March : 2008
::::
Life in A Cocoon
Jennifer Rubin
[commentary] A problem for Barack Obama–after living in the womb of the academic Left, running a virtually uncontested Senate race, being welcomed to the Senate as a trailblazer, and then being received by throngs of cheering pundits as the savior of American politics–is that he hasn’t learned to confront criticism. When reporters wanted to quiz him on Tony Rezko, he seemed shocked that they should demand answers to more than eight questions.
Today he got into a bit of a back and forth with a reporter over his Iraq position. What strikes you is that he’s not very good on his feet, hemming and hawing about what forces he would leave there and for how long. (He then resorts lamely to John McCain’s “100 years” comment, feigning ignorance about using the comment out of context.) When everyone you come in contact with agrees with you, and fawns over you to boot, it does not prepare you to defend yourself or answer tough questions. The media fan club so far has done their favorite candidate no favors in that regard.
::::
Pierre Elliott Obama
[nationalpost] : For Canadians, Trudeaumania was a magic elixir that blotted out the troubles of the modern world. Barack Obama is now selling the United States the same poisonous political opium... [...]
But I have seen this virus before; it devastated a country I loved, a place that nurtured me and raised me up.
In that Canadian day, we called it "Trudeaumania," the suggestion of "Beatlemania" pop idol glitter being no accident. Even those of us in his Liberal party were powerless to stop the mad embrace millions of Canadians threw around Pierre Elliott Trudeau with his promise of reconciliation of the two founding peoples, a happy era when the English (more correctly, Scottish) heritage would join hands with the French legacy and take us forward into a brave new age. And he'd reforge our relationship with "The Elephant to our South."
That he was completely non-specific, avoiding policy questions in favour of depending entirely on his style and panache (and goodness knows, he had a surfeit of both) would surely undo him -- or so those of us who believed him to be a hard line leftist (because we'd read his essays in Cite Libre and studied his record) reassured ourselves.
Of course, we were wrong; his very lack of specificity was his strength. A brilliant orator, he spun webs around huge crowds, proposing big ideas in obscure terms, making it possible for the listener to impose any dream they wished upon his smiling, Savile Row-suited tabula rasa. He was all things to all people. In service to "party loyalty" and civility, we held our tongues.
And, in the meantime, the delighted English-language media, at last faced with a French-speaking Canadian they could love, dubbed him "Canada's JFK." By the time he and they were done, the damage would be staggering, even two generations later. [...]
To many Canadians, especially that huge number now on the left, everything I write here is heresy. But it is history --a sad one.
While it is too late for Canadians to avoid the wreckage of the Trudeau years, it is not too late for Americans to learn from this cautionary tale.
::::
Conrad Black on the 2008 Presidential Race
[nationalpost] : The Democrats and most of the national media seem not to have noticed that the defeatist truisms about Iraq have passed their sell-by date. Senator Clinton and Senator Obama seem to assume that the great majority of their countrymen recognize the Iraq expedition to have been a disaster and that that is the end of it.
The latest intelligence findings in Iraq, generally ignored by the national and world media, detailing Saddam Hussein’s long and extensive promotion of terrorism, leave the Republicans with plenty of room to reargue the casus belli. Iraq’s 75% reduction in violence, 30% increase in oil production, taming of al-Sadr and other factional leaders, and possibly the world’s highest annual economic growth rate since the upward “surge” in U.S. forces, seem not to have entered into the Democratic electoral strategy. [...]
The Democrats will mend their divisions as they did in 1968 when there was horrible fragmentation between Humphrey and McCarthy, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the violent disorders at the Democratic convention in Chicago. If the present administration can’t straddle to November with interest rate cuts that steady the stock market and the economy generally, but continue to depress the dollar, the Democrats should win.
If Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson can keep the ball in the air to Election Day without China breaking its currency’s peg to the U.S. dollar, McCain should win.
Whatever happens, it will be, as Richard Nixon used to say, “a rocking, socking campaign” (and he conducted many). The American genius for showmanship and propensity to commercialize almost everything, are about to reach their heights (or depths). But the result, whoever wins, will be a capable new president.
::::
Newspaper Ad Revenue Plunges to Lowest in 50 Years
[e&p] : The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.
According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.
The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.
Total advertising revenue in 2007 -- including online revenue -- decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.
There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well. Internet ad revenue in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006. In 2006, online ad revenue had soared 31.4% to $2.6 billion. In 2005, it jumped 31.4% to $2 billion.
As newspaper Web sites generate more advertising revenue, the growth rate naturally slows. The NAA reported that online revenue now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenue in 2007 compared to 5.7% in 2006.
That growth could not stave off the losses in the print however. National print advertising revenue dropped 6.7% to $7 billion last year. Retail slipped 5% to $21 billion. Classified plunged 16.5% to $14.1 billion.
::::
[MRamirez]
::::
Harvard Researchers : Negative U.S. media = increased insurgent attacks
[wshtimes] : Researchers at Harvard say that publicly voiced doubts about the U.S. occupation of Iraq have a measurable "emboldenment effect" on insurgents there.
Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq, according to a study by Radha Iyengar, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy research at Harvard and Jonathan Monten of the Belfer Center at the university's Kennedy School of Government.
The increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media, the authors conclude in a report titled "Is There an 'Emboldenment' Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq."
The researchers studied data about insurgent attacks and U.S. media coverage up to November, tracking what they called "anti-resolve statements" by U.S. politicians and reports about American public opinion on the war.
"We find that in periods immediately after a spike in anti-resolve statements, the level of insurgent attacks increases," says the study, published earlier this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a leading U.S. nonprofit economic research organization.
::::
Audacity Without Hope
[nro] : Barack Obama’s own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far-left fringe. In college, “I chose my friends carefully,” he said in his first book, Dreams From My Father.
These friends included “Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets” — in Obama’s own words — as well as the “more politically active black students.” He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman Underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.
Obama didn’t just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way-out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college — members of the anti-American, counter-cultural Left.
In Shelby Steele’s brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama — A Bound Man — it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were — and, like many converts, he went overboard.
Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the U.S. Senate is the furthest left of any Senator. There is a remarkable consistency in what Barack Obama has done over the years, despite inconsistencies in what he says.
The irony is that Obama’s sudden rise politically to the level of being the leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination has required him to project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together.
The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleon-like change, and entranced both white and black Democrats, is a tribute to the man’s talent and a warning about his reliability.
There is no evidence that Obama ever sought to educate himself on the views of people on the other end of the political spectrum, much less reach out to them. He reached out from the Left to the Far Left. That’s bringing us all together?
::::
Get Smart!?
[americanspectator] How smart, really, is the Smart car?
It's not especially inexpensive -- $11,590 for the base Pure coupe -- $13,590 for the "loaded" Passion coupe (and $16,590 for the convertible). At least, not relative to what else you can buy for that money -- for example, a Chevy Aveo ($10,235), Toyota Yaris ($12,225), Kia Spectra ($12,895), or Hyundai Accent ($12,925).
And those are subcompact sedans; they can carry four people. The so-called Smart car is a hypercompact two-seater. If you need room for even three people, you'll need to buy another car. How smart is that, exactly?
But it gets great gas mileage -- right?
Actually, not that great. EPA rates the Smart car at 33 mpg city and 40 mpg on the highway. That's not bad. Then again, a Toyota Yaris (with four doors and room for four people, remember) gets 29 city, 36 highway. So the "smart" car gets exactly 4 mpg better mileage in town and on the highway. Big whoop. And unlike traditional subcompacts, which can be driven pretty much anywhere, the Smart car is only usable as an in-city commuter.
With just a tiny 1.0 liter, 70-hp engine, the Smart is dangerously underpowered at speeds where traffic is moving faster than 45 mph or so. It needs 15-16 seconds to reach 60 mph (about 5 seconds more than the slowest current-year subcompact) and has a best-case top speed of about 90 mph, flat out. That leaves not much of a margin when trying to keep up with highway traffic running 70 or faster.
And it is at a bone-crunching disadvantage if it ever gets hit by a standard-sized car at anything above stop-and-go driving speeds. Take one out in traffic at your own risk.
How, exactly, is that smart?
If the car cost $6k -- even $8k -- it might make sense. It would be cheap transpo, especially as an in-city runabout. And at that price point, one could buy a Smart for local trips and have another, larger (and more roadworthy) car available for longer/highway trips -- and it could possibly make economic sense. But why buy a Smart that costs as much as a conventional subcompact economy car -- but which is only slightly more efficient and a lot less usable?
::::
Hillary Clinton Bosnia Trip : Memory a Little Blurry?
From Hill's speech:
"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base. But it was a moment of great pride for me to visit our troops, not only in our main base as Tuzla, but also at two outposts where they were serving in so many capacities to deactivate and remove landmines, to hunt and seek out those who had not complied with the Dayton Accords and put down their arms, and to build relationships with the people that might lead to a peace for them and their children." [link]
Apparently there was no 'sniper' fire she mentioned or much else resembling her speech content earlier in the week.
** She's now suggesting that it's no big deal and that she "misspoke and was sleep deprived." Good one! Eh...everyone makes mistakes, right? OK, but I kind of think you'd recall sniper fire etc. a little more acurrately. These people are simply all just so full of shit. [link]
::::
Passport Breach : Chief of firm involved is Obama adviser
[cnn] The CEO of a company whose employee is accused of improperly looking at the passport files of presidential candidates is a consultant to the Barack Obama campaign, a source said Saturday.
John O. Brennan, president and CEO of the Analysis Corp., advises the Illinois Democrat on foreign policy and intelligence issues, the source said. Brennan briefed the media on behalf of the campaign this month. The executive is a former senior CIA official and former interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
He contributed $2,300 to the Obama campaign in January.
When asked about the contribution, a State Department official told CNN's Zain Verjee, "We ethically awarded contracts. Political affiliation is not one of the factors that we check."
On Friday, the department revealed that Obama's passport file was improperly accessed three times this year, and the security of passport files of the two other major presidential candidates -- Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain -- had also been breached.
Three contract emplyees are accused in the wrongdoing, including the one who works for Analysis Corp. and who was disciplined. That contract employee accessed McCain's file in addition to Obama's. None of the contract employees was identified.
The other two contract employees worked for Stanley Inc. They were fired.
The Washington Times, which broke the story Thursday night that Obama's records had been improperly accessed, reported Saturday that the State Department inquiry is focusing on the Analysis Corp. employee. Also, the investigation by the department's inspector general will include polygraph tests for supervisors in the passport section to find out whether there was any political motive.
::::
Spitzer = Gone : Patterson = Going?
[nydaily] : Gov. Paterson spent thousands of dollars in campaign funds on personal items like hotel stays, men's suits, home furnishings and bar tabs, documents released Friday show.
He reimbursed his campaign for most of the expenses within about a month, but in two cases did so this week - only after revelations surfaced that he may have used the money for extramarital affairs.
He also dramatically changed his story about why his campaign paid one of his former girlfriends $500, with aides saying he'd "misstated" the first explanation.
Paterson's aides defended his behavior, insisting none of the expenditures was improper because everything was repaid.
