Even now, House liberals are strategizing about a final effort to amend the bill extending the Bush tax cut to raise its death tax provision from 35% to 45% and lower its threshold from $5 million to $3.5 million.
William McGurn, in Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday, pointed out that the democrat’s obsessive animosity toward private wealth is not, in fact, an attitude shared by most ordinary Americans, wealthy or non-wealthy. Americans admire achievement and tend to believe people are entitled to enjoy the fruits of their own effort or even of mere good fortune unmolested.
For all the talk about “fairness,” Mr. Obama, Mr. Sanders and their fellow Democrats never really tell us what the magic number for fairness is. Is it 35% of income? 50%? 75%? Though they never commit themselves to an actual number, in each and every case we get the same answer: Taxes should be higher than they are now, for their own sake.
Americans are a more hopeful and less envious people than that. We are now hearing from them. Thus the heart of the tea party’s objections to the Beltway status quo is fundamentally a moral one: that Washington is arrogant about how it takes and spends our money.
The American people understand this. It’s not just tea partiers or those who work on Wall Street. Many years ago, the activist Michael Harrington—he, like Mr. Sanders, a self-declared socialist—wrote about the experience a friend of his had while campaigning in 1972 for George McGovern among the mostly black and Latina workers of New York City’s garment district.
Harrington told his friend that he must have had an easy time selling the candidate, given Mr. McGovern’s proposal for a 100% tax on every dollar over $500,000 of inheritance. This, Harrington thought, must have especially appealed to garment workers laboring for very low pay.
The friend informed Harrington how wrong he was: “Those underpaid women . . . were outraged that the government would confiscate the money they would hand down to their children if they made a million dollars.” No matter how he tried to tell these garment workers how unlikely they ever were to see a million dollars in their lifetimes, they couldn’t get past the idea that the government would take it from them if they did.
The Jerusalem Post, via an interview with an IT professional, provides an expert assessment on who was responsible for creating the Stuxnet virus and a knowledgeable estimate of just how effective it was in shutting down Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
The Stuxnet virus, which has attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities and which Israel is suspected of creating, has set back the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program by two years, a top German computer consultant who was one of the first experts to analyze the program’s code told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
“It will take two years for Iran to get back on track,†Langer said in a telephone interview from his office in Hamburg, Germany. “This was nearly as effective as a military strike, but even better since there are no fatalities and no full-blown war. From a military perspective, this was a huge success.â€
Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nation’s nuclear watchdog, said that Iran had suspended work at its nuclear-field production facilities, likely a result of the Stuxnet virus.
According to Langer, Iran’s best move would be to throw out all of the computers that have been infected by the worm, which he said was the most “advanced and aggressive malware in history.†But, he said, even once all of the computers were thrown out, Iran would have to ensure that computers used by outside contractors were also clean of Stuxnet.
“It is extremely difficult to clean up installations from Stuxnet, and we know that Iran is no good in IT [information technology] security, and they are just beginning to learn what this all means,†he said. “Just to get their systems running again they have to get rid of the virus, and this will take time, and then they need to replace the equipment, and they have to rebuild the centrifuges at Natanz and possibly buy a new turbine for Bushehr.â€
Widespread speculation has named Israel’s Military Intelligence Unit 8200, known for its advanced Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) capabilities, as the possible creator of the software, as well as the United States.
Langer said that in his opinion at least two countries – possibly Israel and the United States – were behind Stuxnet.
Israel has traditionally declined comment on its suspected involvement in the Stuxnet virus, but senior IDF officers recently confirmed that Iran had encountered significant technological difficulties with its centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment facility.
“We can say that it must have taken several years to develop, and we arrived at this conclusion through code analysis, since the code on the control systems is 15,000 lines of code, and this is a huge amount,†Langer said.
“This piece of evidence led us to conclude that this is not by a hacker,†he continued. “It had to be a country, and we can also conclude that even one nation-state would not have been able to do this on its own.â€
Eric Byres, a computer security expert who runs a website called Tofino Security, which provides solutions for industrial companies with Stuxnet-related problems, told the Post on Tuesday that the number of Iranians visiting his site had jumped tremendously in recent weeks – a likely indication that the virus is still causing great disarray at Iranian nuclear facilities.
“What caught our attention was that last year we maybe had one or two people from Iran trying to access the secure areas on our site,†Byres said. “Iran was never on the map for us, and all of a sudden we are now getting massive numbers of people going to our website, and people who we can identify as being from Iran.â€
Tom Roberson discusses the rise and fall of Barack Obama and explains that it’s really pretty simple, the left chose a lightweight as their standard-bearer.
