By Debra J. Saunders
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
American Taliban John Walker Lindh's father wrote a piece in the Sunday New York Times. Frank Lindh writes that his son was apprehended "unarmed and wounded." He also writes that his son "had no involvement with terrorism."
Item: In a statement of fact signed by Lindh and his attorneys, John Walker Lindh stipulates:
"6. In or about late May or June 2001, the defendant agreed to attend a training camp for additional and extensive military training. In or about June 2001, the defendant traveled to the al-Farooq training camp, a facility associated with Usama Bin Laden, located several hours west of Kandahar, in Afghanistan. In or about June and July 2001, the defendant remained at the al-Farooq camp and participated fully in its training activities, including courses in weapons, orienteering, navigation, explosives and battlefield combat.
"7. Having sworn allegiance to jihad, in or about July or August 2001, after completing his training, the defendant traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan to assist the Taliban. In or about July or August 2001, the defendant carried an AKM rifle issued by the Taliban while he traveled, together with approximately 150 non-Afghani fighters, from Kabul to the front line in Takhar, in northeastern Afghanistan. Between about September and November, 2001, the defendant ... fighting group was divided into smaller groups, and rotated in one to two week shifts in the Takhar trenches, opposing Northern Alliance troops.
In short, Lindh admits to having trained in a camp run by Osama bin Laden and having fought with the wonderful Taliban -- apparently the Taliban, with its mistreatment of women and slaughter of Muslims not even worth mentioning, is not a problem for Frank Lindh. The son also admitted that he carried an AKM rifle and grenades.
In 2002, Frank Lindh compared his son to Nelson Mandela -- which shows how little the lawyer's words can be trusted. While Frank Lindh writes that his son is "intelligent, spiritual and good-natured," he also expects readers to believe his son was so clueless that did not understand that he was training under and fighting for the man who ordered the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And Lindh apparently thinks his son had no responsibility in warning U.S. forces about the prison attack that led to the death of CIA operative Johnny Mike Spann.
Spann's father disagrees, as he wrote in this piece in 2006 on his website www.honormikespann.org.
The site also quotes one-time CNN journalist Robert Young Pelton's letter, "The Truth about John Walker Lindh." (Pelton recommends a book on Lindh written by Mark Kukis.) Wrote Pelton, Lindh the Younger was "exactly the kind of person that fly aircraft into buildings, blow up American troops in Iraq and kill innocent Muslims on their 'spiritual journey' to paradise."
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Exploring the Hollywood Propaganda Machine
By Ben Shapiro
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Hollywood matters.
It matters because we watch Hollywood product day in and day out. Your children spend six or seven hours at school, and couple of hours with their friends, and a couple of hours with you. They spend a full three hours with the television.
You get home from work, kick off your shoes, and plop down in front of the TV, hoping simply to chill out. Instead, you get unmitigated liberalism pouring out of your TV. But you continue to watch because it’s great. It’s fun, thrilling, dramatic, or hilarious. We think it has no impact on us.
But it does. Television made Barack Obama. Television it supported bigger and bigger government, from Welfare to health care; pushed abortion-on-demand and the radical gay agenda into the mainstream; it stumped against war and for meaningless buzzwords like diversity and dangerous buzzwords like multiculturalism. Television has done more to change the politics of our nation than simple politics has.
Television has manipulated us. And those who create television have done it purposefully, and elegantly. They have weeded out conservatives in the industry wholesale. They have worked hand-in-glove with liberals in government to forward the leftist agenda. They have turned pure entertainment into a vehicle for propaganda.
And for years, they’ve lied about it. Just as they did with the mainstream news media and the universities, television industry honchos told us that no bias exists; that if there is bias, it’s because the American public demands bias; that any attempt to peek behind the television screen is McCarthyism.
Now, I’ve peeked behind that screen. In my new book, Primetime Propaganda, I went into the heart of Hollywood. I spoke personally with scores of major Hollywood names, who admitted to me on tape that discrimination takes place in Hollywood, that they use their programming to manipulate Americans politically, that they scorn everyday conservatives, and that they twist the television market to achieve their own political goals.
I didn’t hide who I was in doing these interviews. I told them my name, my legal background, and what my book was about. They granted me interviews because they are proud of their propagandizing efforts. If they had known I was a conservative, would they have let me through the door? Some of them would have. But others probably assumed that because of my Jewish last name and my Harvard Law baseball cap, I was a liberal. More than that, they likely assumed that because I was in Hollywood in the first place, I was a liberal.
Now, we’ve got the goods. The biggest names in television over the past few decades – the people who made your favorite shows – told me that they propagandize, they do it purposefully but subtly, and they do it because they feel a moral need to do it.
Over the next days, we are going to roll out the tape. We’re going to do it from multiple directions, and we’re going to do it in their own house organs. They’re going to have to respond.
Conservatives take heed: the battle has now begun. The entertainment industry is more powerful by multiples than the liberal news media. That’s because even conservatives will watch liberal shows, where few conservatives would watch CNN. We’ll all go see a popcorn flick, even if it’s Avatar, and even if it’s telling us and our children that the American military is imperialistic and evil. That has an impact.
Now we can take our culture back. Culture is the hardware – politics is the software. If we want to take our country back, we need to start by reclaiming our cultural heritage. Primetime Propaganda starts that work.
Then, if you want to do more, visit Declaration Entertainment's website to get involved in the process of making conservative entertainment a reality. We’re conservatives – that means we compete in the marketplace rather than regulating it or boycotting it. They’ve created a market inefficiency we’re going to exploit.
But first, read up on the conflict by picking up a copy of Primetime Propaganda. Find out what you’re watching – from the inside – and find out and why it’s so insidious. The number one tool in the left’s arsenal is the television industry. Let’s take that weapon out of their hands.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Hollywood matters.
It matters because we watch Hollywood product day in and day out. Your children spend six or seven hours at school, and couple of hours with their friends, and a couple of hours with you. They spend a full three hours with the television.
You get home from work, kick off your shoes, and plop down in front of the TV, hoping simply to chill out. Instead, you get unmitigated liberalism pouring out of your TV. But you continue to watch because it’s great. It’s fun, thrilling, dramatic, or hilarious. We think it has no impact on us.
But it does. Television made Barack Obama. Television it supported bigger and bigger government, from Welfare to health care; pushed abortion-on-demand and the radical gay agenda into the mainstream; it stumped against war and for meaningless buzzwords like diversity and dangerous buzzwords like multiculturalism. Television has done more to change the politics of our nation than simple politics has.
Television has manipulated us. And those who create television have done it purposefully, and elegantly. They have weeded out conservatives in the industry wholesale. They have worked hand-in-glove with liberals in government to forward the leftist agenda. They have turned pure entertainment into a vehicle for propaganda.
And for years, they’ve lied about it. Just as they did with the mainstream news media and the universities, television industry honchos told us that no bias exists; that if there is bias, it’s because the American public demands bias; that any attempt to peek behind the television screen is McCarthyism.
Now, I’ve peeked behind that screen. In my new book, Primetime Propaganda, I went into the heart of Hollywood. I spoke personally with scores of major Hollywood names, who admitted to me on tape that discrimination takes place in Hollywood, that they use their programming to manipulate Americans politically, that they scorn everyday conservatives, and that they twist the television market to achieve their own political goals.
I didn’t hide who I was in doing these interviews. I told them my name, my legal background, and what my book was about. They granted me interviews because they are proud of their propagandizing efforts. If they had known I was a conservative, would they have let me through the door? Some of them would have. But others probably assumed that because of my Jewish last name and my Harvard Law baseball cap, I was a liberal. More than that, they likely assumed that because I was in Hollywood in the first place, I was a liberal.
Now, we’ve got the goods. The biggest names in television over the past few decades – the people who made your favorite shows – told me that they propagandize, they do it purposefully but subtly, and they do it because they feel a moral need to do it.
Over the next days, we are going to roll out the tape. We’re going to do it from multiple directions, and we’re going to do it in their own house organs. They’re going to have to respond.
Conservatives take heed: the battle has now begun. The entertainment industry is more powerful by multiples than the liberal news media. That’s because even conservatives will watch liberal shows, where few conservatives would watch CNN. We’ll all go see a popcorn flick, even if it’s Avatar, and even if it’s telling us and our children that the American military is imperialistic and evil. That has an impact.
Now we can take our culture back. Culture is the hardware – politics is the software. If we want to take our country back, we need to start by reclaiming our cultural heritage. Primetime Propaganda starts that work.
Then, if you want to do more, visit Declaration Entertainment's website to get involved in the process of making conservative entertainment a reality. We’re conservatives – that means we compete in the marketplace rather than regulating it or boycotting it. They’ve created a market inefficiency we’re going to exploit.
But first, read up on the conflict by picking up a copy of Primetime Propaganda. Find out what you’re watching – from the inside – and find out and why it’s so insidious. The number one tool in the left’s arsenal is the television industry. Let’s take that weapon out of their hands.
On Celebrating the Death of Evil People
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Osama Bin Laden -- a man whose purpose in life was to inflict death and suffering on as many innocent people as possible -- was finally killed, and much of the Western world's religious and secular elite have expressed moral objections to those who celebrated this death.
Pastor Brian McLaren, named one of Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America" in 2005, expressed this objection. Reacting to television images of young Americans chanting "USA! USA!" the night bin Laden's death was announced, the pastor wrote, "I can only say that this image does not reflect well on my country. ... Joyfully celebrating the killing of a killer who joyfully celebrated killing carries an irony that I hope will not be lost on us. Are we learning anything, or simply spinning harder in the cycle of violence?"
And CNN reported the objection of an Episcopal priest, Danielle Tumminio, whose Long Island neighborhood lost scores of people in the 9/11 attacks.
When she saw images of Americans celebrating, "My first reaction was, 'I wish I was with them.' ... My second reaction was, 'This is disgusting. We shouldn't be celebrating the death of anybody.' It felt gross."
Likewise, many Jews, including rabbis, have cited traditional -- though seemingly conflicting -- Jewish attitudes regarding how to react to the death of evildoers.
One frequently cited source is a famous one from the Talmud: "When the Egyptians were drowning in the Sea of Reeds, the angels wanted to sing. But God said to them, 'The work of my hands is drowning in the sea, and you want to sing?'"
Also cited is the biblical Book of Proverbs: "When your enemy falls, do not rejoice, and when he stumbles, let your heart not exult."
On the other hand, the Talmud also states, "When the wicked perish from the world, good comes to the world." And the Book of Proverbs also states, "When the wicked perish, there is joyful song."
So what is one to make of this mixture of sentiments?
I do not see them as contradictory. God may chastise angels for singing at the drowning of the Egyptian army. But God does not chastise Moses and the Children of Israel for singing at the Egyptians' drowning. People may do so; angels may not.
Secondly, it is one thing to celebrate the fall of one's personal enemy; it is quite another to celebrate the fall of evil individuals. The two Proverbs citations are not contradictory. The vast majority of our personal "enemies" are not evil people. Therefore, we should not exult at their downfall. And the vast majority of the truly evil are not our personal enemies. Bin Laden was not my personal enemy. He was the enemy of all that is good on earth.
It seems to me that if one does not celebrate the death of a truly evil person, one is not celebrating the triumph of good over evil. I do not see how one can honestly say, "I am thrilled that bin Laden can no longer murder men, women, and children, but I do not celebrate his death."
Yes, one can argue that bin Laden's arrest and life imprisonment would have also prevented his murdering anyone else. But keeping him alive would have inspired others terrorists to murder on his behalf or to take hostage innocent Americans and others in the hope of forcing America to release bin Laden.
Celebrating the death of bin Laden is a moral imperative. The notion that Islamists who celebrated 9/11 are morally equivalent to Americans who celebrated bin Laden's death is the essence of moral confusion. It equates the killing of 3,000 innocents with the killing of the person responsible for those 3,000 murders.
All those rabbis and others who think it immoral or un-Jewish to celebrate bin Laden's death will one day have to confront a Jew named Arie Hassenberg, a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As quoted by Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander, after one of the Auschwitz sub-camps (Monowitz) was bombed by the Allies, Hassenberg's reaction was: "To see a killed German; that was why we enjoyed the bombing."
Was Hassenberg's reaction morally wrong or "un-Jewish" -- or "un-Christian," for that matter? I don't think so. What distinguishes Hassenberg from those who lament celebrating the death of the truly evil is that Hassenberg encountered the truly evil.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Osama Bin Laden -- a man whose purpose in life was to inflict death and suffering on as many innocent people as possible -- was finally killed, and much of the Western world's religious and secular elite have expressed moral objections to those who celebrated this death.
Pastor Brian McLaren, named one of Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America" in 2005, expressed this objection. Reacting to television images of young Americans chanting "USA! USA!" the night bin Laden's death was announced, the pastor wrote, "I can only say that this image does not reflect well on my country. ... Joyfully celebrating the killing of a killer who joyfully celebrated killing carries an irony that I hope will not be lost on us. Are we learning anything, or simply spinning harder in the cycle of violence?"
And CNN reported the objection of an Episcopal priest, Danielle Tumminio, whose Long Island neighborhood lost scores of people in the 9/11 attacks.
When she saw images of Americans celebrating, "My first reaction was, 'I wish I was with them.' ... My second reaction was, 'This is disgusting. We shouldn't be celebrating the death of anybody.' It felt gross."
Likewise, many Jews, including rabbis, have cited traditional -- though seemingly conflicting -- Jewish attitudes regarding how to react to the death of evildoers.
One frequently cited source is a famous one from the Talmud: "When the Egyptians were drowning in the Sea of Reeds, the angels wanted to sing. But God said to them, 'The work of my hands is drowning in the sea, and you want to sing?'"
Also cited is the biblical Book of Proverbs: "When your enemy falls, do not rejoice, and when he stumbles, let your heart not exult."
On the other hand, the Talmud also states, "When the wicked perish from the world, good comes to the world." And the Book of Proverbs also states, "When the wicked perish, there is joyful song."
So what is one to make of this mixture of sentiments?
I do not see them as contradictory. God may chastise angels for singing at the drowning of the Egyptian army. But God does not chastise Moses and the Children of Israel for singing at the Egyptians' drowning. People may do so; angels may not.
Secondly, it is one thing to celebrate the fall of one's personal enemy; it is quite another to celebrate the fall of evil individuals. The two Proverbs citations are not contradictory. The vast majority of our personal "enemies" are not evil people. Therefore, we should not exult at their downfall. And the vast majority of the truly evil are not our personal enemies. Bin Laden was not my personal enemy. He was the enemy of all that is good on earth.
It seems to me that if one does not celebrate the death of a truly evil person, one is not celebrating the triumph of good over evil. I do not see how one can honestly say, "I am thrilled that bin Laden can no longer murder men, women, and children, but I do not celebrate his death."
Yes, one can argue that bin Laden's arrest and life imprisonment would have also prevented his murdering anyone else. But keeping him alive would have inspired others terrorists to murder on his behalf or to take hostage innocent Americans and others in the hope of forcing America to release bin Laden.
Celebrating the death of bin Laden is a moral imperative. The notion that Islamists who celebrated 9/11 are morally equivalent to Americans who celebrated bin Laden's death is the essence of moral confusion. It equates the killing of 3,000 innocents with the killing of the person responsible for those 3,000 murders.
All those rabbis and others who think it immoral or un-Jewish to celebrate bin Laden's death will one day have to confront a Jew named Arie Hassenberg, a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As quoted by Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander, after one of the Auschwitz sub-camps (Monowitz) was bombed by the Allies, Hassenberg's reaction was: "To see a killed German; that was why we enjoyed the bombing."
Was Hassenberg's reaction morally wrong or "un-Jewish" -- or "un-Christian," for that matter? I don't think so. What distinguishes Hassenberg from those who lament celebrating the death of the truly evil is that Hassenberg encountered the truly evil.
Monday, May 30, 2011
What We Might Remember This Memorial Day
Our willingness to intervene overseas has made the world a better place.
Victor Davis Hanson
Monday, May 30, 2011
The world is a better place because Adolf Hitler did not preserve his conquest of the European continent, and because the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of Hideki Tojo and his militarists imploded at Midway, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa. Italy and the Mediterranean were far better off without Benito Mussolini and his mad plans for a renewed but debased Roman Empire, which ended on his own Italian soil at exotic-named places like Anzio and Monte Cassino.
The dream of Soviet rulers from Stalin to Brezhnev was a global gulag overseen from the blood-stained Communist Kremlin. It ended only through the 50-year deterrence of the American military. South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan are somehow still free and independent — and would not be without American carriers, jets, and submarines.
Our generation’s own rogues’ gallery of killers — Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Manuel Noriega, and the Taliban — have lost their tyrannies. If South America chooses to become Communist, it will be by its own volition and not because of an unfettered cross-border invasion from Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela. Even our enemies can export or import oil freely from the Middle East without worries of armed intervention or piracy — as long as an American carrier is nearby in the Gulf.
It seems as if the more Europe disarms and gnashes at the United States, the more we are there when it needs us. If an ascendant China decides to bully Japan or Taiwan in earnest, only one country can thwart it. No one will call the European Union or Russia should North Korea tomorrow cross the 38th parallel or Iran decide to launch a missile. If Turkey rearranges the border in Cyprus or claims airspace over the mid-Aegean, anti-American Greece will turn pro-American. There will be no second Holocaust, in part because of American military support for Israel.
The list of American wars, interventions, and campaigns, past and present, is endless — a source of serial political acrimony here at home over the human and financial cost and wisdom of spending American lives to better others. Sometimes we feel we are not good when we are not perfect, whether trying to stop a Stalinist North Vietnamese takeover of the south, or failing to secure Iraq before 2008. But the common story remains the same: For nearly a century, the American soldier has often been the last, indeed the only, impediment to butchery, enslavement, and autocracy.
It was the custom of great leaders from Pericles to Napoleon to declare that the graves of their soldiers in far-off foreign soils were testaments to their nations’ grandeur, power, and reach; yet our white crosses in American cemeteries from Epinal, St.-Mihiel, and Normandy to Manila, Tunisia, and Sicily are tributes to American military courage and competency — and a willingness to see an end to wars that brutal men started and might have won had our youth not crossed the seas.
We should remember all that in the present age of cynicism and nihilism, recalling that nothing has really changed, as some Americans this Memorial Day seek to foster something better than Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, and Moammar Qaddafi. Behind every American soldier, dozens of their countrymen tonight sleep soundly — and hundreds more in their shadow abroad will wake up alive and safe.
Victor Davis Hanson
Monday, May 30, 2011
The world is a better place because Adolf Hitler did not preserve his conquest of the European continent, and because the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of Hideki Tojo and his militarists imploded at Midway, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa. Italy and the Mediterranean were far better off without Benito Mussolini and his mad plans for a renewed but debased Roman Empire, which ended on his own Italian soil at exotic-named places like Anzio and Monte Cassino.
