Marita Noon
Sunday, July 31, 2011
For most of the last decade, alarmists have rung the global warming bell. Back in 2006, when Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was released, it seemed folks were beginning to wake up to the alarm. Public concern regarding global warming peaked following the release of Gore’s movie and is now back down to pre-propaganda levels. Addressing the declining public alarm about global warming, Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, said, “The erosion in both public concern and public trust about global warming should be a clarion call for people and organizations trying to educate the public about this important issue.”
Ed, Al, et al, should be alarmed, as three different news items in one week add to the public’s growing skepticism about global warming.
Most notable is the announcement of an “ongoing internal investigation” into potential scientific misconduct and integrity issues of Charles Monnett—the Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, whose 2004 observation of presumably drowned polar bears in the Arctic helped to galvanize the man-made global warming movement. Monnett’s paper “Observations of mortality associated with extended open-water swimming by polar bears in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea” was released in 2006. (Interestingly, Al Gore started his for-profit company, Generation Investment Management in 2004 and released his film in 2006.)
The scientist who reported on dying polar bears gave the global warming movement its mascot—even though he wasn’t studying polar bears. His study was on whales. He saw dead polar bears. While working on the whales, he made some observations based on anecdotal evidence—not science. Monnett’s report is filled with words like: speculate, suggest, may, presume, apparent, almost, and could. The basic conclusion found in his polar bear mortality paper is that the dead polar bears were the result of high waves during a storm. On the last page of the report, he states: “Although a number of published papers have discussed implications of climate change on polar bears, to date, mortality due to swimming has not been identified as an associated risk.” Despite the statement that the “poster-child” of global warming propaganda isn’t drowning due to climate change, and regardless of the fact that there have not been increasing reports of downing polar bears (other than those mistakenly killed by the researchers), alarmists embraced the polar bear as the icon—making it into the star of An Inconvenient Truth.
But now, the integrity of the author of this foundational work of the global warming movement is under investigation—bringing into question the integrity of the entire theory.
On July 28, the Globe and Mail, updated a report that indicates that melting ice—which is supposedly causing the polar-bear drownings—is not caused by global warming. Instead, Canadian scientists found that ice is melting more quickly than the predictions and it is melting due to varied salt levels in the older ice versus the younger ice. Simon Boxall of the Catlin Artic Survey explained that it is a more complicated process than simple warming. “Because fresh meltwater is colder than seawater, that means relatively warm water is being forced upwards. And that may be part of the reason that sea ice is melting so much faster than anyone thought it would.”
In the same week that the misconduct investigation was announced and the sea ice report was updated, The University of Alabama issued a press release heralding new findings from NASA’s Terra satellite. In short, as reported in Forbes, “The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.” Another assumption bites the dust. Unfortunately, billions of dollars of taxpayer money have already been spent in questionable projects resulting in a campaign to promote expensive ethanol, wind, and solar energy to fix a problem that doesn’t appear to exist.
Add these news items—all from just one week—to the climategate scandal, the overall lack of warming, and other predictions from the alarmists that have not been borne out, and one has to wonder how the alarmists can still believe. More and more, the American public is hitting the snooze button, and it is the alarmists who should be alarmed. It looks like they will have to find a new clarion call—a new way to spread fear, and a new way to restrict energy and control freedom.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
White House's Over-the-Cliff Moment
By Salena Zito
Sunday, July 31, 2011
When historians look back on this moment in American politics, they may wonder why the White House failed to focus on the consuming issue of the time: the economy -- and, in particular, jobs.
An exasperated U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., said in a recent phone interview, "Frankly, our constituents really just want us to focus on jobs."
Instead, he and five Western Pennsylvania congressmen are caught in the crosshairs of Washington's political blood sport, as both parties clash over debt limits and deficits.
Outside Washington, constituents are clamoring about the economy -- or, as U.S. Rep. Jason Altmire, D-McCandless, interprets it: "Let us know when you guys are done with the bickering, so we can talk about fixing our economy."
On Friday, the Commerce Department released stunning numbers that showed that the U.S. economy grew less than forecasted. Consumer spending, which is about 70 percent of the economy, climbed 0.1 percent.
What did that mean? Well, not much in terms of growth.
Most analysts estimated that the economy only grew at an annualized rate of 1.7 percent between April and June; it only grew 1.3 percent, which borders between abysmal and anemic.
Estimates by financial powerhouses such as JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs predict 2.5 percent growth for the second quarter, not enough to put a dent in our 9.2 percent jobless rate.
In fact, our economy would need to chug along at a little more than 4.5 percent growth for a whole year to bring down the unemployment rate by 1 percentage point.
Manufacturing, one of the few economic sectors that has seen growth lately, posted a drop in orders for long-lasting goods in May, according to a mid-July report by the Commerce Department. Those orders are expected to grow, however.
Still, Americans have the jitters when it comes to buying; they have no confidence in the "American Dream" right now, and no confidence means no buying.
Their attitude is backed up by a report issued by a liberal research and advocacy group, the National Employment Law Project, showing that more than 70 percent of the jobs added since the recession began have been in low-wage occupations paying less than $14 an hour.
So, creating jobs is the important mission for members of Congress, according to U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Butler, a member of the 2010 freshman class. He and Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Upper St. Clair, want to see the White House focus on jobs, too.
"Creating well-paying jobs is even more important," adds Rep. Mark Critz, D-Johnstown.
All five lawmakers -- Casey, Altmire, Kelly, Murphy and Critz -- said their constituents want Washington to take action on jobs, based on phone calls to their offices and comments they hear when meeting with voters in their districts.
Voters in Pennsylvania want to see manufacturing and energy production through coal and Marcellus shale gas become central parts of any economic renewal, not only in the Keystone State but across the country.
Murphy thinks Pennsylvanians have a remarkable work ethic, and he wants them to have opportunities to use it.
In June, the nation's unemployment rate rose for a third straight month, as employers added only 18,000 workers and corporate earnings languished.
Anyone buying basic groceries can feel the pinch of consumer prices rising to offset higher commodity costs, so buying little beyond what you absolutely need has become the norm.
President Barack Obama's support has eroded among the very independent voters who helped him sweep into office. That drop-off is based on his inability to lead on numerous issues, but most importantly on the economy.
The latest Pew Research poll confirms just that: Only 8 percent of those polled say the national economy is in excellent or good shape, and only 38 percent rate their personal finances positively.
Such attitudes place Obama in an even worse position than President George H.W. Bush was in during his failed 1991-92 re-election campaign, because today's unemployment rate is much higher and overall satisfaction with the state of the nation is much lower than it was back then.
Polls are no substitute for understanding basic human judgment. Yet they can mark that point in time when an administration fell off the cliff of understanding its own people.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
When historians look back on this moment in American politics, they may wonder why the White House failed to focus on the consuming issue of the time: the economy -- and, in particular, jobs.
An exasperated U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., said in a recent phone interview, "Frankly, our constituents really just want us to focus on jobs."
Instead, he and five Western Pennsylvania congressmen are caught in the crosshairs of Washington's political blood sport, as both parties clash over debt limits and deficits.
Outside Washington, constituents are clamoring about the economy -- or, as U.S. Rep. Jason Altmire, D-McCandless, interprets it: "Let us know when you guys are done with the bickering, so we can talk about fixing our economy."
On Friday, the Commerce Department released stunning numbers that showed that the U.S. economy grew less than forecasted. Consumer spending, which is about 70 percent of the economy, climbed 0.1 percent.
What did that mean? Well, not much in terms of growth.
Most analysts estimated that the economy only grew at an annualized rate of 1.7 percent between April and June; it only grew 1.3 percent, which borders between abysmal and anemic.
Estimates by financial powerhouses such as JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs predict 2.5 percent growth for the second quarter, not enough to put a dent in our 9.2 percent jobless rate.
In fact, our economy would need to chug along at a little more than 4.5 percent growth for a whole year to bring down the unemployment rate by 1 percentage point.
Manufacturing, one of the few economic sectors that has seen growth lately, posted a drop in orders for long-lasting goods in May, according to a mid-July report by the Commerce Department. Those orders are expected to grow, however.
Still, Americans have the jitters when it comes to buying; they have no confidence in the "American Dream" right now, and no confidence means no buying.
Their attitude is backed up by a report issued by a liberal research and advocacy group, the National Employment Law Project, showing that more than 70 percent of the jobs added since the recession began have been in low-wage occupations paying less than $14 an hour.
So, creating jobs is the important mission for members of Congress, according to U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Butler, a member of the 2010 freshman class. He and Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Upper St. Clair, want to see the White House focus on jobs, too.
"Creating well-paying jobs is even more important," adds Rep. Mark Critz, D-Johnstown.
All five lawmakers -- Casey, Altmire, Kelly, Murphy and Critz -- said their constituents want Washington to take action on jobs, based on phone calls to their offices and comments they hear when meeting with voters in their districts.
Voters in Pennsylvania want to see manufacturing and energy production through coal and Marcellus shale gas become central parts of any economic renewal, not only in the Keystone State but across the country.
Murphy thinks Pennsylvanians have a remarkable work ethic, and he wants them to have opportunities to use it.
In June, the nation's unemployment rate rose for a third straight month, as employers added only 18,000 workers and corporate earnings languished.
Anyone buying basic groceries can feel the pinch of consumer prices rising to offset higher commodity costs, so buying little beyond what you absolutely need has become the norm.
President Barack Obama's support has eroded among the very independent voters who helped him sweep into office. That drop-off is based on his inability to lead on numerous issues, but most importantly on the economy.
The latest Pew Research poll confirms just that: Only 8 percent of those polled say the national economy is in excellent or good shape, and only 38 percent rate their personal finances positively.
Such attitudes place Obama in an even worse position than President George H.W. Bush was in during his failed 1991-92 re-election campaign, because today's unemployment rate is much higher and overall satisfaction with the state of the nation is much lower than it was back then.
Polls are no substitute for understanding basic human judgment. Yet they can mark that point in time when an administration fell off the cliff of understanding its own people.
Is Obama or Mexico Worse on Unemployment?
By Kevin McCullough
Sunday, July 31, 2011
This week the Mexican Consulate to Sacramento California proclaimed, "We have become a middle class country!"
Oh if only President Obama could say the same.
See, for Mexico to bootstrap its way to middle class status, lots of things had to change from only a few years ago. Finance markets had to open up. People needed to access education, and ultimately people needed to be able to work.
And work they are south of the border.
Sporting a brand new unemployment rate of just under 5%, the current Mexican economy is humming, people are buying homes and people are working. In fact, the small business community of Mexico is creating jobs and a need for workers so fast that from only California nearly 300,000 illegals have repatriated themselves to Mexico, just to do those jobs "that Americans never would."
Another soaring economic factor for Mexico is that the most lucrative jobs are in the construction business. Homes, production facilities, and factories are all working to spur on the next generation of Mexican entrepreneurial success.
Put that side by side with American construction trends since President Obama came to office and the contrast is stunning.
Do you realize that America has the worst economy on our continent?
White House officials will get unbelievably angry when this is pointed out, but 5% unemployment was what this nation enjoyed under President Bush. So what did President Bush know, and what do Mexico and Canada now know that President Obama doesn't know?
Most likely it's got something to do with the idea that small businesses are the engine to a growing economy. And while Mexico is building things and growing things, inner city Obama voters are sitting on their tukas (or in the collective "tukai") groaning about how much the government "ain't doin' for me!"
Stimulating failed businesses, insisting on "fixing" health care with entitlement "benefits" that no one likes, and talking up green energy while ignoring the plethora of energy resources we have at the reach of our fingers roughly sums up the Obama term. The plan of action so misguided that even now he's taken aback that he must yet try to solve the problem of adding on to the nation's credit card.
All the while he obfuscates and instructs his budget director to do the same, so that he may scare social security recipients of the benefits they paid into. (You do know don't you that the tax intake from July 2011 will be in excess of $200,000,000,000 and it would only take $20,000,000,000 to meet the social security needs?)
I know that in the midst of all the arguments about how the government can't even consider not sending out it's 80,000,000 checks this next week its hard to grasp pictures of two nations most Americans normally see as inferior--actually doing better than us--but reality dictates a closer look be had.
Canada was in almost an identical economic free fall in 2009. We "stimulated" our economy by propping up companies making horrible products and falsely thinking we solved the problem. Obama promised 8% unemployment--worst case--if we passed the stimulus. Canada chose not to, and the rate at which their nation has rebounded has outpaced America on all levels.
Meanwhile to our south, Mexico is seeing the greatest economic middle class expansion in it's history, and their unemployment levels are roughly HALF what ours in America are.
Still think President Obama is improving our image on the international stage?
Mexico has been an infinitely more disorganized, poorly led, poorly secured, and poorly resourced nation for most of its existence in modern times. I mean the words of the Consulate to Sacramento say it all--they're throwing parties that they've become a "middle class nation."
Meanwhile America is on exactly the opposite trend.
How long does this last? About as long as President Obama is left in office, I'm guessing.
One final thought, America's solution might just be one of Mexico's neighbors. Governor Perry in Texas has created half of all the new jobs in the entire nation in the past three years, should he ever decide to take a stab at it, (being President) his proximity to Mexico might just end up being... an asset.
Of course by then President Obama will be sitting in his urban living room collecting his unemployment checks like most of the rest of the people his policies have so miserably failed. The ones he's failed most being just blocks away from his Chicago address.
Just imagine the campaign spots, (Music fade, minor key dramatic)(Big throaty announcer:) "Who would've ever guessed that Mex-i-co would surpass the United States in job creation, just two and half years into his administration? No... He... Can't! Vote for anyone other than Obama in 2012, and take back your con-ti-nent!" (Music swell.)
Sunday, July 31, 2011
This week the Mexican Consulate to Sacramento California proclaimed, "We have become a middle class country!"
Oh if only President Obama could say the same.
See, for Mexico to bootstrap its way to middle class status, lots of things had to change from only a few years ago. Finance markets had to open up. People needed to access education, and ultimately people needed to be able to work.
And work they are south of the border.
Sporting a brand new unemployment rate of just under 5%, the current Mexican economy is humming, people are buying homes and people are working. In fact, the small business community of Mexico is creating jobs and a need for workers so fast that from only California nearly 300,000 illegals have repatriated themselves to Mexico, just to do those jobs "that Americans never would."
Another soaring economic factor for Mexico is that the most lucrative jobs are in the construction business. Homes, production facilities, and factories are all working to spur on the next generation of Mexican entrepreneurial success.
Put that side by side with American construction trends since President Obama came to office and the contrast is stunning.
Do you realize that America has the worst economy on our continent?
White House officials will get unbelievably angry when this is pointed out, but 5% unemployment was what this nation enjoyed under President Bush. So what did President Bush know, and what do Mexico and Canada now know that President Obama doesn't know?
Most likely it's got something to do with the idea that small businesses are the engine to a growing economy. And while Mexico is building things and growing things, inner city Obama voters are sitting on their tukas (or in the collective "tukai") groaning about how much the government "ain't doin' for me!"
Stimulating failed businesses, insisting on "fixing" health care with entitlement "benefits" that no one likes, and talking up green energy while ignoring the plethora of energy resources we have at the reach of our fingers roughly sums up the Obama term. The plan of action so misguided that even now he's taken aback that he must yet try to solve the problem of adding on to the nation's credit card.
All the while he obfuscates and instructs his budget director to do the same, so that he may scare social security recipients of the benefits they paid into. (You do know don't you that the tax intake from July 2011 will be in excess of $200,000,000,000 and it would only take $20,000,000,000 to meet the social security needs?)
I know that in the midst of all the arguments about how the government can't even consider not sending out it's 80,000,000 checks this next week its hard to grasp pictures of two nations most Americans normally see as inferior--actually doing better than us--but reality dictates a closer look be had.
Canada was in almost an identical economic free fall in 2009. We "stimulated" our economy by propping up companies making horrible products and falsely thinking we solved the problem. Obama promised 8% unemployment--worst case--if we passed the stimulus. Canada chose not to, and the rate at which their nation has rebounded has outpaced America on all levels.
Meanwhile to our south, Mexico is seeing the greatest economic middle class expansion in it's history, and their unemployment levels are roughly HALF what ours in America are.
Still think President Obama is improving our image on the international stage?
Mexico has been an infinitely more disorganized, poorly led, poorly secured, and poorly resourced nation for most of its existence in modern times. I mean the words of the Consulate to Sacramento say it all--they're throwing parties that they've become a "middle class nation."
Meanwhile America is on exactly the opposite trend.
How long does this last? About as long as President Obama is left in office, I'm guessing.
One final thought, America's solution might just be one of Mexico's neighbors. Governor Perry in Texas has created half of all the new jobs in the entire nation in the past three years, should he ever decide to take a stab at it, (being President) his proximity to Mexico might just end up being... an asset.
Of course by then President Obama will be sitting in his urban living room collecting his unemployment checks like most of the rest of the people his policies have so miserably failed. The ones he's failed most being just blocks away from his Chicago address.
Just imagine the campaign spots, (Music fade, minor key dramatic)(Big throaty announcer:) "Who would've ever guessed that Mex-i-co would surpass the United States in job creation, just two and half years into his administration? No... He... Can't! Vote for anyone other than Obama in 2012, and take back your con-ti-nent!" (Music swell.)
Saturday, July 30, 2011
A Post-American Planet
Decline starts with the money, but it doesn’t stop there.
Mark Steyn
Saturday, July 30, 2011
That thoughtful observer of the passing parade, Nancy Pelosi, weighed in on the “debt ceiling” negotiations the other day: “What we’re trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We’re trying to save life on this planet as we know it today.”
It’s always good to have things explained in terms we simpletons can understand. After a while, all the stuff about debt-to-GDP ratio and CBO alternative baseline scenarios starts to give you a bit of a headache, so we should be grateful to the House minority leader for putting it in layman’s terms: What’s at stake is “life on this planet as we know it today.” So, if right now you’re living anywhere in the general vicinity of this planet, it’s good to know Nancy’s in there pitching for you.
