Archive for 2014
January 6, 2014
IN THE MAIL: From Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About America.
ROGER SIMON: Gore and Kerry: The Perils Of Presidential Losers.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Obama On The Couch: The president’s TV-viewing tastes are utterly typical of the American educated class. “Anyone who can make it through the piece should conclude that the president is neither a Communist nor a Muslim but a conventional and rather unexciting Bobo, a middle-aged parent of two who unwinds, in between golf and games of pickup basketball, in the accustomed manner of his caste. Ironic, isn’t it: A man whose senses of ego and ambition are continually inflated by his rivals, his supporters, and himself is just another member of a comfortable and confused elite, enjoying television on his large, high-definition set, watching movies in his private screening room, and eating fine cuisine in the most fashionable restaurants while brooding over the prospect of American decline. One reads “Obama’s TV Picks” not for the information it contains or for the conclusions it draws, but for the opportunity to be reassured that, no matter how incompetent he may seem, no matter how far his approval ratings may fall, Barack Obama is, in the end, just like us.”
That Obama is a typical member of America’s ruling class is not at odds with “how incompetent he may seem.”
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: 2013: The World’s Biggest Losers. Shockingly, #3 is “The Obama Administration.”
Excerpt: “What a difference a year makes. The US has been forced to pivot back to the Middle East, and not because things were going well. Al Qaeda is back, having successfully morphed from a group in the AfPak hills into a global movement with affiliates, imitators and fellow travelers wreaking havoc from Africa to Central Asia. Libya is a horror show. Assad bounced back. US prestige and credibility took a hammering in the Syrian air strike fiasco. Iran is on a roll in the Middle East, and this very risk-averse administration is now engaged in two desperate, against the odds negotiating efforts. Somehow, the Obama administration has managed to put itself into a position where unless it achieves the near-impossible (peace treaty between Israel and Palestine, resolution of the US-Iranian standoff) in a few months, it will be judged a definitive failure. One never wants to be in this kind of a position if only because the more desperate you are to reach an agreement, the higher the price of the agreement becomes. Meanwhile, Japan’s new assertiveness in Asia is more like what the White House hoped the pivot to Asia would avoid, rather than an example of what it hoped to achieve.” So much for Smart DiplomacyTM I guess.
Oh, right: “Making things worse is a sharp drop in the credibility of the administration with allies and opponents alike. This is largely a self-inflicted wound; the White House has too often engaged in a deeply counterproductive approach.”
NEWSWEEK: Sky-high taxes and overprotective labor laws are driving out the country’s best and brightest. “As a result, there has been a frantic bolt for the border by the very people who create economic growth – business leaders, innovators, creative thinkers, and top executives. They are all leaving France to develop their talents elsewhere.”
Good thing nothing like that could happen here.
WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT HIPHOP TODAY? Modern Art Was ‘CIA Weapon.’
AT AMAZON, deals on bestselling Wireless Photo Printers.
Also, bestselling photo scanners. Digitize those pics now before they fade.
Plus, today only: 40% Off Puma Tazon 5 Cross-Training Shoes.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Consider Alternative Schooling.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT, IN SATURDAY’S WALL STREET JOURNAL, an excerpt from my new book, The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. It’s not behind the paywall.
TA-NEHISI COATES: Grappling With Holodomor: Thoughts On Timothy Snyder’s The Bloodlands. “A few days ago, I listened to a chapter in Timothy Snyder’s The Bloodlands on famine in Ukraine during the 1930s. The famine was man-made–the result of Stalin making war against his own citizens in Ukraine. I listened (I have the book in MP3 format) to about 90 percent of the chapter before I just had to cut it off. I generally have a strong stomach when it come to reading about evil, but this was too much. . . . That people were starving to death in Ukraine, and that this was a political act, not an act of God, was hidden from the world. And then sometimes the world just looked away.”
Or, as in the case of The New York Times’ Walter Duranty, affirmatively helped to cover it up.
SMART DIPLOMACY:TM The Foreign Policy Essay: “2013: The Year We Lost Iraq.”
HEH: The Column The Academy Hopes No One Will Read. “With the social and technological picture changing so rapidly, it’s hard to know if all of Glenn’s predictions will work out, and we might emphasize even more strongly than he does that the right kind of humanities education can be as practical as anything in the engineering department. But any college president who isn’t taking Glenn’s concerns seriously isn’t doing the job.”
REX MURPHY: The Failed Boycott Campaign Against Israel.
The BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, of which this latest boycott attempt is offspring, has been around since 2005. Its popularity with the hard left coincides with the rise of Israeli Apartheid Week activities on North American campuses. But something has happened in recent years: I notice that the response to the latest urging from the claque of self-styled anti-Zionists is not being received with nearly the same respect as previous iterations. The ASA has been taking withering fire from all quarters. Over 100 American universities already have come forward to say that they want nothing to do with any such boycott.
Catholic University president John Garvey offered a splendid volley: “The Association has appointed itself as a kind of inept volunteer fire department, aiming to put out the Israeli-Palestinian conflagration by throwing gasoline on the fire. That’s not exactly right. It has decided to pour gas not on the source of the fire but on bystanders, some of whom are trying to extinguish the flames.”
Another response, from Richard Slotkin, emeritus professor at Wesleyan University, is admirably succinct: The boycott “is wrong in principle, politically impotent, intellectually dishonest and morally obtuse.”
Yes, this movement is not merely inept, it is evil. The ASA needs to be made an example of, sufficient to deter similar evil in the future.
MICKEY KAUS: GM Loses Market Share, Again?
The press won’t make it easy for you to discover–gets in the way of the pre-packaged “Detroit is back!” narrative–but it looks like General Motors lost market share again in 2013. According to Ward’s Auto, GM sales grew 7.3%–but the market as a whole grew 7.5%. … GM sales for December unexpectedly cratered, despite “high inventory levels … unseen since before the Great Recession.” … If this is a good year for GM, I wonder what a bad year will look like.
I dunno, but I’ll bet it’ll happen unexpectedly.
RAND PAUL: ‘Overwhelm the Government’ with Class-Action Suit Against Obama’s NSA.
The poor NSA. I don’t think it wants to be thought of as “Obama’s.” But given the relentless politicization of every other government department under Obama, that’s hard to avoid, I’m afraid. If I worked there, I’d be wondering how to regain the trust it needs to function, or even to sustain current funding levels.
THAT’S RACISM, STRAIGHT UP. Daniel Mitchell: Government-Run Social Security Is Bad News for Blacks and other Minorities.
EVEN THE GUARDIAN IS NOTICING: The left is too silent on the clunking fist of state power. The thing is, for a lot of lefites, the “clunking fist” is the main attraction.
OBAMACARE VS. COLORADO POT LEGALIZATION: A Tale Of Two Rollouts.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: DeBlasio’s Horse-Drawn Carriage Ban: Is It Really About Campaign Cash?
The bad guy in this drama, according to the carriage drivers, is Steve Nislick, chief executive officer of a New Jersey-based real-estate development company, Edison Properties. The company “employs legions of lobbyists to influence city decisions on real estate and zoning in its favor,” journalist Michael Gross reported in 2009, pointing out that two of Edison’s businesses “have multiple locations in the same Far West Midtown neighborhood as the stables where the Central Park horses are housed.” An anti-carriage pamphlet Nislick circulated in 2008 made this interesting observation: “Currently, the stables consist of 64,000 square feet of valuable real estate on lots that could accomodate up to 150,000 square feet of development. These lots could be sold for new development.”
Gross asked the obvious question: “What are the odds that good neighbor Nislick, the out-of-state real estate developer, simply covets those valuable, underdeveloped New York lots — and has teamed up with ambitious pols to use the emotions of animal rights activists as fuel for their own agendas?”
Pretty fair, I’d say.