It’s becoming a little tiresome having to defend obnoxious racists and the terminally stupid, but freedom of speech is freedom of speech and Britain is still slipping away from its commitment to the principle. As such, many who should be spending our time publicly condemning the dregs of society are instead defending them in court. The Associated Press reports that:
A British judge has jailed a woman whose racist tirade toward fellow subway riders went viral on YouTube.
Jacqueline Woodhouse, 42, boarded the subway drunk on the evening of Jan. 23 and began berating her fellow passengers with a profanity-filled, racist verbal assault.
A seven-minute video of it was uploaded to YouTube and viewed more than 200,000 times.
Judge Michael Snow sentenced Woodhouse to 21 weeks in jail on Tuesday in London, saying that anyone hearing her “grossly offensive” language would feel a “deep sense of shame.”
Woodhouse – who had turned herself in to police after the footage began to circulate – had pleaded guilty to one count of causing racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress by using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior.
Let’s be clear: Jacqueline Woodhouse is a terrible human being by any civilized standard, and right-thinking people who watched the video of her xenophobic tirade when it was doing the rounds last year were quite rightly appalled by her behavior. They did not need the law to instruct them to be so.
But, contra the implications of Judge Michael Snow’s judgment, those who behave shamefully should not necessarily wind up in prison for it. For all her incivility, Woodhouse doesn’t actually do anything more than shout. Naturally, we can agree with the authorities that anyone hearing her ”grossly offensive” language would feel a “deep sense of shame,” but it’s a real jump to conclude that the consequence of this should be government-sanctioned incarceration. Indeed, if Britons generally ended up in jail for behaving shamefully, most main streets in most major towns would be empty on Friday and Saturday nights.
At a stretch, one might have understood if Woodhouse had been arrested for her vague promise to punch a fellow traveller in the face — although review of the tape would have rendered the threat hollow — or for her drunk and disorderly conduct. But she wasn’t. Instead, as is now usual in such cases in Britain, she was arrested and imprisoned for the dangerously vague crime of “racially aggravated, intentional harassment to cause alarm or distress.” As I argued recently on NRO, this is a grave mistake. One man’s alarm is another’s amusement and distress is in the mind of the beholder.
We cannot maintain a free society with rigorous speech protections if we allow such subjective judgements as “alarm” and “distress” to determine what is and what is not acceptable. This is why lines have traditionally been drawn at incitement to “violence” and, better still, at actual violence itself. Former Canadian MP Stockwell Day once wrote, “I believe in freedom of speech, but I believe we should also have the right to comment on freedom of speech.” The two propositions are not antagonistic. Jacqueline Woodhouse has been roundly condemned and was fired by her employer after the video of her behavior went viral. As is so often the case, the government need never have become involved at all.
At this point, I suspect that Trump no longer believes in the Birther nonsense himself, and the only reason he keeps talking about it is to increase his publicity.
In the course of an article for TNR on the increasingly threatening euro-zone crisis, William Galston argues in favor of insulting Germany (although he doesn’t mean it that way):
Until now, the ability of the United States to influence Eurozone policy has been modest, and many of our efforts to do so have produced resentment. So what is President Obama to do? If he believes, as I think he should, that the global economy, U.S. economy, and his own electoral prospects all hang in the balance, then he should call Merkel and propose a quick summit between the two leaders and their respective economic teams. He should come armed with a menu of concrete steps that the United States and major international institutions would be willing to take if Germany were to change course. He should appeal to Germany’s self-interest as the major beneficiary of the expanded export market the Eurozone has created. He should remind Merkel of the sacrifices that the United States made over many decades to help build a Europe that is free, whole, and united. And he should make it clear in private, and announce in public, that from the American standpoint, what touches all concerns all: Chancellor Merkel is not free to proceed as though the current crisis affects only Germany (or Europe) and the rest of the world has no legitimate say in the outcome.
I take the point (who could not?) about the sacrifices that the United States has made in the interests of helping build a Europe that is “free, whole, and united.” The problem is that perpetuating the euro in its current form may well shrink Europe’s democracy, increase its divisions and put on a brake on its prosperity. As such it risks reversing a great deal of what those American sacrifices have wrought.
