Mark Steyn:

The Democrat palace guard of America’s dying monodailies are doing a grand job in reporting the current stand-off in Wisconsin. A headline in The New York Times sums up the media’s bizarre enthusiasm for sacrificing what remains of their reputations in order to protect the cause:

Billionaire Brothers’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute

The dogged John Hinderaker of Powerline is endeavoring to get some answers from the shy and retiring Eric Lipton as to the basis for certain aspects of his story. [UPDATE: New York Times "fact"-checking in action.] But I find the headline alone so perverse you wonder how, even at the Times, it could have wafted up through six layers of editors without someone saying, “Oh, come on…” What’s happening in Wisconsin is all about money: budgets, shortfalls, obligations, perks, pensions, privileges – and the burdens of the beleaguered productive class that pays for it. In a story awash with money, the Koch brothers are the least of it. They’re certainly billionaires, and that’s a lot of dough. Of it, what they inject into the political process is little more than a rounding error. As David Harsanyi puts it:

The libertarian Kochs are super rich and gave less than $2 million to Republicans in the last election cycle, which mathematically speaking amounts to nothing. In fact, Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner dispatched Krugman’s claim that unions were a “counterweight to the political power of big money” by pointing out that “every one of the top ten industries contributing to the 2010 elections gave more money to Democrats.”

If some public union rollbacks are a harbinger of rebirth of the robber barons, why is it that the Service Employees International Union boss — who represents a sliver of the American workforce — has been the most frequent guest at the White House after he handed Barack Obama $28 million and used tens of million more to campaign for him and his policies?

So Big Business and Big Unions both favor Big Government – and for the same reason: it drives out their competition. Why isn’t SEIU honcho Mary Kay Henry (born in that monument to union muscle, Detroit) as famous as the sinister Koch siblings? Ms Henry is a fascinating figure: A lesbian advisor to the Conference of Catholic Bishops whose partner is a bigshot with the Teamsters, she is an advocate for “health care” for “working families” and for same-sex marriage, and on both those issues the President’s views seem to be swinging ever more into happy alignment with her money. Wouldn’t that be worth an in-depth analysis from the Eric Liptons of the world? Instead the Koch brothers, waging their lonely battle for small government, are being lined up as this decade’s Halliburton.

I doubt it will work. The media’s perverse priorities might be just about tenable if they weren’t also making themselves look ever more ridiculous by their willingness to airbrush the truth about the ugly union bruisers out on the streets of Madison.

Read it all.

Christopher Hitchens:

…The Obama administration also behaves as if the weight of the United States in world affairs is approximately the same as that of Switzerland. We await developments. We urge caution, even restraint. We hope for the formation of an international consensus. And, just as there is something despicable about the way in which Swiss bankers change horses, so there is something contemptible about the way in which Washington has been affecting—and perhaps helping to bring about—American impotence. Except that, whereas at least the Swiss have the excuse of cynicism, American policy manages to be both cynical and naive.

This has been especially evident in the case of Libya. For weeks, the administration dithered over Egypt and calibrated its actions to the lowest and slowest common denominators, on the grounds that it was difficult to deal with a rancid old friend and ally who had outlived his usefulness. But then it became the turn of Muammar Qaddafi—an all-round stinking nuisance and moreover a long-term enemy—and the dithering began all over again.

Until Wednesday Feb. 23, when the president made a few anodyne remarks that condemned “violence” in general but failed to cite Qaddafi in particular—every important statesman and stateswoman in the world had been heard from, with the exception of Obama. And his silence was hardly worth breaking. Echoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had managed a few words of her own, he stressed only that the need was for a unanimous international opinion, as if in the absence of complete unity nothing could be done, or even attempted. This would hand an automatic veto to any of Qaddafi’s remaining allies. It also underscored the impression that the opinion of the United States was no more worth hearing than that of, say, Switzerland. Secretary Clinton was then dispatched to no other destination than Geneva, where she will meet with the U.N. Human Rights Council—an absurd body that is already hopelessly tainted with Qaddafi’s membership.

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By the time of Obama’s empty speech, even the notoriously lenient Arab League had suspended Libya’s participation, and several of Qaddafi’s senior diplomatic envoys had bravely defected. One of them, based in New York, had warned of the use of warplanes against civilians and called for a “no-fly zone.” Others have pointed out the planes that are bringing fresh mercenaries to Qaddafi’s side. In the Mediterranean, the United States maintains its Sixth Fleet, which could ground Qaddafi’s air force without breaking a sweat. But wait! We have not yet heard from the Swiss admiralty, without whose input it would surely be imprudent to proceed.

Evidently a little sensitive to the related charges of being a) taken yet again completely by surprise, b) apparently without a policy of its own, and c) morally neuter, the Obama administration contrived to come up with an argument that maximized every form of feebleness. Were we to have taken a more robust or discernible position, it was argued, our diplomatic staff in Libya might have been endangered. In other words, we decided to behave as if they were already hostages! The governments of much less powerful nations, many with large expatriate populations as well as embassies in Libya, had already condemned Qaddafi’s criminal behavior, and the European Union had considered sanctions, but the United States (which didn’t even charter a boat for the removal of staff until Tuesday) felt obliged to act as if it were the colonel’s unwilling prisoner. I can’t immediately think of any precedent for this pathetic “doctrine,” but I can easily see what a useful precedent it sets for any future rogue regime attempting to buy time. Leave us alone—don’t even raise your voice against us—or we cannot guarantee the security of your embassy. (It wouldn’t be too soon, even now, for the NATO alliance to make it plain to Qaddafi that if he even tried such a thing, he would lose his throne, and his ramshackle armed forces, and perhaps his worthless life, all in the course of one afternoon.)

“All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public-personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people.”

