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MAY 21,  2011

BRITAIN CHILLS TOWARD OBAMA – AT 10:54 P.M. ET:  Barack Obama may feel relieved that the prime minister of Israel will soon be leaving, but Mr. Obama faces another difficult meeting with an ally this week – our number one ally, Great Britain.

In his first year in office, Mr. Obama seemed to go out of his way to signal that our relationship with Britain wasn't very special at all, at least to him.   I have no doubt that he sees Britain as just another colonial power, and he probably thinks of Churchill as a guy who wanted to keep the Empire.  All this Battle of Britain stuff is irrelevant.

Now Britain is openly skeptical of Obama and his management of American foreign policy.  That skepticism is coming to a head in disagreement over the Libyan operation, as London's Telegraph reports:

Military and diplomatic sources in both Britain and the US are privately critical over the other side’s role in the action which has hit a damaging “stalemate” and left Colonel Muammar Gadaffi clinging to power.

Britain wants the US to take more of a defined role in the campaign, with UK military chiefs protesting that the effectiveness of bombing raids is being lessened by the absence of American leadership.

US diplomatic sources, meanwhile, have criticised Britain as a “skittish” and unpredictable ally which frequently issues a “red card” -- effectively vetoing a target, causing confusion and greatly hampering proper planning.

Mr Obama emphasised the differences between the two allies yesterday, describing the action against Libya as “limited” in a letter to US lawmakers.

Mr Cameron is expected to pass on the frustration over the lack of leadership from the US when he holds talks with Mr Obama at 10 Downing Street on Wednesday, although Downing Street sources last night denied there were tensions.

They always deny there are tensions.  It's part of the diplomatic game.  But there are tensions. 

Both London and Washington are keen to proclaim a new era for the “special relationship” between the two nations on the eve of the trip, which will see the president and his wife, Michelle, spend two nights in Britain, with the programme including a state banquet at Buckingham Palace and a speech by Mr Obama to both houses of parliament.

Mr. Obama is keen to win next year's election, and part of that is to show that he is truly an American president, rather than a "citizen of the world."  Restoring the image of a relationship with Britain is a good thing for him to do.  I wonder what he'll really be thinking.

May 21, 2011       Permalink

BULLETIN:  WORLD STILL HERE – AT 10:41 P.M. ET:  The world did not end at 6 p.m. ET tonight, despite predictions backed by the full faith and credit of believers who flooded the New York subway system with signs and pamphlets.

I, personally, was disappointed.  The end of the world would have been a great thing to blog about.  And I know that my left-wing colleagues were prepared to blame BUSH (!!), and, especially, CHENEY (!!!!).

My disappointment extends to finance.  My wife and I went to a local mall at about 5 p.m., the kind where you have to pay for parking.  But, with the world scheduled to end at 6, we figured we wouldn't have to pay the parking fee.  Now we're out three bucks.  I'm going to send the bill to the member of the reverend clergy who predicted the end, and ask him to make up my staggering loss.

I do hope that CNN and the other news outlets go back to this chap tomorrow and ask what went wrong.  As for all those believers I saw in the subway this week, I expect that next week they'll shave their heads and do the Hare Krishna bit.  Then after that they'll get jobs on Wall Street or as commentators at MSNBC.

May 21, 2011      Permalink

MURDER IN SYRIA – AT 10:04 A.M. ET:  While the president and the Israeli prime minister debate each other in Washington, the slaughter continues in Syria, with nothing much being done about it except some ineffective lectures by Western leaders:

BEIRUT — Defying a stern warning from President Obama, Syrian forces opened fire on protesters after Friday prayers, killing at least 32 people as the regime led by President Bashar al-Assad showed no sign of easing its military crackdown.

The shootings came a day after Obama said that Assad that he should oversee a transition to democracy or “get out of the way,” marking the first time the U.S. leader has publicly called on the Syrian regime to change its behavior.

You can see just how seriously Obama is taken.  This is what happens when you project weakness rather than strength.

