Under pressure from the Obama administration, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began nudging his Cabinet on Sunday toward accepting a multibillion-dollar package of U.S. incentives designed to restart stalled peace talks with Palestinians.
But Netanyahu immediately faced a flood of opposition from conservative politicians and settler groups, who vowed to block the American proposal because it would reimpose building restrictions on West Bank settlements for three months.
After a hotly contested Cabinet meeting, Moshe Yaalon, Israel's vice prime minister, rejected the U.S. offer as a "honey trap" that "will lead us down a slippery slope and into another crisis with the American administration after three months, or perhaps even sooner."
Netanyahu told Cabinet ministers that the terms of the U.S. offer are still being negotiated by the two countries and he pledged to bring it for a vote before the security Cabinet when the details are finalized.
The package, discussed last week between Netanyahu and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during talks in New York, includes 20 stealth fighter jets worth $3 billion and a promise to veto anti-Israel proposals raised in the U.N. Security Council during the next year, including a potential Palestinian bid to seek international support for a unilateral declaration of statehood.
In return, Israel would renew its partial West Bank construction moratorium for 90 days, including units that broke ground after the previous freeze expired in September. Peace Now, an anti-settlement group that tracks construction, said settlers have resumed construction on 1,650 units over the past six weeks.
Video Hat Tip: The Rhetorican.
Should the government do more to "stimulate" the economy? No.
Before fixing a car, it's a good idea to figure out what's not working. If the starter is broken, "step on the gas" is not the right answer. The same is true for the economy.
Why are we in the doldrums? Most answers to this question point to structural, tax and regulation problems. For example, one consequence of 99 weeks of unemployment benefits is that people tend to stay unemployed longer rather than take an unattractive job or move. That may be the right and humane policy, but it also means that unemployment will remain high, no matter how much stimulus we do. Looming healthcare, labor market regulation, and tax and regulatory uncertainty make it even harder for companies to hire. Congress has not even started debating what taxes will be Jan. 1. How can anyone plan?
"Inadequate stimulus" is an unlikely diagnosis for our problems. Banks are sitting on about $1 trillion in reserves, up from $50 billion before the recession. If they don't want to lend the first trillion, is giving them another half-trillion going to make any difference? The Fed did a great job of putting out the fire in the financial crisis. Alas, once the fire is out, more water will not make the house grow back.
More "stimulus" is not free. Additional "fiscal stimulus" -- borrowing and spending -- means higher taxes later on, which could usher in a low-growth lost decade -- or, worse, a calamity if investors decide not to renew loans to the U.S. Plus, it's unlikely that taking money from A and giving it to B makes us all better off anyway. Additional monetary stimulus, along with efforts to devalue the dollar, threaten the whole world financial and trade system.
We need to solve the nation's actual economic problems, most of them created by rampant government-induced uncertainty, rather than papering them over with more "stimulus."
Come join Nancy Pelosi as she shows you around the wild places of her home district. All the sights and sounds of San Francisco, as you’ve never seen them before…with Nancy as your guide!
China is aiming to reshape the global aviation industry with a home-grown jetliner, a direct challenge to the supremacy of Boeing and Airbus, the world's only manufacturers of large commercial aircraft.Actually, we've dealt with such scenarios before, when Americans were concerned with growing Japanese industrial competitiveness in the late-1980s (see, "Beyond Mutual Recrimination: Building a Solid U.S.-Japan Relationship in the. 1990s," and "Do Relative Gains Matter? America's Response to Japanese Industrial Policy"). Back then, the U.S. response was to place export controls on sensitive industrial sectors, especially in aerospace. I can't imagine in just twenty years that kind of realpolitik in economic policy (neo-mercantilism) has been completely repudiated at the top levels of strategic planning. Perhaps Japan was more brazenly competitive, or China's more stealthy now. Either way, concerns for relative gains contributed to restrictions on sensitive technologies, and limits on private sector exports and cooperation in strategic technologies.