– Franklin D.  Roosevelt

_______________________________________________

“Certain business leaders may consider “big government” or socialism more of an immediate threat to their interests than communism. Are they allowing themselves to be deluded by their own propaganda to the effect that organized labor in this country is in favor of big government or the nationalization of industry?

Nothing could be further from the truth. The main function of American trade unions is collective bargaining. It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government. Unions, as well as employers, would vastly prefer to have even Government regulation of labor-management relations reduced to a minimum consistent with the protection of the public welfare.”

– George Meany, leader of the AFL-CIO for 25 years

The Koch brothers have been around a long time in business, politics and philanthropy.

Last fall, a New Yorker profile launched the meme that these two were secret puppet masters intent on pulling off a right-wing coup via political donations. Ever since “with it” lefties have been citing the Koch at every turn.

But their politics is libertarian, which can flummox certain simple minds.

Reason has this:

In responding to our own Nick Gillespie, Jonathan Chait writes:

…the Kochs will happily put their money behind candidates and intellectuals who agree with their economic agenda but disagree with their social agenda. They will never put their money behind candidates or intellectuals of whom the reverse is true.

In the same post, Chait runs off a series of sums the Kochs have spent over the years on various right-wing causes. Curiously missing, however, is the $20 million donation the Kochs made to the ACLU to fight the Bush administration over the PATRIOT Act.

Browsing various accounts of the Kochs political spending over the years, that $20 million appears to be substantially more than the Kochs have contributed to all political candidates combined for at least the last 15 years. (Their gifts to the arts and other non-political charities exceeds what they’ve spent on politics many times over.)

Now maybe we shouldn’t fault Chait for overlooking the ACLU donation. The Kochs don’t appear to have gone out of their way to publicize it. (Though, curiously, when they don’t publicize their contributions to free market causes, it tends to be interpreted as stealthy or manipulative.) It’s also not nearly as prominently reported on the web as the gifts they’ve made to free market organizations. There’s another mention on the Faces of Philanthropy site, which appears to be down right now. But here’s a cached version. I suspect the mere possibility that the Kochs could make such a gift didn’t enter the minds of most people who have written about all of this. It wasn’t mentioned in Jane Mayer’s much-hyped New Yorker expose, either. I should note that both the linked sources above are secondhand, and I’m waiting to hear back from the ACLU for confirmation.

The Kochs’ contributions to political candidates are often touted as the true indicator of what the family and their company really stand for. I’m not particularly fond of most of the politicians the Kochs have supported over the years, but it seems to me that this is precisely backwards. It’s not only significant that the Kochs’ contributions to actual politicians are dwarfed by gifts like the one they made to the ACLU, their spending to found and fund think tanks, and their contributions to non-political causes like the arts and medical research—this is precisely the point.

Matt Bai has a long profile of New Jersey governor Chris Christie in the NYT. It’s long, but an excellent read.

Like a stand-up comedian working out-of-the-way clubs, Chris Christie travels the townships and boroughs of New Jersey­, places like Hackettstown and Raritan and Scotch Plains, sharpening his riffs about the state’s public employees, whom he largely blames for plunging New Jersey into a fiscal death spiral. In one well-worn routine, for instance, the governor reminds his audiences that, until he passed a recent law that changed the system, most teachers in the state didn’t pay a dime for their health care coverage, the cost of which was borne by taxpayers.

And so, Christie goes on, forced to cut more than $1 billion in local aid in order to balance the budget, he asked the teachers not only to accept a pay freeze for a year but also to begin contributing 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health care. The dominant teachers’ union in the state responded by spending millions of dollars in television and radio ads to attack him.

“The argument you heard most vociferously from the teachers’ union,” Christie says, “was that this was the greatest assault on public education in the history of New Jersey.” Here the fleshy governor lumbers a few steps toward the audience and lowers his voice for effect. “Now, do you really think that your child is now stressed out and unable to learn because they know that their poor teacher has to pay 1½ percent of their salary for their health care benefits? Have any of your children come home — any of them — and said, ‘Mom.’ ” Pause. “ ‘Dad.’ ” Another pause. “ ‘Please. Stop the madness.’ ”

By this point the audience is starting to titter, but Christie remains steadfastly somber in his role as the beseeching student. “ ‘Just pay for my teacher’s health benefits,’ ” he pleads, “ ‘and I’ll get A’s, I swear. But I just cannot take the stress that’s being presented by a 1½ percent contribution to health benefits.’ ” As the crowd breaks into appreciative guffaws, Christie waits a theatrical moment, then slams his point home. “Now, you’re all laughing, right?” he says. “But this is the crap I have to hear.”

Keep reading.

That’s what NYT columnist Charles Blow asserts.

Republicans need to figure out where they stand on children’s welfare. They can’t be “pro-life” when the “child” is in the womb but indifferent when it’s in the world. Allow me to illustrate just how schizophrenic their position has become through the prism of premature babies.

He complains that the GOP is cutting off funds that would otherwise reduce the number of premature babies. (One reason the US  has higher than expected infant mortality rates is because we try to save ever younger babies. )

The good news is that last year the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the rate of premature births fell in 2008, representing the first two-year decline in the last 30 years.

Dr. Jennifer L. Howse, the president of the March of Dimes, which in 2003 started a multimillion-dollar premature birth campaign focusing on awareness and education, has said of the decline: “The policy changes and programs to prevent preterm birth that our volunteers and staff have worked so hard to bring about are starting to pay off.”

So exactly how does “awareness” — gawd, how liberals love that word! — reduce premature births? I followed the link in his column and found this:

“Mothers need to be aware that all pregnancies should go on to 39 weeks at least, unless there is a clear indication of some problem,” he said. “Mothers shouldn’t be asking for early delivery, and doctors shouldn’t be scheduling inductions or C-sections before 39 weeks unless there is a medical reason. If this isn’t happening, mothers should certainly be asking the doctor why.”