Curiously, Mr. Galston has nothing to say about the hundreds of billions that Germany has poured into the EU over, to borrow his phrase on the duration of American generosity, “many decades” (stingy is not something the Germans have been). Nor does he seem too bothered about paying much attention to the opinions of German voters. In that latter respect, he has a great deal in common with those who assembled the single currency. That’s not a good thing.
There’s also the little matter of the German constitution (a real obstacle to some of the proposed euro-zone remedies) to consider. Or is that to count for next to nothing too?
That’s not to say that there’s nothing (more) that Germany could be doing, or should be doing, but subjecting itself to the sort of lecture that Mr. Galston envisions is not one of them.
Mitt Romney may be affluent, but he doesn’t see any reason to believe that makes him out-of-touch with the concerns of less wealthy Americans.
“We don’t say, oh, boy, this person won the lottery and therefore they can’t understand me or — we instead look at people and celebrate their success and their achievement and we look for people who have the skills we think will make our lives better,” Romney told Fox News Channel’s America’s Newsroom in an interview set to air tomorrow morning.
Asked about what he was like a boss, Romney rejected the idea that he had viewed himself that way.
“I didn’t see myself as a boss,” he responded. “I saw myself as someone that would help organize extraordinary people. And the people that worked at the firm I worked in were exceptionally bright, highly motivated with extraordinary insights, a number of them better than I on a series of dimensions.”
“And I wasn’t always the highest compensated,” he added. “I was the guy that set the compensation, but I paid other people more than I paid myself because I thought they were doing a better job.”
Conservative favorite John Bolton endorsed Wendy Long today in the battle to face New York’s Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
Today, I am proud to endorse Wendy Long for United States Senate. In an era when many candidates are lacking in the credentials needed for higher office, Wendy Long is superbly qualified to represent New York in the U.S. Senate. Wendy has served on the staff of two Senators and has also clerked for a Justice of the Supreme Court. She understands the workings of both the judicial and legislative branches of our government and has put that knowledge to work for the executive branch in her effort to ensure the Senate confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito to the Supreme Court.
Former mayor Rudy Giuliani endorsed Bob Turner last week, and as of the most recent polling, the race between Turner and Long remains close. Unfortunately for both candidates, Senator Gillibrand holds a lead of over 30 points against them in potential matchups.
Daniel, thanks for a great poll. Since I come from a military family, I naturally found it irresistible, and figured I’d put it up on the Corner to see if it grabbed any comments over the loveliest and laziest weekend of the year. Right now I see it’s the Komment King, so mission accomplished.
Thanks to everyone who wrote in with their two cents, including those who felt I slighted Robert E. Lee. Although raised in the West, I am in fact a native southerner, so please don’t attribute any innate Yankee bias to me (my New England parentage notwithstanding).
Anyway, to recap, my top three are Grant, Eisenhower, and Patton, with Winfield Scott coming up fast on the outside. Although MacArthur at Inchon was pretty damn good . . .
Here’s an amusing story that has gone almost entirely unnoticed:
If you happen to be on 16th Street in D.C., you might catch some “informational picketing” going on outside the headquarters of the National Education Association. The NEA, which represents 3.2 million public schoolteachers and support personnel, higher education faculty and staff, retired educators, and students preparing to teach, is the largest labor union in the country.
The protesters? They’re from the NEA Staff Organization, the NEA’s in-house labor union representing just over 400 NEA employees.
That’s right. It’s a union picketing a union.
The source of the current brouhaha is the ongoing struggle to hammer out a new three-year contract for the NEA’s headquarters staff, whose current contract will expire at the end of the month. Sara Robertson, spokesman for the NEASO Communications Committee declined to comment on specifics while negotiations continue, but there is good reason to believe that seniority is a crucial issue.
Kathryn, thanks much for linking Live Action’s latest video (and thank God for Lila Rose and her Live Action team). Watching the Planned Parenthood worker casually laugh and scheme to figure out the most convenient and cheapest way to kill a baby girl, I’m reminded of the naïveté of my earlier years. “When the Left sees ‘choice’ colliding head-on with sexism and other forms of discrimination,” I thought “then it will wake up to the evil of abortion.”