The dream of Soviet rulers from Stalin to Brezhnev was a global gulag overseen from the blood-stained Communist Kremlin. It ended only through the 50-year deterrence of the American military. South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan are somehow still free and independent — and would not be without American carriers, jets, and submarines.
Our generation’s own rogues’ gallery of killers — Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Manuel Noriega, and the Taliban — have lost their tyrannies. If South America chooses to become Communist, it will be by its own volition and not because of an unfettered cross-border invasion from Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela. Even our enemies can export or import oil freely from the Middle East without worries of armed intervention or piracy — as long as an American carrier is nearby in the Gulf.
It seems as if the more Europe disarms and gnashes at the United States, the more we are there when it needs us. If an ascendant China decides to bully Japan or Taiwan in earnest, only one country can thwart it. No one will call the European Union or Russia should North Korea tomorrow cross the 38th parallel or Iran decide to launch a missile. If Turkey rearranges the border in Cyprus or claims airspace over the mid-Aegean, anti-American Greece will turn pro-American. There will be no second Holocaust, in part because of American military support for Israel.
The list of American wars, interventions, and campaigns, past and present, is endless — a source of serial political acrimony here at home over the human and financial cost and wisdom of spending American lives to better others. Sometimes we feel we are not good when we are not perfect, whether trying to stop a Stalinist North Vietnamese takeover of the south, or failing to secure Iraq before 2008. But the common story remains the same: For nearly a century, the American soldier has often been the last, indeed the only, impediment to butchery, enslavement, and autocracy.
It was the custom of great leaders from Pericles to Napoleon to declare that the graves of their soldiers in far-off foreign soils were testaments to their nations’ grandeur, power, and reach; yet our white crosses in American cemeteries from Epinal, St.-Mihiel, and Normandy to Manila, Tunisia, and Sicily are tributes to American military courage and competency — and a willingness to see an end to wars that brutal men started and might have won had our youth not crossed the seas.
We should remember all that in the present age of cynicism and nihilism, recalling that nothing has really changed, as some Americans this Memorial Day seek to foster something better than Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, and Moammar Qaddafi. Behind every American soldier, dozens of their countrymen tonight sleep soundly — and hundreds more in their shadow abroad will wake up alive and safe.
Why College is Not For Everyone
By Katie Kieffer
Monday, May 30, 2011
Peter Thiel is rocking the boat of higher education. The libertarian entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and co-founder of PayPal is sending liberal college administrators into a tizzy with his latest push to encourage young innovators to ditch college for two years and pursue entrepreneurship.
Last week, Thiel awarded 20 young people with “20 Under 20” Thiel Fellowships: $100,000 and two years of mentorship to develop entrepreneurial ventures in science and technology.
Thiel’s dismisses conventional wisdom, which says that college is the necessary next-step for success after high school. He understands that conventional wisdom is conventional ignorance now that the American university system is broken.
Today’s students pay bloated prices so universities can hire a fleets of non-academic staff to monitor student speech codes, distribute cookies in campus lounges and court elites like Bill Clinton to speak on-campus and warn young people never to believe: “There is no such thing as a good tax…”
Tuition is rising and debt loads are mounting while students at institutions as prestigious as Stanford’s Graduate School of Business are failing to learn basic skills. When Stanford graduate students rely on private coaches outside the classroom to teach them how to write for business, you know higher education is deteriorating.
I took a hybrid route for my own higher education. I went to college and started an entrepreneurial venture at the same time. My path was unique and challenging, so I understand first-hand that Thiel is offering young entrepreneurs the opportunity of a lifetime.
In college, your liberal arts professors may provide you with tips on how to outline your thoughts, but they generally expect that you already know how to give a 10-minute presentation or write a 15-page paper. Meanwhile, your business professors do not teach you how to run a business. Rather, they lecture you on business models, assign you to read case studies and tell you to look for an internship.
Looking back, I realize that I really did not need college. I think many young people do not need college to become successful. The real world lessons I took away from my college experience came from running a conservative student newspaper on a shoestring budget out of my dorm room and from the experience I gained during my internship in commercial real estate.
Today, historic numbers of high-school graduates are going to college. More than ever, parents are pouring their hard-earned savings into college educations for their children.
Venture capitalist, author and parent James Altucher argues that it is irrational for parents to blindly pay for their child’s higher education. New York Magazine reports Altucher as saying: “What am I going to do? When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that? … The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”
It is not cruel and unusual punishment to expect an 18-year-old to finance his or her own higher education. In fact, forcing them to do so could help them decide whether they even need college. My parents told me, “You’re on your own for college.” So, I chose to be a college student and an entrepreneur simultaneously because I had a boatload of self-motivation, I was blessed with an academic scholarship that allowed me to graduate debt-free, and, because I had developed a growing network of accomplished mentors who generously coached me along the way.
Parents, before you feel tempted to write out that six-figure tuition check, consider doing yourselves and your child a favor by honestly assessing the skills that your child demonstrates. If your child thrives within structure or if they want to pursue law or medicine, then college is likely the right path. However, if your child thrives in a creative environment, is self-driven and is constantly innovating, you should consider offering them your own version of Thiel’s 20 Under 20 fellowship as an alternative to subsidizing their college tuition.
Thiel contends that many parents shy away from even thinking about a nontraditional path for their children because they view college as an insurance policy. “I think that’s the way probably a lot of parents think about it. It’s a way for their kids to be safe … an insurance policy against falling out of the middle class. …Why are we spending ten times as much for insurance as we were 30 years ago?”
That’s a good question. More high-school students and their parents should consider whether there is an entrepreneurial, Thiel-style alternative to success before they impulsively jump into college debt.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Peter Thiel is rocking the boat of higher education. The libertarian entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and co-founder of PayPal is sending liberal college administrators into a tizzy with his latest push to encourage young innovators to ditch college for two years and pursue entrepreneurship.
Last week, Thiel awarded 20 young people with “20 Under 20” Thiel Fellowships: $100,000 and two years of mentorship to develop entrepreneurial ventures in science and technology.
Thiel’s dismisses conventional wisdom, which says that college is the necessary next-step for success after high school. He understands that conventional wisdom is conventional ignorance now that the American university system is broken.
Today’s students pay bloated prices so universities can hire a fleets of non-academic staff to monitor student speech codes, distribute cookies in campus lounges and court elites like Bill Clinton to speak on-campus and warn young people never to believe: “There is no such thing as a good tax…”
Tuition is rising and debt loads are mounting while students at institutions as prestigious as Stanford’s Graduate School of Business are failing to learn basic skills. When Stanford graduate students rely on private coaches outside the classroom to teach them how to write for business, you know higher education is deteriorating.
I took a hybrid route for my own higher education. I went to college and started an entrepreneurial venture at the same time. My path was unique and challenging, so I understand first-hand that Thiel is offering young entrepreneurs the opportunity of a lifetime.
In college, your liberal arts professors may provide you with tips on how to outline your thoughts, but they generally expect that you already know how to give a 10-minute presentation or write a 15-page paper. Meanwhile, your business professors do not teach you how to run a business. Rather, they lecture you on business models, assign you to read case studies and tell you to look for an internship.
Looking back, I realize that I really did not need college. I think many young people do not need college to become successful. The real world lessons I took away from my college experience came from running a conservative student newspaper on a shoestring budget out of my dorm room and from the experience I gained during my internship in commercial real estate.
Today, historic numbers of high-school graduates are going to college. More than ever, parents are pouring their hard-earned savings into college educations for their children.
Venture capitalist, author and parent James Altucher argues that it is irrational for parents to blindly pay for their child’s higher education. New York Magazine reports Altucher as saying: “What am I going to do? When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that? … The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”
It is not cruel and unusual punishment to expect an 18-year-old to finance his or her own higher education. In fact, forcing them to do so could help them decide whether they even need college. My parents told me, “You’re on your own for college.” So, I chose to be a college student and an entrepreneur simultaneously because I had a boatload of self-motivation, I was blessed with an academic scholarship that allowed me to graduate debt-free, and, because I had developed a growing network of accomplished mentors who generously coached me along the way.
Parents, before you feel tempted to write out that six-figure tuition check, consider doing yourselves and your child a favor by honestly assessing the skills that your child demonstrates. If your child thrives within structure or if they want to pursue law or medicine, then college is likely the right path. However, if your child thrives in a creative environment, is self-driven and is constantly innovating, you should consider offering them your own version of Thiel’s 20 Under 20 fellowship as an alternative to subsidizing their college tuition.
Thiel contends that many parents shy away from even thinking about a nontraditional path for their children because they view college as an insurance policy. “I think that’s the way probably a lot of parents think about it. It’s a way for their kids to be safe … an insurance policy against falling out of the middle class. …Why are we spending ten times as much for insurance as we were 30 years ago?”
That’s a good question. More high-school students and their parents should consider whether there is an entrepreneurial, Thiel-style alternative to success before they impulsively jump into college debt.
Pro-Obama Media Always Shocked by Bad Economic News
By Michael Barone
Monday, May 30, 2011
Unexpectedly!
As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.
"New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed," reported cnbc.com May 25.
"Personal consumption fell," Business Insider reported the same day, "when it was expected to rise."
"Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month," Reuters reported May 25, "worse than economists' expectations."
"Previously owned home sales unexpectedly fall," headlined Bloomberg News May 19.
"U.S. home construction fell unexpectedly in April," wrote The Wall Street Journal May 18.
Those examples are all from the last two weeks. Reynolds has been linking to similar items since October 2009.
Mainstream media may finally be catching up. "The latest economic numbers have not been good," David Leonhardt wrote in the May 26 New York Times. "Another report showed that economic growth at the start of the year was no faster than the Commerce Department initially reported -- 'a real surprise,' said Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics."
Which raises some questions. As Instapundit reader Gordon Stewart, quoted by Reynolds on May 17, put it: "How many times in a row can something happen unexpectedly before the experts start to, you know, expect it? At some point, shouldn't they be required to state the foundation for their expectations?"
One answer is that many in the mainstream media have been cheerleading for Barack Obama. They and he both naturally hope for a strong economic recovery. After all, Obama can't keep blaming the economic doldrums on George W. Bush forever.
I'm confident that any comparison of economic coverage in the Bush years and the coverage now would show far fewer variants of the word "unexpectedly" in stories suggesting economic doldrums.
It's obviously going to be hard to achieve the unacknowledged goal of many mainstream journalists -- the president's re-election -- if the economic slump continues. So they characterize economic setbacks as unexpected, with the implication that there's still every reason to believe that, in Herbert Hoover's phrase, prosperity is just around the corner.
A less cynical explanation is that many journalists really believe that the Obama administration's policies are likely to improve the economy. Certainly that has been the expectation as well as the hope of administration policymakers.
Obama's first Council of Economics Adviser Chairman Christina Romer, whose scholarly work is widely respected, famously predicted that the February 2009 stimulus package would hold unemployment below 8 percent. She undoubtedly believed that at the time; she is too smart to have made a prediction whose failure to come true would prove politically embarrassing.
But unemployment zoomed to 10 percent instead and is still at 9 percent. Political pundits sympathetic to the administration have been speculating whether the president can win re-election if it stays above the 8 percent mark it was never supposed to reach.
Administration economists are now making the point that it takes longer to recover from a recession caused by a financial crisis than from a recession that occurs in the more or less ordinary operation of the business cycle. There's some basis in history for this claim.
But it comes a little late in the game. Obama and his policymakers told the country that we would recover from the deep recession by vastly increasing government spending and borrowing. We did that with the stimulus package, with the budget passed in 2009 back when congressional Democrats actually voted on budgets, and with the vast increases scheduled to come (despite the administration's gaming of the Congressional Budget Office scoring process) from Obamacare.
All of this has inspired something like a hiring strike among entrepreneurs and small businessmen. Employers aren't creating any more new jobs than they were during the darkest days of the recession; unemployment has dropped slowly because they just aren't laying off as many employees as they did then.
In the meantime many potential job seekers have left the labor market. If they re-enter and look for jobs, the unemployment rate will stay steady or ebb only slowly.
We tend to hire presidents who we think can foresee the future effect of their policies. No one does so perfectly. But if the best sympathetic observers can say about the results is that they are "unexpected," voters may decide someone else can do better.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Unexpectedly!
As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.
"New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed," reported cnbc.com May 25.
"Personal consumption fell," Business Insider reported the same day, "when it was expected to rise."
"Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month," Reuters reported May 25, "worse than economists' expectations."
"Previously owned home sales unexpectedly fall," headlined Bloomberg News May 19.
"U.S. home construction fell unexpectedly in April," wrote The Wall Street Journal May 18.
Those examples are all from the last two weeks. Reynolds has been linking to similar items since October 2009.
Mainstream media may finally be catching up. "The latest economic numbers have not been good," David Leonhardt wrote in the May 26 New York Times. "Another report showed that economic growth at the start of the year was no faster than the Commerce Department initially reported -- 'a real surprise,' said Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics."
Which raises some questions. As Instapundit reader Gordon Stewart, quoted by Reynolds on May 17, put it: "How many times in a row can something happen unexpectedly before the experts start to, you know, expect it? At some point, shouldn't they be required to state the foundation for their expectations?"
One answer is that many in the mainstream media have been cheerleading for Barack Obama. They and he both naturally hope for a strong economic recovery. After all, Obama can't keep blaming the economic doldrums on George W. Bush forever.
I'm confident that any comparison of economic coverage in the Bush years and the coverage now would show far fewer variants of the word "unexpectedly" in stories suggesting economic doldrums.
It's obviously going to be hard to achieve the unacknowledged goal of many mainstream journalists -- the president's re-election -- if the economic slump continues. So they characterize economic setbacks as unexpected, with the implication that there's still every reason to believe that, in Herbert Hoover's phrase, prosperity is just around the corner.
A less cynical explanation is that many journalists really believe that the Obama administration's policies are likely to improve the economy. Certainly that has been the expectation as well as the hope of administration policymakers.
Obama's first Council of Economics Adviser Chairman Christina Romer, whose scholarly work is widely respected, famously predicted that the February 2009 stimulus package would hold unemployment below 8 percent. She undoubtedly believed that at the time; she is too smart to have made a prediction whose failure to come true would prove politically embarrassing.
But unemployment zoomed to 10 percent instead and is still at 9 percent. Political pundits sympathetic to the administration have been speculating whether the president can win re-election if it stays above the 8 percent mark it was never supposed to reach.
Administration economists are now making the point that it takes longer to recover from a recession caused by a financial crisis than from a recession that occurs in the more or less ordinary operation of the business cycle. There's some basis in history for this claim.
But it comes a little late in the game. Obama and his policymakers told the country that we would recover from the deep recession by vastly increasing government spending and borrowing. We did that with the stimulus package, with the budget passed in 2009 back when congressional Democrats actually voted on budgets, and with the vast increases scheduled to come (despite the administration's gaming of the Congressional Budget Office scoring process) from Obamacare.
All of this has inspired something like a hiring strike among entrepreneurs and small businessmen. Employers aren't creating any more new jobs than they were during the darkest days of the recession; unemployment has dropped slowly because they just aren't laying off as many employees as they did then.
In the meantime many potential job seekers have left the labor market. If they re-enter and look for jobs, the unemployment rate will stay steady or ebb only slowly.
We tend to hire presidents who we think can foresee the future effect of their policies. No one does so perfectly. But if the best sympathetic observers can say about the results is that they are "unexpected," voters may decide someone else can do better.
Crying Rape
By Mike Adams
Monday, May 30, 2011
People often assume that self-described liberals are more supportive of due process than self-described conservatives. That certainly isn’t the case when we talk about the illiberal bureaucrats who run the United States Department of Education.
The notion that an adult charged with a felony should be put on trial using the same standard of evidence used for someone who has been issued a parking ticket is absurd. In fact, it is more than absurd. It is offensive to well-established principles of due process and fundamental fairness.
Recently, however, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has announced new guidelines that will force due process to take a back seat to political correctness. These guidelines will apply to sexual harassment and felony sexual assault cases.
The OCR has decided to teach universities something they already know; namely, that sexual assault and sexual harassment are serious offenses. In the process, however, they are putting innocent students at risk of being wrongly convicted of offenses that could potentially destroy their careers and reputations.
According to the new OCR guidelines, any college that accepts federal funding or federal student loans (close to 100% of our nation’s colleges) must now employ a "preponderance of the evidence" standard of proof in sexual harassment and sexual assault cases. This lowered standard replaces the traditionally accepted standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which, according to most triers of fact, is close to 100% confidence of guilt. In contrast, “preponderance of evidence” means the campus judiciary only needs to be 50.01% confident that a person is guilty of a given offense – even if that offense is rape, which, regardless of degree, is always a serious felony.
This mandate from the federal government will have profound real-life costs for real students. If we learned anything from the infamous Duke Lacrosse case it is this: Academia is quick to blame people for creating a “rape culture” on campus and slow to take responsibility for false accusations.
Unfortunately, Duke was not an isolated case. At Stanford, student jurors in sexual misconduct cases are actually given "training materials" that say things like, "Everyone should be very, very cautious in accepting a man's claim that he has been wrongly accused of abuse or violence” and “An abuser almost never 'seems like the type.'"
In other words, even highly respected universities like Stanford try to create unfair and partial juries prior to rape adjudications – in clear violation of the spirit of the 6th Amendment (Do you remember when liberals cared about the “spirit of the law”?). Adding a mere “preponderance” standard to such a toxic environment would be a recipe for disaster – disaster in the form of wrongful felony convictions.
The OCR mandates are not merely confined to actions. They apply to students' speech, too. Columbia University already lists "love letters" as a form of sexual harassment. The University of California, Santa Cruz, classifies using "terms of endearment" as sexual harassment. (Who could have ever imagined that one could be endeared and harassed at the same time?). At Yale, "unspoken sexual innuendo such as voice inflection" is considered sexual harassment. The absurdities are seemingly endless in 21st Century “hire” education.
Shortly after the evidence revealed that the accuser in the infamous Duke Lacrosse case was lying, I wrote a letter to Duke Professor K. Holloway. She was the ringleader of the “Duke 88” – a bunch of professors who publicly accused the Duke Lacrosse players of both rape and racism before they had their day in court. In my letter, I urged her to take responsibility for damaging the reputations of innocent students at her own university. Her response is printed below in its entirety:
“Mr. [sic] Adams: You have made the error of anticipating that I have some interest in what you have to say. I do not. K. Holloway.”
Professor Holloway may not be a rapist. But she is clearly a racist. Nonetheless, she has inspired me to write to the OCR with a modest proposal for handling sexual assault cases on college campuses.