Mothers are asking for early delivery? Who? Where? What brain dead doctor obliges them? That doesn’t take federal dollars to fix, just common sense.

Rich Noyes and Scott Whitlock in the WSJ:

Loud protests by Wisconsin public employee unions against a budget reform proposal from new Governor Scott Walker have drawn considerable national network news attention since Thursday, the day Democratic state senators fled the state in a last-ditch gambit to prevent the bill from becoming law. A story-by-story analysis by the Media Research Center shows the Wisconsin protests are a perfect case study in the media’s longstanding double standard favoring left-wing causes while demonstrating much more hostility to the Tea Party and conservative protests.

Last March, as thousands protested on Capitol Hill in the days before the passage of ObamaCare, CBS’s Nancy Cordes slammed it as “a weekend filled with incivility,” while World News anchor Diane Sawyer painted the Tea Party as a violent gang, with “protesters roaming Washington, some of them increasingly emotional, yelling slurs and epithets.” In August 2009, ABC anchor Charles Gibson complained how “protesters brought pictures of President Obama with a Hitler-style mustache to a town hall meeting,” failing to mention that the signs were produced by Lyndon LaRouche’s wacky fringe movement, not the Tea Party or conservatives.

Over the past several days, the liberal demonstrations in Wisconsin (bolstered by the national Democratic Party and President Obama’s Organizing for America group) have included signs just as inflammatory as the ones that bothered the networks during the health care debate, including several showing Governor Scott Walker as Adolph Hitler. Others have likened Walker to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (“Scott Stalin”) and recently deposed Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak (“Walker = Mubarak”). (more…)

Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal on the Irish bubble:

If you want to study the economic crisis of the last few years, go to Ireland, where you will find it in its purest form. Ireland is a small country, with a population of just 4.4 million, and the connection between clientelistic politics, bankers’ cupidity, and the mass psychology of bubble markets is easiest to comprehend there.

Dotted around the country, outside of almost every town and sometimes in the middle of nowhere, are housing estates—completed, half-completed, and never-to-be-completed—which are unsaleable, will almost certainly never be inhabited, and are destined to fall into graceless ruins. Some 300,000 new dwellings now stand empty in the Irish Republic, a number whose equivalent in the United States would be approximately 21 million.

The madness that gripped the country can be gauged from a few examples. A 25-acre piece of land on the edge of Dublin on which a derelict factory stood sold in 2006 for $550 million. After the banking collapse two years later, it was valued by the National Asset Management Administration, the public-sector organization set up to handle the banks’ toxic assets, at $80 million, a sum itself arbitrary in the absence of a flourishing market. The Anglo-Irish Bank, which eventually collapsed and left taxpayers a legacy of approximately $40 billion of debt, lent an average of $1.7 billion to each of six property developers; it lent more than $650 million each to another nine. A house in Shrewsbury Road, Dublin, sold for $80 million in 2005 but, now standing empty, is on the way to dereliction, and no house on the road—a millionaires’ row—has sold for the last two years, despite a fall in prices of at least 66 percent. During the boom, taxi drivers and shop assistants would tell you about the third or fourth house they had bought—on borrowed money, of course—and of their apartments in Europe, from Malaga to Budapest to the Black Sea Coast of Bulgaria. It was not so much a boom as a gold rush, or a modern reenactment of the Tulipomania.

All this would not have been possible were it not for the insouciance of foreign banks. The Royal Bank of Scotland alone lent $50 billion in Ireland. German banks extended $140 billion in credit and the British banks as much again. The champions, on a per capita basis, were the Belgians, weighing in at $57 billion. (The cautious Americans lent only $70 billion.) The gross external debt of Ireland is just a fraction less than half a million dollars per head, that is to say, more than $2 trillion in total. It is not difficult to see why a rescue was needed, or who was being rescued: not the Irish, but all of us.

During the boom, the government—under the direction of Ireland’s largest political party, Fianna Fáil, in power for most of the last 80 years and famous for its patronage network—increased public-sector employment by 25 percent and also the rate of remuneration. The average public-service wage rose from $39,000 a year in 1998 to $64,000 in 2008, with pensions following suit, in return for a pledge not to go on strike…

by Burt Prelutsky

If I had the authority, I would use enhanced interrogation methods on progressives. It wouldn’t be my intention to hurt them. At least that wouldn’t be my sole intention. I would simply want to compel them to face facts and to quit parroting left-wing lies.

For one thing, no matter what AARP and the New York Times would have you believe, most Americans don’t favor ObamaCare. Even a lot of Democrats don’t. That’s why it took bribery and intimidation by Obama, Pelosi and Reid, to get the damn thing enacted.

Another fact of life is that the federal government does not create jobs, except those jobs in government that those of us in the private sector are then forced to pay for through our taxes. The only way the feds can help employment is by lowering taxes and eliminating the endless regulations that, thanks to the ecological zealots, hogtie business for the sin of pursuing profits and placing the comfort and well-being of human beings over that of such lower life forms as snails, spiders and ecological zealots.

It is time that Congress and the president acted like adults and quit pandering to those who keep insisting that people control the climate. If we did have such powers, we would have done away with snowstorms, hurricanes and really rotten weather during the World Series. It is also time that we quit pretending that wind and solar power will ever replace fossil fuel. If wind power had such magical properties as the fruitcakes would have us believe, Washington, D.C., would have been a fossil fuel-free zone years ago.

Until something better comes along, we are stuck with natural gas, coal, nuclear power and oil. That being the case, it’s high time that we begin building more nuclear reactors and start drilling in the ocean, in Alaska and anywhere else in America where the geological experts tell us there is oil to be found.