The communist government has staked billions of dollars and national pride on the effort. What may surprise some Americans worried about slipping U.S. competitiveness is that some well-known U.S. companies are aiding China in its quest.
That partnership will be on display next week at an air show in southern China with the unveiling of a full-scale mockup of the C919. Slated for production by 2016, the 156-seat, single-aisle passenger plane would have its fuselage emblazoned with Comac, short for the state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China. But inside, the most crucial systems would bear the trademarks of some of the biggest names in Western aviation.
Honeywell International Inc. will supply power units, on-board computing systems, wheels and brakes; Rockwell Collins Inc. will handle navigation systems; GE Aviation is building the avionics; Eaton Corp. is involved with fuel and hydraulics; and Parker Aerospace of Irvine is responsible for flight controls. Powering the aircraft will be two fuel-efficient engines built by CFM International, a company co-owned by GE and French conglomerate Safran.
Global supply chains are common in the aviation industry: Chicago-based Boeing and Europe's Airbus rely on parts makers and assembly operations around the world. But China isn't content just to buy sophisticated gear for the C919; the government has required foreign suppliers to set up joint ventures with Chinese companies.
That has put U.S. and European suppliers in a tough spot: Be willing to hand over advanced technology to Chinese firms that could one day be rivals or miss out on what's likely to be the biggest aviation bonanza of the next half a century. Honeywell alone has snagged contracts worth more than $11 billion for the project.
"You're faced with either being part of it or not," said Billy Lay, a Dubai-based partner at PRTM, an international consulting firm with expertise in aerospace. "I don't know what the alternatives are."
I'll be back to this topic soon. President Obama was just in the news last week with the statement that America's best days were behind us: "Obama Acknowledges Decline of U.S. Dominance." The president is post-American anyway, but the matter's worth paying attention to. As noted, I'm mostly with Joseph Nye above. But extreme levels of deficit and debt, and now with new signs of threatening international economic competition, look to be putting tremendous pressure on the continuation of American world leadership.The United States still leads the world with its scientific clout, armed with highly respected universities and a big war chest of funding, but Europe and Asia are catching up, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Friday.
The U.S. emphasis on biological and medical sciences leaves the fields of physical sciences and engineering open to the competition, the report finds.
"The United States is no longer the Colossus of Science, dominating the research landscape in its production of scientific papers, that it was 30 years ago," the report reads.
"It now shares this realm, on an increasingly equal basis, with the EU27 (the 27 European Union members) and Asia-Pacific," adds the report, available at http://researchanalytics.thomsonreuters.com/grr/.
By the end, I think I was starting to talk like Professor McGonagall. Or maybe Hagrid.And follow the link to see what she learned.
On a dark, stormy Thursday in late October, in anticipation of the opening of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I" I watched all six "Harry Potter" movies back to back. A stunt, to be sure, but in my line of work there aren't too many opportunities for such things, and I've always wanted to be able to say that I do my own stunt work. I told some people of this plan and noted that the responses fell neatly into two categories: "Oh, that sounds like so much fun!" and (I'm quoting directly here) "You are insane, lady."
The Potterthon at my house began at approximately 7:45 a.m. (when the sunrise would have been, if there had been one, which seemed perfectly Potteresque) and ended roughly 15 hours later, a little before 11 p.m. I watched every minute of every movie — not even fast-forwarding the dull parts in the last hour of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" — except for the end credits, which weren't legible on my TV screen and which would have added at least another hour to the viewing total (they last about 10-15 minutes per movie). Meals were eaten in front of the screen; breaks between movies were no more than 10 minutes. All this struck me as a feat quite worthy of Gryffindor; delightful as the experience was, only the brave — or the heroically foolish, or at least those possessed of comfortable chairs — should attempt six movies in a row.
And what did I learn from the Potterthon? Various random musings, as follows...