Under my plan, any time a collegiate man is charged with rape his accuser is automatically charged with criminal libel. Is she fails to prove her case then she is automatically convicted and expelled.
I plan to write to Professor Holloway because I anticipate that she has some interest in what I have to say. My anticipation might be in error. But, unlike sanctimonious feminists, I’m prepared to face the consequences if I’m wrong.
Monday, May 30, 2011
People often assume that self-described liberals are more supportive of due process than self-described conservatives. That certainly isn’t the case when we talk about the illiberal bureaucrats who run the United States Department of Education.
The notion that an adult charged with a felony should be put on trial using the same standard of evidence used for someone who has been issued a parking ticket is absurd. In fact, it is more than absurd. It is offensive to well-established principles of due process and fundamental fairness.
Recently, however, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has announced new guidelines that will force due process to take a back seat to political correctness. These guidelines will apply to sexual harassment and felony sexual assault cases.
The OCR has decided to teach universities something they already know; namely, that sexual assault and sexual harassment are serious offenses. In the process, however, they are putting innocent students at risk of being wrongly convicted of offenses that could potentially destroy their careers and reputations.
According to the new OCR guidelines, any college that accepts federal funding or federal student loans (close to 100% of our nation’s colleges) must now employ a "preponderance of the evidence" standard of proof in sexual harassment and sexual assault cases. This lowered standard replaces the traditionally accepted standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which, according to most triers of fact, is close to 100% confidence of guilt. In contrast, “preponderance of evidence” means the campus judiciary only needs to be 50.01% confident that a person is guilty of a given offense – even if that offense is rape, which, regardless of degree, is always a serious felony.
This mandate from the federal government will have profound real-life costs for real students. If we learned anything from the infamous Duke Lacrosse case it is this: Academia is quick to blame people for creating a “rape culture” on campus and slow to take responsibility for false accusations.
Unfortunately, Duke was not an isolated case. At Stanford, student jurors in sexual misconduct cases are actually given "training materials" that say things like, "Everyone should be very, very cautious in accepting a man's claim that he has been wrongly accused of abuse or violence” and “An abuser almost never 'seems like the type.'"
In other words, even highly respected universities like Stanford try to create unfair and partial juries prior to rape adjudications – in clear violation of the spirit of the 6th Amendment (Do you remember when liberals cared about the “spirit of the law”?). Adding a mere “preponderance” standard to such a toxic environment would be a recipe for disaster – disaster in the form of wrongful felony convictions.
The OCR mandates are not merely confined to actions. They apply to students' speech, too. Columbia University already lists "love letters" as a form of sexual harassment. The University of California, Santa Cruz, classifies using "terms of endearment" as sexual harassment. (Who could have ever imagined that one could be endeared and harassed at the same time?). At Yale, "unspoken sexual innuendo such as voice inflection" is considered sexual harassment. The absurdities are seemingly endless in 21st Century “hire” education.
Shortly after the evidence revealed that the accuser in the infamous Duke Lacrosse case was lying, I wrote a letter to Duke Professor K. Holloway. She was the ringleader of the “Duke 88” – a bunch of professors who publicly accused the Duke Lacrosse players of both rape and racism before they had their day in court. In my letter, I urged her to take responsibility for damaging the reputations of innocent students at her own university. Her response is printed below in its entirety:
“Mr. [sic] Adams: You have made the error of anticipating that I have some interest in what you have to say. I do not. K. Holloway.”
Professor Holloway may not be a rapist. But she is clearly a racist. Nonetheless, she has inspired me to write to the OCR with a modest proposal for handling sexual assault cases on college campuses.
Under my plan, any time a collegiate man is charged with rape his accuser is automatically charged with criminal libel. Is she fails to prove her case then she is automatically convicted and expelled.
I plan to write to Professor Holloway because I anticipate that she has some interest in what I have to say. My anticipation might be in error. But, unlike sanctimonious feminists, I’m prepared to face the consequences if I’m wrong.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Why Do Liberals See Women As Stupid?
By Kevin McCullough
Sunday, May 29, 2011
This past week the "progressive" left laid claim to the women's vote of 2012.
They intend to compete for the hearts and minds of women.
They intend to win the votes of women, and they will lie, confuse, and mislead if necessary to do so.
In short the left believe that the women's vote in America is something they can manipulate devoid of fact.
More pathetically they believe women in droves will cascade with them over the cliff into the insanity the left offers--all the while attempting to convince them they are truly on their side.
To the left, women are just another group, like ethnicities, and sexual identities, that they believe they can victimize--then rescue, all in the matter of the twenty-second soundbite.
They've even recruited women to do it--case and point--Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who recently assumed control of the DNC.
I've watched Schultz on her pundit hits on cable news, and have never really been very fascinated by any of the victimology ideas she has to peddle. Now that she speaks for the entirety of her party however, her words become seemingly more important. This last week she laid her strategy bare:
“It’s just so hard for me to grasp how they [Republicans] can be as anti-woman as they are,” she said. “I think that the pushback and the guttural reaction from women against the Republicans’ agenda out of the gate, the war on women that the Republicans have been waging since they took over the House, I think is not only going to restore but help us exceed the president’s margin of victory in the next election."
So Republicans are at war with women? Really?
Then why are the most reliable voting block for the GOP - married moms? What... Do they not count?
Schultz is a life long politician, she studied political science in college, worked on getting elected, and now brings home enough pork to keep the district coming back to vote her back in year after year. She has been married to the same man for twenty years, and in liberal political circles--that's a lifetime. She is also the mother of three children and from every outward sign seems to be pretty good at it.
Yet my mind wonders, "How is it that liberals get to constantly make these crazy statements like, 'the GOP is at war with women?'"
I know personally I'd never tangle with women where the area of war is concerned. Women like K.T. McFarland--who was the civilian equivalent of a three star general in her Pentagon days--nope, wouldn't take her on.
Or how 'bout that Sarah Palin lady? Wasn't she drawing crowds as big as Obama's by the end of the campaign in 2008, and don't her book sales dwarf the current President's? There's an accomplished woman in Colorado Springs named Esther Fleece who undertook that Focus On The Family's outreach to people under the age of thirty in 2010, she also knows more about sports than most guys.
Of course that slacker Dr. Condoleeza Rice didn't set the bar very high--speaks several languages, brilliantly trained concert pianist, served as the both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, not to mention provost in higher education and understands the NFL better than you do.
There's Lila Rose who has given undercover investigation--a whole new meaning--in becoming the tip of the spear in the efforts to defund tax-payers from the clutches of Planned Parenthood.
Or how 'bout someone on par with Schultz, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. A woman who has her law doctorate, and was a practicing tax litigation attorney handling mounds of both criminal and civil cases. She raised five children of biological relation and adopted 23 foster kids. She successfully runs a small business that operates a facility for the mentally challenged and she and her husband have met that fifty-person-plus payroll faithfully. She's been re-elected on the state and federal level multiple times, sits on the committees that oversee spending and security, and oh yeah--might just run for President.
The list could be extended at some length, but a simple question for Rep. Schultz, "Where is your proof that the GOP is at war with these ladies?" Because while I'm not 100% certain, I'm fairly sure none of them embrace your ideas of equality for women--a world without men, where butchery of your own children is praised, immoral liberties are encouraged, and the idea of nurturing one's children is the equivalent to dropping a nuclear bomb.
Oh I know that they don't like certain things that you deem really important--like forcing all tax-payers to participate in elective abortions through the redistribution of the monies we earn to Planned Parenthood--who then in turn give you gobs of it to get re-elected each year. Still I don't really find you very convincing.
Sure there is much to be gained by the left attempting to convince women that the GOP--through reducing the size of government--is out to "injure" women. But in order for that rhetorical ploy to be of any effect said women who are voting would have to be magnanimously ignorant of the facts. Which must be the kind of women that Democrats want voting for them.
Idea: Schultz should just wear a sandwich board with "Everybody Stupid Follow Me" printed on it.
The truth is women by the boatloads are waking up to the realities and rewards of personal responsibility. When they see the job they can do for themselves as opposed to "needing" Sugar Daddy Uncle Sam to do it for them, they prefer independence.
If the GOP is at war with women, then this campaign is the most secretive effort ever put underway in the history of political strategy and the aforementioned ladies are all idiots.
But what kind of woman would you rather your daughter grow up to be, Debbie Wasserman Schultz or Dr. Michele Bachmann?
Wow... didn't that choice just become crystal clear!
Sunday, May 29, 2011
This past week the "progressive" left laid claim to the women's vote of 2012.
They intend to compete for the hearts and minds of women.
They intend to win the votes of women, and they will lie, confuse, and mislead if necessary to do so.
In short the left believe that the women's vote in America is something they can manipulate devoid of fact.
More pathetically they believe women in droves will cascade with them over the cliff into the insanity the left offers--all the while attempting to convince them they are truly on their side.
To the left, women are just another group, like ethnicities, and sexual identities, that they believe they can victimize--then rescue, all in the matter of the twenty-second soundbite.
They've even recruited women to do it--case and point--Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who recently assumed control of the DNC.
I've watched Schultz on her pundit hits on cable news, and have never really been very fascinated by any of the victimology ideas she has to peddle. Now that she speaks for the entirety of her party however, her words become seemingly more important. This last week she laid her strategy bare:
“It’s just so hard for me to grasp how they [Republicans] can be as anti-woman as they are,” she said. “I think that the pushback and the guttural reaction from women against the Republicans’ agenda out of the gate, the war on women that the Republicans have been waging since they took over the House, I think is not only going to restore but help us exceed the president’s margin of victory in the next election."
So Republicans are at war with women? Really?
Then why are the most reliable voting block for the GOP - married moms? What... Do they not count?
Schultz is a life long politician, she studied political science in college, worked on getting elected, and now brings home enough pork to keep the district coming back to vote her back in year after year. She has been married to the same man for twenty years, and in liberal political circles--that's a lifetime. She is also the mother of three children and from every outward sign seems to be pretty good at it.
Yet my mind wonders, "How is it that liberals get to constantly make these crazy statements like, 'the GOP is at war with women?'"
I know personally I'd never tangle with women where the area of war is concerned. Women like K.T. McFarland--who was the civilian equivalent of a three star general in her Pentagon days--nope, wouldn't take her on.
Or how 'bout that Sarah Palin lady? Wasn't she drawing crowds as big as Obama's by the end of the campaign in 2008, and don't her book sales dwarf the current President's? There's an accomplished woman in Colorado Springs named Esther Fleece who undertook that Focus On The Family's outreach to people under the age of thirty in 2010, she also knows more about sports than most guys.
Of course that slacker Dr. Condoleeza Rice didn't set the bar very high--speaks several languages, brilliantly trained concert pianist, served as the both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, not to mention provost in higher education and understands the NFL better than you do.
There's Lila Rose who has given undercover investigation--a whole new meaning--in becoming the tip of the spear in the efforts to defund tax-payers from the clutches of Planned Parenthood.
Or how 'bout someone on par with Schultz, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. A woman who has her law doctorate, and was a practicing tax litigation attorney handling mounds of both criminal and civil cases. She raised five children of biological relation and adopted 23 foster kids. She successfully runs a small business that operates a facility for the mentally challenged and she and her husband have met that fifty-person-plus payroll faithfully. She's been re-elected on the state and federal level multiple times, sits on the committees that oversee spending and security, and oh yeah--might just run for President.
The list could be extended at some length, but a simple question for Rep. Schultz, "Where is your proof that the GOP is at war with these ladies?" Because while I'm not 100% certain, I'm fairly sure none of them embrace your ideas of equality for women--a world without men, where butchery of your own children is praised, immoral liberties are encouraged, and the idea of nurturing one's children is the equivalent to dropping a nuclear bomb.
Oh I know that they don't like certain things that you deem really important--like forcing all tax-payers to participate in elective abortions through the redistribution of the monies we earn to Planned Parenthood--who then in turn give you gobs of it to get re-elected each year. Still I don't really find you very convincing.
Sure there is much to be gained by the left attempting to convince women that the GOP--through reducing the size of government--is out to "injure" women. But in order for that rhetorical ploy to be of any effect said women who are voting would have to be magnanimously ignorant of the facts. Which must be the kind of women that Democrats want voting for them.
Idea: Schultz should just wear a sandwich board with "Everybody Stupid Follow Me" printed on it.
The truth is women by the boatloads are waking up to the realities and rewards of personal responsibility. When they see the job they can do for themselves as opposed to "needing" Sugar Daddy Uncle Sam to do it for them, they prefer independence.
If the GOP is at war with women, then this campaign is the most secretive effort ever put underway in the history of political strategy and the aforementioned ladies are all idiots.
But what kind of woman would you rather your daughter grow up to be, Debbie Wasserman Schultz or Dr. Michele Bachmann?
Wow... didn't that choice just become crystal clear!
The Folly of Forsaking Our Friends in Israel
By Ken Connor
Sunday, May 29, 2011
"Israel has no better friend than America, and America has no better friend than Israel." -Benjamin Netanyahu
In a speech before a joint session of Congress this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu affirmed what so many of us know to be true: Israel is the only true friend America has in the Middle East, and we should not take this friendship for granted. Yet this is exactly what it appears President Obama may be doing. After suggesting that renewed peace talks should begin with a return to the 1967 borders, Obama has spent the week attempting to clarify his words and mollify America's Jewish population.
Caveats about "land swaps" notwithstanding, it's unclear why the President would issue a statement so certain to rouse unease among our Jewish allies. If it was an ill-considered attempt at Arab appeasement, the President needs to get real. Aside from denying the legitimacy of the Jewish state and joining the Palestinians in their efforts to push Israel into the Mediterranean Sea, there can be no compromise with anti-Jewish forces in the Middle East. They are not interested in peace, and will never accept a two-state solution. This has been their position for more than sixty years.
Since President Truman became the first Head of State to recognize the Israel, America has been bound by a moral, ideological, and some might say theological commitment to the Jewish people. After witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust – the ghastly climax of centuries of unrelenting discrimination, persecution and ostracism in Europe and elsewhere – the United States came to recognize that the survivors of Hitler's unspeakable terror should be allowed to reclaim a place for themselves in their ancestral homeland.
Our support has been critical through the years, for without it, Israel truly stands alone and vulnerable, surrounded by antagonistic entities hell bent on her destruction. But America's reasons for supporting Israel are not merely sentimental. For those that question the strategic wisdom of the United States continuing its support for Israel in these precarious diplomatic times, it should be acknowledged that no other nation in the region exemplifies western liberal ideals better than Israel. President Obama, like his predecessors before him, often speaks of the flame of freedom that burns within the heart of each person, and the universal right of mankind to exercise this freedom in societies governed by the rule of law. Where can you find such freedom in the Middle East but in Israel? Netanyahu made this point forcefully in his speech to Congress:
My friends, you don't have to . . . do nation-building in Israel. We're already built. You don't need to export democracy to Israel. We've already got it. And you don't need to send American troops to Israel. We defend ourselves. . . . This path of liberty is not paved by elections alone. It's paved when governments permit protests in town squares, when limits are placed on the powers of rulers, when judges are beholden to laws and not men, and when human rights cannot be crushed by tribal loyalties or mob rule. Israel has always embraced this path in a Middle East that has long rejected it. In a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted, Israel stands out. It is different.
Courageous Arab protesters are now struggling to secure these very same rights for their peoples, for their societies. We're proud in Israel that over one million Arab citizens of Israel have been enjoying these rights for decades. Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel's Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights. Now, I want you to stop for a second and think about that. Of those 300 million Arabs, less than one-half of 1 percent are truly free and they're all citizens of Israel. This startling fact reveals a basic truth: Israel is not what is wrong with about the Middle East; Israel is what is right about the Middle East. Israel fully supports the desire of Arab peoples in our region to live freely. We long for the day when Israel will be one of many real democracies in the region – in the Middle East.
Why President Obama would say or do anything to jeopardize the invaluable friendship that's grown up between American and the Middle East's only true democracy is perplexing. Again, if the reason lies in some ideologically-driven desire to appease volatile forces in Palestine, Syria, and Iran, then the President is guilty of grand naivete, for these entities will not be satisfied with anything less than Israel's complete destruction.
Clearly, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a simple issue, but the choice between alliance with radical anti-Semetic, anti-American factions and Israel should be an easy decision for the United States. There is nothing to be gained by forsaking our Jewish friends at this critical moment in time. Freedom and democracy will never thrive in the Middle East if America adopts an attitude of indifference towards the relentless campaign of terror being waged against the nation of Israel.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
"Israel has no better friend than America, and America has no better friend than Israel." -Benjamin Netanyahu
In a speech before a joint session of Congress this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu affirmed what so many of us know to be true: Israel is the only true friend America has in the Middle East, and we should not take this friendship for granted. Yet this is exactly what it appears President Obama may be doing. After suggesting that renewed peace talks should begin with a return to the 1967 borders, Obama has spent the week attempting to clarify his words and mollify America's Jewish population.
Caveats about "land swaps" notwithstanding, it's unclear why the President would issue a statement so certain to rouse unease among our Jewish allies. If it was an ill-considered attempt at Arab appeasement, the President needs to get real. Aside from denying the legitimacy of the Jewish state and joining the Palestinians in their efforts to push Israel into the Mediterranean Sea, there can be no compromise with anti-Jewish forces in the Middle East. They are not interested in peace, and will never accept a two-state solution. This has been their position for more than sixty years.
Since President Truman became the first Head of State to recognize the Israel, America has been bound by a moral, ideological, and some might say theological commitment to the Jewish people. After witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust – the ghastly climax of centuries of unrelenting discrimination, persecution and ostracism in Europe and elsewhere – the United States came to recognize that the survivors of Hitler's unspeakable terror should be allowed to reclaim a place for themselves in their ancestral homeland.
Our support has been critical through the years, for without it, Israel truly stands alone and vulnerable, surrounded by antagonistic entities hell bent on her destruction. But America's reasons for supporting Israel are not merely sentimental. For those that question the strategic wisdom of the United States continuing its support for Israel in these precarious diplomatic times, it should be acknowledged that no other nation in the region exemplifies western liberal ideals better than Israel. President Obama, like his predecessors before him, often speaks of the flame of freedom that burns within the heart of each person, and the universal right of mankind to exercise this freedom in societies governed by the rule of law. Where can you find such freedom in the Middle East but in Israel? Netanyahu made this point forcefully in his speech to Congress:
My friends, you don't have to . . . do nation-building in Israel. We're already built. You don't need to export democracy to Israel. We've already got it. And you don't need to send American troops to Israel. We defend ourselves. . . . This path of liberty is not paved by elections alone. It's paved when governments permit protests in town squares, when limits are placed on the powers of rulers, when judges are beholden to laws and not men, and when human rights cannot be crushed by tribal loyalties or mob rule. Israel has always embraced this path in a Middle East that has long rejected it. In a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted, Israel stands out. It is different.