The continued assault illustrated how little leverage the United States holds over Syria, a country with which it has long had frosty relations, and whose leaders seem in no mood to back down from a brutal effort to suppress the protests by force.

With the protesters also showing renewed determination to brave bullets and tanks to take their challenge to the streets, the country appears locked in a bloody standoff that many fear will only escalate into further violence. Many Syrian activists now say that it may be too late for Assad to change course and offer reforms to a populace that has endured weeks of bloodshed and no longer trusts the regime to change.

COMMENT:  And, as we've reported before, the signs coming out of Egypt are dismal, with the Muslim Brotherhood growing more and more powerful. 

Meanwhile, the president talks about the "Arab spring" as if we're on the verge of a Mideast Utopia.  There is a naiveté about the man, stemming from a lack of experience in the real world, and certainly a lack of international experience.  We will pay for this long after he leaves office. 

May 21, 2011       Permalink

HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS? – AT 9:48 A.M. ET:  Talk about chickens coming home to roost.  From WaPo: 

New York — Ray Capuana paces the rows of cubicles in a haggard high-rise a stone’s throw from Wall Street as his people hustle the phones and hope for a bonus check.

His employees are not bond traders, though. They are call center workers. Many are African Americans without college degrees. Some lack high school diplomas. They work for a Mumbai-based company called Aegis Communications.

India’s outsourcing giants — faced with rising wages at home — have looked for growth opportunities in the United States. But with Washington crimping visas for visiting Indian workers, some companies such as Aegis are slowly hiring workers in North America, where their largest corporate customers are based. In this evolution, outsourcing has come home.

Capuana, a manager for Aegis in New York, motivates this U.S. office with dress-down days and the prospect that workers could, one day, earn a stint training call center workers in Goa, India. One of his tasks is to staff 176 cubicles, where workers make or take calls for customers of prescription drug plans or Medicare contracts and enter and verify information. The pay runs $12 to $14 an hour, with bonus checks of up to $730 a month.

COMMENT:  The good news is that we're gettiong some jobs here.  The bad news is that they're low-paying jobs. 

I'm delighted that some jobs are coming home, but we really don't want a third-world economy here.  We can avoid it if we understand that countries that succeed economically are countries that make things.  Rebuilding our manufacturing base, with some much-needed cooperation between management and labor, must be one of our highest priorities.  I don't see that priority at work.

May 21, 2011       Permalink

WORLD ENDS TODAY AT 6 P.M. ET:  You've all seen the TV reports, and I was visually inundated with signs and sidewalk preachers in New York City on Wednesday, predicting that the world would end today at 6 p.m. ET.  (Please note that it's Eastern time.)

Apparently, the prediction is based on some eccentric minister's interpretation of Biblical texts.  He predicted the same thing in the 1990s, and was wrong.  This time he says he's sure.  He seems to have many followers, at least in the New York subway system.  More mainstream religious authorities find his prediction laughable.

Should we take this seriously?  I don't know.  We'll know it's serious when the Democratic National Committee, ACORN division, tries to register as many voters as possible by six p.m. under its new "Doomsday Registration Program," in which requirements for citizenship, personal I.D. and physical presence are waived.  Your friend Joe can register you just by making a phone call from his bunker.  Remember, voting is a sacred privilege. 

I plan no special preparation, except to get a suit out of the cleaners, as there'll be no deliveries after 6 p.m. 

No matter what happens, your first tax estimate is due June 15th.

May 21, 2011     Permalink

MAY 20,  2011

SCHOOL DAZE – AT 11:29 P.M. ET:  It's commencement time at America's colleges and universities.  For graduates, it's the end of the quest for a degree.  For parents, it may or may not be the end of payments.

When I was a student at the University of Chicago, tuition, room and board for four years came to about $8,000.  Today, the same package at an Ivy League or equivalent school could easily run more than $200,000.  True, there's been inflation in the 145 years since I graduated, but at nowhere near the level that would justify the massive increases in student costs.