RELATED: On the gay suicide media myth: "The 'Suicide Crisis' in the Gay Teen Community."
Myanmar, led by a secretive military junta regarded as one of the most oppressive in the world, is holding a closely watched—and controversial— election on Nov. 7. The government says the vote is part of a "road map to democracy" that will replace generals with civilian leaders and give the public more say in public affairs than at any time in decades.There's also an interactive information feature at the link.
But during a five-day visit to the country recently, across two of Myanmar's biggest cities, the only evidence this reporter saw of the election race was a small campaign poster for an obscure ethnic party hanging on a shopkeeper's wall in a muddy and trash-strewn Yangon outdoor market. Government television stations and newspapers featured some coverage, but it was heavily censored. It included a series of 15-minute segments in which party candidates sat at desks passively reading policy statements approved by government minders.
To the extent anyone discussed the election, it was mainly in the form of quiet whispers in tea houses or in private residences. Locals say there are small gatherings of candidates and voters. The exiled media have reported that campaign signs, mostly for the government-backed parties, appear here and there.
Some were impressed when the largest opposition party, the National Democratic Force, did take out a full-page advertisement in a private newspaper. The simple ad showed the party's logo, a bamboo hat and a giant black check mark. In small type, it reads: "The Hope for Democracy: NDF for the People."
Strict election rules make it tough to do more. Candidates are barred from chanting, marching, or saying anything at political events that could tarnish the state's image. To register to run, they have to pay $500, a huge sum for average Myanmar citizens. Those restrictions—and the government's detention of more than 2,000 critics in prison, according to human-rights groups—have left some candidates unable or reluctant to do more than quietly ask friends and allies for support.
Three days after the midterm elections, senior Obama aides suggested to a gathering of liberal groups at the White House that they might need to scale back their expectations. In the wake of the big Republican win, there would be no new major legislative pushes from President Obama in 2011.
The mood, according to some participants at the meeting, was dour. Although the White House advisors said job creation would be a central goal, they did not lay out a concrete plan for putting more people to work. "There was an undercurrent of, 'Hey, folks. We're going to have to play some defense,'" said one attendee.
Since then, the sense of a president in a crouch has only deepened. Obama was unable to seal a long-anticipated free trade agreement with South Korea during his trip to Asia and was the odd man out at the Group of 20 summit over global economic strategy, where preferences for belt-tightening policies predominate.
When he returns to Washington, he faces an energized Republican opposition. The first issue will be whether to extend George W. Bush-era tax cuts, and Obama is already showing a willingness to compromise on his long-held position that the cuts should expire for families making more than $250,000 a year.
At a news conference Friday in Seoul, Obama bristled at reports that he was caving in to Republican pressure.
"It would be fiscally irresponsible for us to permanently extend the high-income tax cuts," he said. "I think that would be a mistake, particularly when we've got our Republican friends saying that their No. 1 priority is making sure that we deal with our debt and our deficit."
He added, though, that there "may be a whole host of ways to compromise around those issues."
President Obama must decide now how he wants to govern in the two years leading up to the 2012 presidential election.More commentary from Another Black Conservative and Allahpundit.
In recent days, he has offered differing visions of how he might approach the country's problems. At one point, he spoke of the need for "mid-course corrections." At another, he expressed a desire to take ideas from both sides of the aisle. And before this month's midterm elections, he said he believed that the next two years would involve "hand-to-hand combat" with Republicans, whom he also referred to as "enemies."
It is clear that the president is still trying to reach a resolution in his own mind as to what he should do and how he should do it.
This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.
To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012.
If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose.
We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party. The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.
The best way for him to address both our national challenges and the serious threats to his credibility and stature is to make clear that, for the next two years, he will focus exclusively on the problems we face as Americans, rather than the politics of the moment - or of the 2012 campaign.
Quite simply, given our political divisions and economic problems, governing and campaigning have become incompatible. Obama can and should dispense with the pollsters, the advisers, the consultants and the strategists who dissect all decisions and judgments in terms of their impact on the president's political prospects.
