education. Integrating information technology better inside and outside of the traditional classroom can result in significant cost-savings and performance-enhancements. Virtual education, for example, introduces online components into curricula, which makes education more child-centered and engaging to students.
Florida Virtual Schools (FLVS) achieved performance results as good as or better than state averages on any measure at a fraction of the costs. FLVS also represents a model system for tying funding directly to performance. The school only gets paid when students complete their courses with a passing grade.
Necessary state budget cuts could be a boon, rather than a burden, to education if state governors and legislators adopt meaningful education reforms by introducing more competition and school choice in their states.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The budget crisis confronting states is severe and will persist even as the economy rebounds. Most states have substantial shortfalls projected not just this year, but into the future, unless governors and legislators make fundamental changes to the budget. Public education, as the single largest category of all state and local government expenditures, has to be on the table for reductions. The good news is this process offers a great opportunity to consider meaningful education reforms that allow states to do more with less.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, states are in the red for about $130 billion, or 20 percent of budgets in 46 states, for 2011 and 2012. State revenues shrank significantly during the recession and federal stimulus money that propped up state budgets is now drying up as well. States cannot responsibly put off making tough decisions about how to shrink government and bring their budgets back into balance.
Not all budget cuts have to be bad news though. The need to reduce spending on public education should stimulate a serious discussion of what works and what doesn't in American education.
A review of the statistics shows that despite spending on public education growing steadily over the past century, America’s primary and secondary education achievements are mediocre. According to White House data, state-level spending on primary and secondary education totaled $235 billion in 2009/2010, while the latest PISA scores place the U.S. among average achievers. This international education survey, which assesses the knowledge and problem-solving abilities of 15-year-olds, shows that the U.S. is lagging far behind several Asian and European countries, all of which, besides Luxembourg, spend less on average per student on education.
The good news is that there are proven ways to reform education which can ease budget pressures while simultaneously raising student achievement.
Many private and charter schools outperform public schools in terms of both costs and performance. Vouchers’ dollar amounts are significantly lower than the amounts public schools spend per-student and yet voucher programs often achieve better results. A 2010 assessment of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program showed that the 3,300 low-income D.C. children improved their academic achievement significantly under the program. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which is the oldest voucher program in the nation, also bested Milwaukee public school graduation rates by 11 to 13 percent. The success of these programs provides a clue to the root problem of low achievement in so many urban areas: Poverty didn’t keep these children from performing better, failing schools did.
Furthermore, school choice can have a positive impact on public school reform. By introducing more competition for education dollars and students, school choice provides incentives to public schools to improve their academic performance. Studies show that when public schools find themselves in competition with private school vouchers and charter schools, public school student performance improves.
Increased school choice also means more parental empowerment. Empowering parents to choose the best schools for their children is the most promising step to reform America’s education system. When public schools are shielded from competition with better performing private and charter schools, school administrators can succumb to pressures from teachers’ unions rather than from parents who demand superior performance.
Worse, parents who have little say in how tax dollars flowing to public education are spent become discouraged from being actively involved in their children’s academic development. Education is most effective when the learning that takes place in schools and homes is mutually reinforcing. When both structures fail, it’s the children who are left in the dark.
Another important tool for cash-strapped states to get more education for their limited tax dollars is to embrace innovative approaches to education. Integrating information technology better inside and outside of the traditional classroom can result in significant cost-savings and performance-enhancements. Virtual education, for example, introduces online components into curricula, which makes education more child-centered and engaging to students.
Florida Virtual Schools (FLVS) achieved performance results as good as or better than state averages on any measure at a fraction of the costs. FLVS also represents a model system for tying funding directly to performance. The school only gets paid when students complete their courses with a passing grade.
Necessary state budget cuts could be a boon, rather than a burden, to education if state governors and legislators adopt meaningful education reforms by introducing more competition and school choice in their states.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)