What about life on this planet tomorrow? How’s that look if Nancy gets her way? The Democrat model of governance is to spend $4 trillion while only collecting $2 trillion, borrowing the rest from tomorrow. Instead of “printing money,” we’re printing credit cards and pre-approving our unborn grandchildren. To facilitate this proposition, Washington created its own form of fantasy accounting: “baseline budgeting,” under which growth-in-government is factored in to federal bookkeeping as a permanent feature of life. As Arthur Herman of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out this week, under present rules, if the government were to announce a spending freeze — that’s to say, no increases, no cuts, everything just stays exactly the same — the Congressional Budget Office would score it as a $9 trillion savings. In real-world terms, there are no “savings,” and there’s certainly no $9 trillion. In fact, there isn’t one thin dime. But nevertheless, that’s how it would be measured at the CBO.
Around the world, most folks have to work harder than that to save $9 trillion. That’s roughly the combined GDPs of Japan and Germany. But in America it’s an accounting device. This is something to bear in mind when you’re listening to the amount of “savings” touted by whatever triumphant bipartisan deal is announced at the eleventh hour in Washington.
So I find myself less interested in “life on this planet as we know it today” than in life on this planet as we’re likely to know it tomorrow if Nancy Pelosi and her chums decline to reacquaint themselves with reality. If you kinda dig life on this planet as you know it, ask yourself this: What’s holding the joint up? As the old gag goes, if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. If you owe the banks 15,000,000,000,000 dollars, the planet has a problem. Whatever comparisons one might make with Europe’s soi-disant “PIIGS” re debt per capita or deficit-to-GDP ratio, the sheer hard numbers involved represent a threat to the planet that Portugal or Ireland does not. It also represents a threat to Americans. Three years ago, the first developed nation to hit the skids was Iceland. But, unless you’re Icelandic, who cares? And, if you are Icelandic, you hunker down, readjust to straitened circumstances , and a few years down the line Iceland will still be Iceland and, if that’s your bag, relatively pleasant.
That’s not an option for the U.S. We are chugging a highly toxic cocktail: 21st-century spendaholic government with mid-20th-century assumptions about American power. After the Battle of Saratoga, Adam Smith replied to a pal despondent that the revolting colonials were going to be the ruin of Britain: “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” said a sanguine Smith.
That’s generally true. Americans of a certain bent looking at post-war France or Germany might reasonably conclude what’s the big deal about genteel decline. The difference, of course, is that Europe’s decline was cushioned by America. Who’s around to cushion America’s decline?
If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet’s No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever’s elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world’s dominant economic power. As I point out in my rollicking new book, which will be hitting what’s left of the post-Borders bookstore business any day now, this will mark the end of two centuries of Anglophone dominance — first by London, then its greatest if prodigal son. The world’s economic superpower will not only be a Communist dictatorship with a largely peasant population and legal, political, and cultural traditions as alien to its predecessors as possible, but, even more civilizationally startling, it will be, unlike the U.S., Britain, and the Dutch and Italians before them, a country that doesn’t even use the Roman alphabet.
The American economy has been “stimulated” to a bloody pulp by the racketeers in Washington, mostly to buy off approved interests. Meanwhile, as Nancy defends life on this planet today, the contours of life on this planet tomorrow are beginning to emerge.
Remember the Libyan War? Oh, come on. It was in all the papers for a couple of days. And then, oddly enough, the media lost interest in Obama’s war.
But it’s still going on, out there on the fringes of the map. “We are generally in a stalemate,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced to a roomful of chirping crickets the other day. At the start of NATO’s desultory bombing campaign, the French and the British were demanding that Qaddafi be removed from power, leave Libya, and be put on trial at the Hague. Last week, they subtly modified their position: He can remain in Libya, but he definitely has to step down from power. Expect further modifications in their next ultimatum: He can remain in the presidential palace, but he has to move to the poky guest bedroom under the eaves.
Meanwhile, the Lockerbie bomber has been appearing at delirious pro-Qaddafi rallies. Remember the Lockerbie bomber? He was returned to Libya because he was terminally ill and only had three months to live. That was two years ago. It’s amazing what getting out of the care of the Scottish National Health Service can do for your life expectancy. Likewise, back in the spring, NATO declared that Qaddafi’s presidency only had three weeks to live. Like his compatriot, he seems disinclined to follow the diagnosis.
The Libyan War never caught the imagination of the American public, even though you’re paying for most of it. But in Tehran and Moscow and Beijing they’re following it. And they regard it as a useful preview of the post-American world. Absent American will, even a tinpot desert drag queen can stand up to the great powers and survive. The lesson of Obama’s half-hearted little war isn’t lost in the chancelleries of America’s enemies.
For dominant powers in decline, it starts with the money, for Washington as for London and Rome before it. But it never stops there. The horizons shrivel. Two-bit provocateurs across the map pick off remnants of the old order with ever greater ease.
America has had two roles in a so-called “globalized” world: America’s government was the guarantor of global order; America’s economy was the engine of global prosperity. Right now, both roles are up for grabs. And there are no takers for the former. Pace Nancy Pelosi, “life on this planet as we know it today” is going to change, and very fast.
Mark Steyn
Saturday, July 30, 2011
That thoughtful observer of the passing parade, Nancy Pelosi, weighed in on the “debt ceiling” negotiations the other day: “What we’re trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We’re trying to save life on this planet as we know it today.”
It’s always good to have things explained in terms we simpletons can understand. After a while, all the stuff about debt-to-GDP ratio and CBO alternative baseline scenarios starts to give you a bit of a headache, so we should be grateful to the House minority leader for putting it in layman’s terms: What’s at stake is “life on this planet as we know it today.” So, if right now you’re living anywhere in the general vicinity of this planet, it’s good to know Nancy’s in there pitching for you.
What about life on this planet tomorrow? How’s that look if Nancy gets her way? The Democrat model of governance is to spend $4 trillion while only collecting $2 trillion, borrowing the rest from tomorrow. Instead of “printing money,” we’re printing credit cards and pre-approving our unborn grandchildren. To facilitate this proposition, Washington created its own form of fantasy accounting: “baseline budgeting,” under which growth-in-government is factored in to federal bookkeeping as a permanent feature of life. As Arthur Herman of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out this week, under present rules, if the government were to announce a spending freeze — that’s to say, no increases, no cuts, everything just stays exactly the same — the Congressional Budget Office would score it as a $9 trillion savings. In real-world terms, there are no “savings,” and there’s certainly no $9 trillion. In fact, there isn’t one thin dime. But nevertheless, that’s how it would be measured at the CBO.
Around the world, most folks have to work harder than that to save $9 trillion. That’s roughly the combined GDPs of Japan and Germany. But in America it’s an accounting device. This is something to bear in mind when you’re listening to the amount of “savings” touted by whatever triumphant bipartisan deal is announced at the eleventh hour in Washington.
So I find myself less interested in “life on this planet as we know it today” than in life on this planet as we’re likely to know it tomorrow if Nancy Pelosi and her chums decline to reacquaint themselves with reality. If you kinda dig life on this planet as you know it, ask yourself this: What’s holding the joint up? As the old gag goes, if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. If you owe the banks 15,000,000,000,000 dollars, the planet has a problem. Whatever comparisons one might make with Europe’s soi-disant “PIIGS” re debt per capita or deficit-to-GDP ratio, the sheer hard numbers involved represent a threat to the planet that Portugal or Ireland does not. It also represents a threat to Americans. Three years ago, the first developed nation to hit the skids was Iceland. But, unless you’re Icelandic, who cares? And, if you are Icelandic, you hunker down, readjust to straitened circumstances , and a few years down the line Iceland will still be Iceland and, if that’s your bag, relatively pleasant.
That’s not an option for the U.S. We are chugging a highly toxic cocktail: 21st-century spendaholic government with mid-20th-century assumptions about American power. After the Battle of Saratoga, Adam Smith replied to a pal despondent that the revolting colonials were going to be the ruin of Britain: “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” said a sanguine Smith.
That’s generally true. Americans of a certain bent looking at post-war France or Germany might reasonably conclude what’s the big deal about genteel decline. The difference, of course, is that Europe’s decline was cushioned by America. Who’s around to cushion America’s decline?
If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet’s No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever’s elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world’s dominant economic power. As I point out in my rollicking new book, which will be hitting what’s left of the post-Borders bookstore business any day now, this will mark the end of two centuries of Anglophone dominance — first by London, then its greatest if prodigal son. The world’s economic superpower will not only be a Communist dictatorship with a largely peasant population and legal, political, and cultural traditions as alien to its predecessors as possible, but, even more civilizationally startling, it will be, unlike the U.S., Britain, and the Dutch and Italians before them, a country that doesn’t even use the Roman alphabet.
The American economy has been “stimulated” to a bloody pulp by the racketeers in Washington, mostly to buy off approved interests. Meanwhile, as Nancy defends life on this planet today, the contours of life on this planet tomorrow are beginning to emerge.
Remember the Libyan War? Oh, come on. It was in all the papers for a couple of days. And then, oddly enough, the media lost interest in Obama’s war.
But it’s still going on, out there on the fringes of the map. “We are generally in a stalemate,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced to a roomful of chirping crickets the other day. At the start of NATO’s desultory bombing campaign, the French and the British were demanding that Qaddafi be removed from power, leave Libya, and be put on trial at the Hague. Last week, they subtly modified their position: He can remain in Libya, but he definitely has to step down from power. Expect further modifications in their next ultimatum: He can remain in the presidential palace, but he has to move to the poky guest bedroom under the eaves.
Meanwhile, the Lockerbie bomber has been appearing at delirious pro-Qaddafi rallies. Remember the Lockerbie bomber? He was returned to Libya because he was terminally ill and only had three months to live. That was two years ago. It’s amazing what getting out of the care of the Scottish National Health Service can do for your life expectancy. Likewise, back in the spring, NATO declared that Qaddafi’s presidency only had three weeks to live. Like his compatriot, he seems disinclined to follow the diagnosis.
The Libyan War never caught the imagination of the American public, even though you’re paying for most of it. But in Tehran and Moscow and Beijing they’re following it. And they regard it as a useful preview of the post-American world. Absent American will, even a tinpot desert drag queen can stand up to the great powers and survive. The lesson of Obama’s half-hearted little war isn’t lost in the chancelleries of America’s enemies.
For dominant powers in decline, it starts with the money, for Washington as for London and Rome before it. But it never stops there. The horizons shrivel. Two-bit provocateurs across the map pick off remnants of the old order with ever greater ease.
America has had two roles in a so-called “globalized” world: America’s government was the guarantor of global order; America’s economy was the engine of global prosperity. Right now, both roles are up for grabs. And there are no takers for the former. Pace Nancy Pelosi, “life on this planet as we know it today” is going to change, and very fast.
Anders Breivik T-shirts, Anyone?
By Humberto Fontova
Sunday, July 24, 2011
At last count 32 year-old Anders Breivik is accused of 76 murders—to which he both confesses and boasts.
According to the Black Book of Communism, the Castroite firing squads founded and lovingly mentored by Che Guevara, murdered from 12-14 thousand Cubans. During the early months of the bloodbath, the 32 year-old Che Guevara was either delivering the coup ‘de grace to the victims’ (including boys as young as 17) skull, or was at his office window at Havana’s La Cabana prison, watching his darling firing squads at work.
And Che Guevara was no less boastful then Breivik. "Yes--certainly we execute,” Che Guevara boasted while addressing the hallowed halls of the U.N. General Assembly on December 9, 1964. “And we’ll continue executing as long as it is necessary. This is a war to the DEATH against the revolution's enemies!" Che's Guevara's image is considered the most reproduced image of the century, gracing everything from T-shirts to posters, from thong undies to skateboards, from cellphones to infant "onezies." Che Guevara also serves as poster Idol for many fervent activists against the death penalty.
"I have undergone numerous hours of training and simulations. The combination of these factors turns you into an extremely focused and deadly force, a one-man-army. There are situations in which cruelty is necessary, and refusing to apply necessary cruelty is a betrayal of the people whom you wish to protect.” (Anders Breivik’s Manifesto)
“A hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine--that is what our soldiers must become.” (Che Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental.)
This ideal, Che Guevara himself never fulfilled. He was anything but cold-blooded. Guevara relished his kills as both participant and mentor. Their anticipation was no less sweet to this icon of flower children. “I'm here in Cuba's hills, alive and thirsting for blood," he wrote to his wife shortly after landing in Cuba.
“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” said a former Cuban political prisoner, to this writer, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.”
"My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands! With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!" (Che Guevara in his famous “Motorcycle Diaries.”)
From everything written about (and by) him thus far, Breivik appears to have achieved Che Guevara’s ideal of a perfectly cold-blooded killing machine. Other curiosities:
“He predicted a conflagration that would kill or injure more than 1 million people,” writes the NY Times about Breivik’s manifesto. “The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come," wrote Anders Breivik in his Manifesto.
“We reject any peaceful approach. Violence is inevitable. To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” (Che Guevara)
“I’m trying to avoid relationships as it would only complicate my plans any more into one night stands. I am not that person anymore.’ (Anders Breivik)
"I have no home, no woman, no parents, no brothers and no friends. My friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically.” (Che Guevara)
“As a Knight you are operating as a jury, judge and executioner on behalf of all free Europeans.” (Anders Breivik)
“Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. I don't need proof to execute a man. I only need proof that it's necessary to execute him. We execute from revolutionary conviction." (Che Guevara)
“I admit that I am sick of the current development, I would say I'm driven by my love for Europe, European culture and Europeans. (Anders Breivik)
“Let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. (Che Guevara)
“He clearly had no intention of becoming a martyr, “writes Time magazine about Breivik “Instead of fighting to the death with police, he surrendered immediately.
“Don’t shoot! I’m Che. I’m worth more to you alive than dead!” (Che Guevara to Bolivian soldiers Oct. 8 1967)
“You will face women in battle in battle and they will not hesitate to kill you. To them, you are just another armed criminal nut. You must therefore embrace and familiarize yourself with the concept of killing women, even very attractive women.” (Anders Breivik)
On Christmas Eve 1961, a young Cuban woman named Juana Figueroda Diaz spat in the face of the Castroite executioners who were binding and gagging her. They found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (Che’s term for Cuban rednecks who took up arms to fight his theft of their land to create Stalinist kolkhozes.) When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso, Juana was six months pregnant.
Time magazine’s recent piece on Anders Breivik includes the terms, “murderous, deranged, terrorist and psychopath.” But in 1999 Time Magazine hailed Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara among the "heroes and icons" of the century, alongside Mother Theresa.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
At last count 32 year-old Anders Breivik is accused of 76 murders—to which he both confesses and boasts.
According to the Black Book of Communism, the Castroite firing squads founded and lovingly mentored by Che Guevara, murdered from 12-14 thousand Cubans. During the early months of the bloodbath, the 32 year-old Che Guevara was either delivering the coup ‘de grace to the victims’ (including boys as young as 17) skull, or was at his office window at Havana’s La Cabana prison, watching his darling firing squads at work.
And Che Guevara was no less boastful then Breivik. "Yes--certainly we execute,” Che Guevara boasted while addressing the hallowed halls of the U.N. General Assembly on December 9, 1964. “And we’ll continue executing as long as it is necessary. This is a war to the DEATH against the revolution's enemies!" Che's Guevara's image is considered the most reproduced image of the century, gracing everything from T-shirts to posters, from thong undies to skateboards, from cellphones to infant "onezies." Che Guevara also serves as poster Idol for many fervent activists against the death penalty.
"I have undergone numerous hours of training and simulations. The combination of these factors turns you into an extremely focused and deadly force, a one-man-army. There are situations in which cruelty is necessary, and refusing to apply necessary cruelty is a betrayal of the people whom you wish to protect.” (Anders Breivik’s Manifesto)
“A hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine--that is what our soldiers must become.” (Che Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental.)
This ideal, Che Guevara himself never fulfilled. He was anything but cold-blooded. Guevara relished his kills as both participant and mentor. Their anticipation was no less sweet to this icon of flower children. “I'm here in Cuba's hills, alive and thirsting for blood," he wrote to his wife shortly after landing in Cuba.
“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” said a former Cuban political prisoner, to this writer, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.”
"My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands! With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!" (Che Guevara in his famous “Motorcycle Diaries.”)
From everything written about (and by) him thus far, Breivik appears to have achieved Che Guevara’s ideal of a perfectly cold-blooded killing machine. Other curiosities:
“He predicted a conflagration that would kill or injure more than 1 million people,” writes the NY Times about Breivik’s manifesto. “The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come," wrote Anders Breivik in his Manifesto.
“We reject any peaceful approach. Violence is inevitable. To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.” (Che Guevara)
“I’m trying to avoid relationships as it would only complicate my plans any more into one night stands. I am not that person anymore.’ (Anders Breivik)
"I have no home, no woman, no parents, no brothers and no friends. My friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically.” (Che Guevara)
“As a Knight you are operating as a jury, judge and executioner on behalf of all free Europeans.” (Anders Breivik)
“Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. I don't need proof to execute a man. I only need proof that it's necessary to execute him. We execute from revolutionary conviction." (Che Guevara)
“I admit that I am sick of the current development, I would say I'm driven by my love for Europe, European culture and Europeans. (Anders Breivik)
“Let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. (Che Guevara)
“He clearly had no intention of becoming a martyr, “writes Time magazine about Breivik “Instead of fighting to the death with police, he surrendered immediately.
“Don’t shoot! I’m Che. I’m worth more to you alive than dead!” (Che Guevara to Bolivian soldiers Oct. 8 1967)
“You will face women in battle in battle and they will not hesitate to kill you. To them, you are just another armed criminal nut. You must therefore embrace and familiarize yourself with the concept of killing women, even very attractive women.” (Anders Breivik)
On Christmas Eve 1961, a young Cuban woman named Juana Figueroda Diaz spat in the face of the Castroite executioners who were binding and gagging her. They found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (Che’s term for Cuban rednecks who took up arms to fight his theft of their land to create Stalinist kolkhozes.) When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso, Juana was six months pregnant.