Obama himself once said to Diane Sawyer: "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." He now has the chance to deliver on that idea.
The Brecht Forum website is here. These are some really, really bad people.
No sooner had the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared his principled stand in support of Israel and against anti-Jew bigotry – even at the expense of his country’s seat on the Security Council of the Club of Terror – than he was venomously attacked by... Jews. Specifically, those obnoxious Finklers, the ‘Independent Jewish Voices’ – part of that broader coalition of hatred which should surely be called Jews for Injustice Against Jews.According to these individuals, rising Jew-hatred is but a figment of Prime Minister Harper’s imagination; any such claim is merely a device to shut down freedom of speech. Quite why the Canadian Prime Minister should wish to shut down freedom of speech, and for a cause to which he has no obvious endemic affinity, and on behalf of such a cause furthermore to court such ostracism in the highest councils of the world community, is of course a mystery explicable only to the Jews for Injustice Against Jews in their parallel universe of pathological moral inversion.
The rest of us look on aghast at the intimidation and racial bullying being directed against Jewish students on campus, for example, which was specifically referred to by Harper – in the US it’s producing this kind of thing, or this at Brandeis – but to which the JfIAJ are of course wholly oblivious because they are signed up to the culture that is producing it.
They also unleashed their venom against Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu during a speech in New Orleans a few days ago, when a bunch of them heckled him over building for Jewish households in East Jerusalem.
Netanyahu accused the protesters of joining those who believe ‘Israel is guilty until proven guilty’. ‘The greatest success of our detractors is when Jews start believing that themselves. We've seen that today,’ he told the assembly of Jewish Federations of North America.
... The hecklers were members of the Young Leadership Institute of Jewish Voice. Rae Abileah, a 28-year-old protester from San Francisco, shouted ‘the settlements betray Jewish values’.
On the contrary: Jewish values embody justice and truth. Along with the rest of the JfIAJ, people like Rae Abileah stand for injustice and lies – and one of the biggest lies is to egregiously misrepresent the Jewish values they presume to appropriate.
What makes these Jews for Injustice Against Jews such an appalling phenomenon is not that they ‘criticise’ Israel. That happens in spades every day within Israel itself. No, it’s that they flatly deny Jewish victimisation and find only malign intent in Israel’s every action. They thus turn Israel into some kind of cosmic evil, uniquely malign and thus deserving of a unique censure – which they certainly do not mete out to the tyrannies of the region or anywhere else. They effectively depict Israel as standing outside the bounds of humanity itself. And that is classic Jew-hatred.
More at the link.
More at the link.To remain free, free societies must shed our politically correct shackles and address this growing menace to everything we hold dear.
*****This week we learned that Nazareth is an al-Qaida hub. Sheikh Nazem Abu Salim Sahfe, the Israeli imam of the Shihab al-Din mosque in the city, was indicted on Sunday for promoting and recruiting for global jihad and calling on his followers to harm non-Muslims.
Among the other plots born of Sahfe's sermons was the murder of cab driver Yefim Weinstein last November. Sahfe's followers also plotted to assassinate Pope Benedict XVI during his trip to Israel last year. They torched Christian tour buses. They abducted and stabbed a pizza delivery man. Two of his disciples were arrested in Kenya en route to joining al-Qaida forces in Somalia.
With his indictment, Sahfe joins a growing list of jihadists born and bred in Israel and in free societies around the world who have rejected their societies and embraced the cause of Islamic global domination. The most prominent member of this group today is the American-born al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki.
US authorities describe Awlaki as the world's most dangerous man. His jihadist track record is staggering. It seems that there has been no major attack in the US or Britain - including the September 11 attacks and the July 7 attacks in London - in which Awlaki has not played a role.