At the same time, the moratorium on building oil refineries must be ended. Who the heck is in charge, anyway? The Chinese? The Saudis? Mahmud Ahmadinejad? Al Gore?

One might, if one were of a kindly nature, pay lip service to idiots and even con men, but only a person out to sabotage America would allow such folks to dictate our energy policy.

Either we want to be free of dependence on the various anti-American despots in the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela, or we don’t. And if for some reason that escapes me, we aren’t serious, it’s time we quit whining about the high cost of gasoline. The folks selling the stuff to us are not our friends. They have every reason on earth to gouge us. But that’s inevitably the fate of suckers, saps and crybabies.

Speaking of those geologists, I think that while acknowledging that experts exist in the world, we should keep in mind that their expertise is limited, as a rule, to their specific field. Unfortunately, we tend to bestow omnipotence on individuals simply because they’ve won a Nobel Prize or, worse yet, are rich.

People, after all, cop a Nobel for no better reason than that a small group of Scandinavians have somehow determined that they know a lot about, say, physics, chemistry or economics; people achieve wealth because they know how to make, sometimes inherit, occasionally steal, money. But as Tevye pointed out in “Fiddler On the Roof,” while fantasizing about a radical turnaround in his own financial circumstances: “When you’re rich, people think you really know.” I would add that one other advantage that the rich have over others is that people will inevitably laugh at their jokes, no matter how lame.

I heard a while back that NPR’s CEO, Vivian Schiller, was denied her 2010 bonus because of the way she handled the dismissal of Juan Williams. The question that came to mind is why the CEO of a non-profit enterprise should be in the habit of collecting a yearly bonus, especially when a great deal of the outfit’s funding comes out of our tax dollars.

In 2012, in addition to the president, 33 senators will be up for re-election. Only 10 of them will be Republicans. In other words, the GOP could be poised to take control of both houses. But in order to do so, they will have to remember how and why they gained control of the House last November. If they remind us even slightly of the clowns who pretended to be Republicans, but served as Ted Kennedy’s drooling lap dogs from 2001-2007, they will discover just how quickly they can be un-elected.

As for the 23 Democrats who will be up for re-election in 2012, I hope they will spend the next two years remembering what happened to the poor, dumb slugs who had spent the previous two years taking their marching orders from those left-wing drum majorettes, Pelosi and Reid.

It would also serve them well to keep in mind that Barack Obama’s coattails are even shorter than those of Batman’s arch nemesis, the Penguin.

The United States said on Thursday it supported expelling Libya from the United Nations Human Rights Council, saying the government had violated the rights of its people.

Ya think?

Witnesses have said Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has used aircraft, tanks and mercenaries to try to crush protests against his 41-year rule of the oil-exporting nation in North Africa.

Maybe Obama should threaten to put Gaddafi on double secret probation.

Criticizing foreign policy is easy, as Obama and the left demonstrated during Bush’s eight years.

But once in office, Obama discovered the reality of having to choose between bad and worse choices.

So a fair person must consider that Obama sees a bigger picture than we do. That said, his wimpy response to Gaddfi seems embarassing. (Remember how hard he was on the Hondurans who were actually following the law?”)

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof cites some concrete examples of how we could be helping the Libyans.

By telephone, I reached a family in Tripoli, Libya, with deep roots in the armed forces there, and members of the family offered some insight into what we should do to help nudge Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from power.

One member of the family is a senior naval officer who says that his ship and two others were ordered to sail to the major city of Benghazi, which has been liberated by rebels. The boats were instructed to attack Benghazi, he said, speaking through an English-speaking family member.

Some of the senior officers were aghast at the idea of attacking civilians but feared summary execution if they disobeyed orders, by his account. In that tense situation, the officer said, four officials supporting Colonel Qaddafi staged a rally for him on the naval base. Other officers then hushed them up without explicitly condemning the government, my contact said, and there was a fierce argument that ended with the pro-Qaddafi group giving way because it was far outnumbered by the anti-Qaddafi forces.

There has been no mutiny, and in theory the naval officers accepted their orders, my contact said. But in practice they have not yet set sail. I can’t say more for fear of getting some very brave people in trouble.

Likewise, in another phone call to Tripoli, I was given firsthand information about an air force unit in the Tripoli area that is staying on base and refraining from getting involved in the fighting one way or the other. The unit’s leaders don’t dare disobey orders directly, but they are waiting and watching and sitting out the fighting for now.

Those are the people we need to send signals to: Libyan military officers who are wavering about which way to turn their guns.

We shouldn’t invade Libya, but there are steps the international community can take that may make a difference by influencing these officers who haven’t yet committed. Senator John Kerry, the Genocide Intervention Network, the International Crisis Group and others have laid out sensible steps that countries can take. These include:

• Offer a safe haven for Libyan pilots ordered to bomb their country. For example, they could be encouraged to land on airstrips in Malta or neighboring countries. Even if not many took advantage of the offer, Colonel Qaddafi might be more reluctant to dispatch his air force if he thought he might lose it.
• Impose financial and trade sanctions on Libya, as President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has suggested, and freeze assets of the Qaddafi family. In particular, military exchanges and weapons transfers should be canceled. Sanctions take time to bite (aside from a cutoff from the global banking system), but they would signal to those around Colonel Qaddafi that he is going down and they should not obey his orders.
• Impose a no-fly zone, as Libya’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations proposed after he defected, to prevent the government from bombing or strafing its own people. This is what we did to prevent Saddam Hussein from attacking his Kurdish population, and in Libya we could do it without dispatching NATO aircraft to hover continually over the region. We can warn Libya (publicly or quietly) that if military aircraft or ships are used against civilians, Libya’s military assets will later be destroyed. The aim is to encourage the air force and navy to keep their assets from being used against civilians.
• Encourage the Arab League and African Union to continue to pressure Libya in connection with the killing of its people. Such efforts undermine Colonel Qaddafi’s nationalist warnings that this is about foreign powers trying to re-colonize Libya and encourage his aides to appreciate that he is losing all his allies.

