Connect the Dots

After a two week hiatus Just Thought You Might Like to Know is back in business. Where to start? So much material, so little time.

Let's start with a cultural divide wider than the Grand Canyon-and getting wider all the time. Three things occured over the last 3 days that have flown below the radar but are worth some attention:

• Producer and director Larry David creates a fury with his tasteless scene in his HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm in which he urinates on a picture of Jesus. This hilarity causes a pair of devout women to break into prayer when they spy the offending liquid on the icon's face, thinking it is the tears of Christ.
• A Democratic fundraising video on an Obama political site depicts an American flag being covered in graffiti to make a case for the President's healthcare debacle.
• A young health club owner incurs the wrath of several members by hanging an American flag inside the facility. His staff is forced to deal with a steady stream of complaints from patrons who calls the gesture political. One woman sniffs that owner Marc Shea might just as well have hung Jesus' cross over the treadmills.

There was a time not too long ago in this country when God and country were considered inviolate. No more. We now live in a nation where scatological humor aimed at the Almighty passes for comedy. Where an American president himself thinks nothing of desecrating the flag for political gain. And where a heartfelt patriotic gesture by a young entrepreneur is interpreted as a threat by self-absorbed Generation Y-ers with no appreciation for 230 years of sacrifice symbolized by that flag.

We live in a country controlled by shallow, narcissistic people like Larry David, Barack Obama and a whole generation that fears Islamic terrorism only because a bio-terror attack might screw up their careers.

And we are doomed.

Just thought you might like to know.

The Rush to Illiberalism

Liberals are the first to scream when they think their First Amendment rights are being violated. Witness the disputes over menorahs and creches on courthouse steps, Lawsuits over invocations at public school graduations, and the like.

But what about when they disagree with what's being spoken? Some liberal groups will play it down the middle. The ACLU, for example, will take up the causes of atheists who don't want their children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance because of the "one nation under God" phrase added in 1955. But it will also go to bat for neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan's right to parade in public.

Unfortunately, most liberals are not liberal at all when it comes to free speech. Witness the recent controversy over conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh and his quest to be a part-owner of a National Football League team. Mr. Limbaugh, who was forced off of the syndicate bidding for ownership of the St. Louis Rams, was subject to a muzzling campaign led by the Revs. Jesse "Hymietown" Jackson and Al "Tawana" Sharpton. At issue were a number of comments that Mr. Limbaugh allegedly made on-air that were deemed by these two nonpareils to have been racist.

Only one problem: No one can seem to find these comments that were allegedly racist. There was one comment regarding black quarterbacks, specifically the Philadelphia Eagles' Donovan McNabb, where Mr. Limbaugh stated his opinion that some black quarterbacks like Mr. McNabb, are overrated because they are overhyped by black sportswriters. An opinion.
In point of fact, there are thousands of Monday morning quarterbacks in and around Philadelphia who probably share that opinion (I'm not one of them) every Monday following an Eagles loss.

And Exhibit A to support Mr. Limbaugh's opinion is Drew Sharp of the Detroit Free Press, an African American sportswriter who took up the "get Limbaugh" cudgel on Fox News this week.
This is just the latest in a long line of incidents where the Left refuses to tolerate any dissent from orthodoxy. Mr. Jackson can derogate Jews, and Mr. Sharpton can impugn the integrity of police officers unfairly, and they get a pass. But Mr. Limbaugh--caustic, witty, controversial, but worst of all, conservative-shut him up.

This is just the latest in a disturbing list of recent examples of the Left's intolerance:

• 
  Throughout the summer Americans packed town hall meetings across the country lambasting their congressmen over their profligate spending and the impending $1 billion healthcare transition bill. Liberals from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Pres. Obama himself were dismissive of their concerns, claimed that the dissent was the work of outside agitators, and even questioned their patriotism.
• Fox News finds itself in a war of words with the White House over its unrelenting criticism of the president's policies--from the Stimulus giveaway to nationalization of industry to healthcare. But the agents of the criticism are Fox' commentators-not its news operation. Nevertheless, the president in his full court press to shore up support for his flagging healthcare plan, refused to appear on Fox News Sunday-the only network so treated. Like a petulant child who kept saying no when told by the president to take its medicine, Fox News was punished by the silent treatment. Pres. Obama has decided to limit the information that viewers can receive through Fox News. How is that different that Richard Nixon and his enemies list, or the Iranian mullahs banning Twitter and Facebook? And the White House won't let it go. Communications Director Anita Dunn has compared the White House's relations to Fox to a war. Forget the irony of a communications director advising her client to be non-communicative.
• The latest incident occurred last week when a speaker had his microphone turned off for daring to question global warming cheerleader Al Gore over the inconvenient truth that polar bears may not be threatened by warming polar ice caps after all. See the film below.