Sahfe and Awlaki, like nearly all the prominent jihadists in the West, are men of privilege. Their personal histories are a refutation of the popular Western tale that jihad is born of frustration, poverty and ignorance. Both men, like almost every prominent Western jihadist, are university graduates.
So, too, their stories belie the Western fantasy that adherence to the cause of jihad is spawned by poverty. These men and their colleagues are the sons of wealthy or comfortable middle class families. They have never known privation.
Armed with their material comforts, university degrees and native knowledge of the ways of democracy and the habits of freedom, these men chose to become jihadists. They chose submission to Islam over liberal democratic rights because that is what they prefer. They are idealists.
This means that all the standard Western pabulums about the need to expand welfare benefits for Muslims or abstain from enforcing the laws against their communities, or give mosques immunity from surveillance and closure, or seek to co-opt jihadist leaders by treating them like credible Muslim voices, are wrong and counterproductive. These programs do not neutralize their supremacist intentions or actions. They embolden the Western Islamic supremacists by signaling to them that they are winning. Their Western societies are no match for them.
There is no wrath more obnoxious yet powerful than that of an annoying white woman with time to spare. Evidence: This video of a woman verbally abusing a USPS worker and, ultimately, calling him a racial epithet.
The merger of Newsweek magazine and the Daily Beast website, which seemed to have fallen apart three weeks ago, is back on. The deal, announced Friday by The Daily Beast, is a little like a May-December marriage:The merger makes sense to me, although I'm wondering how these folks are going to make money.
The 77-year-old Newsweek, recently purchased for a dollar by audio pioneer Sidney Harman, gets an infusion of energy and immediacy from the 2-year-old Beast and its irrepressible editor and co-founder Tina Brown.
The Daily Beast, part of media mogul Barry Diller's InterActive Corp., gets the gravitas, reach and stable platform of an old, though fading, media icon. Harman and Diller will co-own the new Newsweek Daily Beast Co.
And Brown, a journalistic trophy if ever there was one, will be editor-in-chief of both. She will become the first female editor of Newsweek.
In an interview Friday with National Public Radio, Brown said the Daily Beast will become the digital operation of Newsweek, while Newsweek will continue as a weekly newsmagazine.
"It means that the Daily Beast's terrific young vibrant team who've created this front line of news and adrenaline of the site, can also take that energy and have a different rhythm when they're producing magazine articles."
The only cloud on this rosy horizon: Neither is profitable. Advertisers have fled Newsweek, and circulation is down to about 1.5 million worldwide, from 3.1 million in 2007.
The symbolic price of $1 came with substantial debt; Newsweek's 2010 operating loss is expected to be $20 million, according to The Daily Beast, which aggressively covered the sale and in August published a leaked copy of the memorandum circulated to potential Newsweek buyers by its owner the Washington Post Co.
The future of Newsweek, said the Daily Beast at the time, "will depend on finding a near-genius editor and an inspired publisher and on their freedom and shared approach, as well as on their bankroll."
Diller, who owns about 30 websites, will not disclose how much the Daily Beast has cost him, but has said the site is working on generating premium rates from high-end advertisers who are unaccustomed to paying print-like prices on the Web.
To witness Keith Olbermann - the most opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts - suspended even briefly last week for making financial contributions to Democratic political candidates seemed like a whimsical, arcane holdover from a long-gone era of television journalism when the networks considered the collection and dissemination of substantive and unbiased news to be a public trust.More at the link.
Back then, a policy against political contributions would have aimed to avoid even the appearance of partisanship. But today, when Olbermann draws more than 1 million like-minded viewers to his program every night precisely because he is avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously partisan, it is not clear what misdemeanor his donations constituted. Consistency?
We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.
The commercial success of both MSNBC and Fox News is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's oft-quoted observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.
And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.
