This guy is running your country. The people who manage his teleprompter are his back-up. The economy's imploding, Russia's re-arming, Iran's going nuclear and, and, and...and you pick a President to make you feel good. Hell's bells! Read and weep:
I heard 'elder statesman' Tom Brokaw insert a gratuitous slam against Rush Limbaugh during his commentary on Haiti this morning on the Today Show (while promoting his own show...).
Limbaugh's sin?
Pointing out that Obama is using Haiti to burnish his political image.
Considering the alacrity Obama displayed in getting in front of the camera to emphasize his 'deep concern' and announce U.S. actions, I'd have to concede the point to Limbaugh--especially in light of the anemic reaction of the administration to the Christmas day terror incident on flight 253. Obama's inconsistency is a clear sign that he senses political opportunity in Haiti
Yet, the jury is still out on whether Haiti will be good politics for Obama. The 'noble poor' of Haiti seem only too glad to behead each other for a sack of groceries, as gangs of roving 'youths' patrol the streets with machetes, looking for victims and booty.
Doctors are walking away from make-shift clinics because of security concerns.
Planes full of supplies and personnel are being turned away, ostensibly to give priority to American efforts to find and rescue its own citizens.
Its not very clear who's in charge in Haiti--the U.N. or the U.S., and its unlikely that they'll work it out, because--yes, this is politics--big, big politics. The U.N. sees Haiti has an opportunity to justify its existence, and Obama desperately needs to be seen doing something right and well at this point in his administration.
Its notable that almost all of the articles critical of the relief effort have come from the 'foreign' press, and that's likely to continue and even accelerate as the dichotomy between the political maneuvering between the U.N. and the U.S. and the hellish situation in the streets of Port-au-Prince, creates new, daily outrages.
If Obama's pattern holds, we have started with bold promises and fan-fare, to be followed by neglect, incompetence and perfidy, then inviting last minute personal intervention by the President, an inability to resolve the problem and a lame declaration of victory.
Barry's lucky this didn't happen in the U.S. proper...
I pay property taxes in New Jersey and my youngest children go to public school there. The school's very decent and I'm on good terms with a lovely Ghanaian-American teacher who did a fine job with one of my girls. She's liked me since I read Rikki Tikki Tavi with relish to her class in my weird English accent and I was glad to set up a website for her. She's a major Obama supporter, but I keep my nose clean on that score. The admirable head teacher is discreetly homosexual, so, what with Obama pix in classes, pc prohibitions on Christmas, unionization, overly protective rules against letting children outside in cold weather and so on, there's plenty of scope for societal collapse. In fact the school does a good job overall.
Recently my wife was sent a petition against school staffing cuts by a parent who had voted for Chris Christie. That's the power of socialist propaganda. Governor Christie will need to do a terrific job of communication to overcome this most fearsome special interest - the teachers' union. I was struck by this comment in Powerline:
if he somehow faces down the teachers' union, he may have a Calvin Coolidge kind of sequel in store.
“Investors had always regarded the euro as a de jure German mark,……It’s dawning on the world that it is becoming, de facto, a Greek drachma.”
Club Med governments have built up €7 trillion sovereign debt under the cover of monetary union, which shut down the warning signals for borrowers and creditors alike.
...no British government can ever put Europe on the back-burner and hope it goes away. It hits you in the face, again, and again, and again. This is why so many British ministers end up feeling a visceral hatred for the project.
In my view, the EU elites overstepped the line by ignoring the rejection of the European Constitution by French and Dutch voters, then pushing it through under the guise of the Lisbon Treaty without a popular vote, except in Ireland, and when Ireland voted ‘No’, to ignore that too. The enterprise has become illegitimate – it is starting to exhibit the reflexes of tyranny.
The moment of definition is fast arriving from Britain. The measures now being demanded to save monetary union cannot and will not be accepted by this Government, Nick Clegg notwithstanding. The most eurosceptic people I have ever met are those who have actually worked for the European Commission, though it takes a while – and liberation from Brussels – for these views to ferment.
The outcome – une véritable gouvernement économique – will put Britain and the eurozone on such separate courses that it will amount to separation in all but name. The sooner we get the nastiness of divorce behind us, the better.
"Sarkozy ended up banging his fist on the table and threatening to leave the euro...This forced Angela Merkel to give in and reach an agreement."