Barack Hussein Obama II was an Illinois state senator of little notice or importance who managed to win election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, where he remained undistinguished. Obama has benefited from staged rhetorical skills dependent on the availability of a teleprompter and the perception that he embodied the culmination of left-wing values in an electable package. As his presidency has progressed, his lack of experience and basic knowledge of the political process have been on full display for all to see. …
Obama was raised around radical progressives and truly believes in their agenda, but as a narcissist, he believes even more in his own infallible abilities. His narcissism makes thin-skinned, unable to handle criticism, unable to admit mistakes, and unwilling to compromise or even admit the existence of a different point of view unless it serves his purposes to do so. …
At the end of the day, President Obama is a politician ill-prepared for the office he holds and desperately seeking help from whoever he feels has an answer to his political problems. He is in a bed of his own making, able to reach out to only like-minded progressives just as clueless on matters of economics and who really believe that a massive dose of their agenda will succeed where it has never succeeded before. Obama was shrewd enough to capitalize on a confluence of events to get elected president, but he is unable to admit that he doesn’t know what to do now that he has the job.
Prior to the midterm elections, Obama enjoyed solid support among his base and managed to unite them to pass progressive legislation in the face of united opposition from Republicans. His base eroded by a disastrous midterm election, Obama now faces questions from progressives whom he has alienated in order to secure a second term. Never mind the fact that the capitulation on his no-tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy pledge masks a massive stimulus package chock-full of progressive goodies.
Having no experience in the politics of triangulation, Obama naturally reaches out to Bill Clinton, the man who wrote the book on political triangulation, to get his tax deal past his own party. However, in a show of political inexperience, Obama allowed Clinton an opportunity to look effective while managing to look equally ineffective on the same stage. This latest public relations failure, combined with Obama’s penchant for pickup basketball, his frequent vacationing, and his expensive tastes, makes the president look both ineffective and uninterested in governing.
Down in Texas, they’d say Obama is all hat and no cattle. The simple explanation is that Obama is an empty suit without the experience to handle the presidency. He has been useful to the left in enacting its agenda, but his incompetence now threatens that utility.
Concerning Wikileaks, Governor Mike Huckabee said: “If we want to keep our nation’s secrets ‘SECRET,’ store them where President Obama stores his college transcripts and birth certificate.”
We knew that already. Federal judge Henry Hudson ruling in the lawsuit brought by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli agrees.
There is nothing in the Constitution granting Congress the power to make you buy health insurance. The case will obviously be appealed to the Supreme Court, and Justice Kennedy will almost certainly be the 5th vote killing Obamacare dead as Fogarty’s goat.
Leaking embarrassing communications from the US government is Julian Assange’s chosen occupation, and it seems only fair for Gawker to turn things around and expose a bit of Mr. Assange’s private life.
It seems that the self-appointed conscience of Western governments, back in 2006, was advertising on an Internet hook-up site called OK Cupid, under the nom-de-guerre “Harry Harrison.”
Assange describes himself as a rebel and a man of mystery, a “Passionate and often pig-headed activist intellectual” seeking someone brave, spunky, but not necessarily formally educated for love,children (!), and the “occasional criminal conspiracy.”
He boasts that he personally directs a “consuming, dangerous human rights project” and advertises that the fortunate lady will encounter a man with a “Nordic appearance” and “unusual presence,” someone so sexually appealing that he is stalked by lascivious Asian teenagers.
Assange’s choice of romantic persona has a lot in common with the self-portrait he has made every effort to purvey to the world’s media. He likes to think of himself as a scientifically-trained, technically skilled man of mystery, a brown-paper-package-bearing crusader mischievously confounding the intelligence directorates of the Great Powers, a modern Captain Nemo avenging humanity’s wrongs through mastery of technology, genius, and audacity.
Julian Assange was looking for erotic non-conformist females aged 22-46, preferably with Third World backgrounds, understandably enough. He seems to have not gotten along terribly well with the girls he dated in Sweden.
Peggy Noonan marvels at Barack Obama’s approach to cheerleading for compromise.
We have not in our lifetimes seen a president in this position. He spent his first year losing the center, which elected him, and his second losing his base, which is supposed to provide his troops. There isn’t much left to lose! Which may explain Tuesday’s press conference.