I underestimated the overwhelming ideological power of the sexual revolution. If a “right” to free contraceptives can trump centuries of hard-fought legal and moral arguments for the right of conscience, and the “right” to pay a doctor to kill your child trumps any conceivable nondiscrimination regime, I guess for the Left sexual liberty is now truly our first liberty. But what a stunning con job. Is it really the case that feminists have labored for generations to produce an abortion-on-demand regime that not only gives hedonistic men the great gift of sex without responsibility but also disproportionately produces ever-greater numbers of these healthy (no disabled kids, please) men? As Ian pointed out, sex-selective abortion is altering “the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that 50 years of feminist activism has created a culture that a half-conscious team of drunken frat boys could brainstorm in five minutes.
Last week, my collegue Eileen Norcross produced a chart that underlies a very scary unreported threat for many municipal budgets around the country. In this particular case, the chart showcases the Warwick, R.I.’s municipal budget (excluding the school budget) carved up according to current costs for funding the town’s pension benefits, other post-employment benefits (OPEB), current-employee health-care costs and general-obligation bond payment. The figures come from official budget documents.
What is different about her chart, however, is that it shows the additional amount needed to fully fund pensions based on the risk-free discount rate, rather than the lala land rate usually used for these calculations.
The main message is that if Warwick wasn’t engaging in discount-rate gimmicks (Warwick followed the state in assuming returns at 7.5 percent –down from 8.5 percent — rather than the much lower rate that most economists would recommend) and other actuarial tricks, 75 percent of the town’s budget should be dedicated to health-care and pension spending. This caused quite a stir because her data shows that the city of Warwick doesn’t account for about 25 percent of their pension costs and they omit to contribute another 11 percent for some of the health-care benefits for retiree public employees.
The next act of Greece’s financial tragedy looks like it’s coming. Whether or not Greece exits the euro zone immediately after its June 17 elections, most analysts now predict it’s only a matter of time until it does so.
Recriminations are being hurled in all directions with Greeks blaming the European Union for abandoning them while more and more EU officials say the Greeks should look in the mirror.
International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde put it bluntly on Friday, telling Britain’s Guardian newspaper that Greece has to shape up, and she is more concerned about Africans in poverty than Greek citizens in financial peril:
“As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax.”
Even more than she thinks about all those now struggling to survive without jobs or public services? “I think of them equally. And I think they should also help themselves collectively.” How? “By all paying their tax. Yeah.”
It sounds as if she’s essentially saying to the Greeks and others in Europe, you’ve had a nice time and now it’s payback time.
“That’s right.” [Lagarde] nods calmly. “Yeah.”
Her comments unleashed a torrent of anger not only from Greeks but from leftists in other countries. French left-wing politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon said Lagarde should resign. A spokesman for the new French Socialist government called her remarks “stereotypical.”
But just because they are stereotypical doesn’t make them untrue. Nick Dewhirst, a director at wealth management firm Integral Asset Management, told CNBC on Monday that much of Greek society was built on cheating and scheming, saying “everyone does it” but that other European nations were now fed up.
“The basic question is that a German has to increase working from 65 to 67 and that is to pay for Greeks retiring at 50. The 17th of June is the perfect opportunity to say either ‘we’ll behave’ or ‘we’ll carry on cheating,’” he said.
Harsh words, but they are confirmed by many Greeks I know. A Greek member of parliament told me recently that tax reform was “almost impossible” to achieve because “our tax system is run by the Mafia.” I laughed and said that many countries had people who thought of their tax collectors that way. “No, no,” the parliamentarian insisted. “I mean that organized crime really runs the tax agencies for their benefit, taking a cut of the reduction in taxes they give out to citizens. Every person appointed to reform the system has been pushed out. Respect for authority is nil.”
It increasingly looks as if Greece is on the verge of collapse, a sad condition for the nation that gave us democracy and so much of our civilized heritage 2,500 years ago. But the Greeks should have been warned. It was in the famous Greek tragedies that the concept of hubris was explored — the notion that excessive pride or defiance of the gods leads to disaster. How Greece recovers will depend in part on how much its people take that lesson to heart and start rebuilding.
From Special Report with Bret Baier | Monday, May 28, 2012
On why Mitt Romney enjoys a 24-point lead over Obama among veterans:
I think it [the demographics of military veterans] helps explain the huge gap between the Republicans, whether it’s a Romney or a McCain, in getting support from the veterans. [But] it isn’t only demographic — it’s history.