The European Union and International Monetary Fund agreed a 110 billion euro rescue plan for Greece last week. But Germany, which must shoulder a good deal of the burden, had proven reluctant to commit itself to a plan.
Zapatero told his party members that France, Italy and Spain had formed a united front against Germany at the Brussels meeting and that Sarkozy had threatened to break up a traditional France-Germany "hold" on the rest of Europe
...dealing with a banking crisis was difficult enough, but at least there were public sector balance sheets onto which the problems could be moved.
Once you move into the sphere of concerns about sovereign debt, there is no answer; there’s no backstop. And it is very important therefore that we hit these problems on the head now, put in place credible solutions to prevent the problems becoming worse.
And I detected at the weekend, in the conversations that I spent hours listening to on the telephone, that this sense of the need to work together was there again….
It is absolutely vital, absolutely vital, for governments to get on top of this problem. We cannot afford to allow concerns about sovereign debt to spread into a wider crisis dealing with sovereign debt. Dealing with a banking crisis was bad enough. This would be worse.
Dead parrot Euro socialist v one pissed-off hedge fund manager:
I am struck that very little of the commentary on the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions is dealing with underlying dynamics. The names are different, but all of these countries are exactly the same--crushing poverty, pervasive, systemic corruption and brutal oppression.
None of this is accidental. At some point in each country's past, the takers overwhelmed the producers and the death spiral began. I've always loved the Heinlein quote on this observation.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.This is known as "bad luck.".
More to the point, the tiny minority of rain-makers are only possible in a culture that celebrates freedom, innovation and dreams. Once that culture is transformed into one of exploitation, resentment and entitlement, the country is screwed.
Egypt's revolution is a lesson in the fragility of the totalitarian model. Like most revolutions, the trigger that topples the crumbling structure often seems like the attribution of hurricanes to the flutter of butterfly wings thousands of miles distant. Just as the poor harvests of 1788 led directly to the French revolution, changes in the global markets for grain have produced combustible social stresses virtually simultaneously in Tunisia and Egypt.
The immediate cause of this food spike was the worst drought in Russia and the Black Sea region for 130 years, lasting long enough to damage winter planting as well as the summer harvest. Russia imposed an export ban on grains. This was compounded by late rains in Canada, Nina disruptions in Argentina, and a series of acreage downgrades in the US. The world’s stocks-to-use ratio for corn is nearing a 30-year low of 12.8pc, according to Rabobank.The deeper causes are well-known: an annual rise in global population by 73m; the “exhaustion” of the Green Revolution as the gains in crop yields fade, to cite the World Bank; diet shifts in Asia as the rising middle class switch to animal-protein diets, requiring 3-5 kilos of grain feed for every kilo of meat produced; the biofuel mandates that have diverted a third of the US corn crop into ethanol for cars.
Add the loss of farmland to Asia’s urban sprawl, and the depletion of the non-renewable acquivers for irrigation of North China’s plains, and the geopolitics of global food supply starts to look neuralgic.
Can the world head off mass famine? Yes, with leadership. The regions of the ex-Soviet Union farm 30m hectares less today than in the Khrushchev era, and yields are half western levels.
While successive western governments have traipsed over to Israel and the West Bank to once more fruitlessly argue for peace, the real levers of geopolitical power appear to be commodities.
Remember that as you contemplate the Obama administration's refusal to grant oil and mining leases in this country....
The German zoologist, Ernst Haeckel, wrote that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, meaning that the embryonic development of an individual organism (its ontogeny) followed the same path as the evolutionary history of its species (its phylogeny).
That is a metaphor for economic freedom preceding democratic freedom.
Put yourself in Mubarek's place. What would you do? It would be nice if freedom and security appear spontaneously in a power vacuum, but they don't. Chaos followed by a more violent, more repressive Islamic regime is the base case.
The deep problem of North Africa is big government. Corruption, yes. Stasis, yes. Gerontocracy, yes. But the stranglehold of big government (not the same as big security) means that multitudes of young men stay bored, unproductive, sexually frustrated and spiritually frustrated. They have neither work nor love. They don't need political freedom now, they need economic freedom. Political freedom may come later.
The spark which lit this fire was repeated denial of a trading license to an out of work graduate in Tunisia.
Meanwhile American policy is to clear a path for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It's getting harder and harder to blame Obama's choices on stupidity.