Courageous Arab protesters are now struggling to secure these very same rights for their peoples, for their societies. We're proud in Israel that over one million Arab citizens of Israel have been enjoying these rights for decades. Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel's Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights. Now, I want you to stop for a second and think about that. Of those 300 million Arabs, less than one-half of 1 percent are truly free and they're all citizens of Israel. This startling fact reveals a basic truth: Israel is not what is wrong with about the Middle East; Israel is what is right about the Middle East. Israel fully supports the desire of Arab peoples in our region to live freely. We long for the day when Israel will be one of many real democracies in the region – in the Middle East.
Why President Obama would say or do anything to jeopardize the invaluable friendship that's grown up between American and the Middle East's only true democracy is perplexing. Again, if the reason lies in some ideologically-driven desire to appease volatile forces in Palestine, Syria, and Iran, then the President is guilty of grand naivete, for these entities will not be satisfied with anything less than Israel's complete destruction.
Clearly, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a simple issue, but the choice between alliance with radical anti-Semetic, anti-American factions and Israel should be an easy decision for the United States. There is nothing to be gained by forsaking our Jewish friends at this critical moment in time. Freedom and democracy will never thrive in the Middle East if America adopts an attitude of indifference towards the relentless campaign of terror being waged against the nation of Israel.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Winning the Case, Losing the Principle
Arizona won, but the sovereignty of states suffered a setback.
Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the most politicized Justice Department in American history to drop its imperious lawsuit against the people of Arizona — those impertinent subjects who dare to demand enforcement of the immigration laws Pres. Barack Obama deems null and void.
It is true that this week, in upholding Arizona’s sanctions against employers who hire illegal aliens, the Supreme Court implicitly undermined the preemption-by-executive-fiat theory underlying the administration’s suit. By a 5–3 majority (with Justice Elena Kagan, Obama’s former solicitor general, having recused herself), the Court held that a state is not barred from enacting laws that are consistent with federal statutes and bolster congressional purposes. That is to say, the touchstone of preemption remains law, which is what Congress prescribes, not policy, which is a president’s political calculation about what laws to enforce or not enforce.
That ought to spell doom for DOJ’s civil-rights case against Arizonans, who are doubly afflicted by a federal government that taxes them to support agencies that first refuse to protect them and then haul them into court for trying to protect themselves. The state’s controversial immigration-enforcement law (known as “Senate Bill 1070”) actually strengthens federal laws that bar aliens from entering and remaining in the United States illegally. Given the justices’ apparent enthusiasm for state statutes that support and bolster federal statutes, one might think Attorney General Eric Holder would read the writing on the wall and call off his minions.
He won’t. Obama’s tyrannical preemption theory is damaged by Thursday’s ruling in Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, but it is not destroyed. Nor is that the lone cause for disappointment — far from it. While the Court’s bloc of progressive activists lost this skirmish, they’re winning the federalism war in a rout. Whiting leaves in tatters the concept of state sovereignty, federalism’s bedrock.
For that, Arizona can place much of the blame on itself. Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority decision boldly asserts that the “power to regulate immigration is unquestionably a federal power.” Arizona has mounted no meaningful resistance to this proposition, neither in Whiting nor in the ongoing litigation over the more hotly disputed Senate Bill 1070. Thus, it is perhaps to be expected that this is the one point on which all nine of the Court’s justices seem to be in agreement.
Chief Justice Roberts’s assertion is untrue, at least insofar as it implies federal supremacy over the question of immigration. As I’ve previously contended, there is nothing in the Constitution that vests the federal government with the power to police illegal immigration within the territory of a state. To the contrary, the Constitution empowers Congress merely “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” i.e., to prescribe the qualifications for American citizenship. It says nothing about how those standards are to be enforced. In adopting the Constitution, the states did not delegate to the national government their inherent authority to police their territory, to defend their citizens, and to detain persons who have no lawful right to be on their soil.
In the debates over the adoption of the Constitution, such leading proponents as Hamilton and Madison assured the wary states that they would retain control over the administration of justice within their territories. The federal government’s concerns would be limited to such “external objects” as “foreign commerce.” The states would continue to focus on those “internal objects” that “concern the lives, liberties, and property of the people,” including the “internal order of the state.”
Thus the question was not whether the states were “preempted” from regulating or prohibiting the activities of non-citizens within their territory. It was whether the national government had any power over immigration enforcement. The “unquestionable” power was state power. That is why, in its 1837 New York v. Miln decision, the Supreme Court upheld a state law that allowed New York City to expel arriving aliens it deemed likely to become a public burden. As Justice Philip Barbour explained, the state had acted
That is the tack taken by Chief Justice Roberts, joined in the Whiting majority by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Alito, and, with some apparent but unexplained reservations, by Justice Thomas (who concurred in the judgment but joined in only parts of Roberts’s opinion). Arizona’s law enabling the state government to revoke the licenses of businesses that knowingly hire illegals was upheld, but only because Congress had expressly permitted the states to enact such regulations. Arizona’s requirement that all state employers use the federal E-Verify system to ensure that applicants are entitled to work was likewise upheld, but only because Congress had not barred the states from imposing such a requirement, and because the executive branch (during the Bush administration) had characterized Arizona’s E-Verify mandate as “permissible.”
Plainly, the Court’s unanimous position is that the federal government, in its unfettered discretion, may prevent the states from conducting any immigration enforcement, no matter how threatened the states may be by illegal immigration and no matter how resolutely the president refuses to address such threats. The justices divide only over whether the federal government has already prohibited state action; the dissenters (Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor) contend that it has, implicitly if not explicitly. There is no reason to think Justice Kagan would not have voted with them.
This leaves the states at the mercy of Big Brother for their internal defense, and that is a huge problem. The right of self-defense is a core aspect of sovereignty. If the states no longer have it, they are no longer sovereign, meaning the foundational assumption of our constitutional system no longer obtains.
On the right, commentators are gliding past this looming catastrophe and focusing on the good done by the ruling. To be sure, the validation of a state’s ability to shut down the employment magnet is essential if illegal immigration is to be reduced from a crisis to a nuisance. But this judicial validation is based on the whim of Congress rather than the inherent power of sovereign states. That is not very reassuring: If the years 2007 through 2010 taught us anything, it is that a Congress in the grip of ideology can and will govern against the will of the majority.
And it may not just be a Congress in the grip of ideology that we need concern ourselves about. Yes, much of the Whiting majority opinion appears to dismantle the Obama administration’s theory that state power can be preempted by presidential diktat. Chief Justice Roberts repeatedly emphasizes that Arizona’s alien-employment statute “trace[s]” the analogous federal statutes.” He reasons that the question of whether states are preempted from regulating is controlled by the language Congress enacts into federal law. And he pointedly rejects the argument frequently urged by centralizers that immigration must have a one-size-fits-all enforcement scheme imposed by Washington. “The prospect of some departure from homogeneity,” Roberts explains, is a feature of “our federal system.”
Were the federal courts to hew to this Supreme Court guidance, the Obama administration would have to lose its lawsuit against Arizona. Furthermore, as an ethical matter, the Justice Department should abandon any case in which the law dictates that it should lose, even a case that excites the political base the president badly needs to excite if he is to win reelection. A Justice Department that abandoned a sure winner like the Black Panthers voter-intimidation case should, after Whiting, drop its Arizona case forthwith.
Don’t hold your breath. Obama’s loyalists and the open-borders crowd will observe that Whiting did not present a preemption claim rooted in presidential policy rather than statutory law. That this actually makes Obama’s case against Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 weaker won’t matter; it is a distinction Holder’s Justice Department can point to as a reason for pressing ahead.
Moreover, in one brief section of the Whiting opinion, the chief justice takes pains to distinguish Arizona’s alien-employment law from state laws the Court has occasionally invalidated because they contravened presidential policy in the field of foreign affairs. For a non-political Justice Department in an era more faithful to the federalist underpinnings of our Constitution, those cases would not save the Arizona lawsuit. After all, the conduct of foreign relations is a core power of the presidency — states should not interfere with it, because it is the principal “external object” the federal government was created to manage.
By contrast, immigration enforcement is a traditional responsibility of the states, an “internal object” and an incident of sovereignty. Or at least it used to be.
Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the most politicized Justice Department in American history to drop its imperious lawsuit against the people of Arizona — those impertinent subjects who dare to demand enforcement of the immigration laws Pres. Barack Obama deems null and void.
It is true that this week, in upholding Arizona’s sanctions against employers who hire illegal aliens, the Supreme Court implicitly undermined the preemption-by-executive-fiat theory underlying the administration’s suit. By a 5–3 majority (with Justice Elena Kagan, Obama’s former solicitor general, having recused herself), the Court held that a state is not barred from enacting laws that are consistent with federal statutes and bolster congressional purposes. That is to say, the touchstone of preemption remains law, which is what Congress prescribes, not policy, which is a president’s political calculation about what laws to enforce or not enforce.
That ought to spell doom for DOJ’s civil-rights case against Arizonans, who are doubly afflicted by a federal government that taxes them to support agencies that first refuse to protect them and then haul them into court for trying to protect themselves. The state’s controversial immigration-enforcement law (known as “Senate Bill 1070”) actually strengthens federal laws that bar aliens from entering and remaining in the United States illegally. Given the justices’ apparent enthusiasm for state statutes that support and bolster federal statutes, one might think Attorney General Eric Holder would read the writing on the wall and call off his minions.
He won’t. Obama’s tyrannical preemption theory is damaged by Thursday’s ruling in Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, but it is not destroyed. Nor is that the lone cause for disappointment — far from it. While the Court’s bloc of progressive activists lost this skirmish, they’re winning the federalism war in a rout. Whiting leaves in tatters the concept of state sovereignty, federalism’s bedrock.
For that, Arizona can place much of the blame on itself. Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority decision boldly asserts that the “power to regulate immigration is unquestionably a federal power.” Arizona has mounted no meaningful resistance to this proposition, neither in Whiting nor in the ongoing litigation over the more hotly disputed Senate Bill 1070. Thus, it is perhaps to be expected that this is the one point on which all nine of the Court’s justices seem to be in agreement.
Chief Justice Roberts’s assertion is untrue, at least insofar as it implies federal supremacy over the question of immigration. As I’ve previously contended, there is nothing in the Constitution that vests the federal government with the power to police illegal immigration within the territory of a state. To the contrary, the Constitution empowers Congress merely “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” i.e., to prescribe the qualifications for American citizenship. It says nothing about how those standards are to be enforced. In adopting the Constitution, the states did not delegate to the national government their inherent authority to police their territory, to defend their citizens, and to detain persons who have no lawful right to be on their soil.
In the debates over the adoption of the Constitution, such leading proponents as Hamilton and Madison assured the wary states that they would retain control over the administration of justice within their territories. The federal government’s concerns would be limited to such “external objects” as “foreign commerce.” The states would continue to focus on those “internal objects” that “concern the lives, liberties, and property of the people,” including the “internal order of the state.”
Thus the question was not whether the states were “preempted” from regulating or prohibiting the activities of non-citizens within their territory. It was whether the national government had any power over immigration enforcement. The “unquestionable” power was state power. That is why, in its 1837 New York v. Miln decision, the Supreme Court upheld a state law that allowed New York City to expel arriving aliens it deemed likely to become a public burden. As Justice Philip Barbour explained, the state had acted
to prevent her citizens from being oppressed by the support of multitudes of poor persons who come from foreign countries without possessing the means of supporting themselves. There can be no mode in which the power to regulate internal police could be more appropriately exercised. New York, from her particular situation, is perhaps more than any other city in the Union exposed to the evil of thousands of foreign emigrants arriving there, and the consequent danger of her citizens being subjected to a heavy charge in the maintenance of those who are poor. It is the duty of the state to protect its citizens from this evil; they have endeavored to do so by passing, amongst other things, the section of the law in question. We should, upon principle, say that it had a right to do so.The oppression then faced by New Yorkers pales in comparison to what is happening in modern Arizona, where — in addition to heavy charges for the subsistence, education, and medical needs of an exploding illegal alien population — citizens are besieged by the militias and drug gangs of a disintegrating Mexico. Yet, from its original posture of great difficulty identifying a source of federal authority over immigration enforcement, the Supreme Court suddenly decided, with the dawn of the Progressive era, that the national government had somehow become preeminent in the field.
That is the tack taken by Chief Justice Roberts, joined in the Whiting majority by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Alito, and, with some apparent but unexplained reservations, by Justice Thomas (who concurred in the judgment but joined in only parts of Roberts’s opinion). Arizona’s law enabling the state government to revoke the licenses of businesses that knowingly hire illegals was upheld, but only because Congress had expressly permitted the states to enact such regulations. Arizona’s requirement that all state employers use the federal E-Verify system to ensure that applicants are entitled to work was likewise upheld, but only because Congress had not barred the states from imposing such a requirement, and because the executive branch (during the Bush administration) had characterized Arizona’s E-Verify mandate as “permissible.”
Plainly, the Court’s unanimous position is that the federal government, in its unfettered discretion, may prevent the states from conducting any immigration enforcement, no matter how threatened the states may be by illegal immigration and no matter how resolutely the president refuses to address such threats. The justices divide only over whether the federal government has already prohibited state action; the dissenters (Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor) contend that it has, implicitly if not explicitly. There is no reason to think Justice Kagan would not have voted with them.
This leaves the states at the mercy of Big Brother for their internal defense, and that is a huge problem. The right of self-defense is a core aspect of sovereignty. If the states no longer have it, they are no longer sovereign, meaning the foundational assumption of our constitutional system no longer obtains.
On the right, commentators are gliding past this looming catastrophe and focusing on the good done by the ruling. To be sure, the validation of a state’s ability to shut down the employment magnet is essential if illegal immigration is to be reduced from a crisis to a nuisance. But this judicial validation is based on the whim of Congress rather than the inherent power of sovereign states. That is not very reassuring: If the years 2007 through 2010 taught us anything, it is that a Congress in the grip of ideology can and will govern against the will of the majority.
And it may not just be a Congress in the grip of ideology that we need concern ourselves about. Yes, much of the Whiting majority opinion appears to dismantle the Obama administration’s theory that state power can be preempted by presidential diktat. Chief Justice Roberts repeatedly emphasizes that Arizona’s alien-employment statute “trace[s]” the analogous federal statutes.” He reasons that the question of whether states are preempted from regulating is controlled by the language Congress enacts into federal law. And he pointedly rejects the argument frequently urged by centralizers that immigration must have a one-size-fits-all enforcement scheme imposed by Washington. “The prospect of some departure from homogeneity,” Roberts explains, is a feature of “our federal system.”
Were the federal courts to hew to this Supreme Court guidance, the Obama administration would have to lose its lawsuit against Arizona. Furthermore, as an ethical matter, the Justice Department should abandon any case in which the law dictates that it should lose, even a case that excites the political base the president badly needs to excite if he is to win reelection. A Justice Department that abandoned a sure winner like the Black Panthers voter-intimidation case should, after Whiting, drop its Arizona case forthwith.
Don’t hold your breath. Obama’s loyalists and the open-borders crowd will observe that Whiting did not present a preemption claim rooted in presidential policy rather than statutory law. That this actually makes Obama’s case against Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 weaker won’t matter; it is a distinction Holder’s Justice Department can point to as a reason for pressing ahead.
Moreover, in one brief section of the Whiting opinion, the chief justice takes pains to distinguish Arizona’s alien-employment law from state laws the Court has occasionally invalidated because they contravened presidential policy in the field of foreign affairs. For a non-political Justice Department in an era more faithful to the federalist underpinnings of our Constitution, those cases would not save the Arizona lawsuit. After all, the conduct of foreign relations is a core power of the presidency — states should not interfere with it, because it is the principal “external object” the federal government was created to manage.
By contrast, immigration enforcement is a traditional responsibility of the states, an “internal object” and an incident of sovereignty. Or at least it used to be.
A Win for Arizona, and the Rule of Law
National Review Online
Saturday, May 28, 2011
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld Arizona’s 2007 law requiring all employers in the state to use the federal E-Verify system for screening out illegal aliens and revoking the business licenses of firms that knowingly hire them.
The court split 5–3 along party lines: Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor (Kagan recused herself) ignored the plain meaning of the federal law empowering states to use their licensing power to address the employment of illegal workers. Chief Justice Roberts, on the other hand, found “no basis in law, fact, or logic” for the argument that Arizona should be stopped from doing so in the name of federal “preemption” of state activity.
It’s an important win for many reasons, not least of them the fact that Arizona’s E-Verify mandate actually works. While the illegal-alien population nationwide fell 7 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the number of illegal aliens in Arizona fell by nearly 18 percent, and many analysts credit the E-Verify mandate with that success.
The Court’s decision was a resounding loss for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce–Obama administration effort to prevent states from buttressing federal immigration law. While it doesn’t necessarily follow that the Court will also uphold the suspended portions of last year’s SB1070 — which makes it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant in Arizona and imposes stiff penalties on those who employ and enable illegals — the ruling is a green light for other states to pass their own E-Verify laws. A dozen have already enacted mandates of varying breadth, most recently Georgia and Indiana.
The Chamber of Commerce will complain, but a loss for business lobbyists is not a loss for business. In helping to weaken the employment magnet that draws illegal immigrants to the United States in the first place, E-Verify is an essential tool for immigration control, and it’s likely to become a national standard. The only questions are whether that will happen sooner or later, and whether the process will be smooth or rough. Responsible, law-abiding businesses now have an incentive to work in Congress for a single, national E-Verify mandate, one that would apply in all states and create the stability and predictability that business needs most from government.
Thursday’s decision weakens the hand of the bitter-enders in the Chamber of Commerce, but it has not vanquished them: They are prepared to fight a state-by-state, scorched-earth battle against E-Verify. Such a battle might succeed in delaying implementation of the system in some parts of the country, at the price of heightened uncertainty for employers wanting to hire. Such instability is inherently bad for business.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R., Texas) will be introducing an E-Verify bill soon, and Speaker Boehner would be well-advised to put it on a fast track. Passage will not be easy; the reason the Chamber of Commerce and the Obama administration made defeat of the Arizona E-Verify law in court such a high priority is that each wants to trade mandatory E-Verify for something else. The White House sees E-Verify as a bargaining chip for amnesty, while the Chamber wants to hold it hostage to huge increases in “temporary” worker programs. If Thursday’s ruling creates momentum for a national E-Verify standard as a standalone measure, it knocks one of the legs out from under a “comprehensive reform” amnesty deal.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld Arizona’s 2007 law requiring all employers in the state to use the federal E-Verify system for screening out illegal aliens and revoking the business licenses of firms that knowingly hire them.