"There's nothing out of the ordinary in those reports," declared Henry Berger, a lawyer who says he reviewed expenses listed in 30 to 40 Paterson campaign finance reports dating back to 1999.
Politicians are barred from using campaign funds for personal expenses. Paterson has said he may have "inadvertently" used his campaign credit card when his personal card didn't work.
A review of the documents provided by the campaign makes clear he did so several times and for some high-priced items....
::::
Kerry: Obama Could Help US Relations with Muslim Nations 'Because He's a Black Man'
[abc] : Kerry said that a President Obama would help the US, in relations with Muslim countries, "in some cases go around their dictator leaders to the people and inspire the people in ways that we can't otherwise." [video]
"He has the ability to help us bridge the divide of religious extremism," Kerry said. "To maybe even give power to moderate Islam to be able to stand up against this radical misinterpretation of a legitimate religion."
Kerry was asked what gives Obama that credibility.
"Because he's African-American. Because he's a black man. Who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country."
An African-American president would be "a symbol of empowerment" for those who have been disenfranchised around the world, Kerry said, "an important lesson for America to show Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, other places in the world where disenfranchised people don't get anything."
[commentary] : [...] Where to begin! Have notable Democrats become so intellectually sloppy as to draw some baffling equivalence between blacks and Muslims? The last I checked, Arab Muslims were none too happy with their black countrymen in northern Africa.
Also, where is this “place of oppression and repression” in which Obama has suffered “through the years”? Hawaii? Harvard? The Senate? We should find out immediately and do something about this horrific crisis.
Another thing. Let’s pretend John Kerry is right: Obama, as a result of the concentration of melanin in his skin, is endowed with the power to inspire moderate Islam to crush radicals. How does this play out exactly? A nice Shiite shop owner in Iran sees President Obama give a speech on television and then the next thing he knows he’s slaying a phalanx of mullahs Matrix-style? Let’s hope Obama understands that a power like that requires the close observation of international bodies.
Last, how is what John Kerry said less outrageous than what Geraldine Ferraro said? How is it different at all? They’re both attributing success solely to skin color.
::::
The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud
By Charles Krauthammer
[wapo] [...] "I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was Grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus's time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.
Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred? [...]
But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?
Perspective :
Even in politics, it's seldom that you see such a dirty lie.
[nr] : Asked at a New Hampshire campaign stop about possibly staying in Iraq 50 years, John McCain interrupted — “Make it a hundred” — then offered a precise analogy to what he envisioned: “We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so.” Lest anyone think he was talking about prolonged war-fighting rather than maintaining a presence in postwar Iraq, he explained: “That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.”
And lest anyone persist in thinking he was talking about war-fighting, he told his questioner: “It’s fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintained a presence in a very volatile part of the world.”
::::
Geraldine Ferraro : Not Going Quietly
[politico] : "To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable," Ferraro said today. "[Obama] gave a very good speech on race relations, but he did not address the fact that this man is up there spewing hatred."
Sure, a nice little quote and we hope she continues tossing them around, but the real money is in the comments section that follows. A priceless read and an unbelievable display, but I suppose it's just another in that long line of examples (of which we're always lectured) of the caring, deeply nuanced thinking and superior intelligence of the left and Democratic party. What an utter embarrassment.
::::
Definitely worth a read through:
What a Pentagon Review of 600,000 Iraqi Documents Tells Us
[weeklystandard] : This ought to be big news. Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein actively supported an influential terrorist group headed by the man who is now al Qaeda's second-in-command, according to an exhaustive study issued last week by the Pentagon. "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." According to the Pentagon study, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was one of many jihadist groups that Iraq's former dictator funded, trained, equipped, and armed.
::::
ABC : Journalism Makes for Great Comments
It's often the case these days that the commentary sections of articles are better reading than the article itself and this one is no exception. Comment writers, who apparently actually took the time to read the report sited in the article, lambaste ABC for their self serving headline.
examples:
- Just because it's fun to shout questions into an echo chamber---
How can your headline say the exact opposite of what the report says? Did you forget to read it? No, wait, you read the executive summary and stopped, didn't you? Nice quality reporting there, ABC...
- this 'reporting' is positively SHAMEFUL. Page 35 of this report shows and organization with FINANCIAL links to Al Qaeda, that was SUPPORTED by Iraq had a policy of killing Jews, Americans, Soldiers etc wherever they could find them.
But yeah, why post that when you can create a sensation...
- It is amazing how the Democrat media chooses to rewrite history as documents come to light that show the opposite of what they report.
- There is no substitute for bypassing journalist headlines by authors with an aversion to reading.
Contrary to many media's headlines, an established relationship of support between Saddam and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (aka Islamic Jihad Organization) is indeed a "direct link". EIJ was led by Zawahiri from 1993 to 1998, when he merged the EIJ with al Qaeda.
Are we to assume that Saddam, afater dealing with Zawahiri's group for so long, suddenly ostracized him for the group name change/merger?
Then there's that pesky detail of documented meetings between Mulla Omar's Defense Minister, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, and Saddam in Nov of 1999. The Maulana is known today for his JUI-F party in Pakistan, and was a founding father of the Taliban under Bhutto's ministry.
Saddams' agreement to aid the Taliban in 1999, via the Maulana, is an indirect link to AQ - as OBL had moved AQ headquarters from the Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996. Money to the Taliban equates to cash available to AQ as well.
One might put the headline into perspective when you read the "Conclusion" Section V... which would be very inconvenient for those who have proclaimed Saddam was not a threat. The last sentence pretty much says it all.
"Evidence that was uncovered and analyzed attests to the existence of a terrorist capability and a willingness to use it until the day Saddam was forced to flee Baghdad by Coalition forces."
Suggest you all go read it all before forming some less than correct conclusions based on a reporter's headline. Find the full report at:
[http://a.abcnews.com/images/pdf/Pentagon_Report_V1.pdf]
[abc]
::::
DNC won't give in on Fla., Mich.
[bostonglobe] : Unless Florida and Michigan Democrats devise workable plans to redo their outlaw primaries, there is no chance the national party will yield to pressure and approve their delegates if it could tip the outcome of the Democratic presidential race, a potential key arbiter of the dispute said yesterday.
James Roosevelt Jr. of Massachusetts, cochairman of the Democratic National Committee's rules and bylaws committee, said in an interview with the Globe that he doubts there will be a resolution of the standoff without the states devising do-over contests to be held before June 10.
Florida's Democratic Party this week abandoned a proposal to hold a mail-in primary, and there were signs yesterday that the Michigan Legislature's plan for a June 3 primary was falling apart after legal questions were raised by the campaign of Barack Obama. At a hastily arranged campaign stop yesterday in Detroit, rival Hillary Clinton challenged Obama to support new contests in Michigan and Florida, saying it would be "wrong and frankly un-American" to disenfranchise nearly 2.5 million voters. [...]
At stake are 128 pledged delegates in Michigan and 185 in Florida, which were voided by the DNC because the two states flouted party rules and moved up their primaries to January. Another 28 superdelegates, elected officials and party leaders, in Michigan and 25 in Florida are also in limbo.
::::
Education Revolt in Watts
Vikki Reyes has had it with Locke High, the school her daughters attend in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. She walked in on class one day and recalls “the place was just like a zoo!” Students had taken control, while the teacher sat quietly with a book.
Frank Wells has also had it with Locke High. When he became principal he says gangs ruled the campus. He tried to turn things around but ran into a “brick wall” of resistance from the school district and teachers union.
Locke seemed destined to languish in high crime and low test scores until Wells, Reyes, and many reform-minded teachers joined with a maverick named Steve Barr in an attempt to break free from the status quo. Their battle is just one example of the charter school education revolt that’s erupting across the nation.
::::
'Advice' for Dean
[americanthinker] : [...] I'd pass on my friend Jeff Dobbs' suggestion that you nominate both Obama and Clinton, one each for each of John Edwards' two Americas, but I don't think that'll fly really. Even if you could sell it to the public, it is hard to imagine this working, given the already manifested great acrimony between them.
I figure you have to be bold, and that you have to act no later than June 7 to keep your party from totally disintegrating. Here's my suggestion : Put Jimmy Carter in charge of the entire nomination mess.
You and I both know that the Democratic Party rules have created exactly the kind of atmosphere best suited for Carter's magic touch: utter chaos. Infinite fiddling state-by-state with the rules to achieve minutely-calibrated "proportional representation" by delegates not even bound to follow the voters' wishes, topped by potentially nullifying, appointed super-delegates, accountable to no one but themselves.
Fantastic! Mugabe could not have set this up better
By the way, it's a good idea for you to keep floating the notion to the punditry that the Florida and Michigan voters aren't "disenfranchised" if their votes are not counted. Keep saying they are simply paying for their arrogant disregard of the rules. (None of them seem to have caught on that the officials who okayed the early primaries knowing that would nullify the votes are super-delegates whose votes will count anyway, even if they fixed it so the ordinary party members in their states will lose their votes. Way to go!)
This approach completely distracts people from realizing what an absolute joke the position is that Florida was stolen in 2000.
::::
Not Swimming but Drowning
[nro] : [Mark Steyn] A while back I mentioned Harvard's decision to ban men from its pool and fitness center six times a week in the interests of "accommodating" Muslim women. Our pal Michael Graham picks up the theme [link]:
In the old days, Harvard would have laughed if some Catholic or evangelical mother urged “girls-only” campus workouts in the name of modesty. Today, Harvard happily implements Sharia swim times in the name of Mohammed.
At Harvard, that’s called progress.
Well put. And thus "progress" comes full circle. In Minneapolis last year, the airport licensing authority, faced with a mainly Muslim crew of cab drivers refusing to carry the blind, persons with six-packs of Bud, slatternly women, etc, proposed instituting two types of taxis with differently colored lights, one of which would indicate the driver was prepared to carry members of identity groups that offend Islam. Forty years ago, advocating separate drinking fountains made you a racist. Today, advocating separate taxi cabs or separate swimming sessions makes you a multiculturalist.
Every society has culturally self-segregating groups - the Amish and whatnot. But they're usually in small numbers somewhere out on the edge of the map. In Europe and Canada, the self-segregating group happens to be the principal source of population growth, which presents a profound challenge to societal cohesion. America does not face the same scale of problem, but nevertheless "sharia creep" ought to be resisted before it becomes remorseless. The rest of Michael's column goes on to explain why that doesn't happen: at Harvard and elsewhere, bigshot Saudi princes waving gazillion-dollar checks are in effect buying silence about one of the central questions of the day - Islam's relationship with the west.
::::
::::
Democrats Find A Way To Post Largest Tax Increase in American History Two Years Running
[townhall] : Approaching nearly 10 million words and stretching an interminable 67,000 pages, the American tax code exists today as complicated mess of pitfalls, pratfalls, and potholes – even though its central philosophy couldn’t be more straightforward: “If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want less, tax it.”
