Monthly Archives: April 2015

Is he malevolent or just stupid?

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I have my own answer to this. What I cannot work out is why anyone has a different one. From Daniel Pipes on The Obama Doctrine:

Is this a random series of errors by an incompetent leadership or does some grand, if misconceived, idea stand behind the pattern? To an extent, it’s ineptitude, as when Obama bowed to the Saudi king, threatened Syria’s government over chemical weapons before changing his mind, and now sends the U.S. military to aid Tehran in Iraq and fight it in Yemen.

But there also is a grand idea and it calls for explanation. As a man of the left, Obama sees the United States historically having exerted a malign influence on the outside world. Greedy corporations, an overly-powerful military-industrial complex, a yahoo nationalism, engrained racism, and cultural imperialism combined to render America, on balance, a force for evil.

Being a student of community organizer Saul Alinsky, Obama did not overtly proclaim this view but passed himself off as a patriot, though he (and his charming wife) did offer occasional hints of their radical views about “fundamentally transforming the United States.” On ascending to the presidency, Obama moved slowly, uneager to spread alarm and wanting to be reelected. By now, however, after six full years and only his legacy to worry about, the full-blown Obama is emerging.

The Obama Doctrine is simple and universal: Warm relations with adversaries and cool them with friends.

Picked up at Powerline, under the heading, DANIEL PIPES: THE OBAMA DOCTRINE SERVES UP ONE DISASTER AFTER ANOTHER.

The RBA does the right thing

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Australia is blessed with the central bank most reluctant to lower rates in the world, but even so, of late it has not been able to resist the pressure up until now. But today was different. From Reserve Bank keeps rates on hold for a second month running.

Bucking the global trend toward zero official interest rates for a little longer, the Reserve Bank of Australia board today decided against cutting interest rates for the second time this year, opting to wait until first quarter inflation figures are released later this month.

The RBA board controversially cut the official cash rate to 2.25 per cent in February — ending a near-record 18 months of official rate stability — and strongly hinted it would cut rates again this year to help revive Australia’s flatlining economy in the wake of the resource boom.

Instead, as it did last month, the RBA today left the cash rate unchanged – keeping it at a record low of 2.25 per cent.

Lowering rates would be a catastrophic blunder. The dead-in-the-water nature of other economies who have tried to stimulate through lower rates ought to be a major warning. That the RBA even understands why they should not lower rates makes its previous decisions inexplicable, unless there had been pressure from Treasury or the Government.

The next change ought to be upwards and not down.

All quiet on the Iranian front

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There are other news stories, of course, but the virtually instant disappearance of the negotiations between Obama (not America) and Iran as worth even a mention is astonishing. The majority of the American media, who are as inane as they are ignorant, care about no issue other than whatever it takes to keep a Democrat in the White House. Still, you would think there would be ongoing interest in the terms of the deal and what might be the consequences. It is some consolation that there are people who remain concerned. While Drudge and Instapundit, for example, have gone virtually silent, Powerline and Lucianne continue to treeat this like a story worth examining. Added to the honour role is The Australian today, which carried a front-page story from Greg Sheridan, Obama’s Iranian nuke deal a dismal outcome for the world. I would only differ with Sheridan in that I don’t think Obama was out-negotiated. I think Obama got everything he set out to achieve.

US President Barack Obama has now effectively guaranteed that Iran will eventually acquire ­nuclear weapons, in what will be a black day for the hopes of peace and stability for anyone in the world.

The Iranian government has out-negotiated Obama completely. They showed more ­resolve, more cunning and greater strategic patience.

Obama took a strong hand and played it very badly.

The Iranians played a weak hand to perfection. They were forced into negotiations by the overall weakness of their position but have emerged with all the main elements of their nuclear program intact. In time, they will acquire nuclear weapons. Obama will go down in history as the president who made this possible.

The framework that was announced in Lausanne is a most peculiar document. It is unsigned and interpreted differently in Iran, from in the US. It contains very few details. A great deal of the­ ­substance of any agreement remains to be negotiated by June 30. However, as Obama, his Secretary of State, John Kerry, and other senior officials constantly claim that the only alternative to this deal is war, they have effectively given away the last shreds of American leverage.

