April 01, 2004
Leftist Tufts vs. Academic Freedom. "You don't have to be at Tufts for too long before you notice one thing: there is not a whole lot of diversity here .. Sure, Tufts can boast of an ethnically diverse faculty .. If you look more than skin-deep, however, you'll notice that this place resembles more closely a political party .. ". more Philipp Tsipman, Tufts Daily
Area Studies Scholars vs. America. "Many of the professors who benefit from Title VI subsidies are actively hostile to the idea of training students who might serve in our defense or intelligence agencies .. ". more Stanley Kurtz.
March 31, 2004
The Nuclear Option. Firms join hands to licence a new atomic power plant in America. Such a thing hasn't been dared since 1973.
Mexico. "Go into any discount store in Mexico and look at low-priced clothing, toys, shoes and electronics, or even some Christian religious objects, and it is hard not to buy Chinese ..". more TOM FRIEDMAN. Quotable: ""We are caught between India and China. We have lost about 500,000 manufacturing jobs. It is very difficult for us to compete with the Chinese, except with high-value-added industries. Where we should be competing, in the services area, we are hit by the Indians with their back offices and call centers. . . . Not enough people here speak English." -- Jorge Castañeda, former Mexican foreign minister.
The Iraq - Terror Connection. "The Benjamin-Simon book [The Age of Sacred Terror] contains a long account of the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and also a stern defense of Clinton's decision in August 1998 to hit the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan with cruise missiles. What is interesting is the strong Iraqi footprint that is to be found in both episodes. Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the makers of the bomb that exploded at the World Trade Center, was picked up by the FBI, questioned, and incredibly enough released pending further interrogation as a "cooperative witness." He went straight to Amman and thence to Baghdad, where he remained under Saddam Hussein's protection until last year. As Clarke told the Sept. 11 commission last week: "The Iraqi government didn't cooperate in turning him over and gave him sanctuary, as it did give sanctuary to other terrorists." That's putting it mildly, when you recall that Abu Nidal's organization was a wing of the Baath Party, and that the late Abu Abbas of Klinghoffer fame was traveling on an Iraqi diplomatic passport. But, hold on a moment—doesn't every smart person know that there's no connection between Saddam Hussein and the world of terror? ..
One of the crucial reasons for apathy and inaction, in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, was the fact that two of the prime movers in jihad sponsorship, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, were considered official "friends," not least by the American intelligence "community." An unnoticed benefit of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq is the extent to which both the Pakistani and Saudi oligarchies have been "turned" .. ". more CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS.
Iraq. "We moved against Iraq for what turned out to be the wrong reason and it's probably the only reason that would have gotten international action. That is a damning charge against Western democracy which we deserve to think about long and hard .. ". -- David Kay.
America 1900. "The U.S. was the wealthiest economy in the world. Per capita income was on a level with Britain and Australia, was twice that of France and Germany, and was quadruple the standard of living in Japan and Mexico. Still, most Americans in 1900 were living in what we today would consider poverty. In present-day dollars, per capita American income in 1900 averaged around $5000, less than a fifth the current level. In other words, the typical American in 1900 had about the same income that a typical Mexican has today .. ". more 2BLOWHARDS.
Dropouts & Joblessness. "Each year, about 4 million 18-year-olds should graduate from high school. Of those, 1.2 million drop out without a degree. .. And unemployment among dropouts is growing. In 2003, 2.4 million young people ages 16-24 who didn't finish high school were jobless .. ". more on dropouts and joblessness.
March 30, 2004
Is It Hayek? "We need to get rates to a more neutral level. If you keep (rates) too low for too long, it can contribute to excesses .. ". It's Fed President Jack Guynn.
Leftists Need only Apply. Danial Pipes exposes the government of Califoria's UC Press as a Leftist only closed shop. Quotable: "One subset of California books honors left-wing culture, such as beat poet Allen Ginsberg, leftist printmakers in New York of the 1930s, and Ant Farm, a “radical architectural collective.” Another subset hails left-wing politics, such as U.S. labor unions, an American consumer revolt, and the founder of the Tibetan Communist Party. Squinting as hard as I could at California’s spring list of 140 titles, however, I found not one single conservative book .. ". File this one under Your Tax Dollars At Work.
