Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Paving The Way For An Islamist Egypt

6 Comments

…seems to be U.S. policy:

..by recognizing the Brotherhood and having contacts with it, the Obama administration also makes a unilateral concession encouraging the Brotherhood. People who know the Middle East understand how this works: Soon many Egyptians will say (as they said in Iran and as they now say in Turkey) that the United States wants the Islamists to win.

What a comprehensive disaster this administration is, on almost all policy fronts. And as usual, Al Reuters doesn’t cover itself in glory, either.

[Update a few minutes later]

This comment is interesting:

The comparisons of Egypt to Nazi Germany are increasingly appropriate. First comes the overthrow of the government (mission accomplished). Next comes the “cleansing” of the state of “undesirables” (in this case Coptic Christians and any other identifiable non-Muslim minorities in the country) and then comes the war of aggression (against Israel). Egypt is in Phase II right now. It’s unclear how long it will take for Phase II to be completed. But when it is completed and there’s nobody left in Egypt to oppose it, then will come the war. Of course the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t have to wait for Phase II to be completed to attack Israel. They’re already doing it by supporting anti-Israeli Islamist terrorism as well as the anti-Israeli agenda of the Left.

The good news is that, unlike German, they have no industry to speak of. But that by itself won’t stop them from acquiring the weapons they need.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Obamanomics

21 Comments

…leavin’ on a jet plane:

…the clumsy attempt at class warfare probably wasn’t even Obama’s most disheartening moment during the presser. Several others were at least equally as bad…

But about what one would expect from someone so completely lacking experience or competence for the job: our Class Warrior in Chief.

[Update a few minutes later]

The president’s peculiar press conference:

It all had the feel of a childish tantrum by a person who desperately wishes he were living in a different reality—one in which he is the heroic man of action and his opponents are irresponsible and weak. But the fact is, the president and congressional Democrats have so far utterly failed to offer any path out of our fiscal problems—problems that they have greatly exacerbated. The president proposed a budget in February that would have increased the deficit, and then he retracted it in April and proposed nothing in particular in its place. Senate Democrats have not proposed a budget in two years; they now suggest they finally have one, though apparently it won’t really be brought to a vote. Republicans, meanwhile, have proposed a specific path out of our fiscal mess—averting a debt crisis and setting the budget on a course toward balance through discretionary cuts, budget-process reforms, and gradual but significant entitlement reforms. Rather than negotiate over that budget, the president has chosen to play the demagogue, simultaneously insisting that the budget offers nothing and that it goes too far in cutting government services (medical research, food inspectors, and the weather service are apparently in particular danger, he said yesterday, providing a kind of Salvador Dali map of post-modern lifestyle liberalism).

Now, having added about $5 trillion to the national debt since taking office (nearly doubling the debt), the president wants permission to add another $2 trillion, and he’s upset that rather than being given that permission together with a set of class-warfare tax hikes he is being asked to agree to some spending, budget, and entitlement reforms in return for that permission. Entitlements—the chief drivers of the even greater explosion of debt now coming at us—appear to be off the table altogether as far as he’s concerned. And while the president insists that failing to meet the August 2 debt-limit deadline would unleash a train of calamities not seen since the book of Job, he seems to be willing to risk them all in order to enact a set of tax increases that would yield largely trivial sums of revenue and whose only plausible justification could be the political appeal of envy.

It’s what class warriors do.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Higher-Education Bubble

9 Comments

More thoughts on the overvaluation of a college degree:

Wolf’s position is firm. An increase in the quantity of graduates will neither create a dynamic, wealth-producing economy nor will it create the conditions for the emergence of lots of dynamic, wealth-producing individuals. Universities are not what they are currently being cracked up to be. But that leads to another problem. So deeply entrenched is the belief that, to use the words of the 1998 Dearing report, ‘Higher education has become central to the economic wellbeing of nations and individuals’, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to recall what the purpose of institutions of higher education might be. Their autonomy as academic bodies, in which one ought to be free to pursue an interest in a subject area to a higher level, has been effaced by their thoroughgoing instrumentalisation as drivers of economic growth and social mobility.

One of the biggest myths is that the subject matter doesn’t matter — that a degree in medieval French literature is just as good, and worth just as much money as one in chemical engineering. It’s not.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Fish, Barrel

5 Comments

There’s been a lot of Internet commentary on Time magazine editor Richard Stengel’s profoundly ignorant essay on the Constitution.

Here’s one dissection of it, and here’s another at Patterico.

Given idiocy like this, it’s not surprising that Queen Nancy’s only response to the question about ObamaCare constitutionality was “Are you kidding?! Are you kidding?!” These totalitarians don’t give a damn about the Constitution.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Why The “Unexpected” Keeps Happening

6 Comments

It’s because the idiots in the press actually believe in these “progressive” economic nostrums.

[Update a while later]

Obamanomics is shovel ready:

Obamanomics favors top-down compulsory cooperation over voluntary. It is the anti-Reaganomics. Mr. Obama has done the following: (1) raised taxes, (2) unleashed a wild orgy of spending, including his disastrous so-called “stimulus,” (3) dramatically increased regulations and even nationalized industries and businesses, and (4) printed money out of “quantitative easing” thin air.

The results were predictable. Since the Obama stimulus – a collection of “shovel-ready” projects promised to save the economy – was signed into law, America has lost 1.9 million jobs and unemployment has surpassed 9 percent. GDP growth remains anemic. Consumer confidence has tumbled. Gas prices were at $1.81 per gallon before Mr. Obama put his “boot on the neck” of suppliers, and now it’s more than doubled, to $3.81. We burn our food supply in our gas tanks, and grocery prices have skyrocketed – some staples by as much as 40 percent. Since the president signed his mortgage rescue plan, Americans have seen 3.82 million foreclosures. Most disturbingly, the majority of Americans are receiving some type of welfare.

And yet they persist.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Natural Gas Fiasco

21 Comments

…at the New York Times:

Natural gas just might be the energy solution environmentalists say they want, but actually can’t stand because nothing would put them out of business faster. Forbes blogger Chris Helman words it perfectly:

We would have thought that the Times would be in favor of plentiful, low-cost natural gas. It burns a lot cleaner than coal, and with nuclear off the table for now, gas is poised to fuel U.S. economic growth for more than a generation to come. I can only guess that the problem, as the Times sees it, is that as long as we have all that cheap gas, there’s precious little need for solar panels, windmills and other cornerstones of their much-heralded but slow evolving green jobs revolution.

Forbes, on the other hand, thinks it’s pretty awesome that thanks to drilling ingenuity the U.S. has proven to have one of the world’s biggest and cheapest hoards of clean-burning gas. Now that’s a story.

This may be a solution to some of the idiocy in California as well, given out high electric rates due partly to NIMBY reluctance to build generating capacity and the insane carbon law they passed. We’re currently paying fifteen cents a kilowatt-hour in SoCal (more for amounts exceeding baseline). I can buy a generator like this one (or smaller), and produce the same power for about a quarter of that at current gas prices (and they’re likely to continue to go down). But I imagine if I were to do that, the carbon nazis would come after me. Also, I’m not sure if they’re designed for steady use, but I think that if you could come up with one that was fairly quiet and could run 24/7, it will become pretty attractive to a lot of people around here.