Politico:

Caught between their boss’ anti-lobbyist rhetoric and the reality of governing, President Barack Obama’s aides often steer meetings with lobbyists to a complex just off the White House grounds — and several of the lobbyists involved say they believe the choice of venue is no accident.

It allows the Obama administration to keep these lobbyist meetings shielded from public view — and out of Secret Service logs kept on visitors to the White House and later released to the public.

“They’re doing it on the side. It’s better than nothing,” said immigration reform lobbyist Tamar Jacoby, who has attended meetings at the nearby Jackson Place complex and believes the undisclosed gatherings are better than none.

The White House scoffs at the notion of an ulterior motive for scheduling meetings in what are, after all, meeting rooms. But at least four lobbyists who’ve been to the conference rooms just off Lafayette Square tell POLITICO they had the distinct impression they were being shunted off to Jackson Place — and off the books — so their visits wouldn’t later be made public.

Obama’s administration has touted its release of White House visitors logs as a breakthrough in transparency, as the first White House team to reveal the comings and goings around the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building.

This is an excellent review of the events that led to the ouster of Mubarak. It is divided into two. The first part presents the POV of the youth movement. The second part looks at it from the POV of the Muslim Brothers.

ABC news lists the 112 ways you can spell you-know-who’s name. There must be an American Express ad in here somewhere.

• Qaddafi, Muammar
• Al-Gathafi, Muammar
• al-Qadhafi, Muammar
• Al Qathafi, Mu’ammar
• Al Qathafi, Muammar
• El Gaddafi, Moamar
• El Kadhafi, Moammar
• El Kazzafi, Moamer
• El Qathafi, Mu’Ammar
• Gadafi, Muammar
• Gaddafi, Moamar
• Gadhafi, Mo’ammar
• Gathafi, Muammar
• Ghadafi, Muammar
• Ghaddafi, Muammar
• Ghaddafy, Muammar
• Gheddafi, Muammar
• Gheddafi, Muhammar
• Kadaffi, Momar
• Kad’afi, Mu`amar al- 20
• Kaddafi, Muamar
• Kaddafi, Muammar
• Kadhafi, Moammar
• Kadhafi, Mouammar
• Kazzafi, Moammar (more…)

That’s more than half a billion dollars. For what? A green energy company that has already failed.

Daily Caller:

Solyndra, Inc. was supposed to have showcased the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s stimulus and green jobs initiatives, but instead it has become the center of congressional attention for waste, fraud and abuse of such programs.

According to a Feb. 17 letter signed by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, Michigan Republican, and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns, Florida Republican, to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Fremont, Calif.-based solar panel manufacturer should never have received a $535 million loan guarantee from the stimulus.*

This illustrates two points:

One, the federal government should not be picking investments. Just because Obama thinks green energy is cool doesn’t give him the smarts to throw taxpayer money around.

Two, when the feds shovel big dollars into anything, it’s an invitation to corruption. It could be a coincidence that the beneficiary of this loan happened to be an Obama-connected billionaire. Or not.

The Energy Department estimated in a March 20, 2009 press release that the loan guarantee would create 3,000 construction jobs and a further 1,000 jobs after the plant opened.

And President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden each personally showcased Solyndra as an example of how stimulus dollars were at work creating jobs, during appearances at the company over the course of the following year.

…The vice president justified the federal government’s investment in Solyndra in front of employees and other dignitaries, including Secretary Chu and former Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger, saying the jobs the company intended to create would “serve as a foundation for a stronger American economy.”

As if that bonehead would know.

“These jobs are the jobs that are going to define the 21^st century that will allow America to compete and to lead like we did in the 20^th century,” Biden said.

Instead, it defines Obama’s foolishness.

Instead, Solyndra announced on Nov. 3 it planned to postpone expanding the plant, which put the taxpayers on the hook to the tune of $390.5 million taxpayers**, or 73 percent of the total loan guarantee, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It also announced that it no longer planned to hire the 1,000 workers that Obama and Biden had touted in their speeches and that it planned to close one of its older factories and planned to lay-off 135 temporary or contract workers and 40 full-time employees.

A closer look at the company shows it has never turned a profit since it was founded in 2005, according to its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.

And Solyndra’s auditor declared that “the company has suffered recurring losses, negative cash flows since inception and has a net stockholders’ deficit that, among other factors, [that] raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a growing concern” in a March 2010 amendment to its SEC registration statement.

While playing Scattergories at a party a year ago, someone tossed Rush Limbaugh’s name out as a bad guy. Many in the room murmured their assent.

I kept my tongue, but chuckled to myself that probably none of them had actually heard him — just the nasty stuff the left takes out of context to make him sound racist and unpatriotic.

One said later that he didn’t like all the yelling and talking over each other on the show. Rush doesn’t have guests, I told him. So who is he talking over, himself?

Commentary has a long, thoughtful post on Limbaugh that’s worth reading, and if you’re feeling provocative, forwarding to your lib friends.

…but there aren’t because Gaddaffi, after seeing what happened to Saddam Hussein, in 2003 voluntarily ended his nuclear program.

Thank you George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

In exchange, they removed Libya from the terror list. But Andrea Mitchell, old but not wise, asks Donald Rumsfeld if we got a good deal.

Is she kidding? Imagine how bad the Libya situation would be today if there were nuclear weapons in play.

WATCH her interview with Rumsfeld here.