The Politics of Boom & Bust. "Bull markets tend to occur in the third and fourth years of presidential terms while markets tend to decline in the first and second years. The "making of presidents" is accompanied by an unsubtle manipulation of the economy. Incumbent administrations are duty-bound to retain the reins of power. Subsequently, the "piper must be paid," producing what we have coined the "Post-Presidential Year Syndrome." Most big, bad bear markets began in such years-1929, 1937, 1957, 1969, 1973, 1977 and 1981 .. Some cold hard facts to prove economic manipulation appeared in a book by Edward R. Tufte, Political Control of the Economy. Stimulative fiscal measures designed to increase per capita disposable income providing a sense of well-being to the voting public included: increases in federal budget deficits, government spending and social security benefits; interest rate reductions on government loans; and speed-ups of projected funding. [Example] Federal Spending: During 1962-1973, the average increase was 29% higher in election years than in non-election years .. ". From Stock Trader's Almanac via The Big Picture.
Killer Leftists. "Now perhaps, it is time for a new "Silent Spring," a book outlining how so many children's voices have been forever silenced by the environmentalists .. ". more Oh, That Leftist Media.
March 29, 2004
Mass Immigration. Tent cities are being built to house a massive new surge in illegal immigration. Almost a quarter million illegal aliens were detained over the past 6 months in the Tucson, AZ sector alone.
Mass Immigration. Contemplate the 100+ language LA's government school system, and then contemplate this editorial cartoon.
Planning. "An article in Inc.com tells a story about entrepreneur Craig Knouf who reportedly has revised his business plan more than 120 times .. ". more JEFF CORNWALL. And to think, economists once conceived of entire nations run according to a single 5-year business plan -- a plan drawn up, you guessed it, by economists.
National Movement to Shackle Tax & Spend Politicians. Colorado's Taxpayers Bill of Rights is seen as a model for the nation by activists across the country. It also happens to be just the thing California will need if it is to survive as an economic power in the 21 century. (via Bill Hobbs).
NY Times vs. Union of Concerned Scientists. In a stunning turnaround the NY Times has published remarks critical of the Union of Concerned Scientists and its report on the President. The remarks come at the end of a piece on Bush science advisor John Marburger, who is described at the beginning of the the article as "a prostitute" by Harvard professor Howard Gardner.
Mass Immigration. America, is seems, has room for everyone -- including scores who killed and torturered for their governments. Now that's an open borders policy to write home about.
Politics as Crime by Other Means. The state has always been the most efficient institution for stealing the wealth of others. Consider Indonesia.
Up From NPR. "A few years ago, I worked for a struggling dot-com in Manhattan whose work force was almost uniformly [leftist]. Given my conservative orientation, I saw little sense in getting involved in workplace political discussions. My silence was interpreted as acquiescence until I could stand it no longer and fessed up. One co-worker, who had served on the committee that hired me, felt betrayed. "But," he stammered, remembering my resume, "You worked for NPR." .. I was a co-producer for one of the most unusual programs NPR ever carried, "Bridges: A [Leftist]/Conservative Dialogue." The premise was a discussion between the [leftist] of the show's title, Larry Josephson, and leading conservative thinkers .. One of our first shows after I arrived was a history of American conservatism with the historian George Nash. His magnum opus, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, has long been a reference bible on the right. The book condenses the thought of some of the most consequential political and economic thinkers of the 20th century — men such as Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Burnham. I had heard of very few of them. Nash traced the intellectual fault lines that appeared on the right and that endure today, such as, for example, the one between traditionalists and libertarians. As I read, I kept thinking to myself: "This sure beats Michel Foucault." .. With each subsequent guest — Sam Tanenhaus on Whittaker Chambers, James Q. Wilson on crime and punishment, David Horowitz on Vietnam and the New Left — my [leftist convictions] weakened .. ". more PAUL BESTON.
March 28, 2004
Quotable Horowitz. "[Howard] Zinn's work is a disgrace to the intellectual calling. It is a tendentious, absurd and malicious work, a Protocols of the Elders of Zion with America standing in for the Jews .. ". more DAVID HOROWITZ.
George Shultz - Defending the State System. Amidst the caterwauling of a thousand pygmies GEORGE SHULTZ cuts through to what matters. Compare Shultz to the utterly cynical child talk of former President Clinton. OK, spare yourself, and simply enjoy uncynical foreign policy talk for grown ups.
Richard Clarke. Voted for Gore, not a Republican. Never trust that the partisan Democrat press will get the facts straight. They didn't this time. And they haven't before.
Money Map. The Red State - Blue State Divide. Fundrace 2004 Red State Blue State national county-by-county map. And don't miss the national city maps. Patterico investigates his neighborhood here. Do your own neighborhood search, or type in a few Cambridge, MA area zip codes and find the Harvard Law professor who contributed money to race hustler Al Sharpton, convicted not so long ago of defamation when he spearheaded the destruction of a prosecutor's life by means of an ugly sham in which the false claim was made that the prosecutor raped a black 15 year old girl. At Harvard Law such behavior not only gets a pass, it also gets a big check in the mail -- for good work done, I guess.