But if that used to be a guiding principle in determining how to spend and collect the taxpayers’ money, it’s clear Democrats in Congress aren’t aware of the history. Because this past week, the majority leadership unveiled a budget plan for 2009 that raises taxes on everything from starting a family, to starting a family business. All to finance a reckless spending agenda that comes in a full $276 billion in excess of what the president has requested.
So it goes for an annual budget request that envisions the expiration and elimination of nearly every measure of pro-growth tax relief Republicans fought to pass through Congress. In its place, the bill lays a trap for the American taxpayer in the form of $683 billion in new taxes – far and away the single largest tax increase in the long and ignominious history of the code.
Of course, to achieve that level of prodigious spending, you need to do more than slash the child care tax credit in half (from $1,000 per child to $500) and resurrect the marriage tax penalty that Republicans once successfully slayed. You also need to punish low-income Americans by replacing the 10-percent tax bracket (the lowest percentage one can pay and still pay income taxes) with a new lowest rung of 15 percent; you need to dramatically increase the current 15 percent tax rate on capital gains; you need to punish small investors by raising the tax burden on dividends; you need to pave the way for the Death Tax to rise from the grave in 2011; and let’s not forget: you need to ensure that an estimated 116 million taxpayers pay an average $1,833 more to the federal government this year than they did the year before.
More than anything else, a budget request is a statement of national priorities; a clear enumeration of what our country needs to grow its economy and remain in the future the first-rate power it is today. In the case of the Democrats’ 2009 budget request, the statement of need could not have been articulated any clearer: We need more spending, historic new tax hikes, and greater control over the way American families live their lives.
But while the majority pulled no punches in sketching out a future in which a broader, more expansive government replaces the wisdom of markets and people with the judgment of bureaucrats and politicians, Democrats remained eerily silent – conspicuously so – on what to do about our nation’s looming entitlement crisis. You see, as Yogi Berra might say, our population is getting older by the day. And it won’t be long until the number of Americans drawing funds from accounts like Social Security and Medicare first catches up to – and then far outstrips – the resources on hand to accommodate them.
The unfunded liabilities that currently wrack the Medicare and Social Security systems are scheduled to swell from $38.7 trillion today to $52.5 trillion in just five short years. But at a time and place when bold steps are needed to stem the tide of future entitlement growth and pull these programs back from the precipice of future insolvency, Democrats instead chose to whistle past the graveyard by producing a budget document that refuses to acknowledge there’s even a problem.
Though not putting forth a serious plan to address entitlement spending, Democrats had no trouble putting forth a plan to oversee the spending of more than $3 trillion of your money in the next year alone. Unfortunately, to finance that spending, they’ll have to find a creditor willing to fork over the more than $600 billion in revenue we don’t currently have – the single largest increase in the debt in our nation’s history.
::::
UK fears Iran still working on nuclear weapon
[ukguardian] : The British government said yesterday that Tehran could still be developing a nuclear weapon, and called into question a key American intelligence finding that work on building an Iranian bomb had stopped in 2003.
For the first time, a senior British diplomat cast doubt on the US National Intelligence Estimate published last November which reported "with high confidence" that Tehran's nuclear weapons programme had been halted in autumn 2003. The NIE also judged "with moderate confidence" that the programme had not been restarted.
The intelligence report blocked momentum towards US military action and delayed the passing of a third sanctions resolution against Tehran - a mild version of which was approved this week in an effort to persuade Iran to suspend enrichment of uranium. But the senior British diplomat claimed there was no serious evidence that Iran's efforts to build a nuclear weapon had halted.
"When the NIE came out many of us were surprised at how emphatic the writers of it were - that all the activity stopped in 2003 and the medium confidence that it had not been resumed," the diplomat said on condition of anonymity. "I haven't seen any intelligence that gives me even medium confidence that these programmes haven't resumed. It's an uncertain picture."
The comments appeared to reflect the findings of an independent British assessment of intelligence on Iran's nuclear programme, completed after the American assessment was published.
::::
McCain wins GOP nomination
[cnn] [...] CNN estimates that McCain has amassed 1,195 delegates to the GOP's September convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, four more than the 1,191 needed to claim the party's nomination.
Claiming the title of presumptive nominee will give McCain a head start on the general election campaign while Democratic contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are still locked in a battle for their party's title, said Alex Castellanos, a GOP strategist and CNN contributor.
"Tomorrow, he can get started," Castellanos said. "He'll have the [Republican National Committee] behind him. He'll have a broad base of financial support. It's a big step. Meanwhile, it looks like the Democrats are engaged in the land war across Russia, so he's got a big advantage now."
Both Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady, and Obama, the first-term senator from Illinois, called McCain on Tuesday night, campaign officials said. Obama told McCain he looks forward to running against him in the fall, campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said.
Workers at McCain's Texas headquarters had a sign with the magic number ready to be unveiled when the candidate spoke, and he is slated to go to the White House on Wednesday to receive the endorsement of President Bush, according to two Republican sources.
The Arizona senator's campaign -- his second run for the White House -- was largely written off last summer amid outspoken opposition from the party's conservative base, a major staff shakeup and disappointing fundraising. But the former Navy pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war rebounded with wins in January's primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina, the state where his first presidential bid foundered.
"There were times, obviously, when my political campaign was not viewed as the most viable in America, as you probably know," he told reporters in San Antonio earlier Tuesday. "In fact, I was reminded of the words of Chairman Mao, who said it's always darkest before it's totally black."
Adios, Mr. Huckabee
Adios. We're all really happy that you had a fantastic time traveling around the country pretending that you were a touring rockstar bassist spinning your knee slapping funnies at every interview stop. "You've got nothing else to do," you said. Guess what? We believe you. I'm sure that makes the people that donated to you feel so much better at a dollar spent. Some say you've set yourself for a run in 2012. Yea right. Better get back to the wood-shedding. Jaco, you are not. Buh-bye.
[wapo] : Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said he would wait until someone got 1,191 delegates to consider stepping aside.
He waited about 15 minutes.
Television networks declared Sen. John McCain the Republican nominee, having surpassed the number of delegates he needed, just after 9 p.m. Eastern time. Huckabee was on a stage almost immediately.
"We started this effort with very little recognition and virtually no resources. We ended with slightly more recognition and very few resources," he told his supporters.
Huckabee clearly looked like a man who didn't want to give up the national stage he has commanded since he became a serious contender for the Republican nomination.
::::
Harper to Dion: See you in court
[globeandmail] : A tough-talking Stephen Harper told Stéphane Dion yesterday that he will be seeing the Liberal Leader in court after the Liberals refused to back away from allegations that Conservative operatives tried to bribe dying MP Chuck Cadman.
The Conservatives were “prepared to assist Chuck Cadman in securing his nomination and to ensure, financially and otherwise, that he was able to fight a successful election campaign,” Mr. Harper told the Commons yesterday.
“Those are the facts. Chuck Cadman is on public record saying those are the facts. The Leader of the Opposition says they are otherwise. We will see how that theory stands up when he has to deal with it in a court of law.”
Mr. Cadman's widow, Dona, has said two Conservatives offered her husband a $1-million life insurance policy in exchange for his vote against a Liberal budget in 2005.
::::
Harper Budget Passes : Liberals Make Faces and Pretend to Be Invisible
[nationalpost] : The Harper government quietly survived its final confidence vote on the federal budget yesterday after the Liberals abstained en masse.
As expected, the government's budget motion easily passed, with 125 MPs supporting the motion and 90 opposing it. Only 11 Liberal MPs, including party leader Stephane Dion, deputy leader Michael Ignatieff and Liberal House leader Ralph Goodale, showed up for the vote.
After the vote, Government House leader Peter Van Loan accused the absent Liberals of shirking their "fundamental responsibility" to represent their constituents in the House of Commons.
"Those Liberal members are going to have a hard time going back to voters and saying, 'I want your vote again to be able to go to Ottawa and enjoy all the perks and privileges, but not actually do my job.' "
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty unveiled the budget last Tuesday, calling it a "prudent, disciplined and realistic" plan that will keep Canada's finances in the black.
Unlike the past two years, when the Conservatives showered the public with tax cuts and spending initiatives, this year's budget commits only about $6-billion in new measures over three years. The biggest surprise was a tax-free savings account that enables Canadians to shelter investment income from taxation.
At the time the budget was released, Mr. Dion slammed it as "grab bag" of minor initiatives. But he said it was not bad enough to justify bringing down the government.
His decision has attracted criticism, and reports of dissent within the party over whether to use the opportunity to defeat the government.
::::
[nationalpost] : It is difficult to overstate the severity of the hosing Canadians will experience if Barack Obama becomes president of the United States.
The foremost way in which the callow Senator from Illinois would snatch the double-double from our Timmy's is evident in his attitude toward trade. In pursuit of blue-collar primary votes in Wisconsin and Ohio, and in defiance of the fact that U.S. manufacturing jobs have been declining since 1979, Obama has effectively scapegoated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for job losses, promising to revisit, and perhaps withdraw from, the treaty. [...]
Here is a simple truth with which Canadians should acquaint themselves: Republicans are generally free traders; Democrats, not. Since two Republican presidents and one Conservative prime minister effected the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement in 1989, trade between our two countries has tripled. Bill Clinton's acceptance of NAFTA in 1993 remains a heresy to many in his party -- including his wife and her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama.
But trade is only one aspect of Obama's abysmal agenda. His misbegotten economic and foreign-policy prescriptions matter, too. He plans to raise taxes across the board -- doubling capital gains, increasing inheritance taxes to 55%, and hiking income taxes to such levels that Americans could see marginal rates at the 65-70% range of the bad old days. The American economy is already facing a recession; with Obama's help, a full-on depression is achievable. And as the American economy goes, so does that of Canada.
There is much talk about Obama as the agent of "hope" and "change," and his energy and youth have prompted comparisons to John F. Kennedy. But JFK understood the value of letting businesspeople do business, within and across borders. Kennedy's tax cuts were larger than those of any president since --including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush -- resulting in higher tax receipts for years, and buoying the North American economy.
From a broader perspective, consider Obama's threats to invade Pakistan, negotiate without condition with Cuba and Iran, and cut off exports from China. "Hope," indeed! One hopes Obama does not mean a word he is saying. He is Jimmy Carter without the foreign-policy acumen. [...]
For various ideological reasons, Canadians most often identify with the Democratic candidates in American presidential contests. As Barack Obama prepares to hobble America's economy, close its borders to trade and legitimize our shared enemies, Canadians ought to reconsider their outlook.
::::
Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
[dailytech] : Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.
::::
Weather Channel Founder Blasts Network; Claims It Is 'Telling Us What to Think'
[b&m] : The Weather Channel has lost its way, according to John Coleman, who founded the channel in 1982.
Coleman told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York that he is highly critical of global warming alarmism.
“The Weather Channel had great promise, and that’s all gone now because they’ve made every mistake in the book on what they’ve done and how they’ve done it and it’s very sad,” Coleman said. “It’s now for sale and there’s a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let’s hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information.”
The Weather Channel has been an outlet for global warming alarmism. In December 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society.
Coleman also told the audience his strategy for exposing what he called “the fraud of global warming.” He advocated suing those who sell carbon credits, which would force global warming alarmists to give a more honest account of the policies they propose.