The Iranians know the Obama administration is absolutely desperate to conclude a deal.

All the leverage now rests with the Iranians.

Even the broad terms of the framework as announced contain all manner of key concessions the Americans not so long ago said they would never make.

Among these, Iran gets to keep nuclear facilities, such as its underground Fordow plant, which it developed illegally, in secret, in defiance of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Similarly, it gets to keep its heavy water reactor at Arak, although it will convert it to a facility that for the moment cannot produce plutonium.

It gets to keep 6000 centr­i­fuges to enrich uranium of which 5000 will remain operational. There is no purpose in having these centrifuges other than to eventually produce material for nuclear weapons. It will also be ­allowed to undertake intensive ­research on building more ­advanced centrifuges that can enrich more uranium more quickly. It will not have to export its enriched uranium but merely convert it into a more benign form in a process that can be reversed. And almost all the notional restrictions on Iran run out in 10 years.

There was actually nothing to negotiate. They just had to say, there are sanctions in place, and if you don’t come to the party and stop your nuclear program, they will get even tougher than they already are. Obama’s problem was not how to get the Iranians to dismantle their nuclear program. It was how to remove the sanctions without having the American political system explode around his head. That he most comprehensively has now done. If you think of Obama as an agent of the Iranians, everything becomes perfectly clear.

ROGER SIMON ADDS: I lack sufficient political imagination to follow the non-Iranian pro-Obama perspective. The agreement with Iran cannot possibly be to anyone’s good.

What we have here is not “a failure to communicate,” but Obama’s moral narcissism gone berserk. Forget his former proclaimed views on Iran. Driven by his need for legacy and his conviction that “he knows best” about world peace, the future, whatever, he has reversed course and powered through to what he thinks, or wants us to think, is the framework for a deal that would prevent Iran from fabricating nuclear weapons. Only — as in Gertrude Stein’s Oakland and Amir Taheri’s translations — there’s no there there.

But never mind. His troops seem to be rallying. Democrats who were initially skeptical are apparently folding in and Senator Menendez, Obama’s greatest thorn on the Democratic side, is currently and conveniently being hounded out of office and possibly into prison.

Meanwhile, Dianne Feinstein — whose greatest worry is making sure her and her husband’s hundreds of millions are kept legally separate — is telling Benjamin Netanyahu — whose greatest worry is a second Holocaust – to “contain himself.” (Anyone who thinks a new Holocaust unlikely should read Howard Jacobson’s magnificent new J: A Novel).

And Iran, the mending of whose evil ways was never addressed by the negotiators, is up to its usual mischief, not just expanding across the Middle East from Iraq to Syria to Yemen (we know that), but now — at the same time Obama has told his lap dog Thomas Friedman that America “has Israel’s back” — is making a new alliance with Hamas:

Iran has sent Hamas’s military wing tens of millions of dollars to help it rebuild the network of tunnels in Gaza destroyed by Israel’s invasion last summer, intelligence sources have told The Sunday Telegraph.

It is also funding new missile supplies to replenish stocks used to bombard residential neighbourhoods in Israel during the war, code-named Operation Protective Edge by Israel.

There was a time that in most ways those on the left had a positive view of the world and held an optimistic view of life’s possibilities. The left has now become a collective of the miserable, the self-hating and the angry. They are no longer looking for a better future and a kinder world. They have only destruction in their hearts. ISIS represents the left as it now is and the bitterness so many feel about the world. The harm they do is not accidental. It is their actual intent.

The Egyptian election of 1446 BCE

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I wish to take you to the Egyptian election of 1446 BCE.

Pharaoh was running for office as Lord, Master and Tyrant of all before him. He was, as well, the human incarnation of the sun god, Ra. The leader of the opposition was Moses “Moishe” Rabbeinu Nethaniah.

Pharaoh was running on a platform of “No Change Other than for the Worse, and If You Think it’s Bad Now, You Just Wait”. Moses was running his campaign under the slogan, “Let my people go!”

Pharaoh, naturally, had the media completely on his side, as were virtually all of the scribes and the academic members of the priestly class. He was heading for a landslide win.