And is Hollywood the very heart of the Left Coast? You be the judge.
And don't miss this. Harvard University, like a thermal nuclear device, is ground zero of megabuck Democrat fundraising in the Boston area. Harvard professors give cash hand over fist to the Democrat party left -- so if you're wondering where all those alumni contributions, tuition payments and tax dollars are going, well, a hefty pile of the money is being shuffled along to the coffers of Democrat party politicians.
March 27, 2004
VDH. "To sustain both our military power and foreign largess, we also must look to ourselves inasmuch as we are running vast trade deficits, along with unsustainable budget shortfalls, and are stuck in an entitlement craze where government payouts bring not gratitude but shrill demands for even more subsidies. Our borders are porous and yet we are paralyzed and afraid to enforce our own laws — even as 12 million illegal aliens inside the United States cannot be identified or even be referred to as illegal. Our educational system is increasingly therapeutic and turning out too many poorly educated youth who have not inherited the tradition of American expertise and competence and cannot in the immediate future ensure our privileged position as the world's most affluent consumer society. The Chinese, Europeans, South Koreans, and Japanese are all lending us money for consumption. But they do so only in the trust that our legal system, stability, and competence will continue to justify such debts, which can only be paid back on the expectation that America can sustain its global civilizing role and lead the world in technological innovation and capital formation. So to press on, we must begin to look at the struggle across the spectrum in this new multifaceted war: bring consensual government to the Middle East; destroy the last al Qaeda holdouts; put Syria and Iran on notice to cease their support for terrorists; reexamine the location and purpose of all our bases; encourage candor and a new honesty with our allies; and seek to bring a new discipline to our own government and citizenry .. ". more VICTOR DAVIS HANSON.
Surprise. America tops Europe. "The U.S. economy has expanded by 7.8 percent since the recession, the best performance in the developed world. Indeed, it has grown more than three-times faster than European economies. The U.S. unemployment rate has fallen by 0.8 percentage points — again, the best performance in the developed world. The U.S. unemployment rate of 5.6 percent is far lower than the 8 percent unemployment rate in Europe .. ". more DANIEL MITCHELL.
Is it Hayek? "America is in, [Jim DeMint] says, "an eleventh-hour crisis" of democracy because it recently reached a point where a majority are "dependent on the federal government for their health care, education, income or retirement." Tax reforms, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, have removed many Americans from the income tax rolls: "Today, the majority of Americans can vote themselves more generous government benefits at little or no cost to themselves." DeMint asks: "How can any free nation survive when a majority of its citizens, now dependent on government services, no longer have the incentive to restrain the growth of government?" it's JIM DEMINT as quoted by GEORGE WILL.
Reagan Republicans to Bush - We May Just Sit This One Out. "The Bush administration may be moving leftward in the belief that Reagan conservatives have no place else to go. If so, it is a colossal mistake. Reagan conservatives do have someplace to go: it's called home. They can sit on their hands and not vote at all .. ". more LYN NOFZIGER. And Nofziger has this reminder for the White House: "When the president's father took conservatives for granted, he lost."
If President Bush loses, it will be because small-government Reaganites like me sat on our hands and refused to pull the lever for an "I'll buy every vote I can" Republican. If this is the kind of President we wanted, in 1980 we'd have voted for the President who supported LBJ in 1964, rather than the Republican.
And don't be mistaken. President Bush continues to grab money that doesn't belong to him in order to buy his own re-election -- he's certainly doing this in the case of home buying. He's taking the money my wife and I planned for and worked our butts off for -- and desperately need to pay our morgage -- and he's taking our money and he's using it to buy votes for himself -- and a house for someone else -- someone who didn't work for that money and has no right to that money. It's a crime -- and like many crimes, one perpetrated by the state and sanctioned by law.
This is just one of many ways in which things from a Reagan Republican perspective have taken steps for the worse rather than the better after four years of Bush of the Presidency.
Quotable Stein. "In October 2000, Clarke and Special Forces Colonel Mike Sheehan leave the White House after a meeting to discuss al-Qa'eda's attack on the USS Cole: "'What's it gonna take, Dick?' Sheehan demanded. 'Who the s*** do they think attacked the Cole, f****** Martians? The Pentagon brass won't let Delta go get bin Laden. Does al-Qa'eda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?'" Apparently so. The attack, on the Cole, which killed 17 US sailors, was deemed by Clinton's Defence Secretary Bill Cohen as "not sufficiently provocative" to warrant a response. You'll have to do better than that, Osama! So he did .. ". more MARK STEYN.