I recall a Washington meeting many years later at which Michael Eisner, then the chief executive of Disney, ABC's parent company, took questions from a group of ABC News correspondents and compared our status in the corporate structure to that of the Disney artists who create the company's world-famous cartoons. (He clearly and sincerely intended the analogy to flatter us.) Even they, Eisner pointed out, were expected to make budget cuts; we would have to do the same.
I mentioned several names to Eisner and asked if he recognized any. He did not. They were, I said, ABC correspondents and cameramen who had been killed or wounded while on assignment. While appreciating the enormous talent of the corporation's cartoonists, I pointed out that working on a television crew, covering wars, revolutions and natural disasters, was different. The suggestion was not well received.
The parent companies of all three networks would ultimately find a common way of dealing with the risk and expense inherent in operating news bureaus around the world: They would eliminate them. Peter Jennings and I, who joined ABC News within a year of each other in the early 1960s, were profoundly influenced by our years as foreign correspondents. When we became the anchors and managing editors of our respective programs, we tried to make sure foreign news remained a major ingredient. It was a struggle.
And at Science, "How Cats Lap: Water Uptake by Felis catus."
Animals have developed a range of drinking strategies depending on physiological and environmental constraints. Vertebrates with incomplete cheeks use their tongue to drink; the most common example is the lapping of cats and dogs. We show that the domestic cat (Felis catus) laps by a subtle mechanism based on water adhesion to the dorsal side of the tongue. A combined experimental and theoretical analysis reveals that Felis catus exploits fluid inertia to defeat gravity and pull liquid into the mouth. This competition between inertia and gravity sets the lapping frequency and yields a prediction for the dependence of frequency on animal mass. Measurements of lapping frequency across the family Felidae support this prediction, which suggests that the lapping mechanism is conserved among felines.
"Unstoppable" is as good as its name. A runaway train drama that never slows down, it fashions familiarity into a virtue and shows why old-school professionalism never goes out of style.RTWT.
With action auteur Tony Scott directing, "Unstoppable" certainly features a lot that we've seen before, from its vehicle-from-hell format to its venerable advertising line: "1,000,000 Tons, 100,000 Lives, 100 Minutes." Yes, they still do make them that way.
This is also the second straight Scott film (after the underappreciated "The Taking of Pelham 123") involving a train and the sixth of his career to star Denzel Washington, here sharing the screen with "Star Trek's" Chris Pine and one very out of control locomotive. But while continually doing the same kind of movie might anesthetize some directors, it energizes Scott, who has gotten better and better at building and sustaining traditional kinds of tension.
More at the link.For now: Extend the Bush tax cuts, repeal ObamaCare, support free trade. After 2012: Enact a flat tax, stabilize prices, balance the budget, give politicians incentive pay.
*****
Since its cyclical zenith in December 2007, U.S. economic production has been on its worst trajectory since the Great Depression. Massive stimulus spending and unprecedented monetary easing haven't helped, and yet the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve still cling to the book of Keynes. It's an approach ill-suited to solving the growth problem that the United States has today.
The solution can be found in the price theory section of any economics textbook. It's basic supply and demand. Employment is low because the incentives for workers to work are too small, and the incentives not to work too high. Workers' net wages are down, so the supply of labor is limited. Meanwhile, demand for labor is also down since employers consider the costs of employing new workers—wages, health care and more—to be greater today than the benefits.
Firms choose whether to hire based on the total cost of employing workers, including all federal, state and local income taxes; all payroll, sales and property taxes; regulatory costs; record-keeping costs; the costs of maintaining health and safety standards; and the costs of insurance for health care, class action lawsuits, and workers compensation. In addition, gross wages are often inflated by the power of unions and legislative restrictions such as "buy American" provisions and the minimum wage. Gross wages also include all future benefits to workers in the form of retirement plans.
For a worker to be attractive, that worker must be productive enough to cover all those costs plus leave room for some profit and the costs of running an enterprise. Being in business isn't easy, and today not enough workers qualify to be hired.