Time magazine’s recent piece on Anders Breivik includes the terms, “murderous, deranged, terrorist and psychopath.” But in 1999 Time Magazine hailed Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara among the "heroes and icons" of the century, alongside Mother Theresa.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Ideals Versus Realities
By Thomas Sowell
Friday, July 29, 2011
Many of us never thought that the Republicans would hold tough long enough to get President Obama and the Democrats to agree to a budget deal that does not include raising income tax rates. But they did -- and Speaker of the House John Boehner no doubt desires much of the credit for that.
Despite the widespread notion that raising tax rates automatically means collecting more revenue for the government, history says otherwise. As far back as the 1920s, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon pointed out that the government received a very similar amount of revenue from high-income earners at low tax rates as it did at tax rates several times as high.
How was that possible? Because high tax rates drive investors into tax shelters, such as tax-exempt bonds. Today, as a result of globalization and electronic transfers of money, "the rich" are even less likely to stand still and be sheared like sheep, when they can easily send their money overseas, to places where tax rates are lower.
Money sent overseas creates jobs overseas -- and American workers cannot transfer themselves overseas to get those jobs as readily as investors can send their money there.
All the overheated political rhetoric about needing to tax "millionaires and billionaires" is not about bringing in more revenue to the government. It is about bringing in more votes for politicians who stir up class warfare with rhetoric.
Now that the Republicans seem to have gotten the Democrats off their higher taxes kick, the question is whether a minority of the House Republicans will refuse to pass the Boehner legislation that could lead to a deal that will spare the country a major economic disruption and spare the Republicans from losing the 2012 elections by being blamed -- rightly or wrongly -- for the disruptions.
Is the Boehner legislation the best legislation possible? Of course not! You don't get your heart's desire when you control only one house of Congress and face a presidential veto.
The most basic fact of life is that we can make our choices only among the alternatives actually available. It is not idealism to ignore the limits of one's power. Nor is it selling out one's principles to recognize those limits at a given time and place, and get the best deal possible under those conditions.
That still leaves the option of working toward getting a better deal later, when the odds are more in your favor.
There would not be a United States of America today if George Washington's army had not retreated and retreated and retreated, in the face of an overwhelmingly more powerful British military force bent on annihilating Washington's troops.
Later, when the conditions were right for attack, General Washington attacked. But he would have had nothing to attack with if he had wasted his troops in battles that would have wiped them out.
Similar principles apply in politics. As Edmund Burke said, more than two centuries ago: "Preserving my principles unshaken, I reserve my activity for rational endeavors."
What does "rational" mean? At its most basic, it means an ability to make a ratio, as with "rational numbers" in mathematics. More broadly, it means an ability to weigh one thing against another.
There are a lot of things to weigh against each other, not only as regards the economy, but also what the consequences to this nation would be to have Barack Obama get re-elected and go further down the dangerous path he has put us on, at home and abroad. Is it worth that risk to make a futile symbolic vote in Congress?
One of the good things about the Tea Party movement is that it resisted the temptation to actually form a third political party, which has been an exercise in futility, time and time again, under the American electoral system.
But, if the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party becomes just a rule-or-ruin minority, then they might just as well have formed a separate third party and gone on to oblivion.
Writers can advocate things that have no chance at the moment, for their very writing about those things persuasively can make them possible at some future date. But to adopt the same approach as an elected member of Congress risks losing both the present and the future.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Many of us never thought that the Republicans would hold tough long enough to get President Obama and the Democrats to agree to a budget deal that does not include raising income tax rates. But they did -- and Speaker of the House John Boehner no doubt desires much of the credit for that.
Despite the widespread notion that raising tax rates automatically means collecting more revenue for the government, history says otherwise. As far back as the 1920s, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon pointed out that the government received a very similar amount of revenue from high-income earners at low tax rates as it did at tax rates several times as high.
How was that possible? Because high tax rates drive investors into tax shelters, such as tax-exempt bonds. Today, as a result of globalization and electronic transfers of money, "the rich" are even less likely to stand still and be sheared like sheep, when they can easily send their money overseas, to places where tax rates are lower.
Money sent overseas creates jobs overseas -- and American workers cannot transfer themselves overseas to get those jobs as readily as investors can send their money there.
All the overheated political rhetoric about needing to tax "millionaires and billionaires" is not about bringing in more revenue to the government. It is about bringing in more votes for politicians who stir up class warfare with rhetoric.
Now that the Republicans seem to have gotten the Democrats off their higher taxes kick, the question is whether a minority of the House Republicans will refuse to pass the Boehner legislation that could lead to a deal that will spare the country a major economic disruption and spare the Republicans from losing the 2012 elections by being blamed -- rightly or wrongly -- for the disruptions.
Is the Boehner legislation the best legislation possible? Of course not! You don't get your heart's desire when you control only one house of Congress and face a presidential veto.
The most basic fact of life is that we can make our choices only among the alternatives actually available. It is not idealism to ignore the limits of one's power. Nor is it selling out one's principles to recognize those limits at a given time and place, and get the best deal possible under those conditions.
That still leaves the option of working toward getting a better deal later, when the odds are more in your favor.
There would not be a United States of America today if George Washington's army had not retreated and retreated and retreated, in the face of an overwhelmingly more powerful British military force bent on annihilating Washington's troops.
Later, when the conditions were right for attack, General Washington attacked. But he would have had nothing to attack with if he had wasted his troops in battles that would have wiped them out.
Similar principles apply in politics. As Edmund Burke said, more than two centuries ago: "Preserving my principles unshaken, I reserve my activity for rational endeavors."
What does "rational" mean? At its most basic, it means an ability to make a ratio, as with "rational numbers" in mathematics. More broadly, it means an ability to weigh one thing against another.
There are a lot of things to weigh against each other, not only as regards the economy, but also what the consequences to this nation would be to have Barack Obama get re-elected and go further down the dangerous path he has put us on, at home and abroad. Is it worth that risk to make a futile symbolic vote in Congress?
One of the good things about the Tea Party movement is that it resisted the temptation to actually form a third political party, which has been an exercise in futility, time and time again, under the American electoral system.
But, if the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party becomes just a rule-or-ruin minority, then they might just as well have formed a separate third party and gone on to oblivion.
Writers can advocate things that have no chance at the moment, for their very writing about those things persuasively can make them possible at some future date. But to adopt the same approach as an elected member of Congress risks losing both the present and the future.
Reagan Playbook No Longer Applies
By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, July 29, 2011
The worst thing about the 2008 primaries -- other than, you know, the result -- was the huge amount of time wasted on what amounted to a Republican "Spartacus" re-enactment. Instead of each nominee yelling, "I'm Spartacus," and, "No, I'm Spartacus," we got, "I'm Ronald Reagan!" "No, I'm the real Ronald Reagan here."
The obsession with finding another Reagan was really a veiled slap at the Republican who actually occupied the White House at the time. Nobody was running to be another George W. Bush, nobody promised to give "four more years" of what they got for the last eight.
Everyone understood that running as Bush 2.0 was a bad idea from the outset, but the proof came in the general election, when then-Senator Obama managed to paint John McCain as the reincarnation of Bush.
Things look very different today. President Obama still tries to blame what he can -- and what he can't -- on Bush, but that's growing ever more lame. Increasingly, however, he's also trying to claim the Reagan mantle for himself.
At first it seemed like he just wanted to steal Reagan's re-election playbook. That was the upshot of a lot of wishful thinking masquerading as analysis a few months ago, including a Time magazine cover: "Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan." After all, Reagan blamed a lot of the country's problems on his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, and won re-election in a landslide.
The analogy came apart like toilet paper in a rainstorm when the Obama economy started to grind to a halt like an EPA-approved car with a dead battery and no extension cord.
Reagan's landslide was fueled by huge economic growth, rapidly falling unemployment and growing national optimism. Obama's zero for three on that front.
The intriguing thing is that Obama hasn't let go of Reagan. He and his supporters now invoke the Gipper as a policy role model, not just a strategic one.
In his prime-time debt-ceiling address, he quoted Reagan's support for a debt-reduction deal in 1982 that included increased tax increases. Afterwards, Obama chided, "Those words were spoken by Ronald Reagan. But today, many Republicans in the House refuse to consider this kind of balanced approach."
Translation: See, I'm a mainstream guy who agrees with Reagan. Meanwhile, these knuckle-dragging Tea Partiers are to the right of the most conservative president in our lifetimes. Come back, independents! Love me, moderates!
While Obama's invocation of Reagan worked on a lot of liberal pundits, it was a clunker with conservatives. Of course, it's doubtful Obama thought it would actually persuade the GOP. After all, that 1982 deal which raised taxes was one of Reagan's greatest regrets. The Democrats promised to cut $3 in spending for every $1 in tax increases. They lied, a fact Reagan resented until he died.
And that raises an important point for Republicans and Democrats alike. I don't want to say, "Who cares what Reagan would have done?" It's certainly an interesting question. But the answer in most cases is, "We have no idea." Events today are different than they were in the 1980s. The notion that we can know what Reagan's position would be today is to assume that his views wouldn't adapt to new circumstances. The Republican Party is full of veteran Reaganauts from back then. Their thinking has changed. Reagan's probably would have too, and in the same direction.
Indeed, one of the reasons the Tea Parties are so "outrageously" intransigent and uncompromising is that they've seen what compromise has gotten in the past. In other words, they've learned the lessons of history. It's an insult to Reagan's memory to suggest that he wouldn't have as well. My own view is that Reagan would look at the doubling of the size of the federal government in the last 10 years and become awfully "stubborn" about reducing spending.
Regardless, the irony of all this is the fact that the GOP presidential contenders aren't playing the "I'm Reagan" game all that much anymore. The issues are clear enough, the candidates are confident enough, and the primary voters are energized enough that there's not much to be gained with gassy nostalgia.
They still say nice things about Reagan, of course. But they understand -- finally -- that asking "What would Reagan Do?" doesn't get you all that far. Whereas once it was a provocative thing to call yourself a "Reagan Republican," it's not anymore because Reagan's become so popular and the times have changed so much. Rather, everyone cherry-picks what they like about the guy and claims him as an ally. Even Barack Obama.
Friday, July 29, 2011
The worst thing about the 2008 primaries -- other than, you know, the result -- was the huge amount of time wasted on what amounted to a Republican "Spartacus" re-enactment. Instead of each nominee yelling, "I'm Spartacus," and, "No, I'm Spartacus," we got, "I'm Ronald Reagan!" "No, I'm the real Ronald Reagan here."
The obsession with finding another Reagan was really a veiled slap at the Republican who actually occupied the White House at the time. Nobody was running to be another George W. Bush, nobody promised to give "four more years" of what they got for the last eight.
Everyone understood that running as Bush 2.0 was a bad idea from the outset, but the proof came in the general election, when then-Senator Obama managed to paint John McCain as the reincarnation of Bush.
Things look very different today. President Obama still tries to blame what he can -- and what he can't -- on Bush, but that's growing ever more lame. Increasingly, however, he's also trying to claim the Reagan mantle for himself.
At first it seemed like he just wanted to steal Reagan's re-election playbook. That was the upshot of a lot of wishful thinking masquerading as analysis a few months ago, including a Time magazine cover: "Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan." After all, Reagan blamed a lot of the country's problems on his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, and won re-election in a landslide.
The analogy came apart like toilet paper in a rainstorm when the Obama economy started to grind to a halt like an EPA-approved car with a dead battery and no extension cord.
Reagan's landslide was fueled by huge economic growth, rapidly falling unemployment and growing national optimism. Obama's zero for three on that front.
The intriguing thing is that Obama hasn't let go of Reagan. He and his supporters now invoke the Gipper as a policy role model, not just a strategic one.
In his prime-time debt-ceiling address, he quoted Reagan's support for a debt-reduction deal in 1982 that included increased tax increases. Afterwards, Obama chided, "Those words were spoken by Ronald Reagan. But today, many Republicans in the House refuse to consider this kind of balanced approach."
Translation: See, I'm a mainstream guy who agrees with Reagan. Meanwhile, these knuckle-dragging Tea Partiers are to the right of the most conservative president in our lifetimes. Come back, independents! Love me, moderates!
While Obama's invocation of Reagan worked on a lot of liberal pundits, it was a clunker with conservatives. Of course, it's doubtful Obama thought it would actually persuade the GOP. After all, that 1982 deal which raised taxes was one of Reagan's greatest regrets. The Democrats promised to cut $3 in spending for every $1 in tax increases. They lied, a fact Reagan resented until he died.
And that raises an important point for Republicans and Democrats alike. I don't want to say, "Who cares what Reagan would have done?" It's certainly an interesting question. But the answer in most cases is, "We have no idea." Events today are different than they were in the 1980s. The notion that we can know what Reagan's position would be today is to assume that his views wouldn't adapt to new circumstances. The Republican Party is full of veteran Reaganauts from back then. Their thinking has changed. Reagan's probably would have too, and in the same direction.
Indeed, one of the reasons the Tea Parties are so "outrageously" intransigent and uncompromising is that they've seen what compromise has gotten in the past. In other words, they've learned the lessons of history. It's an insult to Reagan's memory to suggest that he wouldn't have as well. My own view is that Reagan would look at the doubling of the size of the federal government in the last 10 years and become awfully "stubborn" about reducing spending.
Regardless, the irony of all this is the fact that the GOP presidential contenders aren't playing the "I'm Reagan" game all that much anymore. The issues are clear enough, the candidates are confident enough, and the primary voters are energized enough that there's not much to be gained with gassy nostalgia.
They still say nice things about Reagan, of course. But they understand -- finally -- that asking "What would Reagan Do?" doesn't get you all that far. Whereas once it was a provocative thing to call yourself a "Reagan Republican," it's not anymore because Reagan's become so popular and the times have changed so much. Rather, everyone cherry-picks what they like about the guy and claims him as an ally. Even Barack Obama.
The Bullied Gene
By Mike Adams
Friday, July 29, 2011
Yesterday, when I was arguing with a liberal he told me I was entirely too harsh in my assessment of today’s youth. He told me specifically that I needed to be aware of the fact that in 21st Century America one out of five boys gets bullied in school on a “regular basis.” I don’t know where he got that statistic but it really made me ashamed of my country. We need to do better. When I was a kid back in 20th Century America everyone got bullied in school. Those really were the good old days.
My most memorable experience with bullying came during the 1972-73 school year when I was a student at Whitcomb Elementary School in Clear Lake City, Texas. The highlight of the year was Mrs. Ogden who was a total babe (sorry for the antiquated language but I’m telling a story about the 1970s). The lowlight of the year was dealing with some punk named Brian who sat next to me during the last part of the spring semester. Brian was constantly bragging about how tough he was – probably because he was short and had a Napoleon complex.
Eventually, Brian’s bragging about his fighting ability got old – even for Brian. So, one day, he challenged me to a fight on a specific day at a specific time in the schoolyard. Like a wimp, I faked being sick that day so I could stay home and avoid the confrontation. That strategy backfired. After wimping out on my scheduled confrontation with Brian he issued another challenge. And that led to another absence from school, which was excused by another fake illness. My mother was beginning to catch on.
Fortunately, the end of the year was near and I got to spend the summer at home and away from the bully in my second grade class. My parents even sent me to a baseball camp at nearby San Jacinto College where I would be instructed by real college baseball players. I wasn’t aware that Brian’s best friend Mike would be attending the same baseball camp.
I wasn’t really expecting it when Mike came up behind me and shoved me in front of a bunch of the other little league players – many of whom were also my schoolmates. But the second I turned around and saw him I knew that he had shoved me for one reason and one reason only: His best friend Brian had told him I was a wimp who wouldn’t stand up to a bully. So I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances. I punched him in the mouth.
After Mike put his hand to his mouth and realized he was bleeding there was a real look of horror on his face. So I punched him again – this time in the nose. And after Mike sunk to his knees and started waving his hands in surrender I began to hit him with a barrage of uppercuts until he was lying on his back in the middle of the outfield crying like a little girl.
The next spring when I was standing in line for a snow cone after a game in Bay Area Park I saw Mike and Brian in the line ahead of me. Mike acknowledged me and asked if everything was “cool” between us. After I told him it was “cool” Mike turned to Brian and said “He really beat the crap out of me last summer.” So we all became friends and no one bullied anyone after that.
That’s how we dealt with bullying when I was a kid. Someone picked on someone until he got fed up and learned that he had to defend himself. It was all a part of learning to be a man. When the inevitable fight was over the bully and the bullied became friends. And no one really contemplated shooting up the school in retaliation.
But today things are different. The state is increasingly seeing itself as the agent responsible for stopping bullying. And they are increasingly interested in monitoring bullying throughout all levels of the educational process. At my university, there is actually a guide that directs students to various government resources that can help students who are experiencing bullying.
Interestingly, the guide defines bullying as “the act of intimidating a weaker person to make them [sic] do something.” Since other campus programs focus on the disproportionate bullying of homosexuals this seems to be a tacit admission that homosexuals are indeed “weaker person(s).” In other words, the implications of their approach to this topic have not been well-thought-out. Few things are “thought” through in higher education today. People generally “feel” their way through problems.
Speaking of educators, they are the ones most likely to jump on the anti-bullying bandwagon. And when they do there is always a plethora of recommendations and strategies focusing on government intervention – all organized within the framework of our public schools and funded by the over-burdened taxpayer.
Some people believe the government should stop bullying because we have so many defenseless effeminate young men in the public school system. But I believe we have so many defenseless effeminate young men in the public school system because people believe the government should protect them from bullying. That’s the difference between the liberals and me. And I’m pleased to offer my advice at no expense to the taxpayer.