Rich Lowry paints a devasting picture of the empires we call colleges, and their exorbitant practices.  Maybe we should rethink the whole idea of the "college education" and its mystique:

Amid all the uplifting clichés at their commencement ceremonies, graduating college students won't hear a line applicable to some of them - you got ripped off.

Student debt just surpassed the country's credit-card debt for the first time. It is projected to top $1 trillion this year, according to the New York Times, when it was less than $200 billion in 2000. For the class of 2011, the mean student-debt burden is nearly $23,000, up 8 percent from a year ago.

What are students going into hock for? In their book Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa sift through data that only Bluto could relish.

They cite the work of labor economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks showing that in the early 1960s, college students spent 40 hours per week on academic work; now they spend only 27 hours per week. In 1961, 67 percent of students said they studied more than 20 hours per week; now only one in five study that much.

Considering what's being taught by some historians, anthropologists and ethnic-group advocates, that may be a good thing.

Full-time instructional faculty dropped from 78 percent in 1970 to 52 percent in 2005. "On average," Arum and Roksa write, "faculty spend approximately 11 hours per week on advisement and instructional preparation and delivery." The rest is devoted to research and sundry other professional and administrative tasks.

The hiring binge on campus has been devoted to what sociologist Gary Rhoades calls "managerial professionals" specializing in sundry student services. What kind of learning environment is it, after all, without a director of sustainability initiatives?

And...

Reformers are brimming with ideas to renovate an expensive and inefficient system. Economist Richard Vedder suggests dismantling the current architecture of financial aid - which helps drive up costs in a never-ending cycle - and giving help only to truly needy students who are performing well academically. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) asks why we can't move toward three- rather than four-year degrees. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute wants other ways to credential young people besides a BA. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is embarking on a controversial push to get the state's universities to devote themselves more to teaching than to obscure research.

Finally...

In their book, Richard Arum and Josipa Roska make the elementary suggestion that colleges foster "a culture of learning." That would seem to go without saying, except in the groves of academe.

COMMENT:  A distinguished academic who is also an Urgent Agenda reader wrote to us suggesting that the fastest way to improve American colleges would be to abolish all departments with the word "studies" at the end.  Another nationally respected educator, with whom I had a recent discussion, complainted bitterly about the cost of education today compared with the time he was a graduate student.  He also noted that a member of his family, a college student, seems to be home more than she is at school.  I noticed the same attendance issue when my kids were in school.  A vacation every minute.

The college education has been oversold.  There is very little real journalistic reporting on the quality of education that students receive in return for exorbitant fees.  Changes introduced since the 1960s often mean that students are often indoctrinated rather than educated.

If truth be told, many American colleges are glorified high schools.  And many are burdened by a strain that has always been present in universities – a perverse anti-intellectualism.  We like to think that colleges are heady places, and, indeed, some are...and there are some wonderful professors out there.  But political correctness, trendiness, the edifice complex, and the fact that education is, indeed, a business, all work against the search for truth that must be the foundation of any college worthy of its name.

May 20, 2011      Permalink

THE WANTING OF CHRIS – AT 10:17 A.M. ET:  Frustrated Republicans, who see the GOP presidential field as having the excitement of a rest home, are trying to nudge others into the race.  There is now a wanting of Mitch Daniels, the very capable but somewhat dull governor of Indiana.  But the real want is Chris Christie, the bombastic, large, loud, and blunt governor of New Jersey, who has made great strides in turning around a state that was almost as dead as the bodies regularly dumped by local fraternal organizations into New Jersey's marshlands.  But will Christie do it?  John Phillips, writing at the L.A. Times's Top of the Ticket blog, has some stimulating thoughts:

Of all of the potential GOP candidates, the serious Republican money men and women want the girl playing hardest to get: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

The Garden State Guv says no dice, telling reporters, “Short of suicide, I don't really know what I'd have to do to convince you people that I'm not running. I'm not running.”

Until he rolls a seven, I'm not buying it.

CNN recently reported that Christie met with a group of influential Iowa Republican donors who tried to talk him into running.

