The sky is still falling

But not to worry! The Congress is working through the weekend, and presumably the President is on call, so all is well. The choices now seem to be between a bill that does no great harm and not an awful lot of good, and another bill that doesn't do an awful lot of good but no great harm. I truly believe that the wisdom, maturity, and patriotism of the Members, the Senators, and the President will enable them to make that choice before Tuesday noon ... well, before Wednesday anyhow. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

I haven't gotten too excited about the catastrophe that is supposed to visit us at one minute past midnight on August 2. I really don't think President Obama is going to stop granny's Social Security check; after all, she might live to November 2012 and take her revenge at the ballot box. But, much as I am disappointed by the president's acting-out of recent days, I am disappointed as well by the Republicans in the House of Representatives, who failed to pass a bill last night.

The phrase of the month is "the adult in the room." Well, that adult in my mind is John Boehner. Where Mr. Obama has been childish, Mr. Boehner has been very much the grownup. It's a pity that Sarah Palin and others on the nutty right haven't fallen in behind him. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Is this man a Christian?

Well, he could be, but so what? He's also white, balding, and likes to dress up in fancy uniforms. Is he an extremist? Well, of course he is! Who but an extremist would shoot seventy people in cold blood? But the attempt of the New York Times and other mainstream media to paint him as the Christian equivalent of Osama bin Laden is not only pathetic but dishonest. When Mr. Breivik finished his dirty week, a few score young people were dead, and that was the end of it. (He'd like to think otherwise, but he's surely wrong.) When bin Laden finished his dirty work, several thousand people were dead, and his minions were gearing up to do it all over again, in multiple places.

What is Mr. Breivik? He's a white extremist. He's a balding extremist. He's a fancy-dress-uniform extremist.... He's a one-of-kind nutter like Timothy McVeigh or Ted Kaczinski (whose Manifesto Mr. Breivik quoted, along with John Stuart Mill). Far from exculpating Osama bin Laden or the Fort Hood shooter, as the NYT would like to do, Mr. Breivik actually makes them more fearful. Not only are they mass murderers, but they inspire mass murderers elsewhere, not only of their own sort (Islamic nutters) but also of Mr. Breivik's sort (fancy-dress-uniform nutters). Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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Oh, never mind!

Says the New York Times on its front page today:

As Washington continues to debate a debt deal, the Obama administration has been preparing the country for the worst, with officials essentially saying the sky is about to fall.

But so far, oddly enough, nothing has happened. Despite warnings that a deal would need to be brokered by Sunday night before the Asian markets opened, stocks merely stumbled on Monday — the type of weakness usually associated with soft corporate earnings instead of an economic apocalypse.

Wall Street’s blasé response presents a serious challenge for the administration. The government has been ringing the alarm bells of an impending catastrophe to add urgency to its efforts to get Republicans to hash out a compromise.

Now they tell us? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Oslo Suspect Wrote of Fear of Islam and Plan for War

Fascinating! After I linked to the NYT story in the blog post below, the newspaper changed the headline. Instead of the dubious and inflammatory "Christian Extremist Is Charged in Norway", the same story is now headed: "Oslo Suspect Wrote of Fear of Islam and Plan for War". How much more neutral can you get?

The lead paragraph remains the same, however, as does the lead on the NYT story on the Fort Hood shooter, whose ethnicity and religious affiliation are doggedly concealed from view. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Christian Extremist Is Charged in Norway

That's the headline on the New York Times's story about the Norwegian shooter: Christian Extremist Is Charged in Norway. Can you imagine a similar headline if he'd been a Muslim? And the story goes on from there:

OSLO — The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a man they identified as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian in connection with the bombing of a government building in central Oslo and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together killed at least 92 people.

"Right-wing" and "fundamentalist Christian" are words that require no hedging, no attribution; they are mere facts in the eyes of the Gray Lady's reporters and editors, whereas "left-wing" and "Muslim" are inflammatory statements that must be concealed from the world. Compare, for example, the NYT story two days ago on the arraignment of the Fort Hood shooter:

FORT HOOD, Tex. — Wearing a camouflage Army uniform and sitting upright in a wheelchair, the military psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage here appeared in court on Wednesday at his arraignment, without the civilian lawyer who had been his lead defense attorney.

He's a uniformed member of the U.S. Army! He's a military psychiatrist! Even his name is carefully pushed into the second paragraph because it gives away the unspeakable truth that he is not a right-wing fundamentalist Christian. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

So what about a small deal?