The fact is that in the Vietnam era, the Democrats were the anti-war party. And we heard Obama today essentially doing penance for a country that spat on soldiers who returned from the Vietnam War. And what he didn’t say is that in large part that was the work of the American left; it wasn’t the work of the American right who supported the war.
Democrats were the anti-war element in the country, the anti-war party — particularly in 1972. And they inherited the stain of this association with the left that really denigrated soldiers, which is the word that Obama used and he said it shouldn’t ever happen again — so in some ways he is trying to undo this legacy of 50 years. But that’s why for the 50 years Democrats were always seen as the weak and anti-war party, weak on national defense.
But it isn’t only that. It isn’t only history. It continues. Democrats have for decades used the defense budget as a piggy bank for social spending. And we see it today — the sequester of half a trillion dollars… which the secretary of defense under Obama said would hollow out the military and be a catastrophe.
Republicans are opposing it and trying to get out of it. And what are Democrats doing? Leaving it in place and using it as a stick and a blackmail weapon against Republicans in return for trying to get [an] increase in social spending or increase in taxes. So who stands up for the weaponry and the training and the protection that the soldiers are going to have to have? It’s the Republicans.
So it isn’t only history and demographics. It is actually the standing of the parties on policy.
Michael, I’ll cop to being the guy who put together the list. We wanted to limit it to ten, and we wanted it to be fairly well distributed across the generations. To respond to some of the comments from your post:
Nathanael Greene and William T. Sherman were casualties of these constraints. If they seem arbitrary constraints — well, to a certain extent, they are. But we knew there was going to be great debate about the names included and those left off no matter what we did, and indeed there has been.
My own two cents? Greene was Washington’s indispensable man, and may have been the better pure general. I am a huge fan of his. One of the small joys of living in the New York metropolitan area is the lasting footprint of the Revolutionary War: “Fort Greene,” so named for the defensive bulwark Gen. Greene commanded in the Battle of Long Island, is now one of the heppest neighborhoods in Brooklyn. On northern Manhattan and the Jersey palisades, the opposing Forts Washington and Lee (commanded by General Charles Lee) were erected to contest the British Navy’s access to the upper Hudson. Both names have stuck. There’s a park at the site of the former, and a town in New Jersey, on the western terminus of the GWB, bears the name of the latter. NB: I read in — of all places — the G-File that Fort Lee’s high concentration of Asian women boasts the longest average lifespan of any demographic group in America.
Sherman, too, deserves his spot in the pantheon, as both a tactician and a strategist, not to mention as a prognosticator. His exchange with a confederate-sympathizing friend from South Carolina just after that state’s secession straight-up foretells the broad outlines of the coming war, so much so that I’ve always wondered at its authenticity. This is the condensed version most often quoted, but the full thing comes from a 1932 biography aptly titled Sherman, Fighting Prophet:
You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it… Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.
As for the controversial guys who made the list? Robert E. Lee is, of course, a polarizing choice, and one who made it as a tactician despite being a middling strategist engaged in a unworthy cause. By contrast, Eisenhower, who was never really a field commander, made the list almost entirely on the strength of his logistical and administrative genius and his ability to manage the politics and personalities in the European theater. This was, in its way, as important a contribution to the Allied victory as his shepherding of the Normandy invasion.
From Washington to Eisenhower, we’ve been mighty lucky — and/or blessed by Providence — to have men worthy of their moments.
Kathryn: Your video calls to mind an excellent essay by Nicholas Eberstadt from the Fall 2011 issue of The New Atlantis. In “The Global War Against Baby Girls,” Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, details the demographic fallout of sex-selective abortion — a “ruthlessly routine” practice that “has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet.” From the opening paragraph:
Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female — in fact, almost universally female . . . resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls.
UPDATE: The Daily Caller reports that the Planned Parenthood employee caught, in a Live Action video, encouraging a sex-selective abortion (Kathryn Lopez posted the video here this morning) has been fired. Leslie Kantor, a vice president for education at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said that the employee, called “Rebecca” in the video, failed to “follow our protocol for providing information and guidance when presented with a highly unusual patient scenario.”
