News item: “Russian President Dmitry Medvedev named Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to head the commission to investigate the crash…”
That would seem like a big task for a man who, despite having the resources of the FSB at his disposal, couldn’t find the killers of Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya. Maybe Medvedev would have done better to outsource the job to someone else.
Fascinating review of Ernest May’s “Strange Victory – Hitler’s Conquest of France”, by Alex Harrowell over at A Fistfull of Euros.
It turns out that that Hitler’s Germany was able to defeat France and Britain because Germany acted more like an egalitarian democracy, while France went in for authoritarian central planning. And then Germany lost the war because, after the first victories, Hitler insisted on tight control and central planning.
This story has a sort of tragic duality. The Germans won because they had been able to plan more like a democracy than democratic France or Britain – they constantly questioned their assumptions, criticised superiors, and threw out bad ideas – but they would never do so again, precisely because of their triumph over France. Hitler rapidly convinced himself it was all his own work, and the independent authority of the army was permanently destroyed.
My comment to the Battle Creek Enquirer article, “Obama hails job news“
So one day President Obama is telling critics that it has only been a week, that we need to give his health care takeover time to work. Then one jobs report comes out with some good news. It’s far too early to tell if a trend has been established, but the President jumps up and says it shows the economy is turning around.
So how are we supposed to know when patience is a good thing and when it’s better to jump to conclusions?
Vladimir Putin says he’s going to scrape the subway bombers from the bottoms of the sewers. His sidekick says they are going to be harsher and crueller in going against them.
That’s fine, but these claims would have more credibility if Putin had shown the same diligence in going against the killers of Alexander Litvinenko, Anna Politkovskaya, and dozens of other Russian journalists who have been murdered. The experience would also have given him an opportunity to develop the law enforcement skills needed to bring the subway bombers to justice.
Not so long ago a health care bill had to be cobbled together and rushed through Congress while it was still being put together, before people had a chance to digest what was really in it. Now President Obama is suddenly in less of a rush and urges patience. Too bad he didn’t lead by example when he had a chance.
From a USA Today article:
President Obama urged Americans to wait and see how well his new health care plan works, chiding “pundits” who talk about “another poll or headline that said, ‘nation still divided on health care reform.’ “
From a NYT headline: “…Forced to Reconcile Policy and Words”
No, the NYT is not re-examining or reversing its ideology. Those words do not refer to President Obama.
Holman Jenkins explains how President Obama and Congress joined with the insurance industry to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
We’ll let Angela Braly, CEO of insurer WellPoint, take the story from here. She was recently hauled before Congress to justify her company’s proposed 39% rate hike in California. She explained the source was two-fold: rising medical costs and healthier customers dropping their coverage, forcing the sick to pick up the tab.
Now this sounds like two problems, but for WellPoint and other insurers it’s really only one problem. Once everyone is required by government mandate to buy insurance, the industry’s survival is no longer threatened: It can just pass its skyrocketing costs along to customers. Once customers can no longer refuse to buy the industry’s product, the problem of costs won’t be fixed, but it no longer is the insurance industry’s problem.
There, in that one sentence, we give you the failure of ObamaCare, the failure of the congressional health-care debate, the failure of health-care politics in this country
….
Under the law just signed, employers have even more incentive than they did yesterday to lavish excessive health insurance on their high-end employees. They have less incentive to cover low-end workers, or even hire them.
Headline: House Passes Historic Health Bill
You’d think the Obama media would be a little more cautious about putting up headlines that label last night’s congressional action (whether you want to call it a vote or something else) as “historic.” Here are a couple of other actions I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few days, which have also been deemed historic:
President Obama to Bret Baier of Fox News: “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what the procedural rules are in the House or Senate.”
That must be what he meant back in 2005 when he said, “We need to rise above the “ends justify the means” mentality.”
Don Bordreaux at Cafe Hayek says:
A headline in today’s Wall Street Journal reads “Obama Details Effort to Double Exports Over Five Years.”
Translation: “Obama Details Effort to Increase Corporate Welfare Over Five Years.”
Or more loosely paraphrased, “Obama panders to special interests.”