Footnote: I served on a ship identical to the USS Cole. I've never been able to accept the fact that the President and the Pentagon believed that the men of the Cole were not worth defending, were not worth bring justice for ..
Imagine letting an enemy attack your warship and you do nothing, again -- an enemy which has publicly declared war against you. What kind of military of officer would sit back and allow that? What kind of commander in chief would say "go ahead, kill my sailors, attack my forces, I'll just look the other way"? It's unbelievable that this actually happened, and that we are talking about Americans here. Not Frenchmen. Not Spaniards. Americans.
March 26, 2004
While America Slept. "For more than a decade, I felt I was a voice in the wilderness, warning whomever I could reach that the Jihadists were marching towards this country .. I observed the clouds gathering in Khartoum in 1992, when terrorists from all walks of life were assembled by Hassan Turabi to consult on the next world target. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hizbollah and those men who would later form al Qaida were sitting shoulder to shoulder with Mujahideen from Chechnia to Algeria. On the menu: how to defeat the United States. I read about these meetings by purchasing the daily Arabic al Hayat, in subtropical Miami. But the mainstream press in Washington missed what was to come. The holy war machinery was moving, while America slept tight.
“We started to hear about al Qaida around 1994,” said Richard Clarke. “Err, I began to know about them around 1996,” admitted former secretary Madeleine Albright. In the MSNBC studios where I was glued on the TV screen, I sat in disbelief. This country was at war and it didn't even know? ..
After the first Twin Towers attacks in New York in 1993 and the Khobar Towers operation in 1996, Washington sends in the FBI for forensics. The same year, the Taliban takes over Kabul, and al Qaida forms training camps around that poor country. The US dispatches the diplomats to Riyadh instead for mediation. “The infidels are intimidated,” Usama Bin Laden told Western journalists the following year. “Their soldiers can't fight, their Government is on the run,” asserted the commander of the believers on al Jazeera later ..
Ironically, he had the courtesy to inform the United States of his intention. On February 22, 1998, the bearded man declared war. The Clinton administration obviously didn't hear this declaration. In August, Bin Laden’s organization destroyed two American embassies in East Africa. This time, the White House had to respond. The world .. was wondering why Washington wasn't using its power to protect its own citizens. Two missiles landed on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and thirty Tomahawks dug the rocks of Afghanistan. The Taliban readied themselves for the encounter with the Marines but no marching orders were issued across the Potomac.
In 2000, the USS Cole was hit in Yemen. This time, neither the Seals were deployed nor the Cruise missiles were fired. “The international situation could have gotten complicated,” theorized Secretary Albright at the hearings. “We should not be emotional,” rationalized Secretary Cohen. “We had no compelling evidence,” said Dick Clarke.
At the 9/11 hearings, Senator Kerrey .. wondered how al Qaida operatives crossed “all layers of American defense.” .. the truth is not so difficult to understand. Al Qaida did not force its way onto our mainland; it was invited in ..
“How would you know what’s on al Qaida’s mind,” said Secretary Albright at the hearings. That sentence alone should summarize the proceedings of the commission .. ". more WALID PHARES.
Microsoft. Catallarchy is defending Microsoft -- and feeling a bit dirty. For some interesting remarks on patents, copyright and Microsoft go here.
France. "Timmerman .. demonstrates in striking detail how France morphed into an exceedingly corrupt corporate state: fascism with a friendly face. The French willingness to put its corporatist interests above all other concerns resulted in their encouraging Saddam Hussein to wipe out the Marsh Arabs at the behest of French contractors. The French refused to send engineers into an area where they might be kidnapped, "so they suggested that the Iraqis 'clean up' the area ahead of time," Timmerman reports. The Iraqis did just that and "some three hundred thousand marsh Arabs were sent into forced exile in Iran, their way of life gone forever." more NICK SCHULZ. From a review of The French Betrayal of America. (via InstaPundit).
Rumsfeld's Rules. Here they are. Quotable:
"Don't accept the post or stay unless you have an understanding with the president that you're free to tell him what you think “with the bark off” and you have the courage to do it."
UPDATE: Here's the ABC News story based on the content of last night's ABC News special Rumsfeld's Rules of War.