But workers don't focus on how much it costs a firm to employ them. Workers care about how much they receive and can spend after taxes. For them, the question is how the wages they'd receive for working compare to what they'd receive (from the government) if they didn't work, plus the value of their leisure from not working.
The problem is that the government has driven a massive wedge between the wages paid by firms and the wages received by workers. To make work and employment attractive again, this government wedge has to shrink. This can happen over the next two years, even with a Democratic majority in the Senate and President Obama in the White House, through the following measures...
Sorry Lisa but I can't respect your analysis of Objectivism until you read more of Ayn Rand's books.Lisa says she's able to form an intelligent opinion based on Ayn Rand's Wikipedia entries and her television interviews, including this one with Mike Wallace:
Lisa's response at her own blog is here: "Dave Swindle Accused Me of Fervent Anti-Intellectualism?"
Jeremy Spreitzer probably wouldn't read this story if it weren't about him.More at the link. (And food for thought, in any case, especially for armchair intellectuals who don't read the books they're claiming to criticize.)
He is an aliterate -- someone who can read, but chooses not to.
A graduate student in public affairs at Park University in Kansas City, Mo., Spreitzer, 25, gleans most of his news from TV. He skims required texts, draws themes from dust jackets and, when he absolutely, positively has to read something, reaches for the audiobook.
"I am fairly lazy when it comes to certain tasks," says Spreitzer, a long-distance runner who hopes to compete in the 2004 Olympics. "Reading is one of them."
As he grows older, Spreitzer finds he has less time to read. And less inclination. In fact, he says, if he weren't in school, he probably wouldn't read at all.
He's not alone. According to the survey firm NDP Group -- which tracked the everyday habits of thousands of people through the 1990s -- this country is reading printed versions of books, magazines and newspapers less and less. In 1991, more than half of all Americans read a half-hour or more every day. By 1999, that had dropped to 45 percent.
A 1999 Gallup Poll found that only 7 percent of Americans were voracious readers, reading more than a book a week, while some 59 percent said they had read fewer than 10 books in the previous year. Though book clubs seem popular now, only 6 percent of those who read belong to one. The number of people who don't read at all, the poll concluded, has been rising for the past 20 years.
The reports on changes in reading cut to the quick of American culture. We pride ourselves on being a largely literate First World country while at the same time we rush to build a visually powerful environment in which reading is not required.
The results are inevitable. Aliteracy is all around. Just ask:
• Internet developers. At the Terra Lycos portal design lab in Waltham, Mass., researcher William Albert has noticed that the human guinea pigs in his focus groups are too impatient to read much. When people look up information on the Internet today, Albert explains, they are "basically scanning. There's very little actual comprehension that's going on." People, Albert adds, prefer to get info in short bursts, with bullets, rather than in large blocks of text.
• Transportation gurus. Chandra Clayton, who oversees the design of road signs and signals for the Virginia Department of Transportation, says, "Symbols can quickly give you a message that might take too long to read in text." The department is using logos and symbols more and more. When it comes to highway safety and getting lifesaving information quickly, she adds, "a picture is worth a thousand words."
• Packaging designers. "People don't take the time to read anything," explains Jim Peters, editor of BrandPackaging magazine. "Marketers and packagers are giving them colors and shapes as ways of communicating." For effective marketing, Peters says, "researchers tell us that the hierarchy is colors, shapes, icons and, dead last, words."
Some of this shift away from words -- and toward images -- can be attributed to our ever-growing multilingual population. But for many people, reading is passe or impractical or, like, so totally unnecessary in this day and age.
To Jim Trelease, author of "The Read-Aloud Handbook," this trend away from the written word is more than worrisome. It's wicked. It's tearing apart our culture. People who have stopped reading, he says, "base their future decisions on what they used to know.
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P.S. Love the Dead Kennedys! Thought it was very cool you knew the lyrics to California Uber Alles when you were talking about Jerry Brown in class on Tuesday!