“[I] have a feeling this is the opening,” Coleman said. “If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the media stand to testify, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”
::::
Words Matter : Hitchens
[slate] It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It used to be that thinking people would say, with at least a shred of pride, that their own convictions would not shrink to fit on a label or on a bumper sticker. But now it seems that the more vapid and vacuous the logo, the more charm (or should that be "charisma"?) it exerts. Take "Yes We Can," for example. It's the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake. As for "We Are the People We Have Been Waiting For" (in which case, one can only suppose that now that we have arrived, we can all go home), I didn't think much of it when Rep. Dennis Kucinich used it at an anti-war rally in 2004 ("We Are the People We Are Waiting For" being his version) or when Thomas Friedman came across it at an MIT student event last December. He wrote, by the way, that just hearing it gave him—well, you guess what it gave him. Hope? That's exactly right.
Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators. In the new jargon, certain intelligible ideas would become inexpressible. (How could one state, for example, the famous Burkean principle that many sorts of change ought to be regarded with skepticism?) In a rather poor trade-off for this veto on complexity, many views that are expressible (and "We the People Together Dream of and Hope for New Change in America" would be really quite a long sentence in the latest junk language) will, in turn, be entirely and indeed almost beautifully unintelligible.
And it's not as if anybody is looking for coded language in which to say: "Health care—who needs it?" or "Special interests and lobbyists—give them a break," let alone "Dr. King's dream—what a snooze." It's more that the prevailing drivel assumes that every adult in the country is a completely illiterate jerk who would rather feel than think and who must furthermore be assumed, for a special season every four years, to imagine that everyone else "in America" or in "this country" is unemployed or starving or sleeping under a bridge. The next assumption made by the drivel is that only a new president (or perhaps a sitting president who is somehow eager to run against Washington and everything else in his home town) can possibly cure all these ills. The non sequitur is breathtaking. The more I could be brought to believe in a stupid incantation such as "Washington Is Broken," the less inclined I would be to pay the moving expenses to bring a failed Mormon crowd-pleaser and flip-flopper to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And this was the best that a supposed "full-spectrum conservative" could come up with by way of rhetoric. At this rate, Sen. John McCain will have to campaign as a radical post-Castroite to deal with the perceptions that a) he's too old and b) the Republicans are too WASP-dominated.
::::
::::
Obamination
Canadian Memo Recounts Obama Adviser's Meeting
[ctv] : Sen. Barack Obama's campaign was thrown on the defensive after a memo surfaced showing the U.S. presidential candidate's senior economic policy adviser told Canadian diplomats that Obama's call to renegotiate NAFTA was only campaign rhetoric.
The Canadian memo supports what CTV News reported exclusively last week: that Obama adviser Austan Goolsbee assured Canadian officials that the senator's tough talk on the North American Free Trade deal should not be taken seriously by the Harper government.
"Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign,'' said the memo.
"He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."
The memo is the first documentation to emerge publicly out of a meeting that CTV reported on between Goolsbee and the Canadian consulate in Chicago. But the memo's contents are being disputed by Goolsbee.
On Monday, Obama's Democratic rival Sen. Hillary Clinton held up the memo as evidence of doublespeak, saying it shows Obama's campaign was giving Canadians "the old wink-wink" about North American free trade.
"I don't think people should come to Ohio and tell the people of Ohio one thing and then have your campaign tell a foreign government something else behind closed doors," Clinton said in a statement.
"That's the kind of difference between talk and action and that I've been pointing out in this campaign."
Obama Avoids Answering About Rezko
From the comments:
'"Barry is not qualified for the senate, a job he has not even attempted to do. He is too busy being awesome."
That is a great comment!! I'm stealing it!'
Ed. note - Me too!
::::
Obama and Chicago Mores
[wsj] : On Tuesday, Barack Obama may well wrap up the Democratic nomination. Yet how he rose so quickly in Chicago's famously suspect politics -- and who his associates were there -- has received little scrutiny.
That may change today as the trial of Antoin "Tony" Rezko, Mr. Obama's friend of two decades and his campaign fund-raiser, gets under way in federal court in Chicago. Mr. Rezko, a master fixer in Illinois politics, is charged with money laundering, attempted extortion, fraud and aiding bribery in an alleged multimillion dollar scheme shaking down companies seeking state contracts. [...]
Mr. Obama has admitted that the 2005 land deal that he and Mr. Rezko were involved in was a "boneheaded" mistake, in part because his friend was already rumored to be under federal investigation. The newly elected Mr. Obama bought his $1.65 million home on the same day, June 15, that Mr. Rezko's wife bought the plot of land next to it from the same seller for $625,000. Seven months later she sold a slice of the land to the trust that Mr. Obama had put the house into, so the senator could expand his garden.
Mr. Obama has strenuously denied suggestions that the same-day sale enabled him to pay $300,000 under the house's asking price because Mrs. Rezko paid full price for the adjoining lot, or that he asked the Rezkos for help in the matter. Both actions would be clear violations of Senate ethics rules barring the granting or asking of favors.
Still, there are anomalies. Mr. Obama admits that he and Mr. Rezko took a tour of the house before it and the adjoining plot were sold. Financial records given to federal prosecutors a year later show Mrs. Rezko had a salary of only $37,000 and assets of $35,000. In court proceedings at that time, to explain how much his bail should be, Mr. Rezko declared that he had "no income, negative cash flow, no liquid assets."
So where did the money for Mrs. Rezko's $125,000 down payment -- and the collateral for her $500,000 loan from a local bank controlled by Amrish Mahajan, like Mr. Rezko a Chicago political fixer -- come from?
The London Times reports that, three weeks before the land transactions, Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi billionaire living in London, loaned $3.5 million to Mr. Rezko, who was his Chicago business partner. Mr. Auchi's office says he had "no involvement in or knowledge of" the property purchase. Mr. Auchi is a press-shy property developer (estimated worth: $4 billion) who was convicted of corruption in France in 2003 for his involvement in the Elf affair, the biggest political and corporate fraud inquiry in Europe since World War II. He was fined $3 million and given a 15-month prison term that was suspended provided he committed no further crimes.
Mr. Auchi was also a top official in the Iraqi oil ministry in the 1970s. He has for years vigorously denied charges he had dealings with Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War. However, an official report to the Pentagon inspector general in 2004 obtained by the Washington Times cited "significant and credible evidence" of involvement by Mr. Auchi's companies in the Oil for Food scandal and illicit smuggling of weapons to the Hussein regime.
In 2003, Mr. Auchi began investing in Chicago real estate with Mr. Rezko. In April 2007, after his indictment, Mr. Auchi loaned another $3.5 million to Mr. Rezko, a loan that Mr. Rezko hid from U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's office. When Mr. Fitzgerald learned that the money was being parceled out to Mr. Rezko's lawyers, family and friends, he got Mr. Rezko's bond revoked in January and had him put in jail as a potential flight risk.
In court papers, the prosecutor noted that Mr. Rezko had traveled 26 times to the Middle East between 2002 and 2006, mostly to his native Syria and other countries that lack extradition treaties with the U.S. Curiously, Mr. Auchi has also lent an unknown sum of money to Chris Kelly, who, like Mr. Rezko, was a significant fund-raiser for Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (himself under investigation by a federal grand jury as an alleged beneficiary of the Rezko shakedowns). Mr. Kelly is himself under indictment for obstructing an IRS probe into his activities.
Mr. Obama says he has "no recollection" of meeting Mr. Auchi during a 2004 trip the billionaire made to Chicago, and no one believes he knew of his background. While his name will come up in the trial as a beneficiary of Rezko donations (since donated to charity), Mr. Obama will not be called to testify.
There may be nothing more in Mr. Obama's dealings with Mr. Rezko beyond an "appearance of impropriety." Still, Mr. Obama does have an obligation to explain how he fits into Chicago politics. David Axelrod, Mr. Obama's Karl Rove, is a longtime spoke in the Daley machine that's dominated Chicago for a half century. Gov. Blagojevich, also part of the machine, shared key fund raisers with Mr. Obama.
::::
The Point of Tipping
[wsj] : [...] During the second half of the 20th century, the practice of tipping largely retreated from American life. The earliest of tipped workers -- railroad porters -- gave way to flight attendants (the first of whom were registered nurses, whose station was deemed above gratuities). Gone are telegrams, the receipt of which required a tip. Men stopped getting shaved at barbershops -- where one stiffed the barber at one's peril. In June 1903, an unlucky New York streetcar conductor named John Shanno failed to tip his barber, Joseph Ferlanto. "I'll teach you not to forget to tip," Ferlanto screamed, and went all Sweeney Todd on him.
But after decades in which tipping was reserved almost exclusively for waiters, waitresses, hairdressers, cabdrivers and bellhops, the practice has begun to expand again. Typical is a sandwich shop in my neighborhood: Pay with a credit card and the signature slip urges the addition of a gratuity, all for a sack handed over a counter. [...]
When tipping first caught on in the U.S., late in the 19th century, it was the old-world, aristocratic overtones of the practice that drew the most ire. An 1897 editorial in the New York Times declared tipping to be the "vilest of imported vices." The paper lamented not only that "we have men among us servile enough to accept their earnings in this form" but that others were willing "to reward the servility." Joining the chorus against "flunkyism," the Washington Post denounced tipping as "one of the most insidious and one of the most malignant evils" of modern life. Tipping was seen to foster a lord-and-vassal relationship that the prouder professions resisted. Well into the 1910s many bartenders refused gratuities as an insult to their status.
Opposed to vassalage and servility (except to the state, that is), communists have often targeted tipping. When George Orwell arrived in Barcelona in 1936 to fight in Spain's civil war, "almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from an hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy." In fact, one of the best arguments to be found in favor of tipping is that Fidel Castro tried to eradicate it in Cuba. [...]
We Americans see ourselves as generous -- we each want to tip a bit more than the average guy. Thus the actual average creeps ever higher. Not long ago, an 18% restaurant tip was a tad better than the 15% that was expected. Now I don't know anyone who tips less than 20%. Soon we'll feel the need to show our generosity by leaving 25% of the tab.
To resist the custom is to be radically antisocial, like "Mr. Pink," the crook played by Steve Buscemi in "Reservoir Dogs." He doesn't tip "because society says I gotta tip." When a fellow hoodlum avers that waitresses are underpaid, Mr. Pink answers: "She don't make enough money, she can quit."
Generous? No. But economically sound. It's not that we tip waiters because they are paid so little; they are paid so little because they can expect to make up the difference in tips. Starbucks is known for paying relatively well and providing respectable benefits. Yet, without the tip-jar take, the company would have to raise its wages commensurately to maintain the same caliber of employees. Perhaps prices would rise too, but I suspect many would be happy to have the full, unambiguous cost of the transaction up on the board. As things stand, the tip jar subsidizes the company's payroll costs. So when you toss a dollar into the cup, you're really making a donation to Starbucks -- and I can think of needier beneficiaries.