Put simply, the question of whether one will or will not be bullied is largely a matter of choice. You can either remain the boy who is bullied or you can become the man who fights back. I don’t think the former are restricted by what is in their genes. More likely, it’s just what’s missing in their jeans.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Yesterday, when I was arguing with a liberal he told me I was entirely too harsh in my assessment of today’s youth. He told me specifically that I needed to be aware of the fact that in 21st Century America one out of five boys gets bullied in school on a “regular basis.” I don’t know where he got that statistic but it really made me ashamed of my country. We need to do better. When I was a kid back in 20th Century America everyone got bullied in school. Those really were the good old days.
My most memorable experience with bullying came during the 1972-73 school year when I was a student at Whitcomb Elementary School in Clear Lake City, Texas. The highlight of the year was Mrs. Ogden who was a total babe (sorry for the antiquated language but I’m telling a story about the 1970s). The lowlight of the year was dealing with some punk named Brian who sat next to me during the last part of the spring semester. Brian was constantly bragging about how tough he was – probably because he was short and had a Napoleon complex.
Eventually, Brian’s bragging about his fighting ability got old – even for Brian. So, one day, he challenged me to a fight on a specific day at a specific time in the schoolyard. Like a wimp, I faked being sick that day so I could stay home and avoid the confrontation. That strategy backfired. After wimping out on my scheduled confrontation with Brian he issued another challenge. And that led to another absence from school, which was excused by another fake illness. My mother was beginning to catch on.
Fortunately, the end of the year was near and I got to spend the summer at home and away from the bully in my second grade class. My parents even sent me to a baseball camp at nearby San Jacinto College where I would be instructed by real college baseball players. I wasn’t aware that Brian’s best friend Mike would be attending the same baseball camp.
I wasn’t really expecting it when Mike came up behind me and shoved me in front of a bunch of the other little league players – many of whom were also my schoolmates. But the second I turned around and saw him I knew that he had shoved me for one reason and one reason only: His best friend Brian had told him I was a wimp who wouldn’t stand up to a bully. So I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances. I punched him in the mouth.
After Mike put his hand to his mouth and realized he was bleeding there was a real look of horror on his face. So I punched him again – this time in the nose. And after Mike sunk to his knees and started waving his hands in surrender I began to hit him with a barrage of uppercuts until he was lying on his back in the middle of the outfield crying like a little girl.
The next spring when I was standing in line for a snow cone after a game in Bay Area Park I saw Mike and Brian in the line ahead of me. Mike acknowledged me and asked if everything was “cool” between us. After I told him it was “cool” Mike turned to Brian and said “He really beat the crap out of me last summer.” So we all became friends and no one bullied anyone after that.
That’s how we dealt with bullying when I was a kid. Someone picked on someone until he got fed up and learned that he had to defend himself. It was all a part of learning to be a man. When the inevitable fight was over the bully and the bullied became friends. And no one really contemplated shooting up the school in retaliation.
But today things are different. The state is increasingly seeing itself as the agent responsible for stopping bullying. And they are increasingly interested in monitoring bullying throughout all levels of the educational process. At my university, there is actually a guide that directs students to various government resources that can help students who are experiencing bullying.
Interestingly, the guide defines bullying as “the act of intimidating a weaker person to make them [sic] do something.” Since other campus programs focus on the disproportionate bullying of homosexuals this seems to be a tacit admission that homosexuals are indeed “weaker person(s).” In other words, the implications of their approach to this topic have not been well-thought-out. Few things are “thought” through in higher education today. People generally “feel” their way through problems.
Speaking of educators, they are the ones most likely to jump on the anti-bullying bandwagon. And when they do there is always a plethora of recommendations and strategies focusing on government intervention – all organized within the framework of our public schools and funded by the over-burdened taxpayer.
Some people believe the government should stop bullying because we have so many defenseless effeminate young men in the public school system. But I believe we have so many defenseless effeminate young men in the public school system because people believe the government should protect them from bullying. That’s the difference between the liberals and me. And I’m pleased to offer my advice at no expense to the taxpayer.
Put simply, the question of whether one will or will not be bullied is largely a matter of choice. You can either remain the boy who is bullied or you can become the man who fights back. I don’t think the former are restricted by what is in their genes. More likely, it’s just what’s missing in their jeans.
Por La Raza, Nada
By Tom Tancredo
Friday, July 29, 2011
While virtually all President Obama will talk about is the debt ceiling, he took a short break to give an address before the National Council of La Raza on Monday. Calling the audience his “Hermanos y hermanas,” he trumpeted his support of the DREAM Act amnesty, stated his opposition to Arizona’s SB 1070 and all state level immigration laws, and touted his Hispanic appointments—citing Ambassador to the Dominican Republic Raul Yzaguirre, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Obama did not mention one other Hispanic appointment, former La Raza vice president Cecilia Munoz who serves as his Director of Intergovernmental Affairs and his public liaison to Hispanics. In appointing Munoz, Obama violated his own pledge not to allow former lobbyists positions where they control money they formerly controlled, and gave Munoz a special waiver.
While our nation is going broke, the National Council of La Raza is doing just fine. Since Obama and Munoz took up the white house, they have seen their funding skyrocket, nearly tripling from 4.5 to 11 million dollars in 2010. Judicial Watch also found out that the La Raza affiliate, Chicanos por la Causa received over 18 million dollars of tax dollars. That group was the primary plaintiff against Arizona’s law against illegal employers.
And it is not as if La Raza is lacking funds. Between their various sister organizations, they have over 200 million dollars in assets, much of it paid for by corporate America, and Chicanos por la Causa have nearly 100 million dollars.
Although some of La Raza’s government funding was earmarked by congress, virtually all of it was doled out by the Obama administration. Sixty percent of La Raza's take came from the Department of Labor—run by Hilda Solis. They lobbied hard for her appointment and honored her with an award. She paid them back—with millions of our tax dollars.
Even if we were running trillion dollar surpluses, there is no reason why La Raza should get a dime of taxpayer dollars. Here are just a few reasons why.
“La Raza” means “The Race,” specifically the Latino race. Could you imagine if the government were giving millions of dollars to a group called “The National Council of the White Race”?
La Raza counts the pro-reconquista Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán) as an affiliate and helps fund the organization. MeCHA’s slogan is "Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada," meaning “For the Race everything, outside the Race nothing.”
La Raza opposes free speech and has tried to get Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, and other opponents of illegal immigration kicked off the air. Their president Janet Murguia said “when free speech transforms into hate speech, we've got to draw that line.” La Raza has said calling illegal aliens “criminals” is “hate speech.”
La Raza has lobbied for every single amnesty, against immigration enforcement, for Obamacare, and against English as an official language
Barack Obama managed to address the issue of the debt briefly during his talk to La Raza. He stated, “Every day, NCLR and your affiliates hear from families figuring out how to stretch every dollar a little bit further, what sacrifices they’ve got to make, how they're going to budget only what’s truly important. So they should expect the same thing from Washington.”
While 11 million dollars is a tiny fraction of our trillion dollar a year deficit, funding this pro-amnesty propaganda outfit is not “truly important.”
Republicans in the House have passed legislation to defund left wing groups such as Planned Parenthood and ACORN. The National Council of La Raza should be be next. To slightly alter their MeCHA pals' slogan, when it comes to our tax dollars: “Por La Raza, Nada!”
Friday, July 29, 2011
While virtually all President Obama will talk about is the debt ceiling, he took a short break to give an address before the National Council of La Raza on Monday. Calling the audience his “Hermanos y hermanas,” he trumpeted his support of the DREAM Act amnesty, stated his opposition to Arizona’s SB 1070 and all state level immigration laws, and touted his Hispanic appointments—citing Ambassador to the Dominican Republic Raul Yzaguirre, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Obama did not mention one other Hispanic appointment, former La Raza vice president Cecilia Munoz who serves as his Director of Intergovernmental Affairs and his public liaison to Hispanics. In appointing Munoz, Obama violated his own pledge not to allow former lobbyists positions where they control money they formerly controlled, and gave Munoz a special waiver.
While our nation is going broke, the National Council of La Raza is doing just fine. Since Obama and Munoz took up the white house, they have seen their funding skyrocket, nearly tripling from 4.5 to 11 million dollars in 2010. Judicial Watch also found out that the La Raza affiliate, Chicanos por la Causa received over 18 million dollars of tax dollars. That group was the primary plaintiff against Arizona’s law against illegal employers.
And it is not as if La Raza is lacking funds. Between their various sister organizations, they have over 200 million dollars in assets, much of it paid for by corporate America, and Chicanos por la Causa have nearly 100 million dollars.
Although some of La Raza’s government funding was earmarked by congress, virtually all of it was doled out by the Obama administration. Sixty percent of La Raza's take came from the Department of Labor—run by Hilda Solis. They lobbied hard for her appointment and honored her with an award. She paid them back—with millions of our tax dollars.
Even if we were running trillion dollar surpluses, there is no reason why La Raza should get a dime of taxpayer dollars. Here are just a few reasons why.
“La Raza” means “The Race,” specifically the Latino race. Could you imagine if the government were giving millions of dollars to a group called “The National Council of the White Race”?
La Raza counts the pro-reconquista Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán) as an affiliate and helps fund the organization. MeCHA’s slogan is "Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada," meaning “For the Race everything, outside the Race nothing.”
La Raza opposes free speech and has tried to get Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, and other opponents of illegal immigration kicked off the air. Their president Janet Murguia said “when free speech transforms into hate speech, we've got to draw that line.” La Raza has said calling illegal aliens “criminals” is “hate speech.”
La Raza has lobbied for every single amnesty, against immigration enforcement, for Obamacare, and against English as an official language
Barack Obama managed to address the issue of the debt briefly during his talk to La Raza. He stated, “Every day, NCLR and your affiliates hear from families figuring out how to stretch every dollar a little bit further, what sacrifices they’ve got to make, how they're going to budget only what’s truly important. So they should expect the same thing from Washington.”
While 11 million dollars is a tiny fraction of our trillion dollar a year deficit, funding this pro-amnesty propaganda outfit is not “truly important.”
Republicans in the House have passed legislation to defund left wing groups such as Planned Parenthood and ACORN. The National Council of La Raza should be be next. To slightly alter their MeCHA pals' slogan, when it comes to our tax dollars: “Por La Raza, Nada!”
Indoctrination Fridays Three Little Pigs Slaughtered by Leftists
By Kyle Olson
Friday, July 29, 2011
Leftist educators will take just about anything and turn it on its head to fit their agenda. Even children’s fairytales don’t escape the slaughterhouse.
Ellen Wolpert, a longtime “early childhood educator” in Massachusetts, penned an article entitled, “Rethinking ‘The Three Little Pigs.’”
You’re probably familiar with the story: a big, bad wolf threatens to destroy the homes of three individual pigs. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing on the wolf’s part, but he can only blow over the two homes that were constructed with straw and sticks.
The house left standing is made of brick, leaving readers to conclude that careful planning and hard work (as represented by the brick house) leads to success. The pigs’ definition of success, of course, is to avoid being eaten by the wolf.
That’s how normal, well-adjusted people interpret the story. But Leftists, by and large, are dour, unhappy people who see oppression and bigotry around every corner. So it’s no surprise that Wolpert sees a dark and malicious subtext to the simple fairy tale.
“I first became aware of the story’s hidden messages when we were doing a unit on housing at my daycare center,” Wolpert writes in the article. “As part of the unit, we talked about different homes and the many approaches to solving a basic human need: a place to live.”
Having been properly “sensitized by the movement for a multicultural curriculum,” Wolpert began to realize that:
“ … one of the most fundamental messages of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ is that it belittles straw and stick homes and the ‘lazy types’ who build them. On the other hand, the story extols the virtues of brick homes, suggesting that they are built by serious, hardworking people and are strong enough to withstand adversity.
“Is there any coincidence that brick homes tend to be built by people in Western countries, often by those with more money? That straw homes are more common in non-European cultures, particularly Africa and Asia?”
Who knew the story had such a hateful, Eurocentric message?
If parents and teachers persist in filling their children’s heads with such trash as “The Three Little Pigs,” Wolpert offers some strategies for mitigating the damage:
“One might explain, for example, that in many tropical areas straw homes are built to take best advantage of cooling breezes. In some areas, straw homes are on stilts as protection from insects and animals or to withstand flooding.
“Such a perspective then becomes part of a broader process of helping children to understand why homes are different in different parts of the world – and that just because something is different doesn’t mean it’s inferior.”
Sure, tell that to the first little pig and the second little pig. They may appreciate Wolpert’s “broader perspective,” but that doesn’t change the fact that because they wanted to “dance and sing” they almost became the wolf’s dinner.
But why stop there? Perhaps Wolpert could revise the story so in the end, the pigs welcome the wolf, commune with him, and help to understand why he would want to eat them. Perhaps they could dialogue with the wolf about tolerance and multiculturalism, and if they’re really successful, they’ll turn him into a vegan.
I’m sure the Left would like to see rework most of our cultural heritage to promote its agenda. But if they move too fast and reach too far, the people will push back. As with all other leftist agenda, one small step at a time.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Leftist educators will take just about anything and turn it on its head to fit their agenda. Even children’s fairytales don’t escape the slaughterhouse.
Ellen Wolpert, a longtime “early childhood educator” in Massachusetts, penned an article entitled, “Rethinking ‘The Three Little Pigs.’”
You’re probably familiar with the story: a big, bad wolf threatens to destroy the homes of three individual pigs. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing on the wolf’s part, but he can only blow over the two homes that were constructed with straw and sticks.
The house left standing is made of brick, leaving readers to conclude that careful planning and hard work (as represented by the brick house) leads to success. The pigs’ definition of success, of course, is to avoid being eaten by the wolf.
That’s how normal, well-adjusted people interpret the story. But Leftists, by and large, are dour, unhappy people who see oppression and bigotry around every corner. So it’s no surprise that Wolpert sees a dark and malicious subtext to the simple fairy tale.
“I first became aware of the story’s hidden messages when we were doing a unit on housing at my daycare center,” Wolpert writes in the article. “As part of the unit, we talked about different homes and the many approaches to solving a basic human need: a place to live.”
Having been properly “sensitized by the movement for a multicultural curriculum,” Wolpert began to realize that:
“ … one of the most fundamental messages of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ is that it belittles straw and stick homes and the ‘lazy types’ who build them. On the other hand, the story extols the virtues of brick homes, suggesting that they are built by serious, hardworking people and are strong enough to withstand adversity.
“Is there any coincidence that brick homes tend to be built by people in Western countries, often by those with more money? That straw homes are more common in non-European cultures, particularly Africa and Asia?”
Who knew the story had such a hateful, Eurocentric message?
If parents and teachers persist in filling their children’s heads with such trash as “The Three Little Pigs,” Wolpert offers some strategies for mitigating the damage:
“One might explain, for example, that in many tropical areas straw homes are built to take best advantage of cooling breezes. In some areas, straw homes are on stilts as protection from insects and animals or to withstand flooding.
“Such a perspective then becomes part of a broader process of helping children to understand why homes are different in different parts of the world – and that just because something is different doesn’t mean it’s inferior.”
Sure, tell that to the first little pig and the second little pig. They may appreciate Wolpert’s “broader perspective,” but that doesn’t change the fact that because they wanted to “dance and sing” they almost became the wolf’s dinner.
But why stop there? Perhaps Wolpert could revise the story so in the end, the pigs welcome the wolf, commune with him, and help to understand why he would want to eat them. Perhaps they could dialogue with the wolf about tolerance and multiculturalism, and if they’re really successful, they’ll turn him into a vegan.
I’m sure the Left would like to see rework most of our cultural heritage to promote its agenda. But if they move too fast and reach too far, the people will push back. As with all other leftist agenda, one small step at a time.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Michigan’s Lessons for the Debt-Ceiling Debate
In 2007, the state faced a situation much like the current one.
Henry Payne
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Gov. Jennifer Granholm — the charismatic, silver-tongued, Harvard Law School–trained Democratic executive (with no executive experience) who tried to remake Michigan as a “Green Belt” state via stimulus spending and windmills — brought the state to the precipice with a 2007 budget shutdown. Now we are watching Obama’s remake.
The similarities between the two crises are uncanny — but the crucial differences teach a lesson about constitutionally mandated balanced budgets and the need for conservatives to maintain a steely spine against tax increases. Americans can only hope their Republican representatives in Congress have the courage that GOPers in the Michigan state senate lacked.
In 2007, a liberal governor’s determination to enact permanent big spending hikes and tax increases set Michigan on course for a budget war. Granholm’s threat of a shutdown came on the heels of a budget that proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in new “investments” — as she and Obama like to call spending — and, to pay for it, proposed a new services tax. This, even as Michigan’s economy swirled down the drain.
A crucial difference between 2007 and today is that Granholm had won a landslide election the year before, with Democrats regaining the house and eroding the Republicans’ senate majority. But even riding this wave of support, Granholm provoked an immediate public backlash when she suggested tax and spending hikes. A Tea Party–esque movement — led by a teabag-waving, pig-hauling activist named Leon Drolet — emerged to recall legislators who supported the tax hike.
The lines were drawn. Pro-tax Democrats vs. anti-tax Republicans.
Michigan’s economy was struggling, with an unemployment rate hovering 50 percent above the national average. Ratings services added to the drama by downgrading Michigan’s bond rating from “AA− with a stable outlook” to “AA− with a negative outlook.”
Yet Democrats insisted on hiking taxes rather than making structural reforms to the state’s Medicaid program and public-employee health benefits, which together were swallowing Michigan’s budget whole. Republicans tried to plug the $800 million budget gap with a cuts-only approach, but they controlled only one house of the legislature.
Governor Granholm reacted with a page right of Obama’s playbook. “People will die,” she said, if GOP cuts to Medicaid and other social services passed.
No leadership. No structural reforms. Just a relentless threat that she would begin “shutting down” the government. Like Obama today, Granholm “appeared to be disassociated from the process, except to issue occasional press releases criticizing ‘the legislature’ or ‘Senate Republicans’ for failing to adopt her budget recommendations,” wrote the Mackinac Center, a state think tank.