The court split 5–3 along party lines: Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor (Kagan recused herself) ignored the plain meaning of the federal law empowering states to use their licensing power to address the employment of illegal workers. Chief Justice Roberts, on the other hand, found “no basis in law, fact, or logic” for the argument that Arizona should be stopped from doing so in the name of federal “preemption” of state activity.
It’s an important win for many reasons, not least of them the fact that Arizona’s E-Verify mandate actually works. While the illegal-alien population nationwide fell 7 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the number of illegal aliens in Arizona fell by nearly 18 percent, and many analysts credit the E-Verify mandate with that success.
The Court’s decision was a resounding loss for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce–Obama administration effort to prevent states from buttressing federal immigration law. While it doesn’t necessarily follow that the Court will also uphold the suspended portions of last year’s SB1070 — which makes it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant in Arizona and imposes stiff penalties on those who employ and enable illegals — the ruling is a green light for other states to pass their own E-Verify laws. A dozen have already enacted mandates of varying breadth, most recently Georgia and Indiana.
The Chamber of Commerce will complain, but a loss for business lobbyists is not a loss for business. In helping to weaken the employment magnet that draws illegal immigrants to the United States in the first place, E-Verify is an essential tool for immigration control, and it’s likely to become a national standard. The only questions are whether that will happen sooner or later, and whether the process will be smooth or rough. Responsible, law-abiding businesses now have an incentive to work in Congress for a single, national E-Verify mandate, one that would apply in all states and create the stability and predictability that business needs most from government.
Thursday’s decision weakens the hand of the bitter-enders in the Chamber of Commerce, but it has not vanquished them: They are prepared to fight a state-by-state, scorched-earth battle against E-Verify. Such a battle might succeed in delaying implementation of the system in some parts of the country, at the price of heightened uncertainty for employers wanting to hire. Such instability is inherently bad for business.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R., Texas) will be introducing an E-Verify bill soon, and Speaker Boehner would be well-advised to put it on a fast track. Passage will not be easy; the reason the Chamber of Commerce and the Obama administration made defeat of the Arizona E-Verify law in court such a high priority is that each wants to trade mandatory E-Verify for something else. The White House sees E-Verify as a bargaining chip for amnesty, while the Chamber wants to hold it hostage to huge increases in “temporary” worker programs. If Thursday’s ruling creates momentum for a national E-Verify standard as a standalone measure, it knocks one of the legs out from under a “comprehensive reform” amnesty deal.
Five Simple Truths about the Mideast Conflict
By Michael Brown
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Is there any subject more controversial than the question of the legitimacy of the modern State of Israel? Is it the eternal home of the Jewish people, promised to them by God Himself? Or is it the illegitimate home of violent Jewish occupiers, an apartheid state guilty of ethnic cleansing? Or is it something in between? In the midst of the often emotional arguments on both sides, it is helpful to review five simple truths about the Mideast conflict.
1. There is no such thing as a historic “Palestinian people” living in the Middle East. To be sure, there have been Arabs living in the land of Palestine for centuries. (The land of Israel was derisively renamed “Palestine” by the Romans in the second century A.D.). And it is true that some of these families have lived in Palestine without interruption for many generations. But at no time before 1967 did these Arabs identify themselves as “Palestinians,” nor did they seek to achieve any kind of statehood there. As expressed by former terrorist Walid Shoebat, “Why is it that on June 4th 1967 I was a Jordanian and overnight I became a Palestinian?”
Before 1967, there was no such thing as Arab, Palestinian nationalism and no attempt to develop the territory as a homeland for the Arabs who lived there, and in 1936, when the Palestine Orchestra was formed, it was a Jewish orchestra. In fact, the original name of the Jerusalem Post, the flagship Jewish newspaper, was the Palestine Post.
There is no question that there are several million people who identify themselves as Palestinians today, and many of these people have suffered great hardship in recent years. Nonetheless, the concept of a Palestinian people is a modern invention, and it is part of the anti-Israel propaganda machine without any basis in fact. The recent comments of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, claiming a 9,000 year Palestinian pedigree, are purely fictional: “Oh, Netanyahu, you are incidental in history; we are the people of history. We are the owners of history."
2. There were anti-Jewish intifadas in Palestine two decades before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. We are often told that Jews and Arabs coexisted peacefully in Palestine prior to the formation of the Jewish state in 1948, or at least, prior to the rise of strong Jewish nationalism. In reality, as Jews began to return to their one and only ancestral homeland in the late 19th century, hostilities began to rise among their Arab neighbors, despite the fact that there was more than enough room for both.
By the 1920’s, radical Muslim leaders like Haj Amin Al-Husseini, later a confidant of Adolph Hitler, were organizing intifadas against the Jewish population, with many Jewish lives lost. And what helped fuel Al-Husseini’s Jew-hatred was the anti-Jewish sentiment found in the Koran and early Muslim traditions. Post-1948 Jew-hatred simply built on centuries of Islamic anti-Semitism.
3. Jewish refugees fleeing from Muslim and Arab countries were absorbed by Israel after 1948; Arab refugees fleeing from Israel after 1948 were not absorbed by Muslim and Arab countries. Despite the fact that the Muslim nations surrounding Israel are 650 times the size of this tiny state, they made no effort to absorb the approximately 600,000 Arab refugees who fled Israel in 1948 when war was declared on Israel by five neighboring Arab nations.
To this day, these refugees are not welcomed by other Arab states. As expressed more than 20 years ago by Ralph Galloway, former head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, “The Arab States do want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel.” Yet Israel absorbed roughly 800,000 Jewish refugees that had to flee from Muslim nations after 1948.
4. Only one side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is truly committed to peaceful co-existence. It is often stated that if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be no more war but if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be no more Israel. This is not to say that all Palestinians are warmongers and all Israelis are doves. But the vast majority of Israelis are not driven by a radical ideology that calls for the extermination of their Arab neighbors, nor are they teaching their children songs about the virtues of religious martyrdom.
Israel does not relish spending a major portion of its budget on defense, nor does it relish sending its sons and daughters into military service. It simply will not surrender Jerusalem, its historic and religious capital, and it will not commit regional suicide by retreating to indefensible borders. In return it simply asks the Palestinians to say, “We embrace your right to exist.”
5. The current uprisings throughout the Muslim and Arab world today remind us that Israel cannot fairly be blamed for all the tension and conflicts in the region. The nation of Israel is obviously not faultless in the current conflict, but it is ludicrous to think that without the presence of this supposed evil nation in the Middle East, all would be well. There have been constant disputes between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and in 1980, Abd Alhalim Khaddam, then Syria’s Foreign Minister, admitted, “If we look at a map of the Arab Homeland, we can hardly find two countries without conflict. . . . We can hardly find two countries which are not either in a state of war or on the road to war.”
Certainly, there are many obstacles that stand in the way of a true peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, and the road ahead is fraught with uncertainty, but it would be a good starting point if we replaced myths and emotional arguments with facts.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Is there any subject more controversial than the question of the legitimacy of the modern State of Israel? Is it the eternal home of the Jewish people, promised to them by God Himself? Or is it the illegitimate home of violent Jewish occupiers, an apartheid state guilty of ethnic cleansing? Or is it something in between? In the midst of the often emotional arguments on both sides, it is helpful to review five simple truths about the Mideast conflict.
1. There is no such thing as a historic “Palestinian people” living in the Middle East. To be sure, there have been Arabs living in the land of Palestine for centuries. (The land of Israel was derisively renamed “Palestine” by the Romans in the second century A.D.). And it is true that some of these families have lived in Palestine without interruption for many generations. But at no time before 1967 did these Arabs identify themselves as “Palestinians,” nor did they seek to achieve any kind of statehood there. As expressed by former terrorist Walid Shoebat, “Why is it that on June 4th 1967 I was a Jordanian and overnight I became a Palestinian?”
Before 1967, there was no such thing as Arab, Palestinian nationalism and no attempt to develop the territory as a homeland for the Arabs who lived there, and in 1936, when the Palestine Orchestra was formed, it was a Jewish orchestra. In fact, the original name of the Jerusalem Post, the flagship Jewish newspaper, was the Palestine Post.
There is no question that there are several million people who identify themselves as Palestinians today, and many of these people have suffered great hardship in recent years. Nonetheless, the concept of a Palestinian people is a modern invention, and it is part of the anti-Israel propaganda machine without any basis in fact. The recent comments of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, claiming a 9,000 year Palestinian pedigree, are purely fictional: “Oh, Netanyahu, you are incidental in history; we are the people of history. We are the owners of history."
2. There were anti-Jewish intifadas in Palestine two decades before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. We are often told that Jews and Arabs coexisted peacefully in Palestine prior to the formation of the Jewish state in 1948, or at least, prior to the rise of strong Jewish nationalism. In reality, as Jews began to return to their one and only ancestral homeland in the late 19th century, hostilities began to rise among their Arab neighbors, despite the fact that there was more than enough room for both.
By the 1920’s, radical Muslim leaders like Haj Amin Al-Husseini, later a confidant of Adolph Hitler, were organizing intifadas against the Jewish population, with many Jewish lives lost. And what helped fuel Al-Husseini’s Jew-hatred was the anti-Jewish sentiment found in the Koran and early Muslim traditions. Post-1948 Jew-hatred simply built on centuries of Islamic anti-Semitism.
3. Jewish refugees fleeing from Muslim and Arab countries were absorbed by Israel after 1948; Arab refugees fleeing from Israel after 1948 were not absorbed by Muslim and Arab countries. Despite the fact that the Muslim nations surrounding Israel are 650 times the size of this tiny state, they made no effort to absorb the approximately 600,000 Arab refugees who fled Israel in 1948 when war was declared on Israel by five neighboring Arab nations.
To this day, these refugees are not welcomed by other Arab states. As expressed more than 20 years ago by Ralph Galloway, former head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, “The Arab States do want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel.” Yet Israel absorbed roughly 800,000 Jewish refugees that had to flee from Muslim nations after 1948.
4. Only one side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is truly committed to peaceful co-existence. It is often stated that if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be no more war but if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be no more Israel. This is not to say that all Palestinians are warmongers and all Israelis are doves. But the vast majority of Israelis are not driven by a radical ideology that calls for the extermination of their Arab neighbors, nor are they teaching their children songs about the virtues of religious martyrdom.
Israel does not relish spending a major portion of its budget on defense, nor does it relish sending its sons and daughters into military service. It simply will not surrender Jerusalem, its historic and religious capital, and it will not commit regional suicide by retreating to indefensible borders. In return it simply asks the Palestinians to say, “We embrace your right to exist.”
5. The current uprisings throughout the Muslim and Arab world today remind us that Israel cannot fairly be blamed for all the tension and conflicts in the region. The nation of Israel is obviously not faultless in the current conflict, but it is ludicrous to think that without the presence of this supposed evil nation in the Middle East, all would be well. There have been constant disputes between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and in 1980, Abd Alhalim Khaddam, then Syria’s Foreign Minister, admitted, “If we look at a map of the Arab Homeland, we can hardly find two countries without conflict. . . . We can hardly find two countries which are not either in a state of war or on the road to war.”
Certainly, there are many obstacles that stand in the way of a true peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, and the road ahead is fraught with uncertainty, but it would be a good starting point if we replaced myths and emotional arguments with facts.
Defunding Defense
By Ed Feulner
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Can America’s defense budget be cut? Yes. Unfortunately, President Obama is going about it exactly backwards.
He has asked the Pentagon to identify $400 billion in savings. But coming up with an arbitrary figure and telling our military to find some way to hit it isn’t the smart -- or safe -- way to make the necessary cuts.
What comes first should be obvious: the mission. What do we want our armed forces to accomplish? When and how do we want them to do it? What can wait for another day?
Only after we’ve arrived at some satisfactory answers can we then decide what budget cuts are possible -- and prudent.
After all, President Obama isn’t calling for our military to play a smaller role in world affairs. Like his recent predecessors in the Oval Office, he’s enlarged the number and scope of its missions. So how can we ask the military to do more with less? There’s no way to keep America and its allies safe under such a formula. It simply doesn’t compute.
Yet that’s just what Congress and the president have been doing: making cuts that compromise our readiness. On the chopping block: next-generation weapons systems. That’s where, Heritage Foundation military expert Mackenzie Eaglen points out, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been concentrating his budget cuts.
Last year, Eaglen notes, Congress and the administration cut $300 billion by cancelling key programs. Among them: the F-22 fifth-generation fighter, the Army’s future combat systems (primarily a ground-vehicle program), the multiple-kill vehicle for missile defense, an Air Force bomber, and the second airborne laser aircraft.
And there’s more to come -- or go, to be more precise. A next-generation cruiser for the Navy that was delayed last year is up for cancellation altogether. Production of the C-17, our only wide-bodied cargo aircraft, would be ended, along with the Navy’s EPX intelligence aircraft.
The Marine Corps’ expeditionary fighting vehicle program? Another casualty. So is the Army’s surface-to-air missile. And the Air Force’s new bomber. And the Navy’s next-generation nuclear submarine. The list of cuts just keeps growing -- along with added missions and bigger responsibilities. The implicit message to our troops: Good luck doing the impossible.
Never mind that cutting-edge weaponry is a key component to ensuring that our military is the best in the world.
It’s not simply next-generation programs that fall by the wayside. The military also tries to cuts costs by forgoing upgrades and by extending the life of equipment that might otherwise be replaced. Not surprisingly, this degrades the ability of our troops to fulfill their missions.
Worse, this is false economy. Readiness aside, we’re setting ourselves up for big expenses down the road when, eventually, we have to rebuild. It’s happened before: in the 1980s, after the procurement holiday of the Carter years, and again after the post-Cold War cuts of the Clinton era.
In the long run, we spend more than if we’d never made the cuts to begin with. And in the meantime, we grapple with an over-stretched military and needless vulnerabilities.
This is not to say no defense cuts can be made. Like any area of government, defense has waste that could be eliminated. But we need to start by taking a hard look at our defense programs -- in light of clearly defined priorities -- not by throwing a figure at the Pentagon and saying, in essence, “Figure it out.”
Mission first. Then cuts. That’s the only way to ensure that we both spend wisely and keep ourselves safe.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Can America’s defense budget be cut? Yes. Unfortunately, President Obama is going about it exactly backwards.
He has asked the Pentagon to identify $400 billion in savings. But coming up with an arbitrary figure and telling our military to find some way to hit it isn’t the smart -- or safe -- way to make the necessary cuts.
What comes first should be obvious: the mission. What do we want our armed forces to accomplish? When and how do we want them to do it? What can wait for another day?
Only after we’ve arrived at some satisfactory answers can we then decide what budget cuts are possible -- and prudent.
After all, President Obama isn’t calling for our military to play a smaller role in world affairs. Like his recent predecessors in the Oval Office, he’s enlarged the number and scope of its missions. So how can we ask the military to do more with less? There’s no way to keep America and its allies safe under such a formula. It simply doesn’t compute.
Yet that’s just what Congress and the president have been doing: making cuts that compromise our readiness. On the chopping block: next-generation weapons systems. That’s where, Heritage Foundation military expert Mackenzie Eaglen points out, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been concentrating his budget cuts.
Last year, Eaglen notes, Congress and the administration cut $300 billion by cancelling key programs. Among them: the F-22 fifth-generation fighter, the Army’s future combat systems (primarily a ground-vehicle program), the multiple-kill vehicle for missile defense, an Air Force bomber, and the second airborne laser aircraft.
And there’s more to come -- or go, to be more precise. A next-generation cruiser for the Navy that was delayed last year is up for cancellation altogether. Production of the C-17, our only wide-bodied cargo aircraft, would be ended, along with the Navy’s EPX intelligence aircraft.
The Marine Corps’ expeditionary fighting vehicle program? Another casualty. So is the Army’s surface-to-air missile. And the Air Force’s new bomber. And the Navy’s next-generation nuclear submarine. The list of cuts just keeps growing -- along with added missions and bigger responsibilities. The implicit message to our troops: Good luck doing the impossible.
Never mind that cutting-edge weaponry is a key component to ensuring that our military is the best in the world.
It’s not simply next-generation programs that fall by the wayside. The military also tries to cuts costs by forgoing upgrades and by extending the life of equipment that might otherwise be replaced. Not surprisingly, this degrades the ability of our troops to fulfill their missions.
Worse, this is false economy. Readiness aside, we’re setting ourselves up for big expenses down the road when, eventually, we have to rebuild. It’s happened before: in the 1980s, after the procurement holiday of the Carter years, and again after the post-Cold War cuts of the Clinton era.
In the long run, we spend more than if we’d never made the cuts to begin with. And in the meantime, we grapple with an over-stretched military and needless vulnerabilities.
This is not to say no defense cuts can be made. Like any area of government, defense has waste that could be eliminated. But we need to start by taking a hard look at our defense programs -- in light of clearly defined priorities -- not by throwing a figure at the Pentagon and saying, in essence, “Figure it out.”
Mission first. Then cuts. That’s the only way to ensure that we both spend wisely and keep ourselves safe.
Friday, May 27, 2011
What Obama Did to Israel
The president has made negotiations all but impossible.
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 27, 2011
Every Arab-Israeli negotiation contains a fundamental asymmetry: Israel gives up land, which is tangible; the Arabs make promises, which are ephemeral. The longstanding American solution has been to nonetheless urge Israel to take risks for peace while America balances things by giving assurances of U.S. support for Israel’s security and diplomatic needs.
It’s on the basis of such solemn assurances that Israel undertook, for example, the Gaza withdrawal. In order to mitigate this risk, Pres. George W. Bush gave a written commitment that America supported Israel’s absorption of major settlement blocs in any peace agreement, opposed any return to the 1967 lines, and stood firm against the so-called Palestinian right of return to Israel.
For two and a half years, the Obama administration has refused to recognize and reaffirm these assurances. Then last week in his State Department speech, President Obama definitively trashed them. He declared that the Arab-Israeli conflict should indeed be resolved along “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”
Nothing new here, said Obama three days later. “By definition, it means that the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different” from 1967.
It means nothing of the sort. “Mutually” means both parties have to agree. And if one side doesn’t? Then, by definition, you’re back to the 1967 lines.
Nor is this merely a theoretical proposition. Three times the Palestinians have been offered exactly that formula, 1967 plus swaps — at Camp David 2000, Taba 2001, and the 2008 Olmert-Abbas negotiations. Every time, the Palestinians said no and walked away.
And that remains their position today: The 1967 lines. Period. Indeed, in September the Palestinians are going to the U.N. to get the world to ratify precisely that: a Palestinian state on the ’67 lines. No swaps.