::::
::::
Life in A Cocoon
Jennifer Rubin
[commentary] A problem for Barack Obama–after living in the womb of the academic Left, running a virtually uncontested Senate race, being welcomed to the Senate as a trailblazer, and then being received by throngs of cheering pundits as the savior of American politics–is that he hasn’t learned to confront criticism. When reporters wanted to quiz him on Tony Rezko, he seemed shocked that they should demand answers to more than eight questions.
Today he got into a bit of a back and forth with a reporter over his Iraq position. What strikes you is that he’s not very good on his feet, hemming and hawing about what forces he would leave there and for how long. (He then resorts lamely to John McCain’s “100 years” comment, feigning ignorance about using the comment out of context.) When everyone you come in contact with agrees with you, and fawns over you to boot, it does not prepare you to defend yourself or answer tough questions. The media fan club so far has done their favorite candidate no favors in that regard.
::::
Pierre Elliott Obama[nationalpost] : For Canadians, Trudeaumania was a magic elixir that blotted out the troubles of the modern world. Barack Obama is now selling the United States the same poisonous political opium... [...]
But I have seen this virus before; it devastated a country I loved, a place that nurtured me and raised me up.
In that Canadian day, we called it "Trudeaumania," the suggestion of "Beatlemania" pop idol glitter being no accident. Even those of us in his Liberal party were powerless to stop the mad embrace millions of Canadians threw around Pierre Elliott Trudeau with his promise of reconciliation of the two founding peoples, a happy era when the English (more correctly, Scottish) heritage would join hands with the French legacy and take us forward into a brave new age. And he'd reforge our relationship with "The Elephant to our South."
That he was completely non-specific, avoiding policy questions in favour of depending entirely on his style and panache (and goodness knows, he had a surfeit of both) would surely undo him -- or so those of us who believed him to be a hard line leftist (because we'd read his essays in Cite Libre and studied his record) reassured ourselves.
Of course, we were wrong; his very lack of specificity was his strength. A brilliant orator, he spun webs around huge crowds, proposing big ideas in obscure terms, making it possible for the listener to impose any dream they wished upon his smiling, Savile Row-suited tabula rasa. He was all things to all people. In service to "party loyalty" and civility, we held our tongues.
And, in the meantime, the delighted English-language media, at last faced with a French-speaking Canadian they could love, dubbed him "Canada's JFK." By the time he and they were done, the damage would be staggering, even two generations later. [...]
To many Canadians, especially that huge number now on the left, everything I write here is heresy. But it is history --a sad one.
While it is too late for Canadians to avoid the wreckage of the Trudeau years, it is not too late for Americans to learn from this cautionary tale.
::::
Conrad Black on the 2008 Presidential Race
[nationalpost] : The Democrats and most of the national media seem not to have noticed that the defeatist truisms about Iraq have passed their sell-by date. Senator Clinton and Senator Obama seem to assume that the great majority of their countrymen recognize the Iraq expedition to have been a disaster and that that is the end of it.
The latest intelligence findings in Iraq, generally ignored by the national and world media, detailing Saddam Hussein’s long and extensive promotion of terrorism, leave the Republicans with plenty of room to reargue the casus belli. Iraq’s 75% reduction in violence, 30% increase in oil production, taming of al-Sadr and other factional leaders, and possibly the world’s highest annual economic growth rate since the upward “surge” in U.S. forces, seem not to have entered into the Democratic electoral strategy. [...]
The Democrats will mend their divisions as they did in 1968 when there was horrible fragmentation between Humphrey and McCarthy, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the violent disorders at the Democratic convention in Chicago. If the present administration can’t straddle to November with interest rate cuts that steady the stock market and the economy generally, but continue to depress the dollar, the Democrats should win.
If Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson can keep the ball in the air to Election Day without China breaking its currency’s peg to the U.S. dollar, McCain should win.
Whatever happens, it will be, as Richard Nixon used to say, “a rocking, socking campaign” (and he conducted many). The American genius for showmanship and propensity to commercialize almost everything, are about to reach their heights (or depths). But the result, whoever wins, will be a capable new president.
::::
Newspaper Ad Revenue Plunges to Lowest in 50 Years
[e&p] : The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.
According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.
The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.
Total advertising revenue in 2007 -- including online revenue -- decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.
There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well. Internet ad revenue in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006. In 2006, online ad revenue had soared 31.4% to $2.6 billion. In 2005, it jumped 31.4% to $2 billion.
As newspaper Web sites generate more advertising revenue, the growth rate naturally slows. The NAA reported that online revenue now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenue in 2007 compared to 5.7% in 2006.
That growth could not stave off the losses in the print however. National print advertising revenue dropped 6.7% to $7 billion last year. Retail slipped 5% to $21 billion. Classified plunged 16.5% to $14.1 billion.
::::
[MRamirez]
::::
Harvard Researchers : Negative U.S. media = increased insurgent attacks
[wshtimes] : Researchers at Harvard say that publicly voiced doubts about the U.S. occupation of Iraq have a measurable "emboldenment effect" on insurgents there.
Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq, according to a study by Radha Iyengar, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy research at Harvard and Jonathan Monten of the Belfer Center at the university's Kennedy School of Government.
The increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media, the authors conclude in a report titled "Is There an 'Emboldenment' Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq."
The researchers studied data about insurgent attacks and U.S. media coverage up to November, tracking what they called "anti-resolve statements" by U.S. politicians and reports about American public opinion on the war.
"We find that in periods immediately after a spike in anti-resolve statements, the level of insurgent attacks increases," says the study, published earlier this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a leading U.S. nonprofit economic research organization.
::::
Audacity Without Hope
[nro] : Barack Obama’s own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far-left fringe. In college, “I chose my friends carefully,” he said in his first book, Dreams From My Father.
These friends included “Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets” — in Obama’s own words — as well as the “more politically active black students.” He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman Underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.
Obama didn’t just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way-out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college — members of the anti-American, counter-cultural Left.
In Shelby Steele’s brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama — A Bound Man — it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were — and, like many converts, he went overboard.
Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the U.S. Senate is the furthest left of any Senator. There is a remarkable consistency in what Barack Obama has done over the years, despite inconsistencies in what he says.
The irony is that Obama’s sudden rise politically to the level of being the leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination has required him to project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together.
The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleon-like change, and entranced both white and black Democrats, is a tribute to the man’s talent and a warning about his reliability.
There is no evidence that Obama ever sought to educate himself on the views of people on the other end of the political spectrum, much less reach out to them. He reached out from the Left to the Far Left. That’s bringing us all together?
::::
Get Smart!?
[americanspectator] How smart, really, is the Smart car?
It's not especially inexpensive -- $11,590 for the base Pure coupe -- $13,590 for the "loaded" Passion coupe (and $16,590 for the convertible). At least, not relative to what else you can buy for that money -- for example, a Chevy Aveo ($10,235), Toyota Yaris ($12,225), Kia Spectra ($12,895), or Hyundai Accent ($12,925).
And those are subcompact sedans; they can carry four people. The so-called Smart car is a hypercompact two-seater. If you need room for even three people, you'll need to buy another car. How smart is that, exactly?
But it gets great gas mileage -- right?
Actually, not that great. EPA rates the Smart car at 33 mpg city and 40 mpg on the highway. That's not bad. Then again, a Toyota Yaris (with four doors and room for four people, remember) gets 29 city, 36 highway. So the "smart" car gets exactly 4 mpg better mileage in town and on the highway. Big whoop. And unlike traditional subcompacts, which can be driven pretty much anywhere, the Smart car is only usable as an in-city commuter.
With just a tiny 1.0 liter, 70-hp engine, the Smart is dangerously underpowered at speeds where traffic is moving faster than 45 mph or so. It needs 15-16 seconds to reach 60 mph (about 5 seconds more than the slowest current-year subcompact) and has a best-case top speed of about 90 mph, flat out. That leaves not much of a margin when trying to keep up with highway traffic running 70 or faster.
And it is at a bone-crunching disadvantage if it ever gets hit by a standard-sized car at anything above stop-and-go driving speeds. Take one out in traffic at your own risk.
How, exactly, is that smart?
If the car cost $6k -- even $8k -- it might make sense. It would be cheap transpo, especially as an in-city runabout. And at that price point, one could buy a Smart for local trips and have another, larger (and more roadworthy) car available for longer/highway trips -- and it could possibly make economic sense. But why buy a Smart that costs as much as a conventional subcompact economy car -- but which is only slightly more efficient and a lot less usable?
::::
Hillary Clinton Bosnia Trip : Memory a Little Blurry?
From Hill's speech:
"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base. But it was a moment of great pride for me to visit our troops, not only in our main base as Tuzla, but also at two outposts where they were serving in so many capacities to deactivate and remove landmines, to hunt and seek out those who had not complied with the Dayton Accords and put down their arms, and to build relationships with the people that might lead to a peace for them and their children." [link]
Apparently there was no 'sniper' fire she mentioned or much else resembling her speech content earlier in the week.
** She's now suggesting that it's no big deal and that she "misspoke and was sleep deprived." Good one! Eh...everyone makes mistakes, right? OK, but I kind of think you'd recall sniper fire etc. a little more acurrately. These people are simply all just so full of shit. [link]
::::
Passport Breach : Chief of firm involved is Obama adviser
[cnn] The CEO of a company whose employee is accused of improperly looking at the passport files of presidential candidates is a consultant to the Barack Obama campaign, a source said Saturday.
John O. Brennan, president and CEO of the Analysis Corp., advises the Illinois Democrat on foreign policy and intelligence issues, the source said. Brennan briefed the media on behalf of the campaign this month. The executive is a former senior CIA official and former interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
He contributed $2,300 to the Obama campaign in January.
When asked about the contribution, a State Department official told CNN's Zain Verjee, "We ethically awarded contracts. Political affiliation is not one of the factors that we check."
On Friday, the department revealed that Obama's passport file was improperly accessed three times this year, and the security of passport files of the two other major presidential candidates -- Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain -- had also been breached.
Three contract emplyees are accused in the wrongdoing, including the one who works for Analysis Corp. and who was disciplined. That contract employee accessed McCain's file in addition to Obama's. None of the contract employees was identified.
The other two contract employees worked for Stanley Inc. They were fired.
The Washington Times, which broke the story Thursday night that Obama's records had been improperly accessed, reported Saturday that the State Department inquiry is focusing on the Analysis Corp. employee. Also, the investigation by the department's inspector general will include polygraph tests for supervisors in the passport section to find out whether there was any political motive.
::::
Spitzer = Gone : Patterson = Going?
[nydaily] : Gov. Paterson spent thousands of dollars in campaign funds on personal items like hotel stays, men's suits, home furnishings and bar tabs, documents released Friday show.
He reimbursed his campaign for most of the expenses within about a month, but in two cases did so this week - only after revelations surfaced that he may have used the money for extramarital affairs.
He also dramatically changed his story about why his campaign paid one of his former girlfriends $500, with aides saying he'd "misstated" the first explanation.
Paterson's aides defended his behavior, insisting none of the expenditures was improper because everything was repaid.
