A. Britain, France, Italy, and Germany all announced they would vote against unilateral independence before Obama did anything. He didn’t twist their arms; they took the lead.
B. There is no evidence that Obama has tried to twist anyone’s arm in Europe on this issue. Quite the opposite, he’s tried to get them to endorse his program of: We’ll get Palestine independence real fast so they don’t need to go to the UN. In other words, it is an appeasement strategy.
C. No, he has not given “ultimatums”; he’s just said he’s against it and will vote against it. In saying that, he’s assuming that it will go to the UN. An ultimatum is when you threaten someone with serious consequences unless they give in. He has not done so.
D. “He knows Israel is [our] only ally in the Mideast.” This is the most interesting sentence of all. No public action Obama has taken demonstrates that in any way. We only have the ritual pro-Israel statements. And such things as continued good military relations are not expressions of Obama’s personal views, but of Defense Department policies and sheer inertia.
Unfortunately, failure doesn’t distinguish this policy from any of his others.
I’ll obviously have a lot more to say about this in the coming days, but it’s going to be a major battle of one “settled” science versus another:
The big consequences of a major solar calm spell…would be climatic. The next few generations of humanity might not find themselves trying to cope with global warming but rather with a significant cooling. This could overturn decades of received wisdom on such things as CO2 emissions, and lead to radical shifts in government policy worldwide.
We won’t just be firing up the SUVs. We’ll be burning fossil fuels for everything we’re worth, and not just for electricity–for heat. But unlike the watermelons who have been waging war against carbon, I don’t propose any massive government solutions, other than to get the hell out of the way, and let the market work. Oh, and I think I’d be shorting carbon-trading schemes. I wonder if Algore is?
I refuse to believe that, because I don’t take pictures of my privates and send them out on the Internet to women not my wife, I’m abnormal. But I also agree with this comment:
So, besides the grey underpants photo shoot Anthony Weiner shot himself with; he is strange because he is PSYCHOTIC.
He was also strange when he was in the Well of the House, screaming at some republican … “THE GENTLEMAN WILL SIT DOWN”
Yeah, Anthony Weiner does spittle very well.
He isn’t really Jewish. His mom’s not Jewish. And, his marriage to a muslim flew under the radar screen. But is now out there with Hillary’s balloon attached.
Every time I’ve seen Anthony Weiner with his nutty rants in the Well, I’ve thought him deranged — that he was also self-and-marriage-destructively sexually obsessed surprised me not at all (I would be similarly unshocked by similar behavior from the unlamented vaginal-rinse container Alan Grayson). The only thing that surprises me, but shouldn’t is that the Democrats thought he was just fine, and a rising star in the party, until this.
As President Obama struggles, again, to gain control of the economic conversation and relaunch his administration’s economic policy (how many times has this administration announced its determination to focus on job creation?) the similarities between these two idealistic and patriotic men begin to emerge. In both cases we have a President who thought that his mission was to remake the world, but who gradually discovered that the tools in his toolkit were no match for the problems he faced. With great intelligence and serious goodwill, both men set about to address the most important issues facing the country and the world — only to find that their chosen remedies failed one by one.
I am not convinced that the President’s political goose is cooked — yet. For one thing, luck can never be discounted. Recessions don’t last forever, anymore than booms do, and American capitalism is strong enough to stage a recovery in the face of poor policy. But luck aside, the President can still avoid the great mistake that finally wrecked Hoover: the failure to learn.
President Hoover brought some convictions with him to office about how the economy worked, how government worked, and what his role as President should be. As the Depression deepened, he did the best he could within those limits, but nothing seems to have made him reconsider the mix of progressive ideas that he brought with him to the White House. As months of failure and disappointment grew into years, he doesn’t seem to have questioned those core ideas or to think about ways in which the economic emergency might require steps that in normal times would not be taken. He not only failed to end the Depression; he failed to give people a sense that he understood what was happening. Over-optimistic forecasts issued in part to build confidence came back to haunt him. To the public he seemed fuddled and doctrinaire, endlessly recycling stale platitudes in the face of radically new economic problems.
One of the myths of the rewritten history by the left is that Hoover was a conservative, with laissez-faire economic policies (and thus by implication a hero of modern Republicans, particularly Reagan Republicans), but he was an economically ignorant progressive of his time, albeit a good engineer and a good man. The comparison seems quite apt to me (except I’m sure that Hoover was nowhere near as arrogant, narcissistic and self absorbed as the president).
…in academia. But if you point it out, and urge them to be judge people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, you’re the racist.
…or your enemy. I’m fairly fastidious about this (as I am with apostrophes), and I no doubt annoy many people whose stuff I edit. As the piece points out, the purpose of a hyphen is to disambiguate adjectives, so you can tell for sure what is modifying what. For instance, “a light red fox” could be an underweight red fox, but “light-red fox” indicates that it is a fox (of indeterminate subspecies) that is light red in color. The exception is if the first word is an adverb, such as “lightly colored fox,” in which case the hyphen and connection of the two words is implicit.
Is extreme bank regulation a key to the lousy economy? The fact that there’s a ton of uncertainty about Frank-Dodd doesn’t help, either. And of course, Sarbanes-Oxley has been a disaster for start ups.