Under pressure from the state’s balanced-budget requirement — another crucial difference between Michigan then and Washington today — and after a brief government shutdown on October 1, Senate Republicans warily agreed to a deal involving a mix of tax hikes and benefits reform. They agreed to hike income taxes by 12 percent and impose a new set of service taxes on select business activity, raising $1.5 billion. In return, Republicans got fragile promises of spending reform.
“This budget agreement is the right solution for Michigan,” crowed a victorious Granholm. “We prevented massive cuts to public education, health care, and public safety while also making extensive government reforms and passing new revenue. With the state back on solid financial footing, we can turn our focus to the critical task of jumpstarting our economy and creating new jobs.”
Barack Obama couldn’t have said it better. Did it solve the problem?
“Within literally hours of passing the tax hike,” recounts Mackinac Center legislative analyst Jack McHugh, “the legislature passed bills spending the entire $1.4 billion.” By the time Granholm handed over the wheel to Republican Rick Snyder three years later, the deficit had ballooned to $2 billion amidst a stalled economy.
But the tax mirage isn’t Lansing’s only lesson for Washington. The other is that balanced-budget amendments can force divided governments into shutdowns, and force Republicans to accept tax increases. Such amendments are still — on balance — a positive for states like Michigan, but one would be a disaster for a federal government that is drunk on entitlements and needs budget flexibility for national defense.
Lawmakers in Washington should learn the lessons of Michigan’s tax showdown.
Henry Payne
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Gov. Jennifer Granholm — the charismatic, silver-tongued, Harvard Law School–trained Democratic executive (with no executive experience) who tried to remake Michigan as a “Green Belt” state via stimulus spending and windmills — brought the state to the precipice with a 2007 budget shutdown. Now we are watching Obama’s remake.
The similarities between the two crises are uncanny — but the crucial differences teach a lesson about constitutionally mandated balanced budgets and the need for conservatives to maintain a steely spine against tax increases. Americans can only hope their Republican representatives in Congress have the courage that GOPers in the Michigan state senate lacked.
In 2007, a liberal governor’s determination to enact permanent big spending hikes and tax increases set Michigan on course for a budget war. Granholm’s threat of a shutdown came on the heels of a budget that proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in new “investments” — as she and Obama like to call spending — and, to pay for it, proposed a new services tax. This, even as Michigan’s economy swirled down the drain.
A crucial difference between 2007 and today is that Granholm had won a landslide election the year before, with Democrats regaining the house and eroding the Republicans’ senate majority. But even riding this wave of support, Granholm provoked an immediate public backlash when she suggested tax and spending hikes. A Tea Party–esque movement — led by a teabag-waving, pig-hauling activist named Leon Drolet — emerged to recall legislators who supported the tax hike.
The lines were drawn. Pro-tax Democrats vs. anti-tax Republicans.
Michigan’s economy was struggling, with an unemployment rate hovering 50 percent above the national average. Ratings services added to the drama by downgrading Michigan’s bond rating from “AA− with a stable outlook” to “AA− with a negative outlook.”
Yet Democrats insisted on hiking taxes rather than making structural reforms to the state’s Medicaid program and public-employee health benefits, which together were swallowing Michigan’s budget whole. Republicans tried to plug the $800 million budget gap with a cuts-only approach, but they controlled only one house of the legislature.
Governor Granholm reacted with a page right of Obama’s playbook. “People will die,” she said, if GOP cuts to Medicaid and other social services passed.
No leadership. No structural reforms. Just a relentless threat that she would begin “shutting down” the government. Like Obama today, Granholm “appeared to be disassociated from the process, except to issue occasional press releases criticizing ‘the legislature’ or ‘Senate Republicans’ for failing to adopt her budget recommendations,” wrote the Mackinac Center, a state think tank.
Under pressure from the state’s balanced-budget requirement — another crucial difference between Michigan then and Washington today — and after a brief government shutdown on October 1, Senate Republicans warily agreed to a deal involving a mix of tax hikes and benefits reform. They agreed to hike income taxes by 12 percent and impose a new set of service taxes on select business activity, raising $1.5 billion. In return, Republicans got fragile promises of spending reform.
“This budget agreement is the right solution for Michigan,” crowed a victorious Granholm. “We prevented massive cuts to public education, health care, and public safety while also making extensive government reforms and passing new revenue. With the state back on solid financial footing, we can turn our focus to the critical task of jumpstarting our economy and creating new jobs.”
Barack Obama couldn’t have said it better. Did it solve the problem?
“Within literally hours of passing the tax hike,” recounts Mackinac Center legislative analyst Jack McHugh, “the legislature passed bills spending the entire $1.4 billion.” By the time Granholm handed over the wheel to Republican Rick Snyder three years later, the deficit had ballooned to $2 billion amidst a stalled economy.
But the tax mirage isn’t Lansing’s only lesson for Washington. The other is that balanced-budget amendments can force divided governments into shutdowns, and force Republicans to accept tax increases. Such amendments are still — on balance — a positive for states like Michigan, but one would be a disaster for a federal government that is drunk on entitlements and needs budget flexibility for national defense.
Lawmakers in Washington should learn the lessons of Michigan’s tax showdown.
Obama’s ‘Balanced’ Approach
Obama divides the blame equally between the Republicans in front of him and those behind him.
Thomas Sowell
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Barack Obama’s political genius is his ability to say things that sound good to people who have not followed the issues in any detail — regardless of how obviously fraudulent what he says is to those who have. Shameless effrontery can be a huge political asset, especially if uninformed voters outnumber those who are informed.
President Obama’s big pitch in his Monday-night televised talk was that what is needed to deal with the national-debt crisis is a “balanced” approach — not just spending cuts, but revenue increases as well.
What could sound more reasonable — especially to those who have not been following what Obama has actually been doing? This is the same Barack Obama who, earlier this year, called for a “clean” increase in the national-debt ceiling.
In this context, the soothing word “clean” referred to an increase in the national-debt ceiling without any provisos. That is, no spending cuts at all. In other words, a blank check to keep spending. How balanced is that?
Another word that sounds good to people who don’t stop and think is “fair.” President Obama says that he only wants the wealthiest Americans to pay their “fair share.” But he says zilch about just what that fair share is, or even how to determine it.
Is the “fair share” of the top 10 percent of income-earners 20 percent of all taxes? 40 percent? 60 percent? Those who talk about paying a “fair share” of taxes don’t want to be pinned down.
This is another blank check that Obama wants. “Fair share” in plain English means “more,” regardless of how large a share of all income taxes is already paid by a fraction of the population, while nearly half pay no income taxes at all.
What President Obama says may not make any sense if you stop and think about it — which he of course assumes that most people will not do. But that does not mean that he is a confused man. He is crystal clear in what he is doing, however confusing his words may be to others.
At the heart of the political games being played in Washington is taking credit and putting blame on the other guy. That is the game that Obama played flawlessly in his speech.
It began by referring to the increased government spending that had been going on for a decade — in other words, before Barack Obama reached the White House. It is true that Pres. George W. Bush had a record amount of deficit spending. But what is also true is that President Obama’s deficit spending has broken Bush’s record.
While Obama seldom misses an opportunity to blame his problems on the situation he inherited from President Bush, he says nothing about all the hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus money he inherited from the Bush administration. Incidentally, this “stimulus” money did not do any more stimulating under George W. Bush than under Barack H. Obama.
Nevertheless, Obama is an accomplished master at playing the blame game. Having gotten all the political credit for the money he has showered on his favorites from coast to coast, he now seeks to share the blame for the resulting financial crisis with Republicans, by maneuvering them into a position where they have to help solve the debt crisis that Obama created.
He has done this in great part by simply speaking of spending cuts mostly in the abstract, leaving it to the Republicans to be specific — and thus have them face the wrath from the constituencies who support the programs they want to cut.
However one might criticize President Obama’s policies in terms of their effect on the American economy, those policies can turn out to be very successful in the terms that matter most to him — namely, his own re-election.
A Washington Post-ABC poll shows that while 52 percent of the public disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy, 65 percent disapprove of the Republicans’ handling of it.
The Republicans lost control of Congress in the 2006 elections. Whether the Republicans’ ideas are good, bad, or indifferent, they have not been able to pass economic legislation — or any other kind of legislation — for more than four long years.
Yet Obama is still ahead in the blame game.
Thomas Sowell
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Barack Obama’s political genius is his ability to say things that sound good to people who have not followed the issues in any detail — regardless of how obviously fraudulent what he says is to those who have. Shameless effrontery can be a huge political asset, especially if uninformed voters outnumber those who are informed.
President Obama’s big pitch in his Monday-night televised talk was that what is needed to deal with the national-debt crisis is a “balanced” approach — not just spending cuts, but revenue increases as well.
What could sound more reasonable — especially to those who have not been following what Obama has actually been doing? This is the same Barack Obama who, earlier this year, called for a “clean” increase in the national-debt ceiling.
In this context, the soothing word “clean” referred to an increase in the national-debt ceiling without any provisos. That is, no spending cuts at all. In other words, a blank check to keep spending. How balanced is that?
Another word that sounds good to people who don’t stop and think is “fair.” President Obama says that he only wants the wealthiest Americans to pay their “fair share.” But he says zilch about just what that fair share is, or even how to determine it.
Is the “fair share” of the top 10 percent of income-earners 20 percent of all taxes? 40 percent? 60 percent? Those who talk about paying a “fair share” of taxes don’t want to be pinned down.
This is another blank check that Obama wants. “Fair share” in plain English means “more,” regardless of how large a share of all income taxes is already paid by a fraction of the population, while nearly half pay no income taxes at all.
What President Obama says may not make any sense if you stop and think about it — which he of course assumes that most people will not do. But that does not mean that he is a confused man. He is crystal clear in what he is doing, however confusing his words may be to others.
At the heart of the political games being played in Washington is taking credit and putting blame on the other guy. That is the game that Obama played flawlessly in his speech.
It began by referring to the increased government spending that had been going on for a decade — in other words, before Barack Obama reached the White House. It is true that Pres. George W. Bush had a record amount of deficit spending. But what is also true is that President Obama’s deficit spending has broken Bush’s record.
While Obama seldom misses an opportunity to blame his problems on the situation he inherited from President Bush, he says nothing about all the hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus money he inherited from the Bush administration. Incidentally, this “stimulus” money did not do any more stimulating under George W. Bush than under Barack H. Obama.
Nevertheless, Obama is an accomplished master at playing the blame game. Having gotten all the political credit for the money he has showered on his favorites from coast to coast, he now seeks to share the blame for the resulting financial crisis with Republicans, by maneuvering them into a position where they have to help solve the debt crisis that Obama created.
He has done this in great part by simply speaking of spending cuts mostly in the abstract, leaving it to the Republicans to be specific — and thus have them face the wrath from the constituencies who support the programs they want to cut.
However one might criticize President Obama’s policies in terms of their effect on the American economy, those policies can turn out to be very successful in the terms that matter most to him — namely, his own re-election.
A Washington Post-ABC poll shows that while 52 percent of the public disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy, 65 percent disapprove of the Republicans’ handling of it.
The Republicans lost control of Congress in the 2006 elections. Whether the Republicans’ ideas are good, bad, or indifferent, they have not been able to pass economic legislation — or any other kind of legislation — for more than four long years.
Yet Obama is still ahead in the blame game.
Al-Qaeda on the Brink?
The intelligence assessments have been wrong before.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
Thursday, July 28, 2011
The idea that al-Qaeda is on the brink of collapse has taken hold. On Wednesday, the Washington Post noted that “U.S. counterterrorism officials are increasingly convinced that the killing of Osama bin Laden and the toll of seven years of CIA drone strikes have pushed al-Qaeda to the brink of collapse.” Indeed, the Post reports that the view is “widespread” in the CIA and other agencies that “a relatively small number of additional blows could effectively extinguish the Pakistan-based organization.” This comes on the heels of defense secretary Leon Panetta’s declaring in early July that the U.S. is “within reach” of “strategically defeating” al-Qaeda if it kills or captures ten or 20 of its remaining leaders. But if there’s one thing the past ten years of the fight against jihadi groups has taught us, it is: Don’t believe the hype.
Though there are few things I would like to see more than al-Qaeda’s final and definitive collapse as a strategic threat, there is good reason for skepticism. This includes a history of triumphalist statements from government officials concerning al-Qaeda’s imminent collapse, and evidence suggesting that the U.S.’s intelligence on the group is more limited than many would like to admit. Underestimating al-Qaeda’s resilience has proven costly in the past, and our analytic corps should be more cautious in assessing it than these hubristic public statements suggest.
President Bush claimed in September 2003 that al-Qaeda was on the ropes. As Time reported, he told the nation that up to two-thirds of the group’s known leadership was captured or killed; the same Time story said that “its training camps in Afghanistan have been destroyed and the relentless worldwide campaign [against it] has denied it new sanctuaries.” In April 2006, the consensus of the intelligence community was that al-Qaeda had in fact been defeated as an organization. The National Intelligence Estimate released that month said that “the global jihadist movement is decentralized, lacks a coherent strategy, and is becoming more diffuse.” The following month, President Bush shared this cheery assessment, saying, “Absolutely, we’re winning. Al-Qaeda is on the run.”
Things did not turn out the way President Bush and the intelligence community envisioned. By July 2007, the intelligence community’s assessment had shifted radically. The National Intelligence Estimate released that month concluded that al-Qaeda “has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability.”
Obviously, the fact that the intelligence community has been wrong on this matter before does not mean that it will always be wrong. But it raises the question whether, due to gaps in the information at their disposal, intelligence analysts have underestimated this opponent’s resiliency. So are there signs that the U.S.’s understanding of al-Qaeda has improved?
Sadly, the most recent data points suggest that the U.S.’s understanding of al-Qaeda remains limited. The intelligence community had for years believed that Osama bin Laden could be found in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas — and not in Abbottabad, where he was actually located. Moreover, the dominant view in the intelligence community was that bin Laden had been only a figurehead in al-Qaeda, whereas the early reports of the information unearthed in the Abbottabad raid suggest that he was in fact far more involved in running the network than analysts believed. (There has been pushback against these findings by way of selective leaks to the media, but I am quite skeptical of the claims that bin Laden wasn’t actually running al-Qaeda at the time of his death.)
Further, other recent evidence suggests that we continue to underestimate the strength of al-Qaeda and its affiliates. During the chaos that has gripped Yemen this year, for example, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was able to “seize control over swaths of hundreds of kilometers from Lodar city of Yemen’s southern Abyan province to southeast Shabwa province’s city of Rodhom.” Tribal chieftains told Xinhua that AQAP had established checkpoints as well as military camps in that area. This is not meant to suggest that al-Qaeda will hold this territory for a significant length of time. But the fact that the group was able to make such territorial gains suggests that previous estimates of the group’s military power in Yemen did not capture its full strength.
In the past, overestimating our own gains and underestimating our foe has not been costless. When America was preparing to undertake its invasion of Iraq, the perception existed at high levels that the war in Afghanistan had already been won — a view that proved to be tragically wrong.
Dick Cheney, speaking at the Air National Guard Senior Leadership Conference in December 2002, described the Afghanistan war as “America’s most dramatic victory in the war against terrorism” and claimed that “the Taliban regime and the al-Qaeda terrorists have met the fate that they chose for themselves.” As a result of this flawed perception, significant military and intelligence assets were diverted from Afghanistan to Iraq. Robert Grenier, a former director of the CIA’s counterintelligence center, has noted that from late 2002 to early 2003, “the best experienced, most qualified people who we had been using in Afghanistan shifted over to Iraq,” including counterterrorism specialists and special forces.
Moving military assets out of the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater not only harmed coalition efforts in Afghanistan, but also helped to enable al-Qaeda’s regeneration. “If we hadn’t gone into Iraq, we wouldn’t have so gleefully subcontracted the struggle in Pakistan to [Pakistani president] Pervez Musharraf,” Bruce Hoffman, the director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University and one of America’s most distinguished scholars of terrorism, told me in an interview earlier this year. “We gave it to him and walked away. This was also the time when all of a sudden bin Laden went from being public enemy number one to ‘he doesn’t run things, he’s just a symbol.’ It was a complete 180, and all of it breathed new life into al-Qaeda, giving al-Qaeda the breathing space that it needed.”
Al-Qaeda used this breathing space to undertake a number of steps designed to bolster its foothold in Pakistan’s tribal areas. (Even though Western intelligence services mistakenly believed that bin Laden remained in the tribal areas long after he had left, a fact that became obvious after his death, al-Qaeda’s regeneration began there.) Among other things, the jihadi group took advantage of the hospitality offered under the Pashtunwali tribal code, engaged in intermarriage with local women, developed a sound understanding of Pakistan’s tribal politics, and exploited the anti-U.S. backlash in the country.
Despite this, the U.S.’s intelligence agencies continued to believe that the group had been beaten until several terrorist plots — including the successful July 7, 2005, public-transit attacks in London and the plot to destroy several transatlantic flights that was disrupted in August 2006 — forced them to rethink their assumptions.
Moving forward, a big part of actually beating al-Qaeda will involve not repeating the U.S.’s past mistakes. And while it is always difficult to determine the accuracy of intelligence assessments when the facts underlying them have not been made public, there is reason to be concerned that the new proclamations that al-Qaeda is on its deathbed in fact represent the repetition of past errors.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
Thursday, July 28, 2011
The idea that al-Qaeda is on the brink of collapse has taken hold. On Wednesday, the Washington Post noted that “U.S. counterterrorism officials are increasingly convinced that the killing of Osama bin Laden and the toll of seven years of CIA drone strikes have pushed al-Qaeda to the brink of collapse.” Indeed, the Post reports that the view is “widespread” in the CIA and other agencies that “a relatively small number of additional blows could effectively extinguish the Pakistan-based organization.” This comes on the heels of defense secretary Leon Panetta’s declaring in early July that the U.S. is “within reach” of “strategically defeating” al-Qaeda if it kills or captures ten or 20 of its remaining leaders. But if there’s one thing the past ten years of the fight against jihadi groups has taught us, it is: Don’t believe the hype.
Though there are few things I would like to see more than al-Qaeda’s final and definitive collapse as a strategic threat, there is good reason for skepticism. This includes a history of triumphalist statements from government officials concerning al-Qaeda’s imminent collapse, and evidence suggesting that the U.S.’s intelligence on the group is more limited than many would like to admit. Underestimating al-Qaeda’s resilience has proven costly in the past, and our analytic corps should be more cautious in assessing it than these hubristic public statements suggest.
President Bush claimed in September 2003 that al-Qaeda was on the ropes. As Time reported, he told the nation that up to two-thirds of the group’s known leadership was captured or killed; the same Time story said that “its training camps in Afghanistan have been destroyed and the relentless worldwide campaign [against it] has denied it new sanctuaries.” In April 2006, the consensus of the intelligence community was that al-Qaeda had in fact been defeated as an organization. The National Intelligence Estimate released that month said that “the global jihadist movement is decentralized, lacks a coherent strategy, and is becoming more diffuse.” The following month, President Bush shared this cheery assessment, saying, “Absolutely, we’re winning. Al-Qaeda is on the run.”
Things did not turn out the way President Bush and the intelligence community envisioned. By July 2007, the intelligence community’s assessment had shifted radically. The National Intelligence Estimate released that month concluded that al-Qaeda “has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability.”
Obviously, the fact that the intelligence community has been wrong on this matter before does not mean that it will always be wrong. But it raises the question whether, due to gaps in the information at their disposal, intelligence analysts have underestimated this opponent’s resiliency. So are there signs that the U.S.’s understanding of al-Qaeda has improved?
Sadly, the most recent data points suggest that the U.S.’s understanding of al-Qaeda remains limited. The intelligence community had for years believed that Osama bin Laden could be found in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas — and not in Abbottabad, where he was actually located. Moreover, the dominant view in the intelligence community was that bin Laden had been only a figurehead in al-Qaeda, whereas the early reports of the information unearthed in the Abbottabad raid suggest that he was in fact far more involved in running the network than analysts believed. (There has been pushback against these findings by way of selective leaks to the media, but I am quite skeptical of the claims that bin Laden wasn’t actually running al-Qaeda at the time of his death.)
Further, other recent evidence suggests that we continue to underestimate the strength of al-Qaeda and its affiliates. During the chaos that has gripped Yemen this year, for example, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was able to “seize control over swaths of hundreds of kilometers from Lodar city of Yemen’s southern Abyan province to southeast Shabwa province’s city of Rodhom.” Tribal chieftains told Xinhua that AQAP had established checkpoints as well as military camps in that area. This is not meant to suggest that al-Qaeda will hold this territory for a significant length of time. But the fact that the group was able to make such territorial gains suggests that previous estimates of the group’s military power in Yemen did not capture its full strength.
In the past, overestimating our own gains and underestimating our foe has not been costless. When America was preparing to undertake its invasion of Iraq, the perception existed at high levels that the war in Afghanistan had already been won — a view that proved to be tragically wrong.
Dick Cheney, speaking at the Air National Guard Senior Leadership Conference in December 2002, described the Afghanistan war as “America’s most dramatic victory in the war against terrorism” and claimed that “the Taliban regime and the al-Qaeda terrorists have met the fate that they chose for themselves.” As a result of this flawed perception, significant military and intelligence assets were diverted from Afghanistan to Iraq. Robert Grenier, a former director of the CIA’s counterintelligence center, has noted that from late 2002 to early 2003, “the best experienced, most qualified people who we had been using in Afghanistan shifted over to Iraq,” including counterterrorism specialists and special forces.
Moving military assets out of the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater not only harmed coalition efforts in Afghanistan, but also helped to enable al-Qaeda’s regeneration. “If we hadn’t gone into Iraq, we wouldn’t have so gleefully subcontracted the struggle in Pakistan to [Pakistani president] Pervez Musharraf,” Bruce Hoffman, the director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University and one of America’s most distinguished scholars of terrorism, told me in an interview earlier this year. “We gave it to him and walked away. This was also the time when all of a sudden bin Laden went from being public enemy number one to ‘he doesn’t run things, he’s just a symbol.’ It was a complete 180, and all of it breathed new life into al-Qaeda, giving al-Qaeda the breathing space that it needed.”
Al-Qaeda used this breathing space to undertake a number of steps designed to bolster its foothold in Pakistan’s tribal areas. (Even though Western intelligence services mistakenly believed that bin Laden remained in the tribal areas long after he had left, a fact that became obvious after his death, al-Qaeda’s regeneration began there.) Among other things, the jihadi group took advantage of the hospitality offered under the Pashtunwali tribal code, engaged in intermarriage with local women, developed a sound understanding of Pakistan’s tribal politics, and exploited the anti-U.S. backlash in the country.
Despite this, the U.S.’s intelligence agencies continued to believe that the group had been beaten until several terrorist plots — including the successful July 7, 2005, public-transit attacks in London and the plot to destroy several transatlantic flights that was disrupted in August 2006 — forced them to rethink their assumptions.
Moving forward, a big part of actually beating al-Qaeda will involve not repeating the U.S.’s past mistakes. And while it is always difficult to determine the accuracy of intelligence assessments when the facts underlying them have not been made public, there is reason to be concerned that the new proclamations that al-Qaeda is on its deathbed in fact represent the repetition of past errors.
Don’t Forget the Infantry
When Congress cuts defense spending, the Army and Marine Corps get the short end of the stick.
Jim Lacey
Thursday, July 28, 2011
As I write this, 150,000 American ground troops continue to wage violent counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. After ten years of war, our country’s land forces are tired, much of their equipment is worn down, and they fear they are fighting for a cause America no longer concerns itself with. But here is the remarkable thing: If their country asked them to continue the fight for another ten years, they would salute and do their duty. For, when someone on Capitol Hill asks, “Why are the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in Afghanistan?” soldiers and marines have a simple answer: “You sent us.”
Even as American soldiers and marines remain locked in mortal combat, debates rage over how deeply to cut the military. Cuts ranging from $400 billion to $1 trillion over five to ten years are on the table. As none of these discussions appear grounded in any determination of what our strategic needs might be in an uncertain future, I may be wasting my words in pointing out that this appears to be a particularly bad time to think about reducing our military capabilities. Rather, I wish to rail against the one thing that almost always happens when the country undertakes an ill-thought-out reduction of its military might: the senseless elimination of land forces.
After the Soviet Union’s demise, the U.S. Army’s 18 combat divisions were cut to ten. And before 9/11 Secretary Rumsfeld was proposing to cut that force to eight. Let’s put that in perspective. The combat troops within a division (infantry, artillery, armor) are only a fraction of the division’s total strength; the rest serve in crucial logistics and other support roles. If one took all the “trigger pullers” in the nation’s ten Army and two Marine divisions, there would be barely enough to fill half a college football stadium. This lack of manpower was so detrimental to our war efforts that during the peak of the fighting in Iraq serious consideration was given to adding two more combat divisions to the Army. It never happened. And now that our commitment in Iraq is winding down, the Army is once again bracing itself for the possibility of losing two of its ten divisions.
When it comes to budget battles, the Army and Marines are almost always on the losing end. In peacetime, infantry platoon training in the heat, rain, mud, and ice cannot compare with the allure and majesty of a carrier battle group on the high seas. When a congressman visits an aircraft carrier, he is getting an up-close and personal manifestation of America’s awesome power. Just one carrier group (we have nearly a dozen) possesses enough combat power to bring all the navies of World War II to their knees. On the other hand, a congressman visiting an infantry unit in the middle of training will find nothing but dirty, tired soldiers or marines, living in conditions far removed from what one would normally consider civilized.
No one denies that the U.S. Navy and its carrier groups are essential to defending American interests. When there is trouble in the world, the president’s first question is often, “Where is the nearest carrier?” Likewise, what compares to a flight of F-16s, glimmering and deadly as they pass overhead? Besides, the use of airpower looks so simple and clean. Americans have become accustomed to viewing video of cross-hairs sitting on top of targets that disappear in a flash of light and fire, whereupon the pilot returns safely to base for a meal and a nap.
Infantry combat fails by comparison. Films of filthy, exhausted soldiers going street by street and door by door to root out an elusive enemy have none of the glamour of airpower or the magnificence of a warship at sea. Much worse, from the Army and Marine perspective, few of their weapons constitute the backbone of entire industries (shipbuilding and aviation), or are subcontracted out in hundreds of congressional districts. When it comes to defense cuts, there are few voices saying, “We need to protect the poor bloody infantry.”
Now, I am not about to denigrate any service. We need a powerful Navy and an Air Force second to none. No one, not even the Army, disputes that. In fact, in my experience the Army has nothing but love for the other services. As one armor officer told me, “Show me an A-10 pilot [the guys who fly close air support for the ground forces] and I will kiss his butt in the middle of the town square, and give you ten minutes to gather a crowd.” When budgets are being cut, all the Army really hopes for is that the infantrymen are not thrown out with the bathwater.
Former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki was greatly praised for being one of the very few people to tell Congress that stabilizing Iraq after Saddam was deposed would take 250,000 soldiers. What is rarely mentioned is that meeting that number would take all ten Army and both Marine divisions. There would literally be no troops left over to meet any other emergency. Secretary Gates has said, “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” What Gates forgot to mention was that our enemies get a vote on that. If we ever again do find ourselves needing to fight a war on foreign soil, America should not be placed in a position where it is scraping the bottom of the barrel to find enough troops to get the job done.
We all hope that there will never again be a need to place American ground forces in harm’s way. But given history and the current state of the world, only a fool would assume that soldiers and marines will not see combat again this decade. And if they do, it is likely to be in some corner of the world that is not even on policymakers’ radar screens at the moment.
In recent years we have not fought an air or naval war, nor are we likely to do so in the future. In the nation’s two dozen military engagements since the advent of the airplane, only one (Kosovo) was decided by air power, and the war in the former Yugoslavia truly ended only when the 1st Armored Division crashed across the Danube River. The locals had little fear of air strikes. What got their attention was notices such as that sent out by one battalion in the 1st Armored Division: “Peace in the Posavina or deal with us!” While the Navy and Air Force provide crucial support, only ground forces win wars. Unfortunately, they also do most of the dying, particularly in the ugly counterinsurgency conflicts typical of the modern age.
A long deployment at sea or being stationed at an airbase in Kandahar is not a picnic. But the hardships involved in such assignments hardly bear comparison with manning a small patrol base in constant close combat with a murderous foe, while being a hundred miles away from any help. The truth of the matter is that Iraq and Afghanistan have been overwhelmingly ground wars. Total Navy and Air Force losses in our current conflicts are approximately 130 killed and another 1,100 wounded, almost all of them on the ground while supporting Army and Marine operations. Together, the Marines and the Army have lost over 3,500 killed and over 30,000 wounded (equal to the full strength of two and a half combat divisions, or 75 percent of the Army’s and Marine Corps’s total infantry strength). Without in any way belittling the sacrifices made by the other services, they remain only 1/30th of what the Army and Marines have endured.
Many years ago, as a junior infantry officer, I attended semi-annual functions where a toast was drunk to fallen comrades. For most of the young infantrymen present, it was a nearly meaningless toast, as none of us knew any fallen comrades. Those ceremonies are still around today, but now the toast has meaning. Every soldier and marine drinking that same toast now falls into a moment of deep reflective thought as he remembers the names and lives of friends lost. Today when a marine or soldier unexpectedly runs into an old friend, the traditional handshake is mostly passed over in favor of a warm embrace, and the greeting of choice is now “brother.”
Ten years of war and sacrifice have bonded soldiers and marines into a brotherhood that is almost beyond comprehension to those who have not shared their experiences. Because there are so few of them, these soldiers and marines have been on an unending treadmill. Units deploy for a year in the combat zone, return to their homes and families for sometimes as little as six months, and then return for another tour of combat. Many of our mid-career enlisted personnel and officers are on their fourth or fifth combat tours.
Moreover, their time at home is rarely spent resting. Almost as soon as they return, soldiers and marines are thrown into a rigorous training cycle, as they prepare themselves to return to the conflict. Such training always entails long hours daily, and more weeks or months away from their families. Unbelievably, much of this training is done on borrowed equipment. As the Army cannot afford to fully equip the soldiers in combat and also provide enough training equipment for the forces preparing for war, large amounts of equipment are rotated from unit to unit as needed.
For the Army and Marines, Iraq and Afghanistan have been wars without let-up. The pressure has been relentless, and staff officers spend countless hours trying to figure out where they can squeeze one more brigade out of the system so that it can be placed into the rotation to beef up the forces in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such squeezing has often meant that thousands of troops stay in combat months longer than expected, or that others return to combat much earlier than they had thought. This is the price soldiers and marines have regularly paid for the nation’s decision to fight our current wars with the smallest Army and Marine Corps it can possibly get away with.
Despite everything, this nation still possesses the finest land fighting forces in the world. Soldiers and marines still go to the sound of the guns, and in any stand-up fight they always walk away the winners. They have suffered and endured much for the past ten years. They have done so willingly. They will continue to do so for as long as our country asks them to.
What Congress needs to remember is that over the next twenty years there are few scenarios imaginable that will not require “boots on the ground” to ensure success. I too want an Air Force and a Navy that are well ahead of whatever any other country may challenge us with, but not at the cost of gutting this nation’s land forces. Over the next decades, if this nation does involve itself in another conflict, we will assuredly ask soldiers and marines to do the fighting and dying for us. They must have a force large enough to do any job they are called on to do, and the equipment that guarantees their success. Failure to provide both will fill a lot of body-bags.
Jim Lacey
Thursday, July 28, 2011
As I write this, 150,000 American ground troops continue to wage violent counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. After ten years of war, our country’s land forces are tired, much of their equipment is worn down, and they fear they are fighting for a cause America no longer concerns itself with. But here is the remarkable thing: If their country asked them to continue the fight for another ten years, they would salute and do their duty. For, when someone on Capitol Hill asks, “Why are the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in Afghanistan?” soldiers and marines have a simple answer: “You sent us.”
Even as American soldiers and marines remain locked in mortal combat, debates rage over how deeply to cut the military. Cuts ranging from $400 billion to $1 trillion over five to ten years are on the table. As none of these discussions appear grounded in any determination of what our strategic needs might be in an uncertain future, I may be wasting my words in pointing out that this appears to be a particularly bad time to think about reducing our military capabilities. Rather, I wish to rail against the one thing that almost always happens when the country undertakes an ill-thought-out reduction of its military might: the senseless elimination of land forces.
After the Soviet Union’s demise, the U.S. Army’s 18 combat divisions were cut to ten. And before 9/11 Secretary Rumsfeld was proposing to cut that force to eight. Let’s put that in perspective. The combat troops within a division (infantry, artillery, armor) are only a fraction of the division’s total strength; the rest serve in crucial logistics and other support roles. If one took all the “trigger pullers” in the nation’s ten Army and two Marine divisions, there would be barely enough to fill half a college football stadium. This lack of manpower was so detrimental to our war efforts that during the peak of the fighting in Iraq serious consideration was given to adding two more combat divisions to the Army. It never happened. And now that our commitment in Iraq is winding down, the Army is once again bracing itself for the possibility of losing two of its ten divisions.
When it comes to budget battles, the Army and Marines are almost always on the losing end. In peacetime, infantry platoon training in the heat, rain, mud, and ice cannot compare with the allure and majesty of a carrier battle group on the high seas. When a congressman visits an aircraft carrier, he is getting an up-close and personal manifestation of America’s awesome power. Just one carrier group (we have nearly a dozen) possesses enough combat power to bring all the navies of World War II to their knees. On the other hand, a congressman visiting an infantry unit in the middle of training will find nothing but dirty, tired soldiers or marines, living in conditions far removed from what one would normally consider civilized.
No one denies that the U.S. Navy and its carrier groups are essential to defending American interests. When there is trouble in the world, the president’s first question is often, “Where is the nearest carrier?” Likewise, what compares to a flight of F-16s, glimmering and deadly as they pass overhead? Besides, the use of airpower looks so simple and clean. Americans have become accustomed to viewing video of cross-hairs sitting on top of targets that disappear in a flash of light and fire, whereupon the pilot returns safely to base for a meal and a nap.
Infantry combat fails by comparison. Films of filthy, exhausted soldiers going street by street and door by door to root out an elusive enemy have none of the glamour of airpower or the magnificence of a warship at sea. Much worse, from the Army and Marine perspective, few of their weapons constitute the backbone of entire industries (shipbuilding and aviation), or are subcontracted out in hundreds of congressional districts. When it comes to defense cuts, there are few voices saying, “We need to protect the poor bloody infantry.”
Now, I am not about to denigrate any service. We need a powerful Navy and an Air Force second to none. No one, not even the Army, disputes that. In fact, in my experience the Army has nothing but love for the other services. As one armor officer told me, “Show me an A-10 pilot [the guys who fly close air support for the ground forces] and I will kiss his butt in the middle of the town square, and give you ten minutes to gather a crowd.” When budgets are being cut, all the Army really hopes for is that the infantrymen are not thrown out with the bathwater.
Former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki was greatly praised for being one of the very few people to tell Congress that stabilizing Iraq after Saddam was deposed would take 250,000 soldiers. What is rarely mentioned is that meeting that number would take all ten Army and both Marine divisions. There would literally be no troops left over to meet any other emergency. Secretary Gates has said, “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” What Gates forgot to mention was that our enemies get a vote on that. If we ever again do find ourselves needing to fight a war on foreign soil, America should not be placed in a position where it is scraping the bottom of the barrel to find enough troops to get the job done.