"There's nothing out of the ordinary in those reports," declared Henry Berger, a lawyer who says he reviewed expenses listed in 30 to 40 Paterson campaign finance reports dating back to 1999.
Politicians are barred from using campaign funds for personal expenses. Paterson has said he may have "inadvertently" used his campaign credit card when his personal card didn't work.
A review of the documents provided by the campaign makes clear he did so several times and for some high-priced items....
::::
Kerry: Obama Could Help US Relations with Muslim Nations 'Because He's a Black Man'
[abc] : Kerry said that a President Obama would help the US, in relations with Muslim countries, "in some cases go around their dictator leaders to the people and inspire the people in ways that we can't otherwise." [video]
"He has the ability to help us bridge the divide of religious extremism," Kerry said. "To maybe even give power to moderate Islam to be able to stand up against this radical misinterpretation of a legitimate religion."Kerry was asked what gives Obama that credibility.
"Because he's African-American. Because he's a black man. Who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country."
An African-American president would be "a symbol of empowerment" for those who have been disenfranchised around the world, Kerry said, "an important lesson for America to show Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, other places in the world where disenfranchised people don't get anything."
[commentary] : [...] Where to begin! Have notable Democrats become so intellectually sloppy as to draw some baffling equivalence between blacks and Muslims? The last I checked, Arab Muslims were none too happy with their black countrymen in northern Africa.
Also, where is this “place of oppression and repression” in which Obama has suffered “through the years”? Hawaii? Harvard? The Senate? We should find out immediately and do something about this horrific crisis.
Another thing. Let’s pretend John Kerry is right: Obama, as a result of the concentration of melanin in his skin, is endowed with the power to inspire moderate Islam to crush radicals. How does this play out exactly? A nice Shiite shop owner in Iran sees President Obama give a speech on television and then the next thing he knows he’s slaying a phalanx of mullahs Matrix-style? Let’s hope Obama understands that a power like that requires the close observation of international bodies.
Last, how is what John Kerry said less outrageous than what Geraldine Ferraro said? How is it different at all? They’re both attributing success solely to skin color.
::::
The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud
By Charles Krauthammer
[wapo] [...] "I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was Grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus's time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.
Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred? [...]
But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?
Perspective :
Even in politics, it's seldom that you see such a dirty lie.
[nr] : Asked at a New Hampshire campaign stop about possibly staying in Iraq 50 years, John McCain interrupted — “Make it a hundred” — then offered a precise analogy to what he envisioned: “We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so.” Lest anyone think he was talking about prolonged war-fighting rather than maintaining a presence in postwar Iraq, he explained: “That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.”
And lest anyone persist in thinking he was talking about war-fighting, he told his questioner: “It’s fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintained a presence in a very volatile part of the world.”
::::
Geraldine Ferraro : Not Going Quietly
[politico] : "To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable," Ferraro said today. "[Obama] gave a very good speech on race relations, but he did not address the fact that this man is up there spewing hatred."
Sure, a nice little quote and we hope she continues tossing them around, but the real money is in the comments section that follows. A priceless read and an unbelievable display, but I suppose it's just another in that long line of examples (of which we're always lectured) of the caring, deeply nuanced thinking and superior intelligence of the left and Democratic party. What an utter embarrassment.
::::
Definitely worth a read through:
What a Pentagon Review of 600,000 Iraqi Documents Tells Us
[weeklystandard] : This ought to be big news. Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein actively supported an influential terrorist group headed by the man who is now al Qaeda's second-in-command, according to an exhaustive study issued last week by the Pentagon. "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." According to the Pentagon study, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was one of many jihadist groups that Iraq's former dictator funded, trained, equipped, and armed.
::::
ABC : Journalism Makes for Great Comments
It's often the case these days that the commentary sections of articles are better reading than the article itself and this one is no exception. Comment writers, who apparently actually took the time to read the report sited in the article, lambaste ABC for their self serving headline.
examples:
- Just because it's fun to shout questions into an echo chamber---
How can your headline say the exact opposite of what the report says? Did you forget to read it? No, wait, you read the executive summary and stopped, didn't you? Nice quality reporting there, ABC...
- this 'reporting' is positively SHAMEFUL. Page 35 of this report shows and organization with FINANCIAL links to Al Qaeda, that was SUPPORTED by Iraq had a policy of killing Jews, Americans, Soldiers etc wherever they could find them.
But yeah, why post that when you can create a sensation...
- It is amazing how the Democrat media chooses to rewrite history as documents come to light that show the opposite of what they report.
- There is no substitute for bypassing journalist headlines by authors with an aversion to reading.
Contrary to many media's headlines, an established relationship of support between Saddam and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (aka Islamic Jihad Organization) is indeed a "direct link". EIJ was led by Zawahiri from 1993 to 1998, when he merged the EIJ with al Qaeda.
Are we to assume that Saddam, afater dealing with Zawahiri's group for so long, suddenly ostracized him for the group name change/merger?
Then there's that pesky detail of documented meetings between Mulla Omar's Defense Minister, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, and Saddam in Nov of 1999. The Maulana is known today for his JUI-F party in Pakistan, and was a founding father of the Taliban under Bhutto's ministry.
Saddams' agreement to aid the Taliban in 1999, via the Maulana, is an indirect link to AQ - as OBL had moved AQ headquarters from the Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996. Money to the Taliban equates to cash available to AQ as well.
One might put the headline into perspective when you read the "Conclusion" Section V... which would be very inconvenient for those who have proclaimed Saddam was not a threat. The last sentence pretty much says it all.
"Evidence that was uncovered and analyzed attests to the existence of a terrorist capability and a willingness to use it until the day Saddam was forced to flee Baghdad by Coalition forces."
Suggest you all go read it all before forming some less than correct conclusions based on a reporter's headline. Find the full report at:
[http://a.abcnews.com/images/pdf/Pentagon_Report_V1.pdf]
[abc]
::::
DNC won't give in on Fla., Mich.
[bostonglobe] : Unless Florida and Michigan Democrats devise workable plans to redo their outlaw primaries, there is no chance the national party will yield to pressure and approve their delegates if it could tip the outcome of the Democratic presidential race, a potential key arbiter of the dispute said yesterday.
James Roosevelt Jr. of Massachusetts, cochairman of the Democratic National Committee's rules and bylaws committee, said in an interview with the Globe that he doubts there will be a resolution of the standoff without the states devising do-over contests to be held before June 10.
Florida's Democratic Party this week abandoned a proposal to hold a mail-in primary, and there were signs yesterday that the Michigan Legislature's plan for a June 3 primary was falling apart after legal questions were raised by the campaign of Barack Obama. At a hastily arranged campaign stop yesterday in Detroit, rival Hillary Clinton challenged Obama to support new contests in Michigan and Florida, saying it would be "wrong and frankly un-American" to disenfranchise nearly 2.5 million voters. [...]
At stake are 128 pledged delegates in Michigan and 185 in Florida, which were voided by the DNC because the two states flouted party rules and moved up their primaries to January. Another 28 superdelegates, elected officials and party leaders, in Michigan and 25 in Florida are also in limbo.
::::
Education Revolt in Watts
Vikki Reyes has had it with Locke High, the school her daughters attend in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. She walked in on class one day and recalls “the place was just like a zoo!” Students had taken control, while the teacher sat quietly with a book.
Frank Wells has also had it with Locke High. When he became principal he says gangs ruled the campus. He tried to turn things around but ran into a “brick wall” of resistance from the school district and teachers union.
Locke seemed destined to languish in high crime and low test scores until Wells, Reyes, and many reform-minded teachers joined with a maverick named Steve Barr in an attempt to break free from the status quo. Their battle is just one example of the charter school education revolt that’s erupting across the nation.
::::
'Advice' for Dean
[americanthinker] : [...] I'd pass on my friend Jeff Dobbs' suggestion that you nominate both Obama and Clinton, one each for each of John Edwards' two Americas, but I don't think that'll fly really. Even if you could sell it to the public, it is hard to imagine this working, given the already manifested great acrimony between them.
I figure you have to be bold, and that you have to act no later than June 7 to keep your party from totally disintegrating. Here's my suggestion : Put Jimmy Carter in charge of the entire nomination mess.
You and I both know that the Democratic Party rules have created exactly the kind of atmosphere best suited for Carter's magic touch: utter chaos. Infinite fiddling state-by-state with the rules to achieve minutely-calibrated "proportional representation" by delegates not even bound to follow the voters' wishes, topped by potentially nullifying, appointed super-delegates, accountable to no one but themselves.
Fantastic! Mugabe could not have set this up better
By the way, it's a good idea for you to keep floating the notion to the punditry that the Florida and Michigan voters aren't "disenfranchised" if their votes are not counted. Keep saying they are simply paying for their arrogant disregard of the rules. (None of them seem to have caught on that the officials who okayed the early primaries knowing that would nullify the votes are super-delegates whose votes will count anyway, even if they fixed it so the ordinary party members in their states will lose their votes. Way to go!)
This approach completely distracts people from realizing what an absolute joke the position is that Florida was stolen in 2000.
::::
Not Swimming but Drowning
[nro] : [Mark Steyn] A while back I mentioned Harvard's decision to ban men from its pool and fitness center six times a week in the interests of "accommodating" Muslim women. Our pal Michael Graham picks up the theme [link]:
In the old days, Harvard would have laughed if some Catholic or evangelical mother urged “girls-only” campus workouts in the name of modesty. Today, Harvard happily implements Sharia swim times in the name of Mohammed.
At Harvard, that’s called progress.
Well put. And thus "progress" comes full circle. In Minneapolis last year, the airport licensing authority, faced with a mainly Muslim crew of cab drivers refusing to carry the blind, persons with six-packs of Bud, slatternly women, etc, proposed instituting two types of taxis with differently colored lights, one of which would indicate the driver was prepared to carry members of identity groups that offend Islam. Forty years ago, advocating separate drinking fountains made you a racist. Today, advocating separate taxi cabs or separate swimming sessions makes you a multiculturalist.
Every society has culturally self-segregating groups - the Amish and whatnot. But they're usually in small numbers somewhere out on the edge of the map. In Europe and Canada, the self-segregating group happens to be the principal source of population growth, which presents a profound challenge to societal cohesion. America does not face the same scale of problem, but nevertheless "sharia creep" ought to be resisted before it becomes remorseless. The rest of Michael's column goes on to explain why that doesn't happen: at Harvard and elsewhere, bigshot Saudi princes waving gazillion-dollar checks are in effect buying silence about one of the central questions of the day - Islam's relationship with the west.
::::
::::
Democrats Find A Way To Post Largest Tax Increase in American History Two Years Running
[townhall] : Approaching nearly 10 million words and stretching an interminable 67,000 pages, the American tax code exists today as complicated mess of pitfalls, pratfalls, and potholes – even though its central philosophy couldn’t be more straightforward: “If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want less, tax it.”
But if that used to be a guiding principle in determining how to spend and collect the taxpayers’ money, it’s clear Democrats in Congress aren’t aware of the history. Because this past week, the majority leadership unveiled a budget plan for 2009 that raises taxes on everything from starting a family, to starting a family business. All to finance a reckless spending agenda that comes in a full $276 billion in excess of what the president has requested.