Bruce Rastetter, an energy company executive told the Cable News Network, “We want to encourage him from an Iowa perspective and a national perspective. We need a candidate like him in the race...I think the other people are good people, good candidates. Chris Christie is someone who is...unique...and direct.”

If Christie truly has no interest in running, why is he meeting with activists from Iowa instead of watching all of the 'Barefoot Contessa' episodes stored on his TiVO?

It's because Christie wants to be courted.

Think about it, if you want to convince someone to do something they claim they don't want to do, having a never-ending parade of very smart, very wealthy people sweet-talk them into 'saving the country' will do the trick every time. It's the most persuasive route you can take, outside of a rag soaked in chloroform.

If big money donors can eliminate the torturous task of spending 10 hours a day raising money, Christie can spend all of his time on the fun part of campaigning: going on TV, pressing the flesh and eating deep-fat-fried meat products on sticks. As a sweetener, did I mention that he can eat deep-fat-fried meat products on sticks?

COMMENT:  I think Christie is great as governor of New Jersey.  Would he play nationally as a presidential candidate?  Hard to say.  Just as Mitch Daniels may be too quiet, Christie may be too loud.  And did I mention that he tips the scales at "get off before you break the springs"?  If he flies on Air Force One they'd have to add an engine. 

Christie has been losing popularity in his state, the effect of being effective.  If he can be persuaded to jump into the presidential race, he would provide instant theater.  Right now, that can't hurt.

May 20, 2011       Permalink

COMING TO A CLINIC NEAR YOU – AT 9:29 A.M. ET:  For anyone who, in a moment of delirium, thinks socialized medicine is the answer to all our problems, think again.  From Britain's Guardian:

Doctors are blaming financial pressures on the NHS for an increase in the number of patients who are not being treated within the 18 weeks that the government recommends.

Eighteen weeks?  That's the recommended time?  How'd you like that for an American standard?

New NHS performance data reveal that the number of people in England who are being forced to wait more than 18 weeks has risen by 26% in the last year, while the number who had to wait longer than six months has shot up by 43%.

In March this year, 34,639 people, or 11% of the total, waited more than that time to receive inpatient treatment, compared with 27,534, or 8.3%, in March 2010 – an increase of 26% – Department of Health statistics show.

Similarly, in March this year some 11,243 patients who underwent treatment had waited for more than six months, compared with 7,841 in the same month in 2010 – a 43% rise.

Despite rising demand for healthcare caused by the increasingly elderly population and growing numbers of people with long-term conditions, the NHS treated 16,201 fewer people as inpatients in March 2011 compared to March 2010, the latest Referral To Treatment data disclose.

COMMENT:  And there are plenty of people around Obama – you know, the kind who spent their junior year abroad – who think the British system is just lovely.  So civilized.  So centralized.  How egalitarian.  The equality of mediocrity.

I'm afraid we'll be the next victims of this mentality unless Obamacare is repealed or substantially changed.

May 20, 2011     Permalink 

THE VISIT – AT 8:43 A.M. ET:   As noted below, the Israeli prime minister visits the White House today, a day after Mr. Obama delivered his speech on the Middle East.  Already there are problems.

The two men don't much like each other.  In a remarkable slap, someone leaked to The New York Times a personal insult delivered by the president about the prime minister:

By all accounts, they do not trust each other. President Obama has told aides and allies that he does not believe that Mr. Netanyahu will ever be willing to make the kind of big concessions that will lead to a peace deal.

The assumption here is that the Israelis must make the concessions while dealing with a Palestinian movement that would like to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. 

Wait, there's more:

For his part, Mr. Netanyahu has complained that Mr. Obama has pushed Israel too far — a point driven home during a furious phone call with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday morning, just hours before Mr. Obama’s speech, during which the prime minister reacted angrily to the president’s plan to endorse Israel’s pre-1967 borders for a future Palestinian state.