You can't make this stuff up. But you have to connect the dots. When you do, you see a pervasive pattern of intolerance, orthodoxy, and enmity towards anyone who disagrees with the Left. Mr. Limbaugh was not the first victim, and sadly, he won't be the last.

Look up liberalism in the dictionary. You'll find that it is Latin meaning suitable for a free man. Liberalism is a belief in an individual's God-given right to be free. And this includes the freedom to speak your mind: to sports fans, to a pompous ex-vice president hypocritically on the cusp of making a personal fortune by promoting some save-the-planet theory, and yes, a sitting rock star president who can't compute that there are people in the world who don't just adore him.

Liberals have, plain and simple, become illiberal. This is not a crowd that tolerates dissent. And that's dangerous.

Just thought you might like to know.

Nobel Politics

We've let several days pass before commenting on Barack Obama's award of the Nobel Peace Prize. We'll leave issues of whether he deserved it or not to the pundits on the left and the right. But what might be more interesting is a look into the politics behind the Nobel committee.

George Friedman offers a nice explanation in this week's Stratfor newsletter. The committee that awards the prize is composed of Norwegian politicians--current and former members of that country's legislature. They are:

• a former Labor Party prime minister
• A former head of the nation's Conservative Party
• a legislator from the Social Democrat Party
• a former lawmaker from the Progress Party
• a current parliamentarian from the Socialist Left Party

So the committee represents the full spectrum of Norwegian politics, as Alfred Nobel hoped it would when he instituted the prize in the 19th century.

The second thing to note about the Nobel Peace Prize is that Pres. Obama's award wasn't the only time the committee shocked the world. Blessed may be the peacemakers, but they don't often win the Nobel prize for it. Some examples:

1. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the greatest American presidents, was awarded the prize in 1906 for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. But TR's motivations were far from altruistic. He believed that the Japanese were developing a hegemony over Asia that would have disastrous consequences for the United States down the road (His prescience was one reason he was such a great president.) So he stepped in to help the Russians cut a deal so they could remain a viable counterweight in the northern Pacific to the Japanese.
2. In the 1970s North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho shared the prize with Dr. Henry Kissinger. Le Duc Tho was a terrorist whose drive to unite North and South Vietnam led him to the murder of 11,000 South Vietnamese civilians--more than three 9-11s.
3. In the 1990s Yasser Arafat shared the prize with Yitzhak Rabin. Arafat was another terrorist who once had the gall to address the United Nations in waving a handgun.

So the award to Pres. Obama is far from the only eye opener in the history of the award.

The problem, as Mr. Friedman writes, is that Nobel gave his endowment very little direction or criteria on who is worthy of the prize. Left to their own devices a representative panel generally makes the award in accordance with the philosophies of a small, somewhat obscure country on the fringe of Northern Europe.

And something tells me Alfred Nobel wanted it that way.

Just thought you might like to know.

The Worst Economy Since the Great Depression

Every time I hear some administration whiz kid parrot that phrase, incorrect as it is, I want to run for my copy of Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies. The administration is big on comparing the current recession with the Depression. We've blogged about this before. President Obama, like most liberals of his generation with an inflated sense of self, wants to make history before he understands history.

As the philosopher Santayana wrote, those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The Federal Reserve, under the chairmanship of Ben Bernanke, has continued a long policy of cheap money--keeping interest rates low on the theory that it will encourage economic expansion and avoid the peril of deflation. The connection between high unemployment and sagging consumer prices in the 1930s has led the Fed to conclude that it can lead the nation out of the current recession by money supply management.

That's all well and good. Monetary policy is one of the Fed's principle roles. But Art Laffer makes the case that taxes were the real demon that doomed the U.S. during the Depression and will destroy what remains of our economy if we allow it.

Most high school history students know how the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff turned a recession into a rout. By enacting the largest peacetime trade tax in the history of the Republic, it forced foreign governments to retaliate and enact their own tariffs against U.S. products.

As the economy further spiraled downward, government tried to make up the shortfall by raising other taxes, accelerating the decline. One thing about Congress in the good old days: As Mr. Laffer pointed out in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, when Congress raised taxes it didn't try to hide it:

• In 1932 the lowest personal income tax rate went from less than half of 1% to 4%
• The top marginal tax rate went from 25% to 63%
• The death tax more than doubled from 20% to 45%
• The gift tax went from 0 to 33.5% with the stroke of a pen

And the economy went from decline to free fall.

