Will be a year from yesterday.
But Other Than That, It’s Great (Part Two)
The president’s tax plan defies economics. Again, how does that distinguish it from any of his other plans?
[Update a few minutes later]
After Obama, I don’t think there will be any more John Kerry or Al Gore sermons about the superior Europe model either. A disarmed, undemocratic, insolvent, shrinking, and increasingly polarized continent is now a model of what the United States should not be. There simply have been too many California as Greece stories for any politicians to advise us with the old admonition: “But In Europe, they….”
Obama thought that he would replicate the EU paradigm. He would bring in properly certified technocrats from academia or government like Chu, Geithner, Goolsbee, Holder, Orszag, Romer, and Summers to oversee massive new regulations and taxes that would dictate from on high how the ignorant masses must be protected from everything from cheap gas to old-style light bulbs. In less than three years, they all proved far more ignorant about what makes America work than the local car dealer, welder, or farmer. After Obama, Americans will not be fooled for a generation or so into thinking that a Harvard PhD or Berkeley professor “really” knows that borrowing is prosperity, that gas should cost as much as it does in Europe, and that the more we pay millions to regulate, the more the vastly fewer who produce make us all prosperous. (And given Obama’s mysterious silence about the undergraduate record at Occidental and Columbia that won him a scholarship to Harvard Law, we won’t take seriously any more the usual liberal critique of supposedly weak-minded conservative candidates who, based on their leaked undergraduate transcripts, could not get As decades ago in college.)
I hope that the current disastrous presidency turns out to be a blessing in disguise, by finally exposing all the mythology of the left, and inoculating us against such insanity for at least a generation.
[Update a few minutes later]
Tax the rich, just not my rich:
Menendez, Lautenberg and Kirsten Gillibrand support eliminating some or all of the Bush tax cuts. Schumer said the $250,000 limit is unacceptable since it will hit the metropolitan area disproportionately because of the high cost of living here.
“$250,000 makes you really rich in Mississippi but it doesn’t make you rich at all in New York and there ought to be some kind of scale based on the cost of living on how much you pay,” Schumer said.
So, Senator, if we should adjust taxation for areas with higher cost of living, why should there be a single federal minimum wage for the whole country?
[Update a few minutes later]
The president’s plan is all tax hikes and no cuts. What a shocker.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Barack Obama, home alone:
Ron Suskind quotes former administration official Larry Summers complaining: “We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes.”
Put aside the misbegotten nostalgia for Bill Clinton, whose new status as an elder statesman wipes from memory his bouts of reckless immaturity. The Summers comment (subsequently denied, of course) stands as the best summation of the current occupant of the White House, who constantly congratulates himself on his high-minded leadership without exercising any.
Wasn’t this the guy who mused that he’d make a pretty good chief of staff? I’m trying to figure out what he’s good at, other than being a con man.
But Other Than That, It’s Great
Rick Perry: the president’s Middle-East policy is naive, arrogant, misguided and dangerous. It’s not like that distinguishes it from any of his other policies. And Marty Peretz says that Obama’s Middle East is in tatters.
Who could have guessed such a thing could happen when you put an ill-educated leftist academic with no real-world experience into the Oval Office?
[Update a few minutes later]
The Peretz piece really is a must-read:
I wish there would be a Palestinian state, not because there is actually a real Palestinian people. I’m not persuaded of that. And, of course, I don’t think that there is a Nigerian people which is why, when younger, I was an active supporter of Biafra, the would-be Ibo state, squashed by an indifferent world in behalf of the territorial integrity of, yes, Nigeria which is breaking apart before our eyes, in part because of the machinations of Muslim extremism. The world will some day have to come to grips with the fact that most governments are not really representative of their peoples. The whole notion of a country’s UN membership being a certificate of legitimacy is morally corrupt. UN membership is an admission ticket to the expensive blandishments of New York.
So I want a Palestine because I want Israelis not to have to burden themselves with an internal population that has neither the coherence of a nation nor a tradition of democratic norms. President Obama is enamored of the current Palestinian narrative, as false as it is self-pitying. This is a simple narrative and an over-simple projection into the future. It assumes that a 1949 map of the cease-fire lines—yes, of course, with appropriate but tiny land exchanges—will assure the peace. I do not think it assures anything except that Israel would be deflected from the art and science of building an ever freer society, a chore—if you’ll forgive me—it has shown some talents in doing. I do not know Obama’s head. Maybe nobody does. But his fervent and fervid clamoring for a simple Israeli route to an independent Palestine misled no people so much as the Palestinians. When he retreated from his formulae, which the PA assumed he could impose on Israel, they were already on an independence high. His somber entreaties could not bring them back to any semblance of reality.
This conundrum of a non-negotiated state for the Palestinians appeals to the ardent déclarateurs. It ignores the fact that free and responsible politics has never been a habit in the Arab world. Read me right: never. There is nothing in Palestinian history to have made the Arabs of Palestine an exception to this stubborn commonplace now being played out again in virtually every country in the region. A commitment is never a commitment. A border is never a border. A peace is never long-lasting. Turkey has now added its serious mischief to the scenario. Erdogan himself will now unravel Cairo’s peace with Jerusalem, as Erdogan has already locked the PA into phantom international politics.
And the president probably doesn’t even comprehend the implications.
AP Fact Check
No, Obama and Buffett are peddling a myth when they claim that secretaries pay more taxes than their bosses. No surprise — Obama has spent much of his life peddling myths, with great success, to fools.
There Is No Market For Space Tourism
I mean, how silly is it to think that someone would pay money to see something like this?
Kelo
A sad epilogue:
Susette and I were talking in a small circle of people when we were approached by Justice Richard N. Palmer. Tall and imposing, he is one of the four justices who voted with the 4-3 majority against Susette and her neighbors. Facing me, he said: “Had I known all of what you just told us, I would have voted differently.”
I was speechless. So was Susette. One more vote in her favor by the Connecticut Supreme Court would have changed history. The case probably would not have advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Susette and her neighbors might still be in their homes.
Then Justice Palmer turned to Susette, took her hand and offered a heartfelt apology. Tears trickled down her red cheeks. It was the first time in the 12-year saga that anyone had uttered the words “I’m sorry.”
It was really an appalling decision. It greatly enhanced local governments’ capacity for tyranny.
Is Neil Stephenson…
…becoming too conventional? A review of his latest book.
[Update a couple minutes later]
A new book about the high frontier, and an accompanying 3-D space colony app.
[Update a few minutes later]
An interview with Stephenson about the book.
You Don’t Say
Obama deficit plan may miss its targets. Our days of taking this guy seriously should be way past a middle.
AtlasGate
Headline Of The Day
…maybe even of the week, or month: “Anonymous Officials Push Open Government.”