So it goes for an annual budget request that envisions the expiration and elimination of nearly every measure of pro-growth tax relief Republicans fought to pass through Congress. In its place, the bill lays a trap for the American taxpayer in the form of $683 billion in new taxes – far and away the single largest tax increase in the long and ignominious history of the code.
Of course, to achieve that level of prodigious spending, you need to do more than slash the child care tax credit in half (from $1,000 per child to $500) and resurrect the marriage tax penalty that Republicans once successfully slayed. You also need to punish low-income Americans by replacing the 10-percent tax bracket (the lowest percentage one can pay and still pay income taxes) with a new lowest rung of 15 percent; you need to dramatically increase the current 15 percent tax rate on capital gains; you need to punish small investors by raising the tax burden on dividends; you need to pave the way for the Death Tax to rise from the grave in 2011; and let’s not forget: you need to ensure that an estimated 116 million taxpayers pay an average $1,833 more to the federal government this year than they did the year before.
More than anything else, a budget request is a statement of national priorities; a clear enumeration of what our country needs to grow its economy and remain in the future the first-rate power it is today. In the case of the Democrats’ 2009 budget request, the statement of need could not have been articulated any clearer: We need more spending, historic new tax hikes, and greater control over the way American families live their lives.
But while the majority pulled no punches in sketching out a future in which a broader, more expansive government replaces the wisdom of markets and people with the judgment of bureaucrats and politicians, Democrats remained eerily silent – conspicuously so – on what to do about our nation’s looming entitlement crisis. You see, as Yogi Berra might say, our population is getting older by the day. And it won’t be long until the number of Americans drawing funds from accounts like Social Security and Medicare first catches up to – and then far outstrips – the resources on hand to accommodate them.
The unfunded liabilities that currently wrack the Medicare and Social Security systems are scheduled to swell from $38.7 trillion today to $52.5 trillion in just five short years. But at a time and place when bold steps are needed to stem the tide of future entitlement growth and pull these programs back from the precipice of future insolvency, Democrats instead chose to whistle past the graveyard by producing a budget document that refuses to acknowledge there’s even a problem.
Though not putting forth a serious plan to address entitlement spending, Democrats had no trouble putting forth a plan to oversee the spending of more than $3 trillion of your money in the next year alone. Unfortunately, to finance that spending, they’ll have to find a creditor willing to fork over the more than $600 billion in revenue we don’t currently have – the single largest increase in the debt in our nation’s history.
::::
UK fears Iran still working on nuclear weapon
[ukguardian] : The British government said yesterday that Tehran could still be developing a nuclear weapon, and called into question a key American intelligence finding that work on building an Iranian bomb had stopped in 2003.
For the first time, a senior British diplomat cast doubt on the US National Intelligence Estimate published last November which reported "with high confidence" that Tehran's nuclear weapons programme had been halted in autumn 2003. The NIE also judged "with moderate confidence" that the programme had not been restarted.
The intelligence report blocked momentum towards US military action and delayed the passing of a third sanctions resolution against Tehran - a mild version of which was approved this week in an effort to persuade Iran to suspend enrichment of uranium. But the senior British diplomat claimed there was no serious evidence that Iran's efforts to build a nuclear weapon had halted.
"When the NIE came out many of us were surprised at how emphatic the writers of it were - that all the activity stopped in 2003 and the medium confidence that it had not been resumed," the diplomat said on condition of anonymity. "I haven't seen any intelligence that gives me even medium confidence that these programmes haven't resumed. It's an uncertain picture."
The comments appeared to reflect the findings of an independent British assessment of intelligence on Iran's nuclear programme, completed after the American assessment was published.
::::
McCain wins GOP nomination
[cnn] [...] CNN estimates that McCain has amassed 1,195 delegates to the GOP's September convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, four more than the 1,191 needed to claim the party's nomination.
Claiming the title of presumptive nominee will give McCain a head start on the general election campaign while Democratic contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are still locked in a battle for their party's title, said Alex Castellanos, a GOP strategist and CNN contributor.
"Tomorrow, he can get started," Castellanos said. "He'll have the [Republican National Committee] behind him. He'll have a broad base of financial support. It's a big step. Meanwhile, it looks like the Democrats are engaged in the land war across Russia, so he's got a big advantage now."
Both Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady, and Obama, the first-term senator from Illinois, called McCain on Tuesday night, campaign officials said. Obama told McCain he looks forward to running against him in the fall, campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said.
Workers at McCain's Texas headquarters had a sign with the magic number ready to be unveiled when the candidate spoke, and he is slated to go to the White House on Wednesday to receive the endorsement of President Bush, according to two Republican sources.
The Arizona senator's campaign -- his second run for the White House -- was largely written off last summer amid outspoken opposition from the party's conservative base, a major staff shakeup and disappointing fundraising. But the former Navy pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war rebounded with wins in January's primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina, the state where his first presidential bid foundered.
"There were times, obviously, when my political campaign was not viewed as the most viable in America, as you probably know," he told reporters in San Antonio earlier Tuesday. "In fact, I was reminded of the words of Chairman Mao, who said it's always darkest before it's totally black."
Adios, Mr. Huckabee
Adios. We're all really happy that you had a fantastic time traveling around the country pretending that you were a touring rockstar bassist spinning your knee slapping funnies at every interview stop. "You've got nothing else to do," you said. Guess what? We believe you. I'm sure that makes the people that donated to you feel so much better at a dollar spent. Some say you've set yourself for a run in 2012. Yea right. Better get back to the wood-shedding. Jaco, you are not. Buh-bye.[wapo] : Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said he would wait until someone got 1,191 delegates to consider stepping aside.
He waited about 15 minutes.
Television networks declared Sen. John McCain the Republican nominee, having surpassed the number of delegates he needed, just after 9 p.m. Eastern time. Huckabee was on a stage almost immediately.
"We started this effort with very little recognition and virtually no resources. We ended with slightly more recognition and very few resources," he told his supporters.
Huckabee clearly looked like a man who didn't want to give up the national stage he has commanded since he became a serious contender for the Republican nomination.
::::
Harper to Dion: See you in court[globeandmail] : A tough-talking Stephen Harper told Stéphane Dion yesterday that he will be seeing the Liberal Leader in court after the Liberals refused to back away from allegations that Conservative operatives tried to bribe dying MP Chuck Cadman.
The Conservatives were “prepared to assist Chuck Cadman in securing his nomination and to ensure, financially and otherwise, that he was able to fight a successful election campaign,” Mr. Harper told the Commons yesterday.
“Those are the facts. Chuck Cadman is on public record saying those are the facts. The Leader of the Opposition says they are otherwise. We will see how that theory stands up when he has to deal with it in a court of law.”
Mr. Cadman's widow, Dona, has said two Conservatives offered her husband a $1-million life insurance policy in exchange for his vote against a Liberal budget in 2005.
::::
Harper Budget Passes : Liberals Make Faces and Pretend to Be Invisible
[nationalpost] : The Harper government quietly survived its final confidence vote on the federal budget yesterday after the Liberals abstained en masse.
As expected, the government's budget motion easily passed, with 125 MPs supporting the motion and 90 opposing it. Only 11 Liberal MPs, including party leader Stephane Dion, deputy leader Michael Ignatieff and Liberal House leader Ralph Goodale, showed up for the vote.
After the vote, Government House leader Peter Van Loan accused the absent Liberals of shirking their "fundamental responsibility" to represent their constituents in the House of Commons.
"Those Liberal members are going to have a hard time going back to voters and saying, 'I want your vote again to be able to go to Ottawa and enjoy all the perks and privileges, but not actually do my job.' "
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty unveiled the budget last Tuesday, calling it a "prudent, disciplined and realistic" plan that will keep Canada's finances in the black.
Unlike the past two years, when the Conservatives showered the public with tax cuts and spending initiatives, this year's budget commits only about $6-billion in new measures over three years. The biggest surprise was a tax-free savings account that enables Canadians to shelter investment income from taxation.
At the time the budget was released, Mr. Dion slammed it as "grab bag" of minor initiatives. But he said it was not bad enough to justify bringing down the government.
His decision has attracted criticism, and reports of dissent within the party over whether to use the opportunity to defeat the government.
::::
[nationalpost] : It is difficult to overstate the severity of the hosing Canadians will experience if Barack Obama becomes president of the United States.
The foremost way in which the callow Senator from Illinois would snatch the double-double from our Timmy's is evident in his attitude toward trade. In pursuit of blue-collar primary votes in Wisconsin and Ohio, and in defiance of the fact that U.S. manufacturing jobs have been declining since 1979, Obama has effectively scapegoated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for job losses, promising to revisit, and perhaps withdraw from, the treaty. [...]
Here is a simple truth with which Canadians should acquaint themselves: Republicans are generally free traders; Democrats, not. Since two Republican presidents and one Conservative prime minister effected the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement in 1989, trade between our two countries has tripled. Bill Clinton's acceptance of NAFTA in 1993 remains a heresy to many in his party -- including his wife and her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama.
But trade is only one aspect of Obama's abysmal agenda. His misbegotten economic and foreign-policy prescriptions matter, too. He plans to raise taxes across the board -- doubling capital gains, increasing inheritance taxes to 55%, and hiking income taxes to such levels that Americans could see marginal rates at the 65-70% range of the bad old days. The American economy is already facing a recession; with Obama's help, a full-on depression is achievable. And as the American economy goes, so does that of Canada.
There is much talk about Obama as the agent of "hope" and "change," and his energy and youth have prompted comparisons to John F. Kennedy. But JFK understood the value of letting businesspeople do business, within and across borders. Kennedy's tax cuts were larger than those of any president since --including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush -- resulting in higher tax receipts for years, and buoying the North American economy.
From a broader perspective, consider Obama's threats to invade Pakistan, negotiate without condition with Cuba and Iran, and cut off exports from China. "Hope," indeed! One hopes Obama does not mean a word he is saying. He is Jimmy Carter without the foreign-policy acumen. [...]
For various ideological reasons, Canadians most often identify with the Democratic candidates in American presidential contests. As Barack Obama prepares to hobble America's economy, close its borders to trade and legitimize our shared enemies, Canadians ought to reconsider their outlook.
::::
Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling[dailytech] : Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.
::::
Weather Channel Founder Blasts Network; Claims It Is 'Telling Us What to Think'
[b&m] : The Weather Channel has lost its way, according to John Coleman, who founded the channel in 1982.
Coleman told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York that he is highly critical of global warming alarmism.
“The Weather Channel had great promise, and that’s all gone now because they’ve made every mistake in the book on what they’ve done and how they’ve done it and it’s very sad,” Coleman said. “It’s now for sale and there’s a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let’s hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information.”
The Weather Channel has been an outlet for global warming alarmism. In December 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society.
Coleman also told the audience his strategy for exposing what he called “the fraud of global warming.” He advocated suing those who sell carbon credits, which would force global warming alarmists to give a more honest account of the policies they propose.