And while the hand of G-d was eventually to prove decisive, there was, until after the tenth plague, quite some division within the Israelite community. This has been, until now, a little-known fact that my recent research has finally been able to bring to light.

There were some who of course said they wished to leave Egypt and return to the ancestral home, which they had left so long ago. They were sick of being slaves. They wished to have their own community and live in freedom. They no longer wished to be a persecuted minority. They were fed up with making bricks without straw.

They especially didn’t like to have to hide their infant children in the bullrushes to keep them from being murdered. Many felt unsafe going to the local butcher shop. There were some parts of the city they could not enter wearing a kippah.

But there was another side, and surprisingly there were many among the Israelites who supported Pharaoh.

Look, they said, we have it pretty good.

We’ve been here for 400 years. It is Moses who is rocking the boat. He is the one causing most of the trouble in our lives.

I mean really, do you want us to give up everything we have so that we can spend forty years wandering around in a desert. How would we even cross the Red Sea?

I’m sticking with Pharaoh.

We have jobs. We have places to live and food to eat. Because of the Nile, there are no famines like there were in the time of Jacob. We share many of the values of Pharaoh, like when he distributed grain to everyone during the seven thin years.

It’s not perfect. Sure it could be better. But what does Israel really mean to us?

And so began a tradition, that has continued from that day to this.

Let’s talk about how bad the economy is and not the deal with Iran

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From Drudge today, the main set of stories, no doubt representative of the distraction on the deal with Iran that will be universal across the American media:

RECORD 93,175,000 AMERICANS NOT WORKING…
Record 12,202,000 Blacks Not In Labor Force…
Record 56,131,000 Women…
January, February jobs numbers revised down dramatically…
Fed Cuts Growth Forecast to ZERO…

And then there’s Iran. A few stories, just below the fold of no prominence whatsoever:

Congress divided on Iran Deal…
Joyful Iranians dance into night…
‘It doesn’t appear as if Iran agreed to do anything specific’…
PRUDEN: A deal built on lies…

Obama’s major policy focus six years ago was on fixing the economy. It’s old news how bad the economy is, but at least it gets the Iranian deal out of the news, stuff that no one is really interested in, these faraway countries of which we know little. What the foreign policy news will be like six years from today no one can know, but it’s likely to be as good as everything else Obama has done. Pure wreckage from end to end.

The inventor of 43-man Squamish has died

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I am obviously not alone in remembering 43-man Squamish. Someone else at Powerline also remembers, and has put up his obit as a Powerline Pick. The name of so great a person must not go unmentioned. It was Tom Koch (pronounced coke) who infiltrated my mind now these fifty years ago, never to be forgotten.

And as a true confession, it was exactly what I thought had come to life the first time I saw an Australian rules football game (which has 36 men on the ground at any one time!). In fact, I still think it sometimes even after all these years.

No one who has brought such pleasure into other people’s lives should find their passing unremarked. A genius whose name I now learn for the first time at his death. But a long life and I hope a happy one. And I should also encourage you to read the obit in full since there was more to him than this, great as this one contribution was. This is what he said about his own career which sounds as haphazard as any I have every heard, but there is real truth in this for anyone who must live by writing something else after they have already written everything they already have written up to that time:

“People would say I must have had such a great life doing this,” Mr. Koch once recalled, “people who were engineers, doctors, insurance salesmen or whatever. But it was the kind of work where every morning I would wake up and think, ‘My God, I wonder if I can do it again today.’ There is no way you prepare to do it, or even know how you do it.”

Where does the next inspiration come from? Who knows, but for him, it never seemed to have stopped flowing. He was a true genius, an absolute genius.

Iran calls Obama a liar on nuclear agreement

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No sooner do I hear Obama lying about the deal he has struck with Iran then I read on Drudge that even the Iranians are accusing him of lying. It is unanimous, except for the media. You can never believe a word Obama says. This is what the Iranians have to say: Iran Accuses U.S. of Lying About New Nuke Agreement: Says White House misleading Congress, American people with fact sheet. Love that bit about the “fact sheet”. Here’s how the story starts:

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Just hours after the announcement of what the United States characterized as a historic agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, the country’s leading negotiator lashed out at the Obama administration for lying about the details of a tentative framework.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif accused the Obama administration of misleading the American people and Congress in a fact sheet it released following the culmination of negotiations with the Islamic Republic.