Enter FDR, who gets a total pass for his mismanagement of the economy during the Depression. His solution was to administer more of the same toxins that were killing the economy:

• That death tax went from 45% to 60% in 1933
• Not satisfied with that, Roosevelt saw the 60% and raised it 10 more points a year later to 70%
• The gift tax rose to 45 and then to over 52% in losing battle to pay for the New Deal
• By 1936 the highest marginal income tax rate hit 79%--a stunning 216% increase in 4 years!
• Finally, with nothing left to raise, FDR and Congress created a 1% employer and 1% employee tax on all wages up to $3,000

The result: a second economic collapse in 1937.

But wait! There's more! Don't forget about state and local taxes. From 1929 through 1932 they rose from 7% of GDP to 12%--on top of all of the federal tax increases, as documented by Mr. Laffer.

The result was a penury that lasted for another 20 years until 1953 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the unemployment rate (factor out the effects of World War II) finally returned to pre-1930 levels. This is documented in Amity Shlaes study of the Depression, The Forgotten Man.

It is worth noting all this because the current administration has a boundless faith in its own ability to centrally plan, direct and manage the economy. This was the fatal flaw that both a Republican, Herbert Hoover, and a Democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, made. Both were experienced technocrats who thought they could do the thinking for an organic economy that could largely manage itself if left alone.

President Obama and his apparatchiks seem to be making the same mistake. From stimulus packages, to nationalization of key industries to the healthcare takeover he is building a debt that can lead to only one place: higher taxes. In doing so his legacy may be not in restoring the economy through management wizardry, but in making the U.S. a permanent debtor nation.

Just thought you might like to know.

The Real Peacemakers

Here's a trivia question to start off your week: What do John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all have in common?

There are 3 answers to this:

1. They were or are all Democrats
2. They all came to office on a pledge to reduce nuclear weapons with the Russians
3. All failed

What do Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush all have in common?

Again, 3 answers to the question:

1. They were all Republicans
2. They were all pilloried by the mainstream media for being warmongers or bellicose arm chair warriors who refused to make peace with our adversaries
3. All successfully concluded treaties with Moscow:

• Nixon concluded the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty
• Reagan successfully concluded the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (IMF) treaty
• George H.W. Bush gets credit for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)
• George W. Bush signed off on the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty (SORT)

By contrast, the Democrats, who talked the most about nuclear arms reduction, have the least to show for it. Jimmy Carter did negotiate the SALT II treaty, but was forced to withdraw it from Senate consideration after the Soviets big-footed their way into Afghanistan at an inopportune moment. At the same time President Carter was trumpeting his successes at lowering tensions in the world, Soviet panzer divisions were moving out to the Afghan border.

Similarly, Bill Clinton talked a good game when it came to arms reduction, but even his considerable political skill and personal magnetism failed to stop the Senate from rejecting the 1999 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Stephen Rademaker, an arms negotiator under George W. Bush, noted in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece that Democrats fail at the hard work of making peace, as opposed to talking about peace, because by making disarmament the tall pole in their tent they encourage the Russians to overplay their hands at the bargaining table.

"This was a problem for Messrs. Carter and Clinton," writes Mr. Rademaker, "(a)nd it promises to be an even bigger one for Mr. Obama, who comes to office with an arms-control agenda-the abolition of nuclear weapons-far more ambitious than that of any previous administration."

The verification procedures for the START treaty expire in 60 days. President Obama's tactical focus should be getting them renewed. It should not be on using the deadline as an excuse to reopen the treaty to weigh it down with strategic objective that, while laudable, will bog down negotiations and put his administration under the gun for getting a deal done. So says Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana).

Mr. Obama has already agreed to a Russian demand to include not only warheads but delivery systems in the negotiations. That decisions harms the U.S. more than it does the Russians. Right now all the pressure, much of it self-inflicted, is on Pres. Obama-not the Russians-to conclude a deal by the December deadine.

In a little over a week an event that is important in the history of disarmament relations will probably pass without notice in the mainstream media. But it is worth remembering how Ronald Reagan negotiated 23 years with his Soviet counterparts. Rather than be stampeded into a bad deal he walked away from the table, knowing that no deal was better than what the Soviets were offering:

History shows that Pres. Reagan was right to walk away from a bad deal. In doing so he set the stage for several disarmament treaties that benefited both countries.

The clock is ticking. It remains to be seen whether Mr. Obama has the fortitude to walk away from a bad deal, as Ronald Reagan once did, or whether he will capitulate to the left wing of his party and the Russians.

Somehow I think I know the answer.

Just thought you might like to know.