We all hope that there will never again be a need to place American ground forces in harm’s way. But given history and the current state of the world, only a fool would assume that soldiers and marines will not see combat again this decade. And if they do, it is likely to be in some corner of the world that is not even on policymakers’ radar screens at the moment.
In recent years we have not fought an air or naval war, nor are we likely to do so in the future. In the nation’s two dozen military engagements since the advent of the airplane, only one (Kosovo) was decided by air power, and the war in the former Yugoslavia truly ended only when the 1st Armored Division crashed across the Danube River. The locals had little fear of air strikes. What got their attention was notices such as that sent out by one battalion in the 1st Armored Division: “Peace in the Posavina or deal with us!” While the Navy and Air Force provide crucial support, only ground forces win wars. Unfortunately, they also do most of the dying, particularly in the ugly counterinsurgency conflicts typical of the modern age.
A long deployment at sea or being stationed at an airbase in Kandahar is not a picnic. But the hardships involved in such assignments hardly bear comparison with manning a small patrol base in constant close combat with a murderous foe, while being a hundred miles away from any help. The truth of the matter is that Iraq and Afghanistan have been overwhelmingly ground wars. Total Navy and Air Force losses in our current conflicts are approximately 130 killed and another 1,100 wounded, almost all of them on the ground while supporting Army and Marine operations. Together, the Marines and the Army have lost over 3,500 killed and over 30,000 wounded (equal to the full strength of two and a half combat divisions, or 75 percent of the Army’s and Marine Corps’s total infantry strength). Without in any way belittling the sacrifices made by the other services, they remain only 1/30th of what the Army and Marines have endured.
Many years ago, as a junior infantry officer, I attended semi-annual functions where a toast was drunk to fallen comrades. For most of the young infantrymen present, it was a nearly meaningless toast, as none of us knew any fallen comrades. Those ceremonies are still around today, but now the toast has meaning. Every soldier and marine drinking that same toast now falls into a moment of deep reflective thought as he remembers the names and lives of friends lost. Today when a marine or soldier unexpectedly runs into an old friend, the traditional handshake is mostly passed over in favor of a warm embrace, and the greeting of choice is now “brother.”
Ten years of war and sacrifice have bonded soldiers and marines into a brotherhood that is almost beyond comprehension to those who have not shared their experiences. Because there are so few of them, these soldiers and marines have been on an unending treadmill. Units deploy for a year in the combat zone, return to their homes and families for sometimes as little as six months, and then return for another tour of combat. Many of our mid-career enlisted personnel and officers are on their fourth or fifth combat tours.
Moreover, their time at home is rarely spent resting. Almost as soon as they return, soldiers and marines are thrown into a rigorous training cycle, as they prepare themselves to return to the conflict. Such training always entails long hours daily, and more weeks or months away from their families. Unbelievably, much of this training is done on borrowed equipment. As the Army cannot afford to fully equip the soldiers in combat and also provide enough training equipment for the forces preparing for war, large amounts of equipment are rotated from unit to unit as needed.
For the Army and Marines, Iraq and Afghanistan have been wars without let-up. The pressure has been relentless, and staff officers spend countless hours trying to figure out where they can squeeze one more brigade out of the system so that it can be placed into the rotation to beef up the forces in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such squeezing has often meant that thousands of troops stay in combat months longer than expected, or that others return to combat much earlier than they had thought. This is the price soldiers and marines have regularly paid for the nation’s decision to fight our current wars with the smallest Army and Marine Corps it can possibly get away with.
Despite everything, this nation still possesses the finest land fighting forces in the world. Soldiers and marines still go to the sound of the guns, and in any stand-up fight they always walk away the winners. They have suffered and endured much for the past ten years. They have done so willingly. They will continue to do so for as long as our country asks them to.
What Congress needs to remember is that over the next twenty years there are few scenarios imaginable that will not require “boots on the ground” to ensure success. I too want an Air Force and a Navy that are well ahead of whatever any other country may challenge us with, but not at the cost of gutting this nation’s land forces. Over the next decades, if this nation does involve itself in another conflict, we will assuredly ask soldiers and marines to do the fighting and dying for us. They must have a force large enough to do any job they are called on to do, and the equipment that guarantees their success. Failure to provide both will fill a lot of body-bags.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
When is an Ideology Responsible For Murder
By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Last week, a psychotic anti-multiculturalism, anti-immigrant, anti-Marxist named Anders Behring Breivik shot up a children's summer camp in Norway. The left wing media was only too eager to point to his ideology as the rationale for the shooting. David Neiwert of CrooksandLiars.com stated that Breivik subscribed to the "theories about 'Cultural Marxism' ... promoted by the likes of Andrew Breitbart, among others." The Daily Kos tried to link Breivik to Accuracy in Academia and the World Congress of Families. Think Progress blamed Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, blogger Pamela Geller, author Brigitte Gabriel and scholar of Islam Robert Spencer. In short, it was a repeat of the Sarah Palin-Gabby Giffords story, only writ large.
This begs the question: when should an ideology be held responsible for murder undertaken by its adherents?
The quickest answer -- when an adherent of an ideology commits murder, the murderer is responsible -- is obviously the wrong one. Adherents of every ideology commit murder on a regular basis. They may be doing so because they misinterpret the ideology or because they are insane.
A more rational answer would require an ideology to fulfill two basic criteria in order to be blamed for a particular act of violence. First, the ideology must itself promote the sort of violence at issue and the type of violence that takes place must bear some resemblance to the violence being promoted. This makes sense. If a group of pacifists shot-up a school, we could say with accuracy that they'd clearly misinterpreted pacifism. The same does not hold true of neo-Nazi ideology and Jews.
Second, a large number of adherents to the ideology must engage in or support the form of violence in question. It is possible for formerly violent ideologies to change over time -- no one, for example, save Timothy McVeigh, thinks that Constitutional ideology is violent anymore, despite Thomas Jefferson's proclamations about the tree of liberty and the blood of patriots.
Let's take a test case, Islam. There is no question that Islamic texts promote violence against Jews and Christians. For example: the Koran famously proclaims, "Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush." With regard to Jews, one famous tidbit of Islamic oral tradition delightfully states, "The Day of Resurrection will not arrive until the Moslems make war against the Jews and kill them, and until a Jew is hiding behind a rock and tree, and the rock and tree say, 'Oh Moslem, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!'"
Now, if these verses and teachings were interpreted differently over time -- as some seemingly violent verses in the Torah and the New Testament have been, almost universally, by Jewish and Christian scholars -- we would have no problem. But the second prong of the ideological violence test comes out positive here too. As polls show, huge swaths of Muslims endorse anti-Western violence, and the more religious they are, the more they endorse such violence. Over 50 percent of Jordanians and Lebanese support the terrorist group Hezbollah; over 40 percent of Nigerians and Indonesians do too; 30 percent of Egyptians and 19 percent of Pakistanis do as well. Those numbers are even higher, in general, for Hamas. In countries like Iran and territories like those controlled by the Palestinian Authority, the numbers skyrocket.
When Major Nidal Malik Hassan shoots up a cafeteria full of U.S. soldiers while shouting "Allahu Akhbar!," then, it isn't out of line to ask whether Islam is the ideological root cause. The answer may still be debatable, but it is a debate worth having.
The same does not hold true of conservatism with regard to Breivik. In fact, neither prong of the ideological violence test is met here. Conservatism does not promote political violence. Opponents of conservatism cannot come up with any significant support in articulated conservative thought that pushes violence to their chagrin. Certainly with regard to Breivik, the violence he pursued bore no relation to anything at issue in the anti-multicultural context -- he shot up a bunch of Norwegian kids, not a group of immigrant Muslims.
Second, there is literally zero support for Breivik among conservatives. The left cannot find a single conservative who approved of Breivik's acts. That's a far cry from the literally hundreds of millions of Muslims who support terror groups across the globe.
It's time to put away the "incitement to violence" club so often utilized these days to shut down free speech. Breivik's evil doesn't mean that conservatism promoted it or endorsed it. By the same token, not all ideologies are equal -- some (start ital) do (end ital) promote violence. It is imperative that we apply the ideological violence test before dismissing the effects of ideology. It is also necessary that we apply the ideological violence test before pointing fingers at mainstream political actors for violent monstrosities that have nothing to do with them.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Last week, a psychotic anti-multiculturalism, anti-immigrant, anti-Marxist named Anders Behring Breivik shot up a children's summer camp in Norway. The left wing media was only too eager to point to his ideology as the rationale for the shooting. David Neiwert of CrooksandLiars.com stated that Breivik subscribed to the "theories about 'Cultural Marxism' ... promoted by the likes of Andrew Breitbart, among others." The Daily Kos tried to link Breivik to Accuracy in Academia and the World Congress of Families. Think Progress blamed Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, blogger Pamela Geller, author Brigitte Gabriel and scholar of Islam Robert Spencer. In short, it was a repeat of the Sarah Palin-Gabby Giffords story, only writ large.
This begs the question: when should an ideology be held responsible for murder undertaken by its adherents?
The quickest answer -- when an adherent of an ideology commits murder, the murderer is responsible -- is obviously the wrong one. Adherents of every ideology commit murder on a regular basis. They may be doing so because they misinterpret the ideology or because they are insane.
A more rational answer would require an ideology to fulfill two basic criteria in order to be blamed for a particular act of violence. First, the ideology must itself promote the sort of violence at issue and the type of violence that takes place must bear some resemblance to the violence being promoted. This makes sense. If a group of pacifists shot-up a school, we could say with accuracy that they'd clearly misinterpreted pacifism. The same does not hold true of neo-Nazi ideology and Jews.
Second, a large number of adherents to the ideology must engage in or support the form of violence in question. It is possible for formerly violent ideologies to change over time -- no one, for example, save Timothy McVeigh, thinks that Constitutional ideology is violent anymore, despite Thomas Jefferson's proclamations about the tree of liberty and the blood of patriots.
Let's take a test case, Islam. There is no question that Islamic texts promote violence against Jews and Christians. For example: the Koran famously proclaims, "Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush." With regard to Jews, one famous tidbit of Islamic oral tradition delightfully states, "The Day of Resurrection will not arrive until the Moslems make war against the Jews and kill them, and until a Jew is hiding behind a rock and tree, and the rock and tree say, 'Oh Moslem, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!'"
Now, if these verses and teachings were interpreted differently over time -- as some seemingly violent verses in the Torah and the New Testament have been, almost universally, by Jewish and Christian scholars -- we would have no problem. But the second prong of the ideological violence test comes out positive here too. As polls show, huge swaths of Muslims endorse anti-Western violence, and the more religious they are, the more they endorse such violence. Over 50 percent of Jordanians and Lebanese support the terrorist group Hezbollah; over 40 percent of Nigerians and Indonesians do too; 30 percent of Egyptians and 19 percent of Pakistanis do as well. Those numbers are even higher, in general, for Hamas. In countries like Iran and territories like those controlled by the Palestinian Authority, the numbers skyrocket.
When Major Nidal Malik Hassan shoots up a cafeteria full of U.S. soldiers while shouting "Allahu Akhbar!," then, it isn't out of line to ask whether Islam is the ideological root cause. The answer may still be debatable, but it is a debate worth having.
The same does not hold true of conservatism with regard to Breivik. In fact, neither prong of the ideological violence test is met here. Conservatism does not promote political violence. Opponents of conservatism cannot come up with any significant support in articulated conservative thought that pushes violence to their chagrin. Certainly with regard to Breivik, the violence he pursued bore no relation to anything at issue in the anti-multicultural context -- he shot up a bunch of Norwegian kids, not a group of immigrant Muslims.
Second, there is literally zero support for Breivik among conservatives. The left cannot find a single conservative who approved of Breivik's acts. That's a far cry from the literally hundreds of millions of Muslims who support terror groups across the globe.
It's time to put away the "incitement to violence" club so often utilized these days to shut down free speech. Breivik's evil doesn't mean that conservatism promoted it or endorsed it. By the same token, not all ideologies are equal -- some (start ital) do (end ital) promote violence. It is imperative that we apply the ideological violence test before dismissing the effects of ideology. It is also necessary that we apply the ideological violence test before pointing fingers at mainstream political actors for violent monstrosities that have nothing to do with them.
Global Warming Panel to Earth's Rescue, on Our Dime
By Rachel Marsden
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Hundreds of United Nations global warming scientists just met in France via Earth-destroying air travel, ironically at a time of unseasonably cool temperatures across France, to once again justify their funding. Apparently the overall temperature of Earth is set to maybe rise 4 degrees Fahrenheit within the next hundred years. And you can bet that when climate scientists get together to discuss "solutions" to these hypothetical "problems," they're going to come up with ways to make humans suffer for being jerks to the planet.
According to the website for the group -- known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- its newest assessment report is focused on "risk management and the framing of a response through both adaptation and mitigation." It's a modified focus compared with previous reports. A sign, perhaps, that the IPCC has given up on stopping livestock from passing flatulence -- the primary source of climate change gas -- and accepted our pending doom at the hands of our farting overlords.
I'd like to make a contribution to the cause with my own recommendations of how we can all better contend with an apparently devastating temperature rise of probably less than one degree over our lifetimes.
Because it's hard to justify doing anything differently for something so logically insignificant, I'll pretend, as climate scientists do, that I'll lose my funding and livelihood if I can't make something out of nothing. So I'll be exaggerating a bit and pretending that a one-degree rise is really more like a hundred. Let's start in Europe, where this lunacy always catches on easiest before spreading like a plague to North America.
First, if it's going to heat up, we all need to have access to glacial air-conditioning. I'm looking at you, France, where old folks die in summer heat waves because for whatever reason people can't embrace technology-bestowed climate management. The 2007 French decree recommending that no interior with a temperature under 80 degrees Fahrenheit ever be air-conditioned is already outdated. Humans need refuge somewhere from this apparently imminent spontaneous combustion.
Preferably everything everywhere should be air-conditioned between now and the day we're set to spontaneously combust. If we could somehow manage to air-condition the sidewalks as well, then maybe we could eliminate noticing the problem altogether.
Another adaptation I'd like to suggest is better hygiene. If we're going to be increasingly hot and sweaty in the future, we should start making laws curtailing olfactory assault. Specifically, these laws should target people who don't wash either themselves or their clothes often enough in hot weather. Encouraging greater use of water, deodorant and washing/drying machines would go a long way in making us all more comfortable during this inevitable slide into inferno. I suggest imposing stink-fines, and building stink-prisons for the worst offenders.
Oh, and drink lots of water. Guzzle it like we have oceans full of it -- which we do. And we'll have more when the glaciers melt, right?
That's all I've got -- simple and people-centric -- because no one's paying me U.N. money to come up with impractical nonsense. Now let's see what the French environment minister, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet (NKM), has come up with. Wow, it looks like she has 230 ideas, at an estimated total cost of 550 million Euros -- none of which will require a popular vote in French parliament. I bet my suggestion of air-conditioning all the sidewalks would cost less than that.
NKM claims to want to reduce water consumption by 20 percent by 2020 (I'm already thirsty), recycle used water (gross), "diversify the genetic resources of trees" to better adapt parks to forest fires (yay for trees), and adapt things like "trains and roads" to produce less carbon dioxide (yay for trains, bad for plants, which use CO2 as food). What about the humans? Who will represent the interest of non-bureaucrats and non-profiteers in the global-warming debate?
Reducing water consumption and increasing the use of recycled used water seem to be the most sadistic measures that could possibly be adopted to combat a rise in temperature -- especially when the theoretically melting glaciers should be giving us more water than we could ever need. Hopefully we'll still be allowed to make beer when the temperature goes up a couple of degrees, so we can drink and bathe in that as the last bastion of human refreshment.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Hundreds of United Nations global warming scientists just met in France via Earth-destroying air travel, ironically at a time of unseasonably cool temperatures across France, to once again justify their funding. Apparently the overall temperature of Earth is set to maybe rise 4 degrees Fahrenheit within the next hundred years. And you can bet that when climate scientists get together to discuss "solutions" to these hypothetical "problems," they're going to come up with ways to make humans suffer for being jerks to the planet.
According to the website for the group -- known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- its newest assessment report is focused on "risk management and the framing of a response through both adaptation and mitigation." It's a modified focus compared with previous reports. A sign, perhaps, that the IPCC has given up on stopping livestock from passing flatulence -- the primary source of climate change gas -- and accepted our pending doom at the hands of our farting overlords.
I'd like to make a contribution to the cause with my own recommendations of how we can all better contend with an apparently devastating temperature rise of probably less than one degree over our lifetimes.
Because it's hard to justify doing anything differently for something so logically insignificant, I'll pretend, as climate scientists do, that I'll lose my funding and livelihood if I can't make something out of nothing. So I'll be exaggerating a bit and pretending that a one-degree rise is really more like a hundred. Let's start in Europe, where this lunacy always catches on easiest before spreading like a plague to North America.
First, if it's going to heat up, we all need to have access to glacial air-conditioning. I'm looking at you, France, where old folks die in summer heat waves because for whatever reason people can't embrace technology-bestowed climate management. The 2007 French decree recommending that no interior with a temperature under 80 degrees Fahrenheit ever be air-conditioned is already outdated. Humans need refuge somewhere from this apparently imminent spontaneous combustion.
Preferably everything everywhere should be air-conditioned between now and the day we're set to spontaneously combust. If we could somehow manage to air-condition the sidewalks as well, then maybe we could eliminate noticing the problem altogether.
Another adaptation I'd like to suggest is better hygiene. If we're going to be increasingly hot and sweaty in the future, we should start making laws curtailing olfactory assault. Specifically, these laws should target people who don't wash either themselves or their clothes often enough in hot weather. Encouraging greater use of water, deodorant and washing/drying machines would go a long way in making us all more comfortable during this inevitable slide into inferno. I suggest imposing stink-fines, and building stink-prisons for the worst offenders.
Oh, and drink lots of water. Guzzle it like we have oceans full of it -- which we do. And we'll have more when the glaciers melt, right?