As Mr. Obama and the U.S. Congress go through their circus act, everything hinges upon their inability to reach a Big Deal. Why not just kick the can down the road a bit? Raise the debt ceiling by a mere trillion dollars with no tax increases and few or no spending cuts. Then have the argument again next summer when the prospect of elections in November will have clarified the minds of the president, the House of Representatives, and a third of the U.S. Senate. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The walking headache

One of the reasons Peggy Noonan is worth reading is that she is dependably nice. She got a bit testy about Dubya in his couple of years, but then, so did most everybody. And she's now getting testy about his successor. In her Saturday column, readable in advance on Opinion Journal, she has this to say about the president (with a little slap at one of those who would replace him):

He's like a walking headache. He's probably triggering Michele Bachmann's migraines. 

Mr. Obama, when you've lost Peggy Noonan, you've lost Nice America. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Omigod!

I maintain a Google alert for anything about the Flying Tigers. It sends me all kinds of stuff, but I never thought I'd see anything like this. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Back to the 1960s

Notice that that earlier run-up, from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, accompanied the Great Inflation set off by the Johnson-Nixon administrations and their monetary policies, which turned our dollars into dimes. Then the curve was bent downward by the Carter-Reagan discipline and Reagan's tax cuts, in a splendid boom that last until the Bush administration. (The recent, and scarier, blowout is actually a Bush-Pelosi-Obama phenomenon.) Chart from the Wall Street Journal. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Porcelain Unicorn

Winner of the 2011 "Tell It Your Way" competition for a film of three minutes with no more than six lines of dialogue. It was directed by Keegan Wilcox. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Back to the 1930s

From the Wall Street Journal. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The paradox of fuel-efficient automobiles

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article by Joseph White on the subject of Kicking Hybrid Cars Out of the Fast Lane. It seems that the convention Toyota Prius has become so ubiquitous in California that the state highway department is revoking its HOV privileges. No longer can you cruise in solitary splendor down the High Occupancy Vehicle lane in your hybrid Prius. The coveted yellow sticker will now be restricted to vehicles that are more politically correct, like the Nissan Leaf, Honda's natural-gas-powered Civic, and the plug-in version of the Prius. But here's what fascinated me:

"A lot of us will change our patterns of driving," says Cathy Margolin, president of the Orange County Prius Club and owner of a 2005 Prius.

Ms. Margolin, an accounting professor, says she recently changed jobs and cut her commute to about 10 miles from 50, but adds she will cut out tasks requiring long drives now that she has lost solo HOV-lane access.

So you see, the yellow sticker encouraged Ms Margolin to waste gasoline! She drove her Prius five times farther under the old regime, which means that the world actually was worse off than if she'd been driving an SUV. According to Edmunds.com, the Prius gets 48 mpg in highway driving. Ms. Margolin could have achieved an equivalent reduction in her carbon footprint, and saved a whole lot of money, by making the same job change and driving a 1980 pickup truck!

This tracks my own experience with compact fluorescent lightbulbs. There's one in our hallway, which we never turn off. What the heck, it only burns 23 watts.... Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Katyn Findings

In the spring of 1940, under Stalin's order, the Russian security police shot 22,000 Polish officers, enlisted men, and civilians and buried them in mass graves in Russia and Ukraine. The atrocity was discovered by the Germans when they overran this territory in 1942, but the Russians successfully blamed the killings on the invaders. To their shame, the American and British governments connived in the coverup, so as not to sully the reputation of their new best friend, Joseph Stalin in Moscow. In 1951, however, the 85th Congress began hearings into the massacre, compiling thousands of pages of testimony over the next six months. I've published the short version as a Kindle ebook with the title The Katyn Findings 1952. (These ebooks are also accessible in a variety of free apps for smartphones and computers.) The book has a foreword drawn from my current research on Poland during the War years, and I'll be adding to it as I learn more. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

It's the assimilation, stupid!

Of all places, the New York Times has a sensible essay on the failures of multiculturism in Europe, and especially in Britain, though the same issues apply to the United States today. The op-ed is entitled "Assimilation's Failure," but of course the problem is quite the opposite: not assimilation's failure but the failure to assimilate.

Britain never tried to assimilate its minorities, nor did France or Germany or any other European country that I know of. Even a tourist in London can click off the ethnic/religious/racial/national groups as he goes down the street: there a Sikih, there a Muslim, there a Nigerian.... Who's the true minority in London now? Why, it's the Englishman!