John H. McWhorter in City Journal

To feel that something is tired in the idea of Black History Month isn’t, despite what one might hear from some quarters, racist. When Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week in 1926, he hoped that the need for such a celebration would gradually recede. For the week to morph into a month did not exactly bear out his wishes, and today, even black people brandish an array of objections to Black History Month. Actor Morgan Freeman wonders why the history of his people must be relegated to a single month. Others more recreationally inclined consider it suspicious that February is the shortest month. Is it perhaps time to let Black History Month go?

The question is not whether black history is important. It is whether America still needs to be reminded of that fact. What would an America sufficiently aware of black history look like? Suppose, say, the organizers of a centennial commemoration of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo decided to highlight the racially discriminatory side of the original event. Or suppose a traveling museum exhibit of slave ship artifacts reportedly got record-breaking attendance at every site that it visited. Both have happened, both suggest an America that “gets” black history—and both occurred ten years ago, at this writing.

Just a year later, Washington State Representative Hans Dunshee, who is white, agitated to have Jefferson Davis’s name removed from a Seattle highway and replaced with the name of William P. Stewart, a black Civil War veteran from Washington. Meanwhile, white Underground Railroad buffs in Ohio were the most vocal critics of various historical distortions in a planned Cincinnati National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. In modern America, things like this are ordinary: I chose among countless possibilities. If this isn’t an America ready to heed Carter G. Woodson’s advice, then what would be?

How about fast-forwarding to last year? Isabel Wilkerson’s chronicle of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, was one of the most ecstatically received books of the year and will likely win a Pulitzer. Another of the most popular books of 2010 was Rebecca Skloot’s chronicle of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman whose cancer cells researchers harvested without her knowledge; the story will soon be an HBO film. On Broadway, the hit musical Memphis depicted the rise of rock and roll amid a violent response to an interracial romance. Another musical, this one about the injustice perpetrated in the 1930s upon the Scottsboro Boys, was brought from Off Broadway to the Great White Way despite highly mixed reviews, because its (white) creators and backers thought it too important not to be more widely seen…

A serious think piece, as usual, from Walter Russell Mead:

Is America in a race to the bottom, or are we going through what the Austrian born economist Joseph Schumpeter would call a process of “creative destruction”?

As readers over thirty will remember, Ronald Reagan used to tell the story of two boys: a pessimist and an optimist.  A psychologist put the pessimistic boy in a roomful of toys; he sat around morosely worried that if he played with the toys they would break and he would be blamed.  He put the optimist in a room with a big pile of horse manure; the boy started eagerly digging.  The psychologist asked why and the boy answered that with all that manure on the floor there had to be a pony in there somewhere.

Your attitude toward that story probably predicts what you think about the protests in Madison — and a lot else besides.  If you think America is in a race to the bottom as low wage labor in China and elsewhere puts more and more pressure on our middle class living standards here in the US, you probably believe that the Republican attack on public employee unions in Wisconsin is part of a general assault on working people in the United States — and you think this is something we need to fight.  You likely think that the decline of the American middle class will destroy our prosperity and stability and that the public unions are one of the last forces standing in the way of an all out corporate assault on what’s left of the American way of life.

…

The argument in Madison reflects both consensus and disagreement.  The consensus is that things in the United States are going in the wrong direction.  The argument is over what to do.  The Tea Party and other backers of Governor Scott Walker basically argue two things: that big government is the friend of the Davoisie rather than an effective regulator protecting the rest of us by keeping the fat cats in check, and that high government costs and inefficiencies are part of the problem driving down incomes and living standards rather than part of the solution.  The public unions and their supporters argue just the other way: a powerful government is our last ditch line of defense against an aggressive plutocracy and government spending on good living wages for employees is a bastion of what is left of the American middle class.

This is where the pony comes in.  If you think the changes in our economy since the 1970s are just a pointless race to the bottom, you want America to stop digging.  The world is going the wrong way — toward some kind of Blade Runner dystopian future of high tech and low living standards.  You want to stop this future in its tracks.  Governor Walker has created an artificial budget crisis by giving huge tax breaks to rich corporations; now he is using this as an excuse not just to cut the wages of middle class working people but to break them politically by destroying the union that stands between them and naked corporate power.  The systematic destruction of first private sector unions (down to only 7% of the workforce) and now public unions (a majority of American union members overall with more than a third of government workers enrolled) is part of an offensive that won’t stop until the American middle class is back in the third world.

Cure for the Blues

I see those arguments and have felt their force for thirty years.  I’m not, however, convinced that they ultimately make sense.  I’ve been thinking about globalization and the future of American prosperity and power since writing Mortal Splendor and in those thirty years I haven’t so much changed my mind about the problems we face as come to a better understanding of the roots of American prosperity — where the ponies are and how they grow.

I wrote in my first post on Madison that I don’t think that restructuring state government is about the race to the bottom: it’s the way to avoid a race to the bottom.  That answer needs a bit more elaboration.  The world is in a race: a race to be the most efficient and innovative.  Cheapness is one way to win this race: cheap labor can be an advantage.

But America shouldn’t compete on the basis of cheap labor: we are not nor should we try to be the Walmart of Work.  So the first question becomes how do we compete in ways that don’t involve endlessly ratcheting down wages and benefits?  And the second, related question is how can we generate enough demand for American workers so that market forces drive incomes up from year to year and decade to decade?

The key to success is obvious: we need to continue to raise productivity throughout the economy.  If productivity goes up quickly enough, wages can rise here even if they are falling elsewhere.  This is getting harder; productivity is both easier to measure and to raise in manufacturing than in services.  But substituting capital and technology for human sweat has to be a large part of what we do.

by Burt Prelutsky

I have long pondered why people want to get into politics. I’m aware of the obvious perks and I understand that some people want to be the center of attention. But, still, how can anyone stand having to spend hours in the company of egomaniacal dunderheads like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer? But then I realized that politics serves the same purpose as show business for those people who can’t act, sing, dance or play a musical instrument. But whereas show business attracts the gifted, the talented and the good-looking, politics attracts those who are none of those things..