I don't know if that the kind of teaching excellence that Presdient Oakley is looking for, but that's cool my brief discussion of "California Über Alles" went over well with the students.
I would be a liar and an idiot if I didn’t thank Sarah Palin for helping me get here tonight. My partial resemblance and her crazy voice are the two luckiest things that have ever happened to me.
There's a burka-clad Riot Grrrl who scribbles Patti Smith lyrics on her wall and puts forward the notion that a woman doesn't necessarily need to make her face visible to qualify as an outspoken feminist. Another electric guitar-playing skateboarder character tests the limits of his faith by chugging beer and declaring, "I'm not big on the 'Islam is one way' approach."I'll believe it when I hear denunciations of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Taqwacores generally reject specific tenets of Koranic dogma: that homosexuality is a sin, that masturbation amounts to "self-harm" and that a man is justified in beating his wife to discipline her.
But outside of mashing-up of punk with Islam, "The Taqwacores" presents compelling ideas about how modern Muslims worship in this country. The film presents Islam as a dynamic faith that's endlessly argued and debated — and in one case, straight-up revised when a character crosses out a verse in the Koran — to fit unruly American lives in the post- 9/11 world.
"The point of the film was to portray Muslims in this whole new way," the director explained. "There's a notion that Muslims are zombies; they only regurgitate what they're told by the leaders of their community. But there's a huge spectrum. We're showing an extreme of it."
And here's this from WaPo:
Democratic activists Thursday sharply criticized White House officials after a published report indicated that President Obama is likely to back a temporary extension of tax cuts for households with income over $250,000 a year.
In an interview with the Huffington Post, top Obama adviser David Axelrod said: "We have to deal with the world as we find it," in noting that the White House might compromise with the GOP on the issue. He said that White House officials have long opposed a permanent extension of the tax cuts on upper-income Americans. However, Obama aides also have repeatedly said that they have not ruled out backing a temporary extension of those cuts as part of a compromise with Republicans.
Both parties want to keep the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 for households with income below $250,000 a year. But the GOP wants all the cuts extended permanently, while Obama says the cuts for income over $250,000 do little to improve the economy and would increase the deficit.
Liberal groups cast Axelrod's comments as official capitulation on the issue, even as White House aides emphasized that his position was not new.
"Sign our petition telling President Obama that Americans want him to fight the Bush tax cuts for millionaires - and that Democrats will keep losing if he keeps caving," the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, a liberal group, told its members in an e-mail.
Republicans said that they still want to make all the tax cuts permanent, including those for income over $250,000 a year. In response to the controversy, Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio), said that Republicans hoped the White House would "show leadership by convincing Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi to stop these tax hikes permanently in the upcoming lame-duck session."
The nation's elite fighting force celebrates its 235th birthday on November 10th, 2010. Since the inception of the Marine Corps in 1775, thousands of brave men and women have answered a call to serve our country and protect its freedom.
And at Hardin County News-Enterprise, "America's Veterans Deserve Our Honor and Praise":
Today is Veterans Day, the holiday that honors military veterans for their service to the nation.RELATED: At NYT (of all places), "Communities Embrace Veterans of Vietnam War." And more Veterans Day stories at the link.
The tradition of setting aside a day to remember veterans dates back to the first World War. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the “war to end all wars” came to an end. Since that time, America has designated one day a year to honor those who strive to ensure the liberty the founding fathers sought to establish in a fledgling nation.
Throughout history, our veterans have endured numerous hardships – altered lifestyles, separation from family and friends, trepidation of war. All made sacrifices so that we could enjoy the freedoms we have today. Whether the nation is at war or peace, the contributions of veterans cannot, and must not, be forgotten.
Today, all across the nation, grateful Americans will celebrate and pay tribute to the men and women in uniform, and rightfully so. Residents will fly flags, play patriotic songs, march in parades and detail through countless speeches the heroic deeds of veterans who have given their all to defend freedom and democracy.