Note how Obama has undermined Israel’s negotiating position. He is demanding that Israel go into peace talks having already forfeited its claim to the territory won in the ’67 war — its only bargaining chip. Remember: That ’67 line runs right through Jerusalem. Thus the starting point of negotiations would be that the Western Wall and even Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter are Palestinian — alien territory for which Israel must now bargain.
The very idea that Judaism’s holiest shrine is alien or that Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter is rightfully, historically, or demographically Arab is an absurdity. And the idea that, in order to retain them, Israel has to give up parts of itself is a travesty.
Obama also moved the goal posts on the so-called right of return. Flooding Israel with millions of Arabs would destroy the world’s only Jewish state while creating a 23rd Arab state and a second Palestinian state — not exactly what we mean when we speak of a “two-state solution.” That’s why it has been the policy of the U.S. to adamantly oppose this “right.”
Yet in his State Department speech, Obama refused to simply restate this position — and refused again in a supposedly corrective speech three days later. Instead, he told Israel it must negotiate the right of return with the Palestinians after having given every inch of territory. Bargaining with what, pray tell?
No matter. “The status quo is unsustainable,” declared Obama, “and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.”
Israel too? Exactly what bold steps for peace have the Palestinians taken? Israel made three radically conciliatory offers to establish a Palestinian state, withdrew from Gaza, and has been trying to renew negotiations for more than two years. Meanwhile, the Gaza Palestinians have been firing rockets at Israeli towns and villages. And on the West Bank, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas turned down the Olmert offer, walked out of negotiations with Binyamin Netanyahu, and now defies the United States by seeking not peace talks but instant statehood — without peace, without recognizing Israel — at the U.N. And to make unmistakable this spurning of any peace process, Abbas agrees to join the openly genocidal Hamas in a unity government, which even Obama acknowledges makes negotiations impossible.
Obama’s response to this relentless Palestinian intransigence? To reward it — by abandoning the Bush assurances, legitimizing the ’67 borders, and refusing to reaffirm America’s rejection of the right of return.
The only remaining question is whether this perverse and ultimately self-defeating policy is born of genuine antipathy toward Israel or of the arrogance of a blundering amateur who refuses to see that he is undermining not just peace but the very possibility of negotiations.
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 27, 2011
Every Arab-Israeli negotiation contains a fundamental asymmetry: Israel gives up land, which is tangible; the Arabs make promises, which are ephemeral. The longstanding American solution has been to nonetheless urge Israel to take risks for peace while America balances things by giving assurances of U.S. support for Israel’s security and diplomatic needs.
It’s on the basis of such solemn assurances that Israel undertook, for example, the Gaza withdrawal. In order to mitigate this risk, Pres. George W. Bush gave a written commitment that America supported Israel’s absorption of major settlement blocs in any peace agreement, opposed any return to the 1967 lines, and stood firm against the so-called Palestinian right of return to Israel.
For two and a half years, the Obama administration has refused to recognize and reaffirm these assurances. Then last week in his State Department speech, President Obama definitively trashed them. He declared that the Arab-Israeli conflict should indeed be resolved along “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”
Nothing new here, said Obama three days later. “By definition, it means that the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different” from 1967.
It means nothing of the sort. “Mutually” means both parties have to agree. And if one side doesn’t? Then, by definition, you’re back to the 1967 lines.
Nor is this merely a theoretical proposition. Three times the Palestinians have been offered exactly that formula, 1967 plus swaps — at Camp David 2000, Taba 2001, and the 2008 Olmert-Abbas negotiations. Every time, the Palestinians said no and walked away.
And that remains their position today: The 1967 lines. Period. Indeed, in September the Palestinians are going to the U.N. to get the world to ratify precisely that: a Palestinian state on the ’67 lines. No swaps.
Note how Obama has undermined Israel’s negotiating position. He is demanding that Israel go into peace talks having already forfeited its claim to the territory won in the ’67 war — its only bargaining chip. Remember: That ’67 line runs right through Jerusalem. Thus the starting point of negotiations would be that the Western Wall and even Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter are Palestinian — alien territory for which Israel must now bargain.
The very idea that Judaism’s holiest shrine is alien or that Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter is rightfully, historically, or demographically Arab is an absurdity. And the idea that, in order to retain them, Israel has to give up parts of itself is a travesty.
Obama also moved the goal posts on the so-called right of return. Flooding Israel with millions of Arabs would destroy the world’s only Jewish state while creating a 23rd Arab state and a second Palestinian state — not exactly what we mean when we speak of a “two-state solution.” That’s why it has been the policy of the U.S. to adamantly oppose this “right.”
Yet in his State Department speech, Obama refused to simply restate this position — and refused again in a supposedly corrective speech three days later. Instead, he told Israel it must negotiate the right of return with the Palestinians after having given every inch of territory. Bargaining with what, pray tell?
No matter. “The status quo is unsustainable,” declared Obama, “and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.”
Israel too? Exactly what bold steps for peace have the Palestinians taken? Israel made three radically conciliatory offers to establish a Palestinian state, withdrew from Gaza, and has been trying to renew negotiations for more than two years. Meanwhile, the Gaza Palestinians have been firing rockets at Israeli towns and villages. And on the West Bank, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas turned down the Olmert offer, walked out of negotiations with Binyamin Netanyahu, and now defies the United States by seeking not peace talks but instant statehood — without peace, without recognizing Israel — at the U.N. And to make unmistakable this spurning of any peace process, Abbas agrees to join the openly genocidal Hamas in a unity government, which even Obama acknowledges makes negotiations impossible.
Obama’s response to this relentless Palestinian intransigence? To reward it — by abandoning the Bush assurances, legitimizing the ’67 borders, and refusing to reaffirm America’s rejection of the right of return.
The only remaining question is whether this perverse and ultimately self-defeating policy is born of genuine antipathy toward Israel or of the arrogance of a blundering amateur who refuses to see that he is undermining not just peace but the very possibility of negotiations.
The Die Is Cast
By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, May 27, 2011
Alea iacta est. That's what Julius Caesar proclaimed as he crossed the Rubicon river in 49 B.C. It means "the die is cast." By crossing the Rubicon with his army, against Roman law, Caesar guaranteed a head-on conflict with the overconfident Roman ruler Pompey. Outnumbered, Caesar was presented with the choice: win or die.
The recent special election in the 26th congressional district of New York was a political Rubicon. The Democrat, Kathy Hochul, ran against the Republican budget, specifically Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to save Medicare by turning it into a voucher program starting 10 years from now (excluding all current beneficiaries).
The Republican, Jane Corwin, said she supported the plan and then spent much of the campaign defending it with all of the verbal dexterity of a contestant in a cracker-eating competition.
It's difficult to exaggerate the gloating and glee from Democrats about their triumph. Their takeaway: Democrats can win if they demonize the Ryan plan and run ads (or allow third-party groups to run them) showing old ladies being flung from cliffs like Spartan infants.
There is certainly good reason to believe that Hochul's so-called "Medi-scare" tactics made the difference. It was the top issue for nearly a quarter of voters. And while most of them may well have voted Democrat anyway, the simple fact is that Hochul won a single-issue campaign in a district that shouldn't have elected a Democrat at all.
Republicans console themselves by noting that the she won with only 47 percent of the vote, and a Democrat-gadfly who bought the tea party label garnered 9 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, Corwin simply wasn't a very strong candidate. Karl Rove points out in the Wall Street Journal that Hochul received merely one more percentage point than Barack Obama did when he lost the district in 2008.
Even Paul Ryan says that aside from the Democrats' lies and distortions about his plan, Hochul's victory "shows that a Democrat running as a tea party candidate dumping a couple million dollars in the race is going to have an effect."
Fine, fine. For the sake of argument let's stipulate that's all true. So what?
The simple fact is that the Democrats have their battle plan. It's going to be Medi-scare every day in every way for the next 17 months. They are on autopilot. They are committed. Their die is cast. They have crossed their Rubicon. They have no desire to defend ObamaCare, high gas prices, high unemployment and a third Middle East war. They want -- no, need -- to be on offense because they have so much they cannot defend.
The question now is, What are Republicans going to do about it? Are they going to play the role of Pompey, the dissolute leader who didn't want to fight? Or will they don Caesarian robes and join the battle head-on because they know they have nowhere to retreat? That is the political choice for the GOP: win or die.
There's an entirely plausible case to be made that the GOP bravely blundered in passing the Ryan budget. I don't agree with that argument. But again, so what?
A surefire way for that claim to be proven true is for Republicans to start hemming and hawing and apologizing for what they've done. Look, the House of Representatives passed it with a near-unanimous vote among Republicans. Forty Senate Republicans voted for it as well. Republicans can't run from that, so they shouldn't try.
The one advantage the outnumbered Caesar had was that he and his battle-tested forces understood that there was only one solution to their plight: victory.
The battle-tested Republicans have the same suite of options. And they are battle-tested. Last November they won sweeping victories in the midterm elections. How? By focusing first and foremost on the Democrats' failures.
For instance, the Democrats have a plan too. It's the Status Quo-Plus. It involves letting Medicare continue to spiral out of control, consuming our budget until it becomes necessary for an unelected chamber of health-care bureaucrats to impose draconian cuts. Actually, Democrats have two plans. That was the Obama plan. There's also the Harry Reid plan, which involves lawlessly refusing to pass a budget for coming up on 800 days.
The GOP does need to be more optimistic and pro-growth. It can't just sell reality-based pain when the opposition is selling the cheap lies of deceit.
But more than anything, Republicans need to realize that the die has been cast. All that is left for them is to decide whether they will play the role of Pompey or of Caesar.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Alea iacta est. That's what Julius Caesar proclaimed as he crossed the Rubicon river in 49 B.C. It means "the die is cast." By crossing the Rubicon with his army, against Roman law, Caesar guaranteed a head-on conflict with the overconfident Roman ruler Pompey. Outnumbered, Caesar was presented with the choice: win or die.
The recent special election in the 26th congressional district of New York was a political Rubicon. The Democrat, Kathy Hochul, ran against the Republican budget, specifically Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to save Medicare by turning it into a voucher program starting 10 years from now (excluding all current beneficiaries).
The Republican, Jane Corwin, said she supported the plan and then spent much of the campaign defending it with all of the verbal dexterity of a contestant in a cracker-eating competition.
It's difficult to exaggerate the gloating and glee from Democrats about their triumph. Their takeaway: Democrats can win if they demonize the Ryan plan and run ads (or allow third-party groups to run them) showing old ladies being flung from cliffs like Spartan infants.
There is certainly good reason to believe that Hochul's so-called "Medi-scare" tactics made the difference. It was the top issue for nearly a quarter of voters. And while most of them may well have voted Democrat anyway, the simple fact is that Hochul won a single-issue campaign in a district that shouldn't have elected a Democrat at all.
Republicans console themselves by noting that the she won with only 47 percent of the vote, and a Democrat-gadfly who bought the tea party label garnered 9 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, Corwin simply wasn't a very strong candidate. Karl Rove points out in the Wall Street Journal that Hochul received merely one more percentage point than Barack Obama did when he lost the district in 2008.
Even Paul Ryan says that aside from the Democrats' lies and distortions about his plan, Hochul's victory "shows that a Democrat running as a tea party candidate dumping a couple million dollars in the race is going to have an effect."
Fine, fine. For the sake of argument let's stipulate that's all true. So what?
The simple fact is that the Democrats have their battle plan. It's going to be Medi-scare every day in every way for the next 17 months. They are on autopilot. They are committed. Their die is cast. They have crossed their Rubicon. They have no desire to defend ObamaCare, high gas prices, high unemployment and a third Middle East war. They want -- no, need -- to be on offense because they have so much they cannot defend.
The question now is, What are Republicans going to do about it? Are they going to play the role of Pompey, the dissolute leader who didn't want to fight? Or will they don Caesarian robes and join the battle head-on because they know they have nowhere to retreat? That is the political choice for the GOP: win or die.
There's an entirely plausible case to be made that the GOP bravely blundered in passing the Ryan budget. I don't agree with that argument. But again, so what?
A surefire way for that claim to be proven true is for Republicans to start hemming and hawing and apologizing for what they've done. Look, the House of Representatives passed it with a near-unanimous vote among Republicans. Forty Senate Republicans voted for it as well. Republicans can't run from that, so they shouldn't try.
The one advantage the outnumbered Caesar had was that he and his battle-tested forces understood that there was only one solution to their plight: victory.
The battle-tested Republicans have the same suite of options. And they are battle-tested. Last November they won sweeping victories in the midterm elections. How? By focusing first and foremost on the Democrats' failures.
For instance, the Democrats have a plan too. It's the Status Quo-Plus. It involves letting Medicare continue to spiral out of control, consuming our budget until it becomes necessary for an unelected chamber of health-care bureaucrats to impose draconian cuts. Actually, Democrats have two plans. That was the Obama plan. There's also the Harry Reid plan, which involves lawlessly refusing to pass a budget for coming up on 800 days.
The GOP does need to be more optimistic and pro-growth. It can't just sell reality-based pain when the opposition is selling the cheap lies of deceit.
But more than anything, Republicans need to realize that the die has been cast. All that is left for them is to decide whether they will play the role of Pompey or of Caesar.
Republicans Better Learn To Defend Ryan Plan
By Mona Charen
Friday, May 27, 2011
Though I warned two weeks ago about the possibility of a Republican loss in NY 26, I'm not sorry that Democrat Kathy Hochul's deceptive, demagogic resort to Mediscare succeeded. After May 24, no Republican can fail to anticipate the contours of the 2012 election. They'd best pay attention.
The New York loss may yield even more dividends. It may induce a certain complacency among Democrats. Rep. Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, crowed, "Today, the Republican plan to end Medicare cost Republicans $3.4 million and a seat in Congress. And this is only the first seat ... We served notice to the Republicans that we will fight them anywhere in America when it comes to defending and strengthening Medicare."
Liberal columnist E.J. Dionne noted with satisfaction that "This is a big setback for Paul Ryan's budget and a warning for Republican incumbents everywhere."
And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, eager to wring every partisan drop from the special election results, scheduled a rushed vote on the Ryan budget. It failed 57-40 in the Democrat-majority chamber. A number of Republicans, including Scott Brown, Lisa Murkowski, and the ladies from Maine voted with the Democrats. (Rand Paul also voted against the Ryan budget -- believing it to be too timid.)
Democrats believe that Republicans have blundered badly -- changing the subject from the limping economy, the soaring debt, and the unpopular Obamacare to the Democrats' favorite campaign issue -- Medicare. But that confidence is misplaced.
Jane Corwin, the Republican candidate in NY 26, didn't make counterarguments about Medicare -- not even when the liberal group The Agenda Project aired a spot that looked more like a "Saturday Night Live" parody of a political ad than the real thing. A tall young fellow looking very much like Ryan pushes a delicate old lady in a wheelchair toward a scenic lookout. To the strains of "America the Beautiful," on-screen graphics describe the Medicare program and claim that Ryan's budget would "privatize" and thus end it. At the end of the spot, the Ryan figure dumps grandma out of the wheelchair and off the cliff. Subtle.
"Is America still beautiful without Medicare?" asks the graphic.
Is America still beautiful with politics like this? Sheesh.
For the Democrats to succeed with this tactic (and on political hygiene grounds alone, they deserve to lose), they must rely on the ignorance of voters. That's a dangerous gamble. In one special election, you can get by with it. But in a nationwide contest that includes the presidency, it's not going to be so easy.
Republicans happen to have reality on their side.
Reality: It isn't as if there is a choice between preserving Medicare "as we know it" and reform. Medicare is -- to use the environmentalists' favorite word -- unsustainable. The trustee's report issued last week puts the program's unfunded liabilities at $24.6 trillion and projects the program going broke in 2024. Even Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner recognizes "the need to act sooner rather than later to make reforms to our entitlement programs."
Reality: Without reform, severe benefit cuts will be required in the Medicare program. Increased taxes simply will not cover the gap.
Reality: The Ryan plan would not affect those 55 and older and would gradually shift from an open-ended entitlement (which pays all bills submitted and thus encourages overuse) to a "premium support" model that will encourage competition among private providers. It will provide less money to the wealthy and more to lower-income elderly.
Reality: One of the biggest drivers of spiraling medical costs is the third-party payer problem. Both in the Medicare program and in employer-provided coverage, the patient himself has no incentive to shop around, and doctors are encouraged to order more and more tests and services because they are paid on a fee-for-service basis.
Reality: The Democrats' solution to rising Medicare costs is rationing. They deny it, but the Independent Payment Advisory Board (which will not come into existence until after the 2012 election), a 15-person panel created by Obamacare, would have virtually unreviewable discretion to set prices for medical services. While it's technically true that the IPAB wouldn't have the power to prevent doctors from performing services, the low reimbursement levels will surely dry up the number of doctors willing to take Medicare patients.
Reality: The Democrats' plan for a centralized, unaccountable, bureaucratic, price-controlling body for key medical decisions is precisely the sort of policy that has led European nations toward insolvency. Competition-oriented reform is not only the only possible way to save Medicare; it is the only way to preserve the national fisc.
And that's the real message of NY 26.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Though I warned two weeks ago about the possibility of a Republican loss in NY 26, I'm not sorry that Democrat Kathy Hochul's deceptive, demagogic resort to Mediscare succeeded. After May 24, no Republican can fail to anticipate the contours of the 2012 election. They'd best pay attention.
The New York loss may yield even more dividends. It may induce a certain complacency among Democrats. Rep. Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, crowed, "Today, the Republican plan to end Medicare cost Republicans $3.4 million and a seat in Congress. And this is only the first seat ... We served notice to the Republicans that we will fight them anywhere in America when it comes to defending and strengthening Medicare."
Liberal columnist E.J. Dionne noted with satisfaction that "This is a big setback for Paul Ryan's budget and a warning for Republican incumbents everywhere."
And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, eager to wring every partisan drop from the special election results, scheduled a rushed vote on the Ryan budget. It failed 57-40 in the Democrat-majority chamber. A number of Republicans, including Scott Brown, Lisa Murkowski, and the ladies from Maine voted with the Democrats. (Rand Paul also voted against the Ryan budget -- believing it to be too timid.)
Democrats believe that Republicans have blundered badly -- changing the subject from the limping economy, the soaring debt, and the unpopular Obamacare to the Democrats' favorite campaign issue -- Medicare. But that confidence is misplaced.
Jane Corwin, the Republican candidate in NY 26, didn't make counterarguments about Medicare -- not even when the liberal group The Agenda Project aired a spot that looked more like a "Saturday Night Live" parody of a political ad than the real thing. A tall young fellow looking very much like Ryan pushes a delicate old lady in a wheelchair toward a scenic lookout. To the strains of "America the Beautiful," on-screen graphics describe the Medicare program and claim that Ryan's budget would "privatize" and thus end it. At the end of the spot, the Ryan figure dumps grandma out of the wheelchair and off the cliff. Subtle.