“[I] have a feeling this is the opening,” Coleman said. “If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the media stand to testify, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”
::::
Words Matter : Hitchens
[slate] It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It used to be that thinking people would say, with at least a shred of pride, that their own convictions would not shrink to fit on a label or on a bumper sticker. But now it seems that the more vapid and vacuous the logo, the more charm (or should that be "charisma"?) it exerts. Take "Yes We Can," for example. It's the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake. As for "We Are the People We Have Been Waiting For" (in which case, one can only suppose that now that we have arrived, we can all go home), I didn't think much of it when Rep. Dennis Kucinich used it at an anti-war rally in 2004 ("We Are the People We Are Waiting For" being his version) or when Thomas Friedman came across it at an MIT student event last December. He wrote, by the way, that just hearing it gave him—well, you guess what it gave him. Hope? That's exactly right.
Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators. In the new jargon, certain intelligible ideas would become inexpressible. (How could one state, for example, the famous Burkean principle that many sorts of change ought to be regarded with skepticism?) In a rather poor trade-off for this veto on complexity, many views that are expressible (and "We the People Together Dream of and Hope for New Change in America" would be really quite a long sentence in the latest junk language) will, in turn, be entirely and indeed almost beautifully unintelligible.
And it's not as if anybody is looking for coded language in which to say: "Health care—who needs it?" or "Special interests and lobbyists—give them a break," let alone "Dr. King's dream—what a snooze." It's more that the prevailing drivel assumes that every adult in the country is a completely illiterate jerk who would rather feel than think and who must furthermore be assumed, for a special season every four years, to imagine that everyone else "in America" or in "this country" is unemployed or starving or sleeping under a bridge. The next assumption made by the drivel is that only a new president (or perhaps a sitting president who is somehow eager to run against Washington and everything else in his home town) can possibly cure all these ills. The non sequitur is breathtaking. The more I could be brought to believe in a stupid incantation such as "Washington Is Broken," the less inclined I would be to pay the moving expenses to bring a failed Mormon crowd-pleaser and flip-flopper to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And this was the best that a supposed "full-spectrum conservative" could come up with by way of rhetoric. At this rate, Sen. John McCain will have to campaign as a radical post-Castroite to deal with the perceptions that a) he's too old and b) the Republicans are too WASP-dominated.
::::
::::
Obamination
Canadian Memo Recounts Obama Adviser's Meeting
[ctv] : Sen. Barack Obama's campaign was thrown on the defensive after a memo surfaced showing the U.S. presidential candidate's senior economic policy adviser told Canadian diplomats that Obama's call to renegotiate NAFTA was only campaign rhetoric.
The Canadian memo supports what CTV News reported exclusively last week: that Obama adviser Austan Goolsbee assured Canadian officials that the senator's tough talk on the North American Free Trade deal should not be taken seriously by the Harper government.
"Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign,'' said the memo.
"He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."
The memo is the first documentation to emerge publicly out of a meeting that CTV reported on between Goolsbee and the Canadian consulate in Chicago. But the memo's contents are being disputed by Goolsbee.
On Monday, Obama's Democratic rival Sen. Hillary Clinton held up the memo as evidence of doublespeak, saying it shows Obama's campaign was giving Canadians "the old wink-wink" about North American free trade.
"I don't think people should come to Ohio and tell the people of Ohio one thing and then have your campaign tell a foreign government something else behind closed doors," Clinton said in a statement.
"That's the kind of difference between talk and action and that I've been pointing out in this campaign."
Obama Avoids Answering About Rezko
From the comments:
'"Barry is not qualified for the senate, a job he has not even attempted to do. He is too busy being awesome."
That is a great comment!! I'm stealing it!'
Ed. note - Me too!
::::
Obama and Chicago Mores
[wsj] : On Tuesday, Barack Obama may well wrap up the Democratic nomination. Yet how he rose so quickly in Chicago's famously suspect politics -- and who his associates were there -- has received little scrutiny.
That may change today as the trial of Antoin "Tony" Rezko, Mr. Obama's friend of two decades and his campaign fund-raiser, gets under way in federal court in Chicago. Mr. Rezko, a master fixer in Illinois politics, is charged with money laundering, attempted extortion, fraud and aiding bribery in an alleged multimillion dollar scheme shaking down companies seeking state contracts. [...]
Mr. Obama has admitted that the 2005 land deal that he and Mr. Rezko were involved in was a "boneheaded" mistake, in part because his friend was already rumored to be under federal investigation. The newly elected Mr. Obama bought his $1.65 million home on the same day, June 15, that Mr. Rezko's wife bought the plot of land next to it from the same seller for $625,000. Seven months later she sold a slice of the land to the trust that Mr. Obama had put the house into, so the senator could expand his garden.
Mr. Obama has strenuously denied suggestions that the same-day sale enabled him to pay $300,000 under the house's asking price because Mrs. Rezko paid full price for the adjoining lot, or that he asked the Rezkos for help in the matter. Both actions would be clear violations of Senate ethics rules barring the granting or asking of favors.
Still, there are anomalies. Mr. Obama admits that he and Mr. Rezko took a tour of the house before it and the adjoining plot were sold. Financial records given to federal prosecutors a year later show Mrs. Rezko had a salary of only $37,000 and assets of $35,000. In court proceedings at that time, to explain how much his bail should be, Mr. Rezko declared that he had "no income, negative cash flow, no liquid assets."
So where did the money for Mrs. Rezko's $125,000 down payment -- and the collateral for her $500,000 loan from a local bank controlled by Amrish Mahajan, like Mr. Rezko a Chicago political fixer -- come from?
The London Times reports that, three weeks before the land transactions, Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi billionaire living in London, loaned $3.5 million to Mr. Rezko, who was his Chicago business partner. Mr. Auchi's office says he had "no involvement in or knowledge of" the property purchase. Mr. Auchi is a press-shy property developer (estimated worth: $4 billion) who was convicted of corruption in France in 2003 for his involvement in the Elf affair, the biggest political and corporate fraud inquiry in Europe since World War II. He was fined $3 million and given a 15-month prison term that was suspended provided he committed no further crimes.
Mr. Auchi was also a top official in the Iraqi oil ministry in the 1970s. He has for years vigorously denied charges he had dealings with Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War. However, an official report to the Pentagon inspector general in 2004 obtained by the Washington Times cited "significant and credible evidence" of involvement by Mr. Auchi's companies in the Oil for Food scandal and illicit smuggling of weapons to the Hussein regime.
In 2003, Mr. Auchi began investing in Chicago real estate with Mr. Rezko. In April 2007, after his indictment, Mr. Auchi loaned another $3.5 million to Mr. Rezko, a loan that Mr. Rezko hid from U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's office. When Mr. Fitzgerald learned that the money was being parceled out to Mr. Rezko's lawyers, family and friends, he got Mr. Rezko's bond revoked in January and had him put in jail as a potential flight risk.
In court papers, the prosecutor noted that Mr. Rezko had traveled 26 times to the Middle East between 2002 and 2006, mostly to his native Syria and other countries that lack extradition treaties with the U.S. Curiously, Mr. Auchi has also lent an unknown sum of money to Chris Kelly, who, like Mr. Rezko, was a significant fund-raiser for Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (himself under investigation by a federal grand jury as an alleged beneficiary of the Rezko shakedowns). Mr. Kelly is himself under indictment for obstructing an IRS probe into his activities.
Mr. Obama says he has "no recollection" of meeting Mr. Auchi during a 2004 trip the billionaire made to Chicago, and no one believes he knew of his background. While his name will come up in the trial as a beneficiary of Rezko donations (since donated to charity), Mr. Obama will not be called to testify.
There may be nothing more in Mr. Obama's dealings with Mr. Rezko beyond an "appearance of impropriety." Still, Mr. Obama does have an obligation to explain how he fits into Chicago politics. David Axelrod, Mr. Obama's Karl Rove, is a longtime spoke in the Daley machine that's dominated Chicago for a half century. Gov. Blagojevich, also part of the machine, shared key fund raisers with Mr. Obama.
::::
The Point of Tipping[wsj] : [...] During the second half of the 20th century, the practice of tipping largely retreated from American life. The earliest of tipped workers -- railroad porters -- gave way to flight attendants (the first of whom were registered nurses, whose station was deemed above gratuities). Gone are telegrams, the receipt of which required a tip. Men stopped getting shaved at barbershops -- where one stiffed the barber at one's peril. In June 1903, an unlucky New York streetcar conductor named John Shanno failed to tip his barber, Joseph Ferlanto. "I'll teach you not to forget to tip," Ferlanto screamed, and went all Sweeney Todd on him.
But after decades in which tipping was reserved almost exclusively for waiters, waitresses, hairdressers, cabdrivers and bellhops, the practice has begun to expand again. Typical is a sandwich shop in my neighborhood: Pay with a credit card and the signature slip urges the addition of a gratuity, all for a sack handed over a counter. [...]
When tipping first caught on in the U.S., late in the 19th century, it was the old-world, aristocratic overtones of the practice that drew the most ire. An 1897 editorial in the New York Times declared tipping to be the "vilest of imported vices." The paper lamented not only that "we have men among us servile enough to accept their earnings in this form" but that others were willing "to reward the servility." Joining the chorus against "flunkyism," the Washington Post denounced tipping as "one of the most insidious and one of the most malignant evils" of modern life. Tipping was seen to foster a lord-and-vassal relationship that the prouder professions resisted. Well into the 1910s many bartenders refused gratuities as an insult to their status.
Opposed to vassalage and servility (except to the state, that is), communists have often targeted tipping. When George Orwell arrived in Barcelona in 1936 to fight in Spain's civil war, "almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from an hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy." In fact, one of the best arguments to be found in favor of tipping is that Fidel Castro tried to eradicate it in Cuba. [...]
We Americans see ourselves as generous -- we each want to tip a bit more than the average guy. Thus the actual average creeps ever higher. Not long ago, an 18% restaurant tip was a tad better than the 15% that was expected. Now I don't know anyone who tips less than 20%. Soon we'll feel the need to show our generosity by leaving 25% of the tab.
To resist the custom is to be radically antisocial, like "Mr. Pink," the crook played by Steve Buscemi in "Reservoir Dogs." He doesn't tip "because society says I gotta tip." When a fellow hoodlum avers that waitresses are underpaid, Mr. Pink answers: "She don't make enough money, she can quit."
Generous? No. But economically sound. It's not that we tip waiters because they are paid so little; they are paid so little because they can expect to make up the difference in tips. Starbucks is known for paying relatively well and providing respectable benefits. Yet, without the tip-jar take, the company would have to raise its wages commensurately to maintain the same caliber of employees. Perhaps prices would rise too, but I suspect many would be happy to have the full, unambiguous cost of the transaction up on the board. As things stand, the tip jar subsidizes the company's payroll costs. So when you toss a dollar into the cup, you're really making a donation to Starbucks -- and I can think of needier beneficiaries.
::::
![BBCi: Javascript is not available
on this browser](http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/shared/bsp/hi/services/htmlsyndication/img/synd_js_error_js-inactive.gif")