And just as show business serves as an incubator for unleashed libidos, politics gives the homely, the boring and the totally unremarkable, a shot at being a chick magnet. I even recall thinking back in the 1970s when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was making a name for himself as a ladies man, squiring around the likes of Jill St. John and other starlets, that any administration that had a guy who looked and sounded like Kissinger as its resident sex symbol was in big trouble. As I saw it, Watergate was inevitable.

But lest you think I am indulging in hyperbole, I’ll give you a rundown on just those politicians who, over just the past two decades, were involved in sex scandals involving female members of their staff. That precludes, say, Mark Sanford, who left his heart and precious bodily fluids down in Argentina, or Chris Lee (R-NY), who apparently left his brains in his other suit.

Frankly, I’m surprised that the wives of politicians don’t insist that their hubbies only hire men. Of course, as we discovered with Rep. Eric “Mr. Tickle” Massa, even male staffers aren’t always safe around randy politicians.

In the spirit of being fair-minded and non-partisan, I will indicate the party affiliation of these old goats who make our laws when they’re not busy just making out. (For the record, Massa was a Democrat and Sanford, a Republican.)

In alphabetical order: Bill Clinton (D), Gary Condit (D), John Edwards (D), John Ensign (R), Newt Gingrich (R), Steve LaTourette (R), Tim Mahoney (D), Robert Packwood (R), Mal Reynolds (D) and Mark Souder (R).

Keep in mind those are just the clucks who, like Ted Kennedy, got involved with their interns, secretaries and volunteers, and, God knows, I may have missed a few. It does not include TV reporters or the wives of staffers and contributors. Neither does it include those who prefer, like Eliot Spitzer, to have sex on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Clearly, these politicians have way too much time on their hands. In such cases, the prescription is generally to take up a hobby. The trouble is, these guys already have.

The late Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci interviewed a few tyrants in her career including Ayatollah Khomeini. When interviewing Khomeni, she got into an argument about wearing the chador.

Fallaci – I still have to ask you a lot of things. About the “chador,” for example, which I was obliged to wear to come and interview you, and which you impose on Iranian women. [...] I am not only referring to the dress but to what it represents, I mean the apartheid Iranian women have been forced into after the revolution. They cannot study at the university with men, they cannot work with men, they cannot swim in the sea or in a swimming-pool with men. They have to do everything separately, wearing their “chador.” By the way, how can you swim wearing a “chador”?

Khomeini- None of this concerns you, our customs do not concern you. If you don’t like the islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it, since it is for young women and respectable ladies.

Fallaci – This is very kind of you, Imam, since you tell me that, I’m going to immediately rid myself of this stupid medieval rag. There !

Still, for Muammar al-Gaddafi she harbored special contempt.

Jonah Goldberg on the critical difference between public- and private-sector unions.

…Do you recall the Great DMV cave-in of 1959? How about the travails of second-grade teachers recounted in Upton Sinclair’s famous schoolhouse sequel to “The Jungle”? No? Don’t feel bad, because no such horror stories exist.

Government workers were making good salaries in 1962 when President Kennedy lifted, by executive order (so much for democracy), the federal ban on government unions. Civil service regulations and similar laws had guaranteed good working conditions for generations.

The argument for public unionization wasn’t moral, economic or intellectual. It was rankly political.

Traditional organized labor, the backbone of the Democratic Party, was beginning to lose ground. As Daniel DiSalvo wrote in “The Trouble with Public Sector Unions,” in the fall issue of National Affairs, JFK saw how in states such as New York and Wisconsin, where public unions were already in place, local liberal pols benefited politically and financially. He took the idea national.

The plan worked. Public union membership skyrocketed and government union support for the party of government skyrocketed with it. From 1989 to 2004, AFSCME — the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — gave nearly $40 million to candidates in federal elections, with 98.5% going to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Why would local government unions give so much in federal elections? Because government workers have an inherent interest in boosting the amount of federal tax dollars their local governments get. Put simply, people in the government business support the party of government.

And this gets to the real insidiousness of government unions. Wisconsin labor officials fairly note that they’ve acceded to many of their governor’s specific demands — that workers contribute to their pensions and healthcare costs, for example. But they don’t want to lose the right to collective bargaining.

But that is exactly what they need to lose. (more…)

Liberals never run out of ways to stick their noses in other people’s business. And in the case of Jews, their religion. Will they have the guts to go after Muslim “female circumcision?”

Self-described “civil rights advocates” say that a ballot proposition to ban circumcision is on track for gathering signatures, meaning that San Franciscans may vote on the measure this November.

The proposed law is being spearheaded by local resident Lloyd Schofield, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

It’s part of a national push to end the procedure, which some say is steeped in tradition but poses risks and has little medical benefit. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association do not recommend routine circumcision.

Getting on the ballot is the easy part — only about 7,000 signatures are required. Once it’s there, advocates will have to convince voters that snipping off body parts is a bad idea.

Someone should introduce Lloyd to a real life version of the mohel from Seinfeld, one of the funniest characters on a show with plenty of them.

WATCH it here.

Our government at work. Sean Kerrigan:

The US government is offering private intelligence companies contracts to create software to manage “fake people” on social media sites and create the illusion of consensus on controversial issues.

The contract calls for the development of “Persona Management Software” which would help the user create and manage a variety of distinct fake profiles online. The job listing was discussed in recently leaked emails from the private security firm HBGary after an attack by internet activist last week.

According to the contract, the software would “protect the identity of government agencies” by employing a number of false signals to convince users that the poster is in fact a real person. A single user could manage unique background information and status updates for up to 10 fake people from a single computer.

If only fake personas paid taxes, Team Obama could balance the budget.