"Is America still beautiful without Medicare?" asks the graphic.
Is America still beautiful with politics like this? Sheesh.
For the Democrats to succeed with this tactic (and on political hygiene grounds alone, they deserve to lose), they must rely on the ignorance of voters. That's a dangerous gamble. In one special election, you can get by with it. But in a nationwide contest that includes the presidency, it's not going to be so easy.
Republicans happen to have reality on their side.
Reality: It isn't as if there is a choice between preserving Medicare "as we know it" and reform. Medicare is -- to use the environmentalists' favorite word -- unsustainable. The trustee's report issued last week puts the program's unfunded liabilities at $24.6 trillion and projects the program going broke in 2024. Even Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner recognizes "the need to act sooner rather than later to make reforms to our entitlement programs."
Reality: Without reform, severe benefit cuts will be required in the Medicare program. Increased taxes simply will not cover the gap.
Reality: The Ryan plan would not affect those 55 and older and would gradually shift from an open-ended entitlement (which pays all bills submitted and thus encourages overuse) to a "premium support" model that will encourage competition among private providers. It will provide less money to the wealthy and more to lower-income elderly.
Reality: One of the biggest drivers of spiraling medical costs is the third-party payer problem. Both in the Medicare program and in employer-provided coverage, the patient himself has no incentive to shop around, and doctors are encouraged to order more and more tests and services because they are paid on a fee-for-service basis.
Reality: The Democrats' solution to rising Medicare costs is rationing. They deny it, but the Independent Payment Advisory Board (which will not come into existence until after the 2012 election), a 15-person panel created by Obamacare, would have virtually unreviewable discretion to set prices for medical services. While it's technically true that the IPAB wouldn't have the power to prevent doctors from performing services, the low reimbursement levels will surely dry up the number of doctors willing to take Medicare patients.
Reality: The Democrats' plan for a centralized, unaccountable, bureaucratic, price-controlling body for key medical decisions is precisely the sort of policy that has led European nations toward insolvency. Competition-oriented reform is not only the only possible way to save Medicare; it is the only way to preserve the national fisc.
And that's the real message of NY 26.
"The Worst Environmental Disaster in U.S. History!" (One Year Later)
By Humberto Fontova
Thursday, May 26, 2011
"There's just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster, “said Marine Scientist and former LSU professor Ivor Van Heerden who also works as a BP spill-response contractor. “I have no interest in making BP look good — I think they lied about the size of the spill — but we're not seeing catastrophic impacts. There's a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it."
In fact these observations came-- not a year after the Deepwater Horizon blew-up -- but a mere three months afterwards, making them all the more blasphemous at the time. By now they’ve been amply vindicated, making the Obama team’s “moratorium” and more recent stonewalling on Gulf of Mexico drilling permits all the more preposterous.
Your loyal servant here grew up in South Louisiana and spends most week-ends along the Louisiana coast hooking, spearing, gaffing, blasting and otherwise assassinating the raw ingredients of his family meals. He also shares the resulting joys and debacles with readers and TV-show hosts. So he had more than a casual concern with the BP oil spill.
The reasons for this “disasters’” fizzling out are many and were apparent to non-hack scientists from the get-go. To wit:
“People don’t comprehend how so much oil could break down in such a short time period,” explains Dr. LuAnn White, a toxicologist with the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, who also serves as Director of the Center for Applied Environmental Health. “But we have natural oil seeps in the Gulf, and over 200 genera of microbes that break down oil already exist there.”
“It cannot be repeated often enough,” says Louisiana Marine Biologist Jerald Horst , Crude oil is a natural substance, its biodegradable. It’s a feast for microbes. And these consumed most of it from the BP spill.”
The horrid black goo that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico from the BP spill last year is certainly toxic—but so are broccoli, beer and salt. It all depends on the dosage. In fact that horrid black goo has spilled naturally into the Gulf of Mexico for millennia— at the rate of two Exxon Valdez spills annually.
A study by the Dept. of Oceanography at Texas A&M found 600 “oils spills,” into the Gulf of Mexico, all ancient if not prehistoric, all antiseptically “natural”, and all courtesy of Earth Goddess Gaia. In fact these “spills” probably saved the survivors of Hernando De Soto’s plucky band of explorers in 1542, who record caulking their boats with the abundant tar balls found along an east Texas beach. The study also reports that in 1909 a genuine gusher was spotted in the same area, shooting crude oil high into the air from the Gulf floor.
Not all these gushers lie below the Gulf of Mexico however. In fact one of Mother Earth’s biggest “spills” is off Southern California’s coast at Coal Oil Point, not far from the homes of ”environmentalist activists” Leo De Caprio, Charlie Sheen, Barbara Streisand, Brad Pitt, Ed Begley Jr and many, many others of their ilk. This spill gushes an estimated 3000 gallons of crude oil daily into the waters off Malibu beach. But none of the above “activists” appear overly agitated over this “disaster.”
Nothing normally soothes the savage beast of an environmentalist like the notion of a substance being “biodegradable.” Indeed, the term “environmentally-friendly,” has become almost its synonym. Well, crude oil is about as biodegradable as substances come, especially when spewed into warm, microbe-filled waters like the Gulf of Mexico. Hence the stratospheric dunce caps crowning so many “environmentalist” heads a mere year after “The Worst Environmental Disaster in U.S. History!”
“The damaging effects of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will be felt all the way to Europe and the Arctic!” according to a “top scientist” addressing a congressional panel, as reported by CNN last year.
In fact, the damaging effects were hardly visible in Louisiana itself a few months later. Dr. Van Heerden who spent most of his days inspecting the Louisiana coast found that less than one square mile of coastal marsh had been severely oiled, mostly around Timbalier Bay. That’s out of 5300 square miles of Louisiana coastal marsh and swamp, by the way.
And by last July the “severely oiled” areas were already bouncing back. “Van Heerden's assessment team showed me around Casse-tete Island in Timbalier Bay,” wrote Time Magazine’s Michael Grunwald last July, “where new shoots of Spartina (marsh) grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes and new leaves were already growing on the first black mangroves I've ever seen that were actually black."
“Ah!” you ask. “But what about that poisonous chemical used as a dispersant for the oil?”
You probably ingested traces of this poisonous chemical compound with last night’s dinner, and other traces probably coat your pots, pans, cups, spoons and forks right now. Some people call the dispersant Corexit 9500—and some call it “soap.” Essentially it’s Dawn dishwashing detergent.
“Dispersants are not very toxic.” Explains Dr. Robert Dickey, director of FDA’s Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory. “They are detergents and solvents. And they become rapidly diluted. One square mile of sea water one foot deep is 200 million gallons. We added 1.8 million gallons in the whole Gulf.”
Point is: you add much higher concentration to your kitchen sink to make your dishes “safe” for your family.
After the spill, the FDA’s Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Seafood Inspection Laboratory, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the Louisiana Dept. of Health and Hospitals along with similar agencies from neighboring Gulf coast states have methodically and repeatedly tested Gulf seafood for cancer-causing “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.”
“Not a single sample [for oil or dispersant] has come anywhere close to levels of concern,” reported Olivia Watkins, executive media advisor for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
“All of the samples have been 100-fold or even 1,000-fold below all of these levels, “reports Bob Dickey, director of the FDA’s Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory. “Nothing ever came close to these levels.”
“Fine,” some might say. But kindly define what constitutes this “level of concern.”
“The small amount of hydrocarbons in a seafood meal is much less than the exposure from pumping gas,” clarifies La. Dept. of Health and Hospitals Dr. Jimmy Guidry
“Anyone who smokes one cigarette gets more PAHs than they could get from eating gallons of any Gulf oysters that have been tested,” clarifies Dr. LuAnn White
After the Exxon Valdez “disaster” a NOAA study found that “residents of village communities (near Prince William Sound) became upset when it was pointed out that samples of smoked fish from their villages contained carcinogenic hydrocarbon levels hundreds of times higher than any shellfish samples collected from oiled beaches.”
The proof of the abundance of Louisiana’s the marine life is in the eating, but first comes the catching and spearing. So let’s head to an offshore oil platform a few months after and a few miles away from “The Worst Environmental Disaster in U.S. History!” and take a peek.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
"There's just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster, “said Marine Scientist and former LSU professor Ivor Van Heerden who also works as a BP spill-response contractor. “I have no interest in making BP look good — I think they lied about the size of the spill — but we're not seeing catastrophic impacts. There's a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it."
In fact these observations came-- not a year after the Deepwater Horizon blew-up -- but a mere three months afterwards, making them all the more blasphemous at the time. By now they’ve been amply vindicated, making the Obama team’s “moratorium” and more recent stonewalling on Gulf of Mexico drilling permits all the more preposterous.
Your loyal servant here grew up in South Louisiana and spends most week-ends along the Louisiana coast hooking, spearing, gaffing, blasting and otherwise assassinating the raw ingredients of his family meals. He also shares the resulting joys and debacles with readers and TV-show hosts. So he had more than a casual concern with the BP oil spill.
The reasons for this “disasters’” fizzling out are many and were apparent to non-hack scientists from the get-go. To wit:
“People don’t comprehend how so much oil could break down in such a short time period,” explains Dr. LuAnn White, a toxicologist with the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, who also serves as Director of the Center for Applied Environmental Health. “But we have natural oil seeps in the Gulf, and over 200 genera of microbes that break down oil already exist there.”
“It cannot be repeated often enough,” says Louisiana Marine Biologist Jerald Horst , Crude oil is a natural substance, its biodegradable. It’s a feast for microbes. And these consumed most of it from the BP spill.”
The horrid black goo that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico from the BP spill last year is certainly toxic—but so are broccoli, beer and salt. It all depends on the dosage. In fact that horrid black goo has spilled naturally into the Gulf of Mexico for millennia— at the rate of two Exxon Valdez spills annually.
A study by the Dept. of Oceanography at Texas A&M found 600 “oils spills,” into the Gulf of Mexico, all ancient if not prehistoric, all antiseptically “natural”, and all courtesy of Earth Goddess Gaia. In fact these “spills” probably saved the survivors of Hernando De Soto’s plucky band of explorers in 1542, who record caulking their boats with the abundant tar balls found along an east Texas beach. The study also reports that in 1909 a genuine gusher was spotted in the same area, shooting crude oil high into the air from the Gulf floor.
Not all these gushers lie below the Gulf of Mexico however. In fact one of Mother Earth’s biggest “spills” is off Southern California’s coast at Coal Oil Point, not far from the homes of ”environmentalist activists” Leo De Caprio, Charlie Sheen, Barbara Streisand, Brad Pitt, Ed Begley Jr and many, many others of their ilk. This spill gushes an estimated 3000 gallons of crude oil daily into the waters off Malibu beach. But none of the above “activists” appear overly agitated over this “disaster.”
Nothing normally soothes the savage beast of an environmentalist like the notion of a substance being “biodegradable.” Indeed, the term “environmentally-friendly,” has become almost its synonym. Well, crude oil is about as biodegradable as substances come, especially when spewed into warm, microbe-filled waters like the Gulf of Mexico. Hence the stratospheric dunce caps crowning so many “environmentalist” heads a mere year after “The Worst Environmental Disaster in U.S. History!”
“The damaging effects of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will be felt all the way to Europe and the Arctic!” according to a “top scientist” addressing a congressional panel, as reported by CNN last year.
In fact, the damaging effects were hardly visible in Louisiana itself a few months later. Dr. Van Heerden who spent most of his days inspecting the Louisiana coast found that less than one square mile of coastal marsh had been severely oiled, mostly around Timbalier Bay. That’s out of 5300 square miles of Louisiana coastal marsh and swamp, by the way.
And by last July the “severely oiled” areas were already bouncing back. “Van Heerden's assessment team showed me around Casse-tete Island in Timbalier Bay,” wrote Time Magazine’s Michael Grunwald last July, “where new shoots of Spartina (marsh) grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes and new leaves were already growing on the first black mangroves I've ever seen that were actually black."
“Ah!” you ask. “But what about that poisonous chemical used as a dispersant for the oil?”
You probably ingested traces of this poisonous chemical compound with last night’s dinner, and other traces probably coat your pots, pans, cups, spoons and forks right now. Some people call the dispersant Corexit 9500—and some call it “soap.” Essentially it’s Dawn dishwashing detergent.
“Dispersants are not very toxic.” Explains Dr. Robert Dickey, director of FDA’s Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory. “They are detergents and solvents. And they become rapidly diluted. One square mile of sea water one foot deep is 200 million gallons. We added 1.8 million gallons in the whole Gulf.”
Point is: you add much higher concentration to your kitchen sink to make your dishes “safe” for your family.
After the spill, the FDA’s Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Seafood Inspection Laboratory, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the Louisiana Dept. of Health and Hospitals along with similar agencies from neighboring Gulf coast states have methodically and repeatedly tested Gulf seafood for cancer-causing “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.”
“Not a single sample [for oil or dispersant] has come anywhere close to levels of concern,” reported Olivia Watkins, executive media advisor for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
“All of the samples have been 100-fold or even 1,000-fold below all of these levels, “reports Bob Dickey, director of the FDA’s Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory. “Nothing ever came close to these levels.”
“Fine,” some might say. But kindly define what constitutes this “level of concern.”
“The small amount of hydrocarbons in a seafood meal is much less than the exposure from pumping gas,” clarifies La. Dept. of Health and Hospitals Dr. Jimmy Guidry
“Anyone who smokes one cigarette gets more PAHs than they could get from eating gallons of any Gulf oysters that have been tested,” clarifies Dr. LuAnn White
After the Exxon Valdez “disaster” a NOAA study found that “residents of village communities (near Prince William Sound) became upset when it was pointed out that samples of smoked fish from their villages contained carcinogenic hydrocarbon levels hundreds of times higher than any shellfish samples collected from oiled beaches.”
The proof of the abundance of Louisiana’s the marine life is in the eating, but first comes the catching and spearing. So let’s head to an offshore oil platform a few months after and a few miles away from “The Worst Environmental Disaster in U.S. History!” and take a peek.
Are Voters As Stupid As Insiders Think?
By Debra J. Saunders
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Do Americans have the will to cut government spending in order to curb the rampant growth in government debt and liabilities? Not if the politicians they send to Washington have anything to do with it.
On Tuesday, a Republican candidate lost a special election to replace a disgraced GOP congressman from Buffalo, N.Y. -- to a Democrat who won with the help of a third-party candidate. Presto.
On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called a vote on the House GOP budget bill. As The New York Times reported, Reid "brought the legislation to the floor so that Senate Republicans would either have to vote for it, exposing them to attacks from Democrats and their allies, or against it, exploiting growing Republican divisions on the issue."
Under Reid, the Senate has not passed a budget since April 29, 2009. The Senate has yet to pass a resolution to authorize the use of military force in Libya, even though the 1973 War Powers Resolution requires Congress to authorize military force abroad lasting longer than 60 days. Friday is the 60th day.
But when Reid sees a chance to make Republicans squirm in a symbolic vote that won't change anything, he is a tiger.
The GOP package failed, as expected, after four moderate Republicans and Kentucky purist Rand Paul voted against it.
Then the Senate voted on the Obama spending blueprint. It tanked 97-0.
While headlines focused on the GOP 57-40 loss, there was not a single Democrat who voted to take up the Obama budget. Gee. Reid sure is good at exploiting GOP divisions.
So tell me, what do the Democrats stand for?
I know what most Republicans stand for. The House budget plan trimmed federal spending by $6 trillion over 10 years and targeted the big enchilada, entitlement spending. Under Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's plan, Medicare enrollees would receive subsidies that would allow them to purchase private health care plans starting in 2022.
Democrats call that "ending Medicare as we know it." Republicans counter that the Medicare trust fund is expected to go bust in 2024 (five years earlier than trustees predicted last year) so Washington better change Medicare -- and fast -- in order to save it.
House Republicans are so righteous about reform that their plan includes means-testing to make affluent seniors pay more for Medicare. At a speech to the Economic Club of New York earlier this month, House Speaker John Boehner told billionaire and deficit hawk Pete Peterson, "Pete, I love you to death, but I don't think the taxpayers ought to be paying your Medicare premium."
Democrats are so stuck in "no" mode that they have been reduced to protesting Boehner's remarks. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, issued a statement in which he complained, "this idea may undermine Medicare and cost beneficiaries more at the same time."
The conventional wisdom inside the Beltway says that Republicans lost twice this week -- first in a special election, then a Senate vote. Conventional wisdom says that voters will bite if politicians, who promised fiscal discipline, lift a finger against entitlement spending. But a 97-zip vote on Plan Obama? Who calls that "winning?
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Do Americans have the will to cut government spending in order to curb the rampant growth in government debt and liabilities? Not if the politicians they send to Washington have anything to do with it.
On Tuesday, a Republican candidate lost a special election to replace a disgraced GOP congressman from Buffalo, N.Y. -- to a Democrat who won with the help of a third-party candidate. Presto.
On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called a vote on the House GOP budget bill. As The New York Times reported, Reid "brought the legislation to the floor so that Senate Republicans would either have to vote for it, exposing them to attacks from Democrats and their allies, or against it, exploiting growing Republican divisions on the issue."
Under Reid, the Senate has not passed a budget since April 29, 2009. The Senate has yet to pass a resolution to authorize the use of military force in Libya, even though the 1973 War Powers Resolution requires Congress to authorize military force abroad lasting longer than 60 days. Friday is the 60th day.
But when Reid sees a chance to make Republicans squirm in a symbolic vote that won't change anything, he is a tiger.
The GOP package failed, as expected, after four moderate Republicans and Kentucky purist Rand Paul voted against it.
Then the Senate voted on the Obama spending blueprint. It tanked 97-0.
While headlines focused on the GOP 57-40 loss, there was not a single Democrat who voted to take up the Obama budget. Gee. Reid sure is good at exploiting GOP divisions.
So tell me, what do the Democrats stand for?
I know what most Republicans stand for. The House budget plan trimmed federal spending by $6 trillion over 10 years and targeted the big enchilada, entitlement spending. Under Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's plan, Medicare enrollees would receive subsidies that would allow them to purchase private health care plans starting in 2022.
Democrats call that "ending Medicare as we know it." Republicans counter that the Medicare trust fund is expected to go bust in 2024 (five years earlier than trustees predicted last year) so Washington better change Medicare -- and fast -- in order to save it.
House Republicans are so righteous about reform that their plan includes means-testing to make affluent seniors pay more for Medicare. At a speech to the Economic Club of New York earlier this month, House Speaker John Boehner told billionaire and deficit hawk Pete Peterson, "Pete, I love you to death, but I don't think the taxpayers ought to be paying your Medicare premium."