March 25, 2004
Put a Fork in Richard Clarke. A writer at TIME takes a stab. No, I don't think Clarke is credible. What he's said about Rice and Bush patently isn't credible. Here's my take on what is going on. Thousands died on Clarke's watch, and he's understably uncomfortable with letting the full blame fall at his own feet (via Clinton). I mean, he's the one who warned everybody, right? Well, he knew the threat -- and year after year after year he worked for a President who utterly failed to respond to that threat. And Clarke says himself that he would spin to protect the top guys -- which means he cared more for his own employment than for the truth or the safety of the country. It's hard not to get the feeling that there is something wrong with this man -- and I think what we are seeing is the public meltdown of a man suffering an unbearable case of what the professors call "cognitive dissonance". It's predictable human nature, but it isn't pretty and it isn't admirable.
UPDATE: Don't miss today's CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER. Quotable: "The 1990s were al Qaeda's springtime: Blissfully unmolested in Afghanistan, it trained, indoctrinated, armed and, most fatally, planned. For the United States, this was a catastrophic lapse, and in a March 2002 interview on PBS's "Frontline," Clarke admitted as much: "I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists, sending them out around the world would have been destroyed." Instead, "now we have to hunt [them] down country by country." What should we have done during those lost years? Clarke answered: "Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. . . . That's . . . the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened." It did not. And who was president? Bill Clinton. Who was the Clinton administration's top counterterrorism official? Clarke. He now says that no one followed his advice. Why did he not speak out then? And if the issue was as critical to the nation as he now tells us, why didn't he resign in protest? ...
Clarke is clearly an angry man, angry that Condoleezza Rice demoted him, angry that he was denied a coveted bureaucratic job by the Bush administration. Angry and unreliable. He told the commission to disregard what he said in his 2002 briefing because he was, in effect, spinning. "I've done it for several presidents," he said. He's still at it, spinning now for himself".
UPDATE: Dean Esmay makes an important point:
Most disturbing to me in all this is something too few people have noted. Clarke seems like a fairly typical career civil servant who is neither appointed nor elected. Such people tend to become fairly narrow-minded, inflating the importance of their own role, and also resentful of the "big vision" folks--i.e. the elected and appointed officials who have to tie together broad policy positions involving far more than one civil servant's specialty. This is pretty normal, but now, all future administrations are going to have to worry that the career civil servants whose job is to give them information and advice will try to make them look stupid ..If our governing officials can no longer trust the people who work for them, this is not a good thing. Because we're not talking about blowing the whistle on criminal activity here: we're talking about policy debates, and a career civil servant deciding he doesn't like the strategies formulated by the people he works for--and being treated like a hero by partisans who just don't happen to like the people in office right now.
Very unhealthy, very dangerous in the long run.
Yes, very.
Get Happy. "I think it's time for a reality check. What's everyone really complaining about? That India and China are joining the global trading system? That Russia and Taiwan just had democratic elections, however imperfect, for their Presidents? That the American productivity growth rate jumped to a 3% average annual rate from 1995 to 2003, about double the anemic pace of 1973 to 1995? .. ". more CHRISTOPHER FARRELL.
Quotable: "Let's not lose sight of the bigger picture here. Even with the threat of terrorism, freer trade is invigorating global growth by providing entrepreneurs from all the world's major economies access to bigger markets. The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek emphasized the role the markets play in creating and disseminating knowledge. In the Information Age, the cost of gathering and sharing information and knowledge has plummeted even as the size of the market has expanded exponentially. "Capitalism, as Hayek conceived it, was fundamentally dynamic, and that dynamism was due to the discovery of new needs and new ways of fulfilling them by entrepreneurs possessed with 'resourcefulness,'" writes historian Jerry Muller in The Mind and the Market. These are the tantalizing glimmers of a payoff from globalization. WHAT IF? Productivity growth isn't the magic mantra it was a few years ago because, as the U.S. loses manufacturing jobs, an increasingly efficient Corporate America is under little pressure to add to its payrolls. Nevertheless, "productivity growth is what determines our living standards, the competitive advantage of companies, and the wealth of nations," says Erik Brynolfssohn, an economist at MIT. Take the recent report on Social Security issued by the system's trustees. It assumes under its intermediate projection (essentially the baseline forecast) that productivity will grow at an average annual rate of 1.6%, and that the Social Security system runs into financial trouble come 2042. Yet, consider this: The Social Security problem largely disappears if the productivity growth rate hits an underlying trend growth rate of 2.5% a year .. ".
Zero Inflation -- 6.4% Growth. In Japan. Now enough idiot talk from the economists and the press about the impossibility of growth with prices that are holding stagnant or are declining.
More than a Trillion in New Borrowing "Responsible". At least it is according to President Bush. And so is government spending in the 10 trillion dollar range over the next four years. I kid you not. That's what the President had to say about the national budget passing the House yesterday.