Legal Insurrection:

When it came to overthrowing Hosni Mubarek, the western media thrust itself into the situation and portrayed the uprising as a western-style demand for freedom.

The television screens were filled with stories of relatively western figures such as Google employee Wael Ghonim, who became the face of the new Egypt — educated, professional, and desirous of freedom as we know it.

Now that Mubarek is gone, the western media mostly has moved on to the next revolution, secure in the perception that Egypt is moving in the right direction.

But that is a false comfort. As I posted yesterday, over a million Egyptians turned out in Tahrir Square last Friday to cheer the vile anti-Semitic Sunni cleric Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who had been exiled by Mubarek, and who espouses the fundamentalist Islamic view that Jews must live as Dhimmis under Islamic control.  Instead of accurately reporting the significance of this event, The New York Times whitewashed the cleric as someone who supports a “a pluralistic, multiparty, civil democracy.”

Where was the western hero Ghonim?

He tried to take the microphone to speak to the crowd, presumably to preach his western values, but he was kept off the stage by Sheik al-Qaradawi’s security.

But you probably haven’t heard that, because it was not widely reported, except by AFP, Egypt protest hero Wael Ghonim barred from stage (h/t Israel Matzav):

Google executive Wael Ghonim, who emerged as a leading voice in Egypt’s uprising, was barred from the stage in Tahrir Square on Friday by security guards, an AFP photographer said. Ghonim tried to take the stage in Tahrir, the epicentre of anti-regime protests that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, b ut men who appeared to be guarding influential Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi barred him from doing so.

Ghonim, who was angered by the episode, then left the square with his face hidden by an Egyptian flag.

This is the problem with those, like Roger Cohen in The New York Times, who glorify the “Arab Street.”  Ghonim was not the face of the “Arab Street,” he merely was a face to which western media could relate.

Follow the link for embedded videos.

Maybe his mommy wouldn’t get him a train set for Christmas. Whatever the reason, Obama is hung up on blowing wads of federal dollars on train boondoggles.

Joel Kotkin:

Perhaps nothing so illustrates President Obama’s occasional disconnect with reality than his fervent advocacy of high-speed rail. Amid mounting pressure for budget cuts that affect existing programs, including those for the inner city, the president has made his $53 billion proposal to create a national high-speed rail network as among his top priorities.

Our President may be an intelligent and usually level-headed man, but this represents a serious case of  policy delusion. As Robert Samuelson pointed out in Newsweek, high-speed rail is not an appropriate fit for a country like the U.S. Except for a few areas, notably along the Northeast Corridor, the U.S. just lacks the density that would make such a system work. Samuelson calls the whole idea “a triumph of fancy over fact.”

Arguably the biggest problem with high-speed rail is its extraordinary costs, which would require massive subsidies to keep operating. Unlike the Federal Highway Program, largely financed by the gas tax, high-speed rail lacks any credible source of funding besides taxpayer dollars.

Part of the pitch for high-speed rail is nationalistic. To be a 21st century super power, we must emulate current No. 2 China. But this is a poor reason to indulge in a hugely expensive program when the U.S. already has the world’s most evolved highway, freight rail and airline system.

Also, if the U.S. were to follow the Chinese model, as some have suggested, perhaps it should impose rule from a Washington version of a centralized authoritarian government. After all, dictatorships are often quite adept at “getting things done.”  But in a democracy “getting things done” means balancing interests and efficiencies, not following orders from above.

In China high-speed rail is so costly that the trains are too expensive for the average citizen. Furthermore, construction costs are so high the Chinese Academy of Sciences has already warned that its debts may not be payable. This experience with ballooning costs and far lower fare revenues have raised taxpayer obligations in Taiwan and Korea and added to heavily to the national debt in Japan…

Somehow, Obama has convinced the commentariat that he’s a pragmatist, not an idealogue.

Vidal Sassoon: The Movie” opens with a blast of hyperbole from an assembly of disembodied voices: “I think it’s impossible to overestimate the importance of Vidal Sassoon.” “He built something that rocked the world.” “He was one of the greatest if not the greatest hairdresser who ever lived.” One commentator even compares Mr. Sassoon, now a spry, fit 83, to Einstein and Muhammad Ali.

That’s from Stephen Holden’s NYT review of the hagiographic film about a hair dresser. Why does he merit such acclaim?

Mr. Sassoon’s invention, inspired by Bauhaus architecture, took years to develop. One of the first landmarks was the Nancy Kwan haircut in 1963. There soon followed the boyish five-point haircut that blurred class and sexual distinctions in the unisex era. Easy to maintain, it signaled liberation from the constraints of the past.

Please give me a moment to subdue my goose bumps.

I plan to skip the Sasson movie.

But I did see The Social Network, the much hyped biopic about Mark Zuckerberg, co-creator of Facebook. It’s up for best picture, which says a lot about the competition this year. (See Winter’s Bone — it’s a fine movie.)

If you know the basic outline of how Facebook came to be, something you could get from watching “60 Minutes”, there’s very little suspense in the movie.

Yep, the nerd can write code. Yep, he’s a jerk. Yep, he probably screwed a few people along the way. Yep, they sued him. Yep, yep, yep.

All of this is presented as if Facebook changed the world. (Norman Borlaug really did change the world but few know of him. As for the ‘net, Google has been a world changer.)

Suppose the business Zuckerberg created wasn’t a social networking website, but a new candy bar or a sports drink. Or a five point hair style. Would we be inclined to care?

The filmmakers’ skill at story construction, editing, tarting up the facts and rat-a-tat dialog can’t compensate for boring characters and the tale’s ultimate insignificance.

Even with Leslie Stahl’s fawning ickiness, “60 Minutes” told the story better and quicker.

This is the same Evan Thomas who compared Obama to god.

Doctors and teachers commiting fraud.