Zarif bragged in an earlier press conference with reporters that the United States had tentatively agreed to let it continue the enrichment of uranium, the key component in a nuclear bomb, as well as key nuclear research.

Zarif additionally said Iran would have all nuclear-related sanctions lifted once a final deal is signed and that the country would not be forced to shut down any of its currently operating nuclear installations.

And what do the Americans, or any one else who isn’t Iran, get from the deal? You know the answer already. Now read the whole thing, and be sure you get to the very end where you can see this last bit of detail:

Zarif also revealed that Iran will be allowed to sell “enriched uranium” in the international market place and will be “hopefully making some money” from it.

Are you wondering who the buyers of this enriched uranium will be? Undoubtedly insane to the very core, but who was expecting anything else? And no matter what John Kerry and his boss might think, if this is the Iranian interpretation, how is the US going to get Iran to follow what they think the Iranians agreed to unless they leave the sanctions exactly where they are?

But the more interesting question may be whether any of this will be reported in the American media. Not much of a question really, but thought I would mention it just for the record.

Do NOT raise taxes and do NOT lower rates

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If the Government’s suicidal tendencies continue, there will be no saving them from their own idiocies. It’s not even that raising taxes is politically popular. It is absolute voter poison. Raising taxes is guaranteed to lose you the next election.

But what makes it worse, is that raising taxes is also economic poison. The Treasurer has his eyes firmly fixed on 2055, forty years from now. I wish he would occasionally also glance at 2016 and 2017, which also happens to be when they will be trying to get re-elected.

It is bad economic management to raise taxes in a recession. Let me say this again with emphasis: It is bad economic management to raise taxes in a recession.

You have to stop looking at things from the perspective of those dunces in Treasury. All they can think of is how are they going to find the money for all of those programs you and Labor have committed us to?

If you really do think that recovery is in any way promoted by government spending, other than in a very very narrow and select range of areas, then you have not even got to first base in understanding how an economy works. Stop listening to these people and start thinking about who you really want to put purchasing power in the hands of.

It is business and the private sector that will give you growth and lower unemployment. It cannot come from any other source. And if you think that business will be encouraged by hearing that the budget deficit is fractionally lower, then you are so far off the beam that I don’t know where you think you are. Business is encouraged by making money. The economy grows through productive investment. Jobs and real increases in income are based on faster rates of private sector growth. If you think private sector growth driven by some form of government-financed activity is the same, then your whole basis of thinking about these issues is a FAIL.

And then there are the supposedly popular cuts to interest rates. Here’s a small test. Suppose interest rates went up by a quarter of a percent (which is what they should do, but won’t). You tell me: what would happen to the housing market? It would stall and possibly crash. Housing is already unaffordable. Why would you want to continue to finance a bubble that has now trapped every government so deeply, that it seems almost impossible to imagine rates going up any time soon. Although given past history, they will, in the month before the next election.

Thomas Sowell on “the most catastrophic international agreement in the nation’s history”

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Obama knows better than anyone else, just as he did with healthcare and just as he did with the economy. And now he is bringing his same non-existent analytical skills to solving the tensions in the Middle East by engineering a cave-in to every single demand the Iranians are making about building nuclear weapons. A country that literally floats on oil does not need to build a nuclear power plant. This is Thomas Sowell writing on these matters, in a column titled, Etiquette Versus Annihilation. Here is how he begins:

Recent statements from United Nations officials, that Iran is already blocking their existing efforts to keep track of what is going on in their nuclear program, should tell anyone who does not already know it that any agreement with Iran will be utterly worthless in practice. It doesn’t matter what the terms of the agreement are, if Iran can cheat.

It is amazing — indeed, staggering — that so few Americans are talking about what it would mean for the world’s biggest sponsor of international terrorism, Iran, to have nuclear bombs, and to be developing intercontinental missiles that can deliver them far beyond the Middle East.