President Obama was supposed to be announcing an important compromise, as he put it, on tax policy. Normally a president, having agreed with the opposition on something big, would go through certain expected motions. He would laud the specific virtues of the plan, show graciousness toward the negotiators on the other side—graciousness implies that you won—and refer respectfully to potential critics as people who’ll surely come around once they are fully exposed to the deep merits of the plan.
Instead Mr. Obama said, essentially, that he hates the deal he just agreed to, hates the people he made the deal with, and hates even more the people who’ll criticize it. His statement was startling in the breadth of its animosity. Republicans are “hostage takers” who worship a “holy grail” of “tax cuts for the wealthy.” “That seems to be their central economic doctrine.”
As for the left, they ignore his accomplishments and are always looking for “weakness and compromise.” They are “sanctimonious,” “purist,” and just want to “feel good about” themselves. In a difficult world, they cling to their “ideal positions” and constant charges of “betrayals.”
Those not of the left might view all this as straight talk, and much needed. But if you were of the left it would only deepen your anger and sharpen your response. Which it did. “Gettysburg,” “sellout,” “disaster.”
The president must have thought that distancing himself from left and right would make him more attractive to the center. But you get credit for going to the center only if you say the centrist position you’ve just embraced is right. If you suggest, as the president did, that the seemingly moderate plan you agreed to is awful and you’ll try to rescind it in two years, you won’t leave the center thinking, “He’s our guy!” You’ll leave them thinking, “Note to self: Remove Obama in two years.”
This week, Obama seems to have hit the same point-of-no-return in which he is visibly angry with the American people for not supporting his policies that Jimmy Carter did at the time of his “malaise” speech.
Walter Russell Mead argues that the real weak point of American society is its intelligentsia, mired in self-interest and passionately committed to a 19th century world-view. The future is going to pass this clerisy by, but they are certainly putting up a determined fight on behalf of an already discredited ideology..
Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state. The government, guided by credentialed intellectuals with scientific training and values, would lead society through the economic and political perils of the day. An ever more powerful state would play an ever larger role in achieving ever greater degrees of affluence and stability for the population at large, redistributing wealth to provide basic sustenance and justice to the poor. The social mission of intellectuals was to build political support for the development of the new order, to provide enlightened guidance based on rational and scientific thought to policymakers, to administer the state through a merit based civil service, and to train new generations of managers and administrators. The modern corporation was supposed to evolve in a similar way, with business becoming more stable, more predictable and more bureaucratic.
Most American intellectuals today are still shaped by this worldview and genuinely cannot imagine an alternative vision of progress. It is extremely difficult for such people to understand the economic forces that are making this model unsustainable and to see why so many Americans are in rebellion against this kind of state and society – but if our society is going to develop we have to move beyond the ideas and the institutions of twentieth century progressivism. The promises of the administrative state can no longer be kept and its premises no longer hold. The bureaucratic state is too inefficient to provide the needed services at a sustainable cost – and bureaucratic, administrative governments are by nature committed to maintain the status quo at a time when change is needed. For America to move forward, power is going to have to shift from bureaucrats to entrepreneurs, from the state to society and from qualified experts and licensed professionals to the population at large.
Nate Anderson shares a story from a flyers’ forum that occurred in 2009.
I’m in line at Terminal E’s main TSA checkpoint at IAH [Houston’s main airport] and there are two gentlemen about 10-12 spots in front of me in line wearing kilts. No one is actually paying them much extra attention (and I have seen men in kilts before at IAH and other US airports) and we all continue toward the belts/bins… One of the “kilted” men was chosen for a random (as he did not alarm) secondary it seems; they had “placed†him into their magic plexiglass cube of indignity to do the pat down. Here is where it gets funny. I wait by the belt and slowly put my shoes on so I can hear and watch some of the fun.
The TSOgre says immediately, and I quote EXACTLY, “Why you wearin’ a skirt, bro?” The kilted traveler just kind of stood in a stunned silence. The TSOgre proceeds to pat the front and back of the torso down but then stops at the waist and calls a supervisor. Mister pay band F supervisor shows up and the TSA’s finest continue to chat about how to pat down the lower body. The line lackey TSOgre suggested the gentleman raise his kilt (no, I am not kidding…), to which the band F supervisor actually says, “That is not a good ideaâ€. At this point the other kilted man had put his shoes back on and walked away and I had to go as well. When I left the kilted traveler was laughing and in good spirits.