As for the investigators, Kantor said:
Recently, opponents of Planned Parenthood conducted hoax patient visits with hidden video cameras and are now using edited videotapes to promote false claims about our organization and patient services. In highly unusual and scripted scenarios, hoax patients sought services related to sex selection.
Does she mean the “false claim” that some Planned Parenthood employees encourage abortion for sexual selection?
Liberals formerly wanted to keep politics out of the bedroom. Now they want to insert them into the bathroom. Elaina Plott at The College Fix:
The University of Arkansas-Fort Smith recently changed its restroom policies after Jennifer Braly, a transgender student, filed a complaint with the Department of Justice.
Braly, 38, sought legal action when the university, after receiving complaints from female students, mandated that Braly use gender-neutral restrooms on campus, rather than women’s restrooms. Braly is currently anatomically male.
Braly, however, wrote in an online appeal for sex reassignment surgery that this solution was insufficient:
“One problem to this is there are not unisex bathrooms in every building. Especially the two main buildings where most of my classes are, so I have to go to a completely different building to use the restroom.”
The unisex bathrooms were created specifically for Braly in early 2011, prior to a successful court appeal to legally change gender status from male to female. Prior to the legal name change, Jennifer Braly’s legal name was Russell Braly.
The New York Times does terrific, balanced reporting from the battlefields (e.g., the articles by C. J. Chivers) and fairly presents controversial military topics (e.g., Sunday’s article by Elisabeth Bumiller). Given its editorial advocacy for Obama and all things liberal, however, the Times must be careful when its correspondents write factual articles pertaining to the White House. Today’s article re “Obama’s Leadership in War on Al Qaeda” illustrates the dilemma.
The article raises interesting points, but it includes too many adjectives and descriptions that verge on hyperbolic value judgments. Examples include the following:
“Obama’s ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda strikes that have eviscerated Al Qaeda”
“a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action”
“The president had no intention of ending rendition — only its abuse.”
“‘Pragmatism over ideology,’ his campaign national security team had advised. . . . It was counsel that reinforced the president’s instincts.”
“A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility.”
“Mr. Obama’s striking self-confidence”
“a precision weapon, the drone”
“a withering campaign to use unmanned aircraft to kill Qaeda terrorists”
Such encomiums assure access to the White House but detract from objectivity. On the surface, Mr. Obama comes across as a tough wartime president, which is helpful to him in his reelection bid.
To its credit, though, the article did contain two disturbing facts. First, it presented a process that is at odds with the statement that the Obama administration had “eviscerated Al Qaeda.” The article described a debating society comprising 100 persons who “recommend to the President who should be the next to die. Given the contentious discussions, it can take five or six sessions for a name to be approved, and names go off the list if a suspect no longer appears to pose an imminent threat.”
How can that be described as “a withering campaign?”
Second, the article poised a central dilemma about the acquisition of intelligence:
Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive . . . only one has been taken into American custody, and the president has balked at adding new prisoners to Guantánamo.
Wow. If only one al-Qaeda member in the past three or more years has been captured and interrogated in the U.S. system, then how do our analysts gather the fresh leads that Jose Rodriguez (Hard Measures) and Hank Crumpton (The Art of Intelligence) insist is the lifeblood of operational intelligence?
Over the weekend, more news emerged about the bizarre controversy over how Elizabeth Warren and Harvard University identified the law professor’s ethnicity. Warren has claimed that she did not identify herself as a minority, and didn’t know that Harvard had, but Harvard registered her as a Native American in a federal database that’s usually based on self-identification (indeed, one wonders how else someone would label Warren a Native American, save her claim). The Boston Globereports:
US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has said she was unaware that Harvard Law School had been promoting her purported Native American heritage until she read about it in a newspaper several weeks ago.
But for at least six straight years during Warren’s tenure, Harvard University reported in federally mandated diversity statistics that it had a Native American woman in its senior ranks at the law school. According to both Harvard officials and federal guidelines, those statistics are almost always based on the way employees describe themselves.
In addition, both Harvard’s guidelines and federal regulations for the statistics lay out a specific definition of Native American that Warren does not meet.
The documents suggest for the first time that either Warren or a Harvard administrator classified her repeatedly as Native American in papers prepared for the government in a way that apparently did not adhere to federal diversity guidelines. They raise further questions about Warren’s statements that she was unaware Harvard was promoting her as Native American. . . .