That's all I've got -- simple and people-centric -- because no one's paying me U.N. money to come up with impractical nonsense. Now let's see what the French environment minister, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet (NKM), has come up with. Wow, it looks like she has 230 ideas, at an estimated total cost of 550 million Euros -- none of which will require a popular vote in French parliament. I bet my suggestion of air-conditioning all the sidewalks would cost less than that.
NKM claims to want to reduce water consumption by 20 percent by 2020 (I'm already thirsty), recycle used water (gross), "diversify the genetic resources of trees" to better adapt parks to forest fires (yay for trees), and adapt things like "trains and roads" to produce less carbon dioxide (yay for trains, bad for plants, which use CO2 as food). What about the humans? Who will represent the interest of non-bureaucrats and non-profiteers in the global-warming debate?
Reducing water consumption and increasing the use of recycled used water seem to be the most sadistic measures that could possibly be adopted to combat a rise in temperature -- especially when the theoretically melting glaciers should be giving us more water than we could ever need. Hopefully we'll still be allowed to make beer when the temperature goes up a couple of degrees, so we can drink and bathe in that as the last bastion of human refreshment.
The Tragic View Returns
The therapeutic society’s world view has become unsustainable.
Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
In hard times, as in war, questions arise that were once considered taboo. As we approach $15 trillion run up in aggregate national debt, and confront the reality of a welfare state that is predicated on flawed assumptions about everything from demography to human nature, a rendezvous with brutal reality is now upon us.
Indeed, an entire array of tragic questions arises in a bankrupt but suddenly open-minded society in a way unimaginable in a reactionary, affluent one with endless credit: Should those on welfare who have more than three children still qualify for increased assistance for each additional offspring? Should state-subsidized elective operations automatically be provided for the chronically obese or lifelong smokers? Does the affluent class deserve mortgage-interest deductions on second and third homes? Should U.S. troops subsidize the defense of an allied and rich Germany or Japan 66 years after World War II?
Social Security reform used to be the third rail that politicians dared not touch. But is that prohibition really still operative as big government approaches insolvency? Expect soon not just the retirement age to jump, reflecting modern longevity, or automatic cost-of-living increases to cease, mirroring the reality found in the private sector, but also the entire notion of disability to change as well.
Quite simply, the dogma that a teenager with dyslexia or a mature man with a bum knee will receive years of Social Security disability benefits will be assessed as an historical aberration of the last twenty years. A decision by an insurance company or government agency that a 62-year old must settle for arthroscopic surgery on a chronically torn meniscus rather than a complete knee replacement will not be interpreted as social cruelty.
Almost everything that can be said has been said about illegal immigration — and about the sustainability and morality of millions of Mexican and Latin American nationals crossing the U.S. border unlawfully and plugging into the American entitlement system. But an insolvent state like California, despite the liberal protestations, cannot continue to house 50,000 Mexican nationals in its penal system at a per capita cost of nearly $35,000 a year, or to extend free tuition in its broke university system to those without legal residence, or to provide social services to illegal aliens that may well cost the state nearly $10 billion a year. Even to suggest such limits was once considered illiberal. Now, not to state the obvious — that those without education, English, and legality have been expecting far more than what they could contribute in return — will be considered derelict.
An eight-decade tradition of direct agricultural subsidies was once considered sacrosanct. In laughable fashion, farm-state senators invoked everything from the “Save the family farm” mantra to national security to green energy, all to ensure ongoing direct cash grants to affluent and influential corporate agribusiness. But even in flush times the system had long ago become intellectually and morally indefensible: Why subsidize one crop and not another? Why give public money to those who already make good profits in the private sector? As the government crosses its financial Rubicon, such largess will quietly disappear as well. The only mystery that will remain a decade from now will be how such an absurdity lasted as long as it did.
Nearly 50 million people are now on “food stamps.” Of course, the nomenclature is an anachronism, because modern therapeutic society long ago rejected the stigma of shuffling clumsy stamps at the check-out counter, and reduced the process of getting free food into flashing a government-issued plastic card no different in appearance from a bank ATM card. The calcified liberal technocracy talks as if each new person added to the program was faced with Dickensian starvation, even as the other five-sixths of Americans trade anecdotes about waiting in line behind a subsidized cart of food far superior to their own.
But again, $14 trillion–plus in debt cuts into a lot of liberal screeds. At some not too distant date, we will begin to see only poor people buying food on taxpayers’ money, and buying only essentials — we will not see those in the middle class counting on such subsidies to free up cash for elective purchases.
In that regard, the entire modern therapeutic sensibility will wane when the ability to borrow endlessly ceases, and the old tragic view of human experience will reassert itself. A classical Greek would suggest that the more one supplies generous pensions, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and direct government subsidies, the more entirely human responses assert themselves: the incentive to be self-reliant disappearing in direct proportion to the spread of self-righteousness about deserving such entitlements as a birthright. A year ago, to hint that many were not looking so eagerly for work because they enjoyed long-term unemployment benefits and an array of state subsidies would have been deemed heartless; soon the pieties of a credit-obsessed society will vanish with the tragic nod, and the remark “But of course — human nature being what it is.”
Finally, the entire debate about wealth and poverty, confined solely to the ossified realm of reported income and federal and state entitlements, will also change. Is one poor who has access to an iPhone or iPod, a big-screen television, or a hand-held GPS — appurtenances that even a decade ago were mostly confined to the affluent? Is one poor who can walk into a Wal-Mart and buy a Chinese- or Indian-made sweat suit for less than $20, one that appears not much different from the $500 designer sports outfit worn by the Wall Street grandee in Central Park?
Is the hot water any less hot, the stovetop any cooler, in the HUD-subsidized tract houses two miles from my home than in the mansions of a John Edwards, John Kerry, or Barack Obama?
Is the cash economy always to remain just an abstraction, or at some point does one tabulate officially what we know privately is commonplace? Do millions perennially count as impoverished who mow lawns, clean houses, and serve food for tax-free cash wages while qualifying for state subsidies?
Reactionary politicians in a time warp harangue about 19th-century-style poverty as if only their efforts to borrow more money to extend more entitlements to more people each day save humanity, even as high technology has reinvented modern consumer life, a huge cash economy has arisen hand-in-glove with half the nation not paying income tax, and some 500 million Indian and Chinese workers flood U.S. stores with low-cost items unimaginable just twenty years ago.
There is a certain brutal honesty about this debt crisis. It is slowly beginning to force us to see the world in the tragic way it is, rather than in the therapeutic way we dream it must be.
Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
In hard times, as in war, questions arise that were once considered taboo. As we approach $15 trillion run up in aggregate national debt, and confront the reality of a welfare state that is predicated on flawed assumptions about everything from demography to human nature, a rendezvous with brutal reality is now upon us.
Indeed, an entire array of tragic questions arises in a bankrupt but suddenly open-minded society in a way unimaginable in a reactionary, affluent one with endless credit: Should those on welfare who have more than three children still qualify for increased assistance for each additional offspring? Should state-subsidized elective operations automatically be provided for the chronically obese or lifelong smokers? Does the affluent class deserve mortgage-interest deductions on second and third homes? Should U.S. troops subsidize the defense of an allied and rich Germany or Japan 66 years after World War II?
Social Security reform used to be the third rail that politicians dared not touch. But is that prohibition really still operative as big government approaches insolvency? Expect soon not just the retirement age to jump, reflecting modern longevity, or automatic cost-of-living increases to cease, mirroring the reality found in the private sector, but also the entire notion of disability to change as well.
Quite simply, the dogma that a teenager with dyslexia or a mature man with a bum knee will receive years of Social Security disability benefits will be assessed as an historical aberration of the last twenty years. A decision by an insurance company or government agency that a 62-year old must settle for arthroscopic surgery on a chronically torn meniscus rather than a complete knee replacement will not be interpreted as social cruelty.
Almost everything that can be said has been said about illegal immigration — and about the sustainability and morality of millions of Mexican and Latin American nationals crossing the U.S. border unlawfully and plugging into the American entitlement system. But an insolvent state like California, despite the liberal protestations, cannot continue to house 50,000 Mexican nationals in its penal system at a per capita cost of nearly $35,000 a year, or to extend free tuition in its broke university system to those without legal residence, or to provide social services to illegal aliens that may well cost the state nearly $10 billion a year. Even to suggest such limits was once considered illiberal. Now, not to state the obvious — that those without education, English, and legality have been expecting far more than what they could contribute in return — will be considered derelict.
An eight-decade tradition of direct agricultural subsidies was once considered sacrosanct. In laughable fashion, farm-state senators invoked everything from the “Save the family farm” mantra to national security to green energy, all to ensure ongoing direct cash grants to affluent and influential corporate agribusiness. But even in flush times the system had long ago become intellectually and morally indefensible: Why subsidize one crop and not another? Why give public money to those who already make good profits in the private sector? As the government crosses its financial Rubicon, such largess will quietly disappear as well. The only mystery that will remain a decade from now will be how such an absurdity lasted as long as it did.
Nearly 50 million people are now on “food stamps.” Of course, the nomenclature is an anachronism, because modern therapeutic society long ago rejected the stigma of shuffling clumsy stamps at the check-out counter, and reduced the process of getting free food into flashing a government-issued plastic card no different in appearance from a bank ATM card. The calcified liberal technocracy talks as if each new person added to the program was faced with Dickensian starvation, even as the other five-sixths of Americans trade anecdotes about waiting in line behind a subsidized cart of food far superior to their own.
But again, $14 trillion–plus in debt cuts into a lot of liberal screeds. At some not too distant date, we will begin to see only poor people buying food on taxpayers’ money, and buying only essentials — we will not see those in the middle class counting on such subsidies to free up cash for elective purchases.
In that regard, the entire modern therapeutic sensibility will wane when the ability to borrow endlessly ceases, and the old tragic view of human experience will reassert itself. A classical Greek would suggest that the more one supplies generous pensions, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and direct government subsidies, the more entirely human responses assert themselves: the incentive to be self-reliant disappearing in direct proportion to the spread of self-righteousness about deserving such entitlements as a birthright. A year ago, to hint that many were not looking so eagerly for work because they enjoyed long-term unemployment benefits and an array of state subsidies would have been deemed heartless; soon the pieties of a credit-obsessed society will vanish with the tragic nod, and the remark “But of course — human nature being what it is.”
Finally, the entire debate about wealth and poverty, confined solely to the ossified realm of reported income and federal and state entitlements, will also change. Is one poor who has access to an iPhone or iPod, a big-screen television, or a hand-held GPS — appurtenances that even a decade ago were mostly confined to the affluent? Is one poor who can walk into a Wal-Mart and buy a Chinese- or Indian-made sweat suit for less than $20, one that appears not much different from the $500 designer sports outfit worn by the Wall Street grandee in Central Park?
Is the hot water any less hot, the stovetop any cooler, in the HUD-subsidized tract houses two miles from my home than in the mansions of a John Edwards, John Kerry, or Barack Obama?
Is the cash economy always to remain just an abstraction, or at some point does one tabulate officially what we know privately is commonplace? Do millions perennially count as impoverished who mow lawns, clean houses, and serve food for tax-free cash wages while qualifying for state subsidies?
Reactionary politicians in a time warp harangue about 19th-century-style poverty as if only their efforts to borrow more money to extend more entitlements to more people each day save humanity, even as high technology has reinvented modern consumer life, a huge cash economy has arisen hand-in-glove with half the nation not paying income tax, and some 500 million Indian and Chinese workers flood U.S. stores with low-cost items unimaginable just twenty years ago.
There is a certain brutal honesty about this debt crisis. It is slowly beginning to force us to see the world in the tragic way it is, rather than in the therapeutic way we dream it must be.
Norway and Gun Control
Gun laws do not hit their target.
Charlie Cooke
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Whenever a tragedy such as last week’s attack in Norway occurs, the first instinct of many is to ask how the perpetrator was able to get hold of a gun, and shortly after to conclude that Something Must Be Done About Guns. Among those to speak out after Friday’s horror was Dennis Hennigan, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Mr. Hennigan suggested that “such a tragedy in Norway likely will lead to determined efforts to further examine their nation’s gun policies.”
Whether it will or not remains to be seen, but history shows us that this would be the wrong response. Those who are willing to break the laws against murder do not care about the regulation of firearms, and will get hold of weapons whether doing so is legal or not. As the old trope goes, to expect a mass-murderer to be concerned that his firearm is obtained outside the law is akin to expecting a truck bomber to fret that his vehicle is occupying two parking spaces. Put simply, gun laws do not hit their target.
Norway already has strict regulation of firearms, but this is an irrelevance when considering the actions of Anders Breivik. There are also laws in that country against impersonating a police officer, against setting off bombs, and against massacring children. Most people follow these. But then, most people are not the problem. Most people do not get out of bed and plan terrorist attacks. Those who do are beyond the law and will not be constrained by changes to it. In a free society, maniacs will always find a way.
This is not a new concept. Cesare Baccaria outlined this truth in his seminal book Crimes & Punishments in 1764, in a passage that made such an impression upon Thomas Jefferson that he copied it into his daybook and quoted it at length in letters to his nephew and to James Madison:
A better question than “How did the shooter get his guns?” is “What would have happened had others at Utøya had had access to weapons too?” If Breivik had been denied his monopoly on violence, we may have read a different story. As it was, Breivik could have been fairly confident that he would not be challenged — even by the police, who are unarmed except in special circumstances, and who took an hour and a half to get to the scene.
Norway’s system is the worst of both worlds. Licenses are tied to interests — farming, hunting, sports — rather than to rights. Transportation of firearms is heavily restricted, and there is no such thing as a concealed-carry permit. The police are unarmed. We have heard much about how “uncontroversial” the issue is in Norway, but it should be more so. Currently, it is a veritable paradise for those with ill intent who know that their actions will go unchecked.
The United States is no stranger to gun violence, but it is inconceivable that a shooter could have terrorized such a large area for an hour and a half with impunity in, say, Idaho. When Charles Whitman ran amok at the University of Texas in 1966, his intended victims started shooting back. He was eventually killed by a policeman. As John Lott Jr. has persuasively argued, the relationship between guns and crime is counterintuitive; even those who do not own guns are protected by those who do, both actively and, because criminal behavior is affected by calculation of risk, passively.
To live in freedom is to expose ourselves to the occasional outburst of the insane and the criminal. We cannot stop those who have evil in their hearts, but we can make sure that those who do not — the citizenry and the police — are given a fighting chance to protect us all.
Charlie Cooke
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Whenever a tragedy such as last week’s attack in Norway occurs, the first instinct of many is to ask how the perpetrator was able to get hold of a gun, and shortly after to conclude that Something Must Be Done About Guns. Among those to speak out after Friday’s horror was Dennis Hennigan, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Mr. Hennigan suggested that “such a tragedy in Norway likely will lead to determined efforts to further examine their nation’s gun policies.”
Whether it will or not remains to be seen, but history shows us that this would be the wrong response. Those who are willing to break the laws against murder do not care about the regulation of firearms, and will get hold of weapons whether doing so is legal or not. As the old trope goes, to expect a mass-murderer to be concerned that his firearm is obtained outside the law is akin to expecting a truck bomber to fret that his vehicle is occupying two parking spaces. Put simply, gun laws do not hit their target.
Norway already has strict regulation of firearms, but this is an irrelevance when considering the actions of Anders Breivik. There are also laws in that country against impersonating a police officer, against setting off bombs, and against massacring children. Most people follow these. But then, most people are not the problem. Most people do not get out of bed and plan terrorist attacks. Those who do are beyond the law and will not be constrained by changes to it. In a free society, maniacs will always find a way.
This is not a new concept. Cesare Baccaria outlined this truth in his seminal book Crimes & Punishments in 1764, in a passage that made such an impression upon Thomas Jefferson that he copied it into his daybook and quoted it at length in letters to his nephew and to James Madison:
The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? And does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.There are few laws that Norway could have passed to prevent such an attack. The fertilizer that Breivik used in his bomb was legally bought through a farm he had registered, and the guns he used in his rampage were legally registered. Guns are allowed in Norway only for hunting and sports shooting, with handgun licenses requiring the applicant to take a nine-hour firearm-safety course, pass a written test, and prove active and continuing membership of a shooting club. This Breivik did, pointing explicitly in his application to his clean criminal record. Had he not been able to get hold of the weapons domestically, he would have found them elsewhere. (He had already taken an abortive trip to Prague with this aim, hollowing out the back seats of his car to make space for the AK-47 assault rifle and Glock pistol he coveted. He failed to make any connections with the many illicit weapons dealers for which Prague is famous, but that he was prepared to risk dying at the hands of what he described as “brutal and cynical criminals” to obtain firearms is an indication that he was unlikely to give up.)
A better question than “How did the shooter get his guns?” is “What would have happened had others at Utøya had had access to weapons too?” If Breivik had been denied his monopoly on violence, we may have read a different story. As it was, Breivik could have been fairly confident that he would not be challenged — even by the police, who are unarmed except in special circumstances, and who took an hour and a half to get to the scene.
Norway’s system is the worst of both worlds. Licenses are tied to interests — farming, hunting, sports — rather than to rights. Transportation of firearms is heavily restricted, and there is no such thing as a concealed-carry permit. The police are unarmed. We have heard much about how “uncontroversial” the issue is in Norway, but it should be more so. Currently, it is a veritable paradise for those with ill intent who know that their actions will go unchecked.
The United States is no stranger to gun violence, but it is inconceivable that a shooter could have terrorized such a large area for an hour and a half with impunity in, say, Idaho. When Charles Whitman ran amok at the University of Texas in 1966, his intended victims started shooting back. He was eventually killed by a policeman. As John Lott Jr. has persuasively argued, the relationship between guns and crime is counterintuitive; even those who do not own guns are protected by those who do, both actively and, because criminal behavior is affected by calculation of risk, passively.
To live in freedom is to expose ourselves to the occasional outburst of the insane and the criminal. We cannot stop those who have evil in their hearts, but we can make sure that those who do not — the citizenry and the police — are given a fighting chance to protect us all.
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