Back during the years of the nuclear stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States, contemplating what a nuclear war would be like was called “thinking the unthinkable.” But surely the Nazi Holocaust during World War II should tell us that what is beyond the imagination of decent people is by no means impossible for people who, as Churchill warned of Hitler before the war, had “currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them.”

Have we not already seen that kind of hatred in the Middle East? Have we not seen it in suicide bombings there and in suicide attacks against America by people willing to sacrifice their own lives by flying planes into massive buildings, to vent their unbridled hatred?

Well, we have seen it, but Obama has not. Or if he has, he has taken a very different lesson from the rest of us. Sowell concludes:

Against the background of the Obama administration’s negotiating what can turn out to be the most catastrophic international agreement in the nation’s history, to complain about protocol is to put questions of etiquette above questions of annihilation.

Meanwhile the most intense current debate in the United States is over whether someone’s religious views should be allowed to influence how they run their business. The US is no longer the leader of the free world. It is even questionable whether Americans are any longer even a free people.

Lies, damned lies and politics

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The interviewer is Dana Bash. The interviewee is Harry Reid, former Senate Majority Leader in the United States. During the election in 2012, he helped lie Obama back into the White House by stating that Mitt Romney hadn’t paid taxes in ten years. And so, the other day this is what he said:

BASH: So no regrets about Mitt Romney, about the Koch Brothers. Some people have even called it McCarthyite.

REID: Well… [shrug] … they can call it whatever they want. Um … Romney didn’t win, did he?

This is how it works on the left in politics everywhere. There are the “intellectuals”, academics and journalists. And there are those who are on the receiving end of a pipeline of government money, some rich (crony capitalists and all) and most not so rich. Good governance is the farthest thing from their minds. With the media as slanted to the left as Pravda in the days of the Soviet Union, it is a generally winning combination. That the US is now a mess, and becoming less consequential every day, is no concern of theirs. Harry Reid speaks for them all. Admits he lied, but so what. Obama won and Romney didn’t.

And in Australia. You have the same combination of the left intellectual “elite”, who generally are anti-market, and the ALP/Green support base, who have little clue where the good things in life come from, other than knowing they aren’t getting their fair share. What’s cheaper electricity and a more reliable supply got to do with anything? If you can make ownership of poles and wires work for you, you can win government. Everybody at the top of the Labor Party knew Martin Ferguson was right. But had it not been for him and a few others, Labor might have won the election, just as Obama did in 2012.

In Australia, our media is not as slanted. You do get to hear both sides on most issues – although the ABC, being a public broadcaster and the most far left of the lot is a major distortion in our news and information flow. Under the Harry Reid Principle (or lack of principle), Martin Ferguson is being forced out of the Labor Party for telling an inconvenient truth. Truth in politics is what you can get away with.

Victoria’s union chiefs have unanimously called on Labor to expel Rudd-Gillard frontbencher Martin Ferguson from the party as anger rises over recent comments savaging the ALP and the trade union movement.

Mr Ferguson, a former ACTU president and federal resources minister, describes himself as “Labor to the bootstraps” despite now working as a lobbyist for the oil and gas industry and representing companies including Shell, Exxon Mobil, Woodside and BHP.

But a slew of recent political attacks by Mr Ferguson have sparked frustration and a strong push to turf out the former Labor heavyweight from the party.

Tensions spilled over this week, with Mr Ferguson publicly supporting the reinstatement of the hardline Australian Building and Construction Commission, claiming the militant construction union must be “brought to heel”.

He also accused NSW Labor leader Luke Foley of “rank opportunism” and “blatant scaremongering” in the run-up to Saturday’s state election. Mr Ferguson became the face of a NSW Liberal Party campaign ad, where he expresses disgust over his party’s anti-privatisation campaign. [Bolding added]

And where are we now? Labor might well have won had Ferguson not said what he said as publicly as he did. The entire east coast would have then had the same junk governments, and Tony Abbott would have had to go. An informed electorate is one thing; a perpetually deceitful and ignorant media class is quite another.

And I draw your attention to the implicit bias in the story which clearly implies that working for the resources sector and trying to control rogue unions is somehow against the Labor Party ethos. It may well be so, but it is not a winning combination for the long-term prosperity of this country.