Warren, who has been dogged with questions about her ancestry since late April, was again grilled by reporters during a campaign stop in Brookline Thursday, but she refused to answer most of the queries, instead trying to shift the focus to Senator Scott Brown’s economic record.
The US Department of Labor requires large employers to collect diversity statistics annually and suggests they be based on employees’ classification of themselves. In cases in which employees do not self-identify, federal regulations allow some administrators to make judgment calls on the correct categories using “employment records or observer identification.’’
A new video from the Obama campaign highlights Donald Trump’s refusal to believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States:
Mitt Romney is holding a fundraiser tonight in Las Vegas featuring Trump, and his campaign is running a “Dine with the Donald” promotion. Asked about his association with Trump yesterday, Romney said, “I don’t agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in. But I need to get 50.1% or more, and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people,”
Trump responded to the Obama campaign’s attack with this tweet: “.@BarackObama is practically begging @MittRomney to disavow the place of birth movement, he is afraid of it and for good reason. He keeps using @SenJohnMcCain as an example, however, @SenJohnMcCain lost the election. Don’t let it happen again.” Asked about birtherism on CNBC this morning, Trump said, “Nothing’s changed my mind.”
“Look,” he continued, “a publisher came out last week and had a statement about Obama given to them by Obama when he was doing a book as a young man a number of years ago in the nineties: ‘Born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia.’” Trump was referencing a biography found by Breitbart.com earlier this month.
Simon Johnson (a former chief economist at the IMF, amongst other things, and, admittedly no optimist when it comes to the current financial mess) and Peter Boone pile on (my emphasis added):
Europe’s crisis to date is a series of supposedly “decisive” turning points that each turned out to be just another step down a steep hill. Greece’s upcoming election on June 17 is another such moment. While the so-called “pro-bailout” forces may prevail in terms of parliamentary seats, some form of new currency will soon flood the streets of Athens. It is already nearly impossible to save Greek membership in the euro area: depositors flee banks, taxpayers delay tax payments, and companies postpone paying their suppliers – either because they can’t pay or because they expect soon to be able to pay in cheap drachma.
The troika of the European Commission (EC), European Central Bank (ECB), and International Monetary Fund (IMF) has proved unable to restore the prospect of recovery in Greece, and any new lending program would run into the same difficulties….
Faced with five years of recession, more than 20 percent unemployment, further cuts to come, and a stream of failed promises from politicians inside and outside the country, a political backlash seems only natural. With IMF leaders, EC officials, and financial journalists floating the idea of a “Greek exit” from the euro, who can now invest in or sign long-term contracts in Greece? Greece’s economy can only get worse.
Some European politicians are now telling us that an orderly exit for Greece is feasible under current conditions, and Greece will be the only nation that leaves. They are wrong. Greece’s exit is simply another step in a chain of events that leads towards a chaotic dissolution of the euro zone.
Cory Booker’s communications director, Anne Torres, has resigned, an apparent ritualistic sacrifice to the high priests of the Obama campaign, offered for Booker’s transgression on Meet the Press last week.
“International Pressure On Syria Grows After Killings,” a New York Times headline reads today. The killings in question are the massacres perpetrated this weekend by the Assad regime’s soldiers and the rabble called the “shabiha,” who together murdered more than a hundred villagers in the town of Houla — many of them executed in cold blood, and many of them women and children. These are the latest of the more than 12,000 civilians the regime has killed in the last 15 months.
But what is the “pressure” to which the Times referred? First is the return to Syria of Kofi Annan, whose “peace plan” has provided a useful façade behind which Assad could continue killing and various governments, including our own, could hide while wringing their hands. Annan is back, but what can he do? How many legions has a former secretary general? Does anyone believe that Kofi Annan scares Bashar Assad?
Second is the coordinated expulsion today of Syrian diplomats by many of those same governments, again including ours. This is symbolic of our disgust with the weekend’s killings, officials around the world have said. And that is precisely correct: The expulsions are symbolic. They do not hurt Assad nor do they help the Syrian people bring his bloody regime to an end any more than visits by Kofi Annan do. In February Secretary Clinton said about the killings in Syria that “world opinion is not going to stand idly by.” Three months later, it is, and so is she.
But the new murders do make it harder for this charade to continue and to be taken seriously.
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