That is news.  We didn't know about the Clinton call, which apparently was also leaked to The Times.   This isn't shaping up to be a cordial visit.  Mr. Obama sometimes feels more comfortable with enemies of the United States than with allies.

There is a history here, and not a good one:

From one of their first meetings, at the King David Hotel on July 23, 2008, when Mr. Obama, then the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, visited Israel, the two men have struck, at most, an intellectual bond. Mr. Netanyahu, as the leader of Israel’s conservative Likud Party, was far more comfortable with the Republican Party in the United States than with Mr. Obama, the son of a Muslim man from Kenya whose introduction to the Arab-Israeli conflict was initially framed by discussions with pro-Palestinian academics.

That's a key point.  You can be sure the Israeli Mossad has given Mr. Netanyahu a detailed picture of Mr. Obama, and the picture painted cannot be one an Israeli leader would like:  Mr. Obama spent an inordinate amount of time hanging around with leftist "intellectuals," including the militantly anti-American and anti-Israel Bill Ayers. 

Welcome to Washington, Mr. Netanyahu.  If you feel awkward, remember that the British prime minister got an even worse reception.

May 20, 2011       Permalink

THE SPEECH – AT 8:01 A.M. ET:  President Obama delivered what was dubbed a "major" speech on the Middle East yesterday.  Notice the difference?

The most worrisome thing about the speech is that it is being praised in Europe. 

The speech was based on a false premise, that President Obama has always stood for democracy in the region.  I mean, who could doubt that The One was always for "the people"?  But as former Republican official Elliott Abrams points out, the president didn't exactly get his own history right:

The first thing he did was take credit for the Arab Spring, saying he had supported it all along. This is simply not true. The by-word early in his administration was “engagement,” with a caustic rejection of the Bush “Freedom Agenda.” Bush’s tougher policies toward Iran and Syria were to be replaced by outreach, discussion, diplomacy — far more civilized. And that engagement was with the rulers, not the ruled; Obama’s was a world of states, and you engaged with the people ruling them.

And...

It is traditional now for Obama to insult the Bush administration, and this time he referred at the start to how he had had to “shift our foreign policy” after a decade of war. In fact, the shift he had to perform today was from indifference to democracy in the Arab world to the Bush policy of supporting it.

That is correct, but the Obamans never concede that Bush got anything right.  To do so would be to violate the holy beliefs of the political left. 

It was just a speech, long on nice talk about democracy, but short on policy – kind of like having the preamble to the Constitution, without the Constitution. 

Most of the attention has not been given to Obama's bromides about democracy.  They are meaningless and are just words.  The president had little to say about Iran's suppression of democracy, nothing to say about Saudi Arabia, one of the most regimented societies on Earth, and he actually suggested that Assad of Syria, currently head of a government that has murdered more than 1,000 of its own citizens recently, can still play a useful role in his country.  We fail to see a coherent, practical policy in this.  And Gadaffi of Libya remains in power, despite Obama's demand, now forgotten, that he leave.  Obama doesn't do democracy very well.

In fact, far more press attention has been given to Obama's demand that peace between Israel and a proposed Palestinian state be based on the "1967 borders," borders that existed before the Six-Day War of 1967.  This has infuriated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who arrives today for a visit with the president.  Obama's proposal, now applauded by the European appeasers, codifies for the Palestinian side that it will get a state within the borders it wishes without negotiating a single point. 

True, the president did blast the recent, sordid "unity" deal between the Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank, and the terror group Hamas, which runs Gaza, asking how Israel can be expected to make peace with a Palestinian government that includes a terror organization that denies Israel's right to exist.  That is a good question.  But it's a question, not a policy.  The policy was in the proposal that peace be based on 1967 borders that Israel considers indefensible.  The fact that this policy was insultingly spelled out on the eve of the visit of the Israeli prime minister shows, once again, Obama's contempt for an American ally, a contempt he has shown before toward Britain, France, and Canada. 

We can't read this speech and feel any confidence about the future of American foreign policy.  I wish we had one.

May 20, 2011     Permalink