Democrats are so stuck in "no" mode that they have been reduced to protesting Boehner's remarks. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, issued a statement in which he complained, "this idea may undermine Medicare and cost beneficiaries more at the same time."
The conventional wisdom inside the Beltway says that Republicans lost twice this week -- first in a special election, then a Senate vote. Conventional wisdom says that voters will bite if politicians, who promised fiscal discipline, lift a finger against entitlement spending. But a 97-zip vote on Plan Obama? Who calls that "winning?
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Living in Appeasement World
The Obama administration is at home in unreality.
Conrad Black
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Contrary to the famous advice of Franklin D. Roosevelt in his State of the Union message in 1941 — “We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal would preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement” — the United States is now effectively an appeasement power. Because it is so helplessly dependent on imported oil from unfriendly places (unlike Canada), and the American public is so cranky and churlish about paying what other countries pay for imported petroleum products, and the political class of both parties for 40 years has been so hopelessly feeble about explaining the problem and trying to persuade the country to face up to it, the U.S. tolerates the subsidization of Islamic extremism by Saudis and seems to be afraid to do anything to prevent the nuclear militarization of Iran.
Because the U.S. is so debt-ridden and the political class of both parties has generally been incapable of speaking straight to the country about public-sector debt and the related burden of the current-account deficit (half composed of oil imports), and because so much U.S. government debt is held by China, the country’s government is afraid to encourage China’s neighbors to coordinate even an unprovoking and entirely civilized response to China’s high-handed condescensions to India on the Himalayan frontier and puerile expansionism in the South China Sea, presumably for fear of China’s response as a large creditor of the U.S.
No sane person wishes abrasions with another country, especially an important country like China. And there is an argument to be made that short of atrocities on a scale between the anticipated Qaddafi bloodbath in Benghazi and the hecatombs of Rwanda and Cambodia, questions of citizens’ rights in one country are not the province of another country. But all of these responses to the Saudis, Iranians, Chinese, and other regimes, whether concealed in mundane metaphors about reset buttons or swaddled in pseudo-worldly solicitude for the sensibilities of other cultures, show what Roosevelt called “the ‘ism’ of appeasement.”
President Obama campaigned on promises to restore fiscal order and reduce imports of oil from hostile countries. He is already trying to raise a billion dollars for his reelection campaign but has delivered nothing on these absolutely vital objectives that he so clearly espoused. We are still wallowing in oil consumption, mouthing fairy tales about renewable energy and climate change, while we seem to have raised our hands like hold-up victims and surrendered on a military option to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear military power, and have scaled back Mrs. Clinton’s promised “crippling sanctions” against the ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad to porous inconveniences.
Instead of addressing the debt problem that has made discussion of default on “the faith and credit of these United States” a routine possible scenario, the U.S. has poured out $3 trillion of debt, which can be financed only by issuance of bonds to the Federal Reserve, paid for by electronic notes from the Federal Reserve. The world’s reserve currency has become virtual money; no serious arm’s-length entity will buy its debt; most of the largest states of the union are bust; there is no visible will to pay down the debt instead of just devaluing the currency in which it is denominated; the Treasury secretary is as silent as a cigar-store Indian; and Mr. Bernanke’s homilies about clearing up the central bank’s balance sheet are moonshine. The emperor not only has no clothes; in his underclad state he can be seen to be missing some important anatomical components as well.
Mao Tse-tung, in frustration, called the U.S. a “paper tiger,” before he conciliated it; Andrei Gromyko impatiently dismissed his Egyptian ally as “a paper camel,” before their relations broke down. If present trends continue, the U.S. will be a paper mouse before the great American people finally demand that America be America. In the meantime, Iran will at least have punctured the bubble of the hypocrisy of the nuclear-arms regime. The non-proliferation agreements require the nuclear powers to negotiate toward disarmament, which is nonsense, and Barack Obama is the first person to take the idea seriously since the senescent Bertrand Russell. If Iran proceeds undisturbed, other than by hackers, to nuclear capability, assisted by the Russians (while Joe Biden resets the button) and by the Chinese (whom we seem not to dare to question), 20 or 30 countries will follow. If Pakistan and Iran, and the gangster state of Russia, can have nuclear weapons, why should not all the responsible countries, less confident than they were in the American alliance, as well as many of the irresponsible countries, do the same?
A piquant irony in the Obama age is the extreme rudeness of this administration to its ostensible friends, and in normal contacts within the official Washington establishment. President Obama responded to British prime minister Gordon Brown’s thoughtful gift of a bureau made from the timbers of a ship that fought the slave trade, with a set of DVDs for Queen Elizabeth and the return of a bust of Sir Winston Churchill (an honorary citizen of the United States, after whom President Clinton named a U.S. Navy frigate). President Obama harangued the Supreme Court in his State of the Union message in January 2010 with a version of the court’s campaign-financing ruling that he knew to be false and that at least one of the justices helpfully and loudly stated to be false, on camera in mid-speech. Supreme Court justices’ attendance at such occasions is now spotty.
The president produced a ludicrous budget that ignored the fiscal crisis, and when House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan produced substantive proposals, Mr. Obama announced that he would reciprocate. He invited Congressman Ryan to attend the unveiling, seated him right in front of him, and pilloried the congressman and his committee. The Congress having invited Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu to address it, President Obama waited until a day before the Israeli leader’s arrival and then gave an address at the State Department that he knew to be completely unacceptable to Israel, had a cordial photo op of reciprocal smiling accusations of bad faith and stupidity with his visitor, and left the country. Even if the 1967 borders were the key to a lasting Israel-Palestine agreement (which they aren’t — Arab acceptance of a Jewish state is), Israel should not be making preemptive concessions to an Arab world almost all of whose neighboring governments are apt to collapse or be overthrown from one week to the next. (Netanyahu’s elegant address to the Congress de-escalated the impasse without turning the other cheek.)
Unless this regime has invented a virtual diplomacy and revisionist history to accompany its virtual currency, none of it makes any sense.
Conrad Black
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Contrary to the famous advice of Franklin D. Roosevelt in his State of the Union message in 1941 — “We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal would preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement” — the United States is now effectively an appeasement power. Because it is so helplessly dependent on imported oil from unfriendly places (unlike Canada), and the American public is so cranky and churlish about paying what other countries pay for imported petroleum products, and the political class of both parties for 40 years has been so hopelessly feeble about explaining the problem and trying to persuade the country to face up to it, the U.S. tolerates the subsidization of Islamic extremism by Saudis and seems to be afraid to do anything to prevent the nuclear militarization of Iran.
Because the U.S. is so debt-ridden and the political class of both parties has generally been incapable of speaking straight to the country about public-sector debt and the related burden of the current-account deficit (half composed of oil imports), and because so much U.S. government debt is held by China, the country’s government is afraid to encourage China’s neighbors to coordinate even an unprovoking and entirely civilized response to China’s high-handed condescensions to India on the Himalayan frontier and puerile expansionism in the South China Sea, presumably for fear of China’s response as a large creditor of the U.S.
No sane person wishes abrasions with another country, especially an important country like China. And there is an argument to be made that short of atrocities on a scale between the anticipated Qaddafi bloodbath in Benghazi and the hecatombs of Rwanda and Cambodia, questions of citizens’ rights in one country are not the province of another country. But all of these responses to the Saudis, Iranians, Chinese, and other regimes, whether concealed in mundane metaphors about reset buttons or swaddled in pseudo-worldly solicitude for the sensibilities of other cultures, show what Roosevelt called “the ‘ism’ of appeasement.”
President Obama campaigned on promises to restore fiscal order and reduce imports of oil from hostile countries. He is already trying to raise a billion dollars for his reelection campaign but has delivered nothing on these absolutely vital objectives that he so clearly espoused. We are still wallowing in oil consumption, mouthing fairy tales about renewable energy and climate change, while we seem to have raised our hands like hold-up victims and surrendered on a military option to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear military power, and have scaled back Mrs. Clinton’s promised “crippling sanctions” against the ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad to porous inconveniences.
Instead of addressing the debt problem that has made discussion of default on “the faith and credit of these United States” a routine possible scenario, the U.S. has poured out $3 trillion of debt, which can be financed only by issuance of bonds to the Federal Reserve, paid for by electronic notes from the Federal Reserve. The world’s reserve currency has become virtual money; no serious arm’s-length entity will buy its debt; most of the largest states of the union are bust; there is no visible will to pay down the debt instead of just devaluing the currency in which it is denominated; the Treasury secretary is as silent as a cigar-store Indian; and Mr. Bernanke’s homilies about clearing up the central bank’s balance sheet are moonshine. The emperor not only has no clothes; in his underclad state he can be seen to be missing some important anatomical components as well.
Mao Tse-tung, in frustration, called the U.S. a “paper tiger,” before he conciliated it; Andrei Gromyko impatiently dismissed his Egyptian ally as “a paper camel,” before their relations broke down. If present trends continue, the U.S. will be a paper mouse before the great American people finally demand that America be America. In the meantime, Iran will at least have punctured the bubble of the hypocrisy of the nuclear-arms regime. The non-proliferation agreements require the nuclear powers to negotiate toward disarmament, which is nonsense, and Barack Obama is the first person to take the idea seriously since the senescent Bertrand Russell. If Iran proceeds undisturbed, other than by hackers, to nuclear capability, assisted by the Russians (while Joe Biden resets the button) and by the Chinese (whom we seem not to dare to question), 20 or 30 countries will follow. If Pakistan and Iran, and the gangster state of Russia, can have nuclear weapons, why should not all the responsible countries, less confident than they were in the American alliance, as well as many of the irresponsible countries, do the same?
A piquant irony in the Obama age is the extreme rudeness of this administration to its ostensible friends, and in normal contacts within the official Washington establishment. President Obama responded to British prime minister Gordon Brown’s thoughtful gift of a bureau made from the timbers of a ship that fought the slave trade, with a set of DVDs for Queen Elizabeth and the return of a bust of Sir Winston Churchill (an honorary citizen of the United States, after whom President Clinton named a U.S. Navy frigate). President Obama harangued the Supreme Court in his State of the Union message in January 2010 with a version of the court’s campaign-financing ruling that he knew to be false and that at least one of the justices helpfully and loudly stated to be false, on camera in mid-speech. Supreme Court justices’ attendance at such occasions is now spotty.
The president produced a ludicrous budget that ignored the fiscal crisis, and when House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan produced substantive proposals, Mr. Obama announced that he would reciprocate. He invited Congressman Ryan to attend the unveiling, seated him right in front of him, and pilloried the congressman and his committee. The Congress having invited Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu to address it, President Obama waited until a day before the Israeli leader’s arrival and then gave an address at the State Department that he knew to be completely unacceptable to Israel, had a cordial photo op of reciprocal smiling accusations of bad faith and stupidity with his visitor, and left the country. Even if the 1967 borders were the key to a lasting Israel-Palestine agreement (which they aren’t — Arab acceptance of a Jewish state is), Israel should not be making preemptive concessions to an Arab world almost all of whose neighboring governments are apt to collapse or be overthrown from one week to the next. (Netanyahu’s elegant address to the Congress de-escalated the impasse without turning the other cheek.)
Unless this regime has invented a virtual diplomacy and revisionist history to accompany its virtual currency, none of it makes any sense.
Back to the Pre-American World
By Victor Davis HansonThursday, May 26, 2011
Is America's preeminent world role over?
That's what a recent New Yorker essay, based on interviews with presidential advisers, claimed. It characterized the new Obama foreign-relations style as "leading from behind" -- given the supposed inevitable American decline and growing unpopularity. The president is said to agree with pundits such as Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman, who have often outlined the parameters of what the post-American world would look like.
But if American abrogates its preeminent leadership position of the last 65 years, wouldn't the world look a lot like it did in the pre-American days of the 1930s? Then, a Depression-era United States was just one of many powers and reluctant to assert leadership abroad.
Eighty years ago, a newly Westernized and anti-democratic Japanese powerhouse, in the fashion of today's rising China, was carving out uncontested Asian spheres of influence. An oil-, rubber- and iron-hungry imperial Japan claimed it needed more natural resources to fuel its industrial revolution, and so spread an authoritarian Asian co-prosperity sphere of influence as an alternative to alliance with an economically depressed and psychologically withdrawn America.
Most Americans then were tired anyway of overseas commitments. Our ancestors felt that their considerable sacrifices in World War I either had gone unappreciated or had solved little -- not unlike the way we are becoming exhausted by Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya.
A newly confident, united and ascendant Germany was growing angry at other European countries. It nursed a long list of financial grievances over feeling used and abused. Sound familiar? A weak Britain and France had almost no confidence in their own declining militaries -- sort of like the sad spectacle of their impotence in Libya that we have witnessed over the last two months.
Much-vaunted international institutions, like the bankrupt League of Nations, were about as effective in the role of world watchdogs as the corrupt United Nations is today. Europe and America were emerging from the nightmare of financial insolvency.
The so-called international community cared as much in the 1930s about rising, aggressive totalitarian states in Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia as it does today about ascendant China or Iran. Millions of Jews, then as now, heard crazy threats of their annihilation, and desperately -- and in vain -- looked to the protection of the United States.
In other words, the post-American world could look a lot like the rather terrifying pre-American version of seven decades past. Why in the world would we wish to return to it?
The declinists insist we have no choice. Globalization has spread power. America has depleted its resources, both natural and financial. And our prior leadership abroad is something worthy of apology rather than pride anyway. Think of receding postcolonial Britain around 1946 as our model, not the confident, rising postwar United States of Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
But decline is always a choice, not an inevitable fate. America's known fossil-fuel reserves -- natural gas, oil, coal, shale, tar-sands -- are larger than ever. The problem is not finding more energy but marshaling the will to use the vast new sources of energy we have recently discovered.
Our military is not just larger than the alternatives, but vastly larger and ever more lethal. Given the enormous size and productivity of the U.S. economy, we have the means -- but not yet the will -- to rapidly pay down our huge debt. In a world short on food, America is the world's greatest agricultural producer.
Other industrialized populations age and decline; ours is still growing. America is widely criticized abroad even as it remains by far the favored destination of global immigrants. Diverse religious practice is still vibrant in the United States. Elsewhere, it is fossilized in Europe, nonexistent in China, and intolerant in the Middle East.
While riots, strikes or revolutions sweep southern Europe and the Middle East, the United States remains stable and quiet -- despite far greater racial, ethnic and religious diversity. Globalization is still mostly a phenomenon of American innovation and originality to be licensed and outsourced abroad.
There have been plenty of thugs who threatened their neighbors over the last 30 years. Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Manuel Noriega and the Taliban were all deposed from rule only by American power. The "lost" war in Iraq resulted in a democratic and, for now, still viable government in place of genocide. Afghanistan is depressing, but the medieval Taliban still have remained out of power for nearly a decade.
In short, the old pre-American world was as unstable and dangerous as would be a new post-American update. But both retrenchments were choices that an unsure and depressed United States made -- not symptoms, then or now, of inherent weakness or inevitable decline.
Is America's preeminent world role over?
That's what a recent New Yorker essay, based on interviews with presidential advisers, claimed. It characterized the new Obama foreign-relations style as "leading from behind" -- given the supposed inevitable American decline and growing unpopularity. The president is said to agree with pundits such as Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman, who have often outlined the parameters of what the post-American world would look like.
But if American abrogates its preeminent leadership position of the last 65 years, wouldn't the world look a lot like it did in the pre-American days of the 1930s? Then, a Depression-era United States was just one of many powers and reluctant to assert leadership abroad.
Eighty years ago, a newly Westernized and anti-democratic Japanese powerhouse, in the fashion of today's rising China, was carving out uncontested Asian spheres of influence. An oil-, rubber- and iron-hungry imperial Japan claimed it needed more natural resources to fuel its industrial revolution, and so spread an authoritarian Asian co-prosperity sphere of influence as an alternative to alliance with an economically depressed and psychologically withdrawn America.
Most Americans then were tired anyway of overseas commitments. Our ancestors felt that their considerable sacrifices in World War I either had gone unappreciated or had solved little -- not unlike the way we are becoming exhausted by Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya.
A newly confident, united and ascendant Germany was growing angry at other European countries. It nursed a long list of financial grievances over feeling used and abused. Sound familiar? A weak Britain and France had almost no confidence in their own declining militaries -- sort of like the sad spectacle of their impotence in Libya that we have witnessed over the last two months.
Much-vaunted international institutions, like the bankrupt League of Nations, were about as effective in the role of world watchdogs as the corrupt United Nations is today. Europe and America were emerging from the nightmare of financial insolvency.
The so-called international community cared as much in the 1930s about rising, aggressive totalitarian states in Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia as it does today about ascendant China or Iran. Millions of Jews, then as now, heard crazy threats of their annihilation, and desperately -- and in vain -- looked to the protection of the United States.
In other words, the post-American world could look a lot like the rather terrifying pre-American version of seven decades past. Why in the world would we wish to return to it?
The declinists insist we have no choice. Globalization has spread power. America has depleted its resources, both natural and financial. And our prior leadership abroad is something worthy of apology rather than pride anyway. Think of receding postcolonial Britain around 1946 as our model, not the confident, rising postwar United States of Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
But decline is always a choice, not an inevitable fate. America's known fossil-fuel reserves -- natural gas, oil, coal, shale, tar-sands -- are larger than ever. The problem is not finding more energy but marshaling the will to use the vast new sources of energy we have recently discovered.
Our military is not just larger than the alternatives, but vastly larger and ever more lethal. Given the enormous size and productivity of the U.S. economy, we have the means -- but not yet the will -- to rapidly pay down our huge debt. In a world short on food, America is the world's greatest agricultural producer.
Other industrialized populations age and decline; ours is still growing. America is widely criticized abroad even as it remains by far the favored destination of global immigrants. Diverse religious practice is still vibrant in the United States. Elsewhere, it is fossilized in Europe, nonexistent in China, and intolerant in the Middle East.
While riots, strikes or revolutions sweep southern Europe and the Middle East, the United States remains stable and quiet -- despite far greater racial, ethnic and religious diversity. Globalization is still mostly a phenomenon of American innovation and originality to be licensed and outsourced abroad.
There have been plenty of thugs who threatened their neighbors over the last 30 years. Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Manuel Noriega and the Taliban were all deposed from rule only by American power. The "lost" war in Iraq resulted in a democratic and, for now, still viable government in place of genocide. Afghanistan is depressing, but the medieval Taliban still have remained out of power for nearly a decade.
In short, the old pre-American world was as unstable and dangerous as would be a new post-American update. But both retrenchments were choices that an unsure and depressed United States made -- not symptoms, then or now, of inherent weakness or inevitable decline.
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