Monthly Archives: March 2011

March 20, 2011 — John Hinderaker

Sarah Palin In Jerusalem

Liberals love to insult Sarah Palin’s intelligence. It’s not a subject on which I have any particular opinion, except to note that, apparently by a remarkable coincidence, her judgment is correct on just about every subject. For instance, Israel. Today she and her husband Todd were in Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Post reports: Palin and her husband Todd arrived for a two-day visit on Sunday afternoon and toured the Western Wall »
March 20, 2011 — John Hinderaker

What Really Happened at Fukushima

The most cogent explanation I have seen of the nuclear incident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant is by Ken Haapala. You can download the whole thing here. An excerpt: All six of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant are Generation II boiling water reactors of GE design. The oldest is about 40 years old. Unlike the Chernobyl reactor, these reactors have two strong features designed to contain »
March 20, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Spring can really hang you up the most

There are a few torch songs that lament the coming of Spring. This time of year, if you’re tuned to one of the right stations, you may well find yourself listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s unforgettable rendition of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” The song is a buried treasure on Ella’s 1961 quartet-backed jazz set “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie!” (I love the Amazon review that rates it »
March 19, 2011 — John Hinderaker

More Jobs Americans Won’t Do. Unfortunately.

This, from President Obama’s speech in Rio today, is the latest sign of America’s decline: In particular, with the new oil finds off Brazil, President Rousseff has said that Brazil wants to be a major supplier of new stable sources of energy, and I’ve told her that the United States wants to be a major customer, which would be a win-win for both our countries. Under Obama’s new, post-industrial order, »
March 19, 2011 — John Hinderaker

President Hillary?

I think Roger Simon overstates the case a bit, but he certainly says what a lot of people are thinking: Jets over Libya as H. Clinton Assumes Presidency: This division in our leadership could not have been more evident today watching Obama speak from Brazil followed by Clinton’s Paris conference. Obama was a blip, his vaunted verbal facility from the ’08 presidential election now seeming a distant memory from a »
March 19, 2011 — John Hinderaker

Pursuing the Brazilian Dream

Our ancestors came to the United States because they saw more opportunity here than in their native countries. As our economy falters under the Obama/Pelosi/Reid regime and opportunities narrow in the United States, more Americans are looking abroad to see whether they can better their prospects. The BBC reports on an exodus of Americans–small, so far, to be sure–to Brazil: Americans eye opportunities in Brazil’s booming economy: The Harkins and »
March 19, 2011 — John Hinderaker

Spin Control

It is way too early to predict how events will turn out in Libya; it may well be years before we can assess the results of actions that are taken (or not taken) today. But Obama administration officials are already working behind the scenes to spin events, mostly to explain the about-face that occurred a day or two ago. The Clinton camp was the main source for this account in »
March 19, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Discovering Japan: Graham Parker forgets

“Discovering Japan” was the highlight of Graham Parker and the Rumour’s 1979 new wave album, Squeezing Out Sparks. It’s Parker’s own Hiroshima mon amour. I hadn’t thought about the song for a long time, but it seems to evoke the moment: Her heart is nearly breaking, the earth is nearly quaking The Tokyo’s taxi’s braking, it’s screaming to a halt And there’s nothing to hold on to when gravity betrays »
March 19, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Chernobyl in perspective: A footnote

In the post below I cite former Reagan speechwriter Josh Gilder’s illuminating column “Chernobyl in perspective.” I wrote Gilder on Thursday to ask if he had anything he might want to add to what he had to say in the column. He kindly responded: First, Obama’s extraordinary performance, of lack of it, on the Japanese tsunami disaster, and the complete lack of proportion in his remarks yesterday. Personally, I would »
March 19, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Discovering Japan

Steve Hayward took time out from posting his observations here this week to review the events in Japan and their likely consequences on power generation. Steve’s Weekly Standard article is “A fossil fuel renaissance?” Here are the first few sentences: “The catastrophe at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is being regarded as the atomic power equivalent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which set »
March 18, 2011 — John Hinderaker

Obama On Libya

President Obama delivered a public statement on the situation in Libya today. His statement displayed the same incoherence that has characterized the administration’s policies on Libya to date. Obama explained why the U.S. has a vital interest at stake: Now, here’s why this matters to us. Left unchecked, we have every reason to believe that Gadhafi would commit atrocities against his people. Many thousands could die. A humanitarian crisis would »
March 18, 2011 — John Hinderaker

CBO Sees Trillions More In Red Ink Under Obama’s Budget

Today the Congressional Budget Office released its Preliminary Analysis of the President’s Budget for 2012. The CBO finds that Obama’s budget incorporates unduly optimistic economic assumptions and assumes that certain money will materialize for no apparent reason. Consequently, the CBO concludes that Obama’s budget underestimates the total deficits over the next ten years by $2.3 trillion. Senator Jeff Sessions sums up some of the high points: * The Administration had »
March 18, 2011 — John Hinderaker

The Only Good Republican Is A Dead Republican

At Big Journalism, John Nolte does an excellent job of collecting accounts of the last 20 days of union/Democratic Party thuggery in Wisconsin. The harassment, death threats and violent language far surpass anything that we have seen in recent years. Yet, what do we hear from the national media on what supposedly was, just recently, a topic of great interest? »
March 18, 2011 — John Hinderaker

One-Third of a French Fry Short of a Big Mac Meal

How can we put the current debate over the federal budget into a tangible perspective that anyone can understand? This morning I read a post by Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute in which he criticized the Washington Post’s characterization of the $6 billion cut in the most recent continuing resolution as “slashing” the federal budget: Federal spending has soared by more than $2,000,000,000,000 during the Bush-Obama years, pushing the »
March 18, 2011 — Steven Hayward

Climate High-Sticking

Embedded below, if I have mastered the custom Power Line formatting, is a stunning five-minute video of Berkeley physicist Richard Muller shredding the infamous climate “hockey stick” that is making the rounds widely on the Internet, so Power Line readers should see it too. (You can see the entire 52 minute lecture from which this excerpt is drawn here.) Never heard of Muller? You’ll start to hear from him now. »
March 18, 2011 — John Hinderaker

It’s the Spending, Stupid

In Washington, Democrats and Republicans are engaged in a slow-motion showdown over the budget. Republicans want to close the deficit by cutting spending–although, to be fair, their proposals so far are modest at best–while the Democrats don’t want to close the deficit at all. If pressed, the Dems’ preferred course is to raise taxes. Republicans should gain courage from these findings by Scott Rasmussen. Interestingly, this is an “all adults” »
March 18, 2011 — John Hinderaker

Cease-Fire

Libya’s government has announced a cease-fire and a cessation of “all military operations” in the wake of the U.N. resolution authorizing establishment of a no-fly zone and other military measures. It is unclear whether this bombardment occurred before or after the cease-fire was proclaimed. Qaddafi may be crazy, but he isn’t stupid. This looks like a shrewd move. Two weeks ago, with Qaddifi’s government seemingly in control of very little »