A Polish friend tells the story of riding in a London taxi which came to a screeching halt to avoid hitting a brown-skinned man in a turban. "Bloody British passport!" cried the driver, a reference to the policy that allowed any resident of the British Empire to claim the highly valued, dark blue hardcover book that was then the UK passport.

"I'm a British passport too," Basia chided him.

"Yes, love," he answered, "but you're different." Right: different because she was white, she was pretty, she was conventionally dressed, and she spoke English without a notable accent. In other words, she had assimilated.

In multiculturalism lies the destruction of cultures. European countries are now paying the price of that mistake, and the United States seems ready to follow them. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Mr. Obama's coal-burner

It was a tight squeeze, but the president got his photo op the other day, sitting at the wheel of a Chevy Volt to boost his administration's plan to oblige automakers to average 56 miles a gallon across their fleets of cars and trucks. Huh. What do you suppose the chances are that Mr. Obama will every actually drive a 56 mpg automobile, as opposed to the black SUVs with hidden machine guns that convoy him around every day?

The solution would be a Volt, I suppose, assuming it could be modified to a comfortable fit. If he returns to Chicago after his presidential tour is over, the $41,000 automobile would be powered in reality by electricity generated in--yes!--a coal-fired plant. That would seem to conflict with another of his pie-in-the-sky goals, that of a pollution-free environment. "If ever a president seems to have learned nothing from the times he's living in," writes Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal, "Barack Obama is it. Economies around the world are foundering from an accumulation of policy excesses produced by the sort of straight-line, robotic thinking he's applying to so-called corporate average fuel economy rules." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Assassination as statecraft

I've long been uncomfortable with the notion of sending in commandos with the mission of killing someone the current administration doesn't like. Why this should be so, I'm not entirely sure: I don't have the same queasiness when it comes to troops invading another country, or even of sending a Predator drone to blow the same evil-doer into oblivion. Now here come two British academics who ponder the larger question of Targeted Killings. Among their points:

The United States is intensifying its targeted strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan to a level causing astonishment even among Israeli security specialists. American forces now carry out more targeted killings than any state in the world.

The writers object to the use of the word "assassination," since it's a moral judgment. They go further, to argue that international law explicitly condones such killings:

Article 51 of the UN Charter permits states to defend themselves against actions attributable to other states, but also to sub-state and nonstate entities threatening their national security. That is, targeted killings undertaken in self-defense—to include preemptive attacks—do not breach international law.

It goes on. None of this may interest those who argue, simply, "whatever it takes!" But it does interest me. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Bronze Rons, all over the place

Here's Ronald Reagan newly burnished in Budapest. A British version--twelve feet tall!--will be unveiled in Grosvenor Square later this morning. As is appropriate for an homage the Great Conservative, the two thousand guests will have paid for their tickets! That tidbit comes from the BBC story, which is hilariously sour. The Daily Mail is more generous. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Deluge

What better way to absorb history than sitting back and watching a handsome rascal and a pretty maiden brighten dreary events? In the case, the event is the Swedish invasion of Poland in the 17th century--what Poles call "Potop" or The Deluge. One quarter of the population died. (Yes, the Swedes were once the bloodiest interlopers in Europe. Perhaps it was their brush with the Poles that reformed them?) No matter: it's a splendid film, sprawling across two disks and more than five hours. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Oops, sigh, sorry!

 

The unlovable groper, M. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has been released from his luxurious house arrest in Manhattan, though prosecutors are holding his passport for the time being. Seems that his accuser has been lying about some things, which leads to the perhaps unfair assumption that she has been lying about everything. Sigh. I suppose I owe him an apology for the mockery that I among others heaped upon his noble head this spring. But there's a bright side! It may be some little time before the next overpaid international technocrat makes a grab for the maid in a $3500-a-night Manhattan hotel suite. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Memo to the debt-limit negotiators

Townhall.com is a right-wing magazine, and Victor Davis Hansen is an eminent and conservative historian. All the more notable then is Mr. Hansen's column of June 23,  in which he takes on the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

"The Department of Agriculture no longer serves as a lifeline to millions of struggling homestead farmers. Instead, it is a vast, self-perpetuating postmodern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion -- a sum far greater than the nation's net farm income this year. In fact, the more the Agriculture Department has pontificated about family farmers, the more they have vanished -- comprising now only about 1 percent of the American population."

Can that really be true? The USDA spends more money in a year than American farmers earn? It's unbelievable ... almost!

So here's a challenge for farm-state Republicans who want budget cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling: what if we abolished the USDA? For its last act, let it identify each American farmer by name and address, and mail him a pro-rata share of $130 billion along with a farewell note of thanks. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford