Monthly Archives: July 2012

“You didn’t build that”: Context

Featured image Reader Jeffrey King forwards the video below providing the context for Obama’s Roanoke declaration. He writes: “Now President Obama is saying he did not say what he said. This is the ad Romney should run in response.” »

The next big battle in Syria, and what might follow

Featured image Aleppo has become the latest focal point in Syria’s civil war. Rebels have advanced into the city and the Syrian government is rushing in reinforcements. Aleppo, with a population of more than two million, is Syria’s largest city and its commercial center. The city is only 40 miles from Turkey, so expect refugees to flood towards Turkey if the fighting in Aleppo escalates, as expected. Last week, the rebels attacked »

The Battle for Ballot Integrity in Pennsylvania

Featured image Pennsylvania is, for the moment, ground zero in the battle over voter fraud. In March, Pennsylvania’s legislature enacted a law that requires identification for voting. The ACLU has sued to enjoin enforcement of the law; a trial on its lawsuit began today and is expected to last for around a week. This illustrates how low the ACLU has fallen. Voting illegally–that’s a “civil right!” But how about not having your »

Behind the UN Gun Treaty

Featured image There’s a lot of commotion right now about the forthcoming UN treaty proposing to regulate the international arms trade that critics think, with justification, would be the handgun equivalent of the Kyoto Protocol for the United States.  Despite well-founded fears that the treaty might “grow” or “evolve” (since international law is even more “alive” than our Constitution), the Obama Administration indicates it will sign the treaty.  Then it will require »

How I was Cory Booker’d into submission

Featured image “How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission” is the alternate title of “A Simple Desultory Philippic,” the jokey Paul Simon song that appears on Simon and Garfunkel’s 1966 album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme. This year the Democrats could update Simon’s subtitle with a reference to Cory Booker rather than Robert McNamara. The latest Booker’d specimen is Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. When it »

What Would We Do Without Experts?

Featured image I thought the best headline of the last week was “Pole Dancing Prostitutes Destroying Street Signs in New Zealand,” which suggests the obvious possibilities of a remake of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, in which we discover an ingenious method for ridding our countryside of the ugly wind farms the greenies have imposed upon us.  Paging Will Ferrell! But no.  By far the best “Is-It-The-Onion-Or-A-Real-Newspaper?” head turner is the lead »

Small Businessmen Push Back Against Obama

Featured image The Obama campaign is reeling from the fallout over the president’s demand that small business people pay higher taxes because they owe their success to the government. In a few unscripted minutes, Obama, by saying what he really thinks, dealt his own campaign a severe blow. Today groups of small business owners in 24 cities rallied against Obama: The Romney campaign has been heavily pressing their “you didn’t build that” »

The UPS and Downs (Mostly Downs) of the Economy

Featured image I’ve written before here about what I call the “FedEx Indicator”—i.e., what package delivery traffic can tell us about the direction of the economy.  The FedEx indicator has been flashing yellow for months, with FedEx dropping plane fights and delaying new airplane purchases. Well now FedEx’s chief rival, UPS, is flashing the same warning signal, as reported this morning in the Wall Street Journal: United Parcel Service reported tepid growth »

Does the CBO know the score?

Featured image The Congressional Budget Office has re-scored Obamacare in light of the Supreme Court’s decision. The CBO finds that the decision’s impact is fairly minimal — about 3 million fewer Americans insured in ten years, and about $84 billion less in spending over the next ten years (out of a total of about $1.7 trillion in spending on the law’s coverage provisions) than would otherwise have happened. Yuval Levin is not »

Barack Obama, Attack Dog

Featured image Barack Obama is running the most relentlessly negative campaign in history. So it provoked hollow chuckles when David Axelrod said on CBS’s “This Morning” show: “I would point out that much of our advertising has been positive. We’ve been from the very beginning of this campaign.” The Romney campaign put together this graphic to show how false Axelrod’s statement was. In fact, 97% of the Obama campaign’s advertising consists of »

What Does Jesse Read?

Featured image So here’s a real dog-bites-man story: When the Rev. Jesse Jackson sat down in the row just ahead of me on yesterday’s connecting flight from Chicago to Las Vegas (where I am today), what does he read?  Why, the editorial page of the New York Times, of course.  I didn’t think anyone actually reads the house editorials of the Times, except for purposes of satire or clinical research, but there »

Time to tear down that statue of Tim Geithner

Featured image The Washington Post reports that when he was head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Tim Geithner failed to communicate in key meeting with top regulators that Barclays, the British bank, had admitted to Fed staffers that it was rigging Libor — the benchmark interest rate. As a result, regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Justice Department worked largely without the Fed’s help to build »

A word from Jessica Molaskey

Featured image Over the weekend I raved about the weekly radio show that John Pizzarelli does with his wife, Jessica Molaskey. Both Pizzarelli and Molaskey are talented artists in their own right. We saw John Pizzarelli perform a terrific show at the Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant in downtown Minneapolis a few years ago. (We also saw John’s dad, the venerable Bucky Pizzarelli, perform a beautiful one-off show with jazz pianist Benny »

Crony capitalism and Obama’s big new national defense idea

Featured image In his speech to the VFW today, Mitt Romney derided President Obama’s defense policy as follows: “When the biggest announcement in his last State of the Union address on improving our military was that the Pentagon will start using more clean energy – then you know it’s time for a change.” Romney might have added that Obama has used his “clean energy for the military” policy to line the pockets »

Romney Gave a Good Speech. Will It Matter? (with update by Paul)

Featured image Like pretty much everyone else, I expect this year’s election to be decided more or less exclusively by voters’ judgments about the economy. This is one respect in which the present campaign differs from 1980. In 1980, America’s alarming weakness abroad and the steady expansion of the Soviet Union probably ranked equally in most voters’ minds with the high unemployment and inflation that marked the Carter years. This year, foreign »

Random Thoughts for a Tuesday Afternoon

Featured image . . . while changing airplanes in Chicago.  I’m finding it remarkably hard to get back into blogging mode after two days of anchoring talk radio.  Which, by the way, is harder than it looks. Lots of stories and threads of stories floating around right now, and I can’t decide where to start.  So let’s go “around the horn,” as they say on sports shows.  Following the death of astronaut »

From Aaron K. in Baghdad

Featured image Reader Aaron K. writes from Baghdad to comment on Paul Mirengoff’s post “Al Qaeda on the rise in Iraq” and Mario Loyola’s NRO/Corner post on America’s waning influence in Iraq. He writes: Let me say at the outset that I am writing this from Baghdad where I have been living and working for the past twenty months.  And, unlike some of those US government workers at the embassy who can »