Inactivism

What made us rich was liberty, not helpful nudges and lovely industrial policies and wonderful protections enforced by the government’s monopoly of coercion, on display in China in the hugely unprofitable governmental enterprises.--McCloskey

Happy Halloween!

Tremendous series. I stayed up til the end last night. Nothing I expected--or anybody expected. Just a terrific event. Washington deserved every bit of it.



Rob Lowe and Liv Tyler on a redo TV series?

Fighting sexual inequality: Monogamy reduces the ability of high-status males to monopolize women and helped to equalize mating opportunities. Reproductive justice! This decreased violent competition among males. Jordan Peterson has been especially vocal about the sexual-egalitarian and violence-reduction benefits of monogamy.

AR-15: AR stands for ArmaLite Rifle, which is manufactured by Colt Manufacturing Co. 

If the solidarity and love for our fellow compatriots that we do not personally know led us to forbid the importation of goods from other producers that we also do not personally know - say, like those in Asia or Europe - we would destroy the ability of markets to support specialization and thereby create wealth and human betterment.  Such conflict prominently takes the form of sharp controversies over inequality in the distribution of income and wealth, and whether or to what extent wealth creation generates inequality through innovation and the subsequent distribution of its benefits.--Smith and Wilson.
If politics disrupt that relationship--through whatever stated grand motive (like "social justice")--that virtuous relationship is replaced by something else, certainly inferior to what it started with. Controlling wealth creation is more than arrogant, it is by definition destructive.

Science: from Latin scientia, present participle of scire (to know). Ultimately from the Indo-European root skei- (to cut or split), which also gave us schism!

An unmanned X-37B space plane landed at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, wrapping up a record 780 days in orbit, the US Air Force said Sunday. The mission broke the mysterious plane's own record by spending more than two years in space. "The X-37B continues to demonstrate the importance of a reusable space plane," secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett said in a statement.

Competition is, to paraphrase Hayek, how we decide who will serve us best.  (Murphy--Jon, not the dog)

“At this time there are no known benefits for taking CBD over-the-counter,” explains Dr. Davey Smith, Chief of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at UC San Diego. “CBD is this generation’s snake oil, where millions are engaging with the product without evidence of any benefit.”

On October 31, 1517, legend has it that the priest and scholar Martin Luther approaches the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and nails a piece of paper to it containing the 95 revolutionary opinions that would begin the Protestant Reformation.

                          Inactivism

Retired community activist and former President Obama said in an interview that publicly shaming people on Twitter is "not activism."

"I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people — and this is accelerated by social media — there is this sense sometimes of 'the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people,'" he said.

Obama went on to say, "This idea of purity, and you're never compromised, and you're always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly."

Calling for more nuance in difficult conversations, Obama said, "The world is messy, there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you."

This, of course, is totally untrue. Shallow outrage and virtue signaling is exactly what social activism is. And a constituency that needs to be told that the world is "messy" and has "ambiguities" cannot possibly be expected to initiate any significantly worthwhile change. 

Birthers

Some people have a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality in freedom.--deTocqueville

Mick Jagger is having an open heart this week in N. Y..

Self publishing works! On Monday, the Sun reported that the health insurance giant Kaiser Permanente paid Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh $114,000 for copies of her books from 2015 to 2018. In September 2017, the city’s spending board, which Pugh controls, awarded Kaiser a $48 million contract for insurance for city employees. Pugh has not said anything about a deal with Kaiser.

This week gender activists and feminist organizations like the American Association of  University Women will be promoting “Equal Pay Day” on Tuesday, April 2. This continues the wonderful tradition of just blatant mendacity that has become our cultural norm. These lies just stagger on, unchallenged, and feed the smoldering resentments of a misunderstanding minority.
"This study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers." (from a study by the Dept of Labor, 2009)
If women were paid 77 cents on the dollar, a profit-oriented firm could dramatically cut labor costs by just replacing male employees with females. 

And going along with the lying:  “Undoubtedly there is collusion,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters in Washington this week. This is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who earlier had implied that he had knowledge of the Collusion.  Maybe the Left thinks the Collusion of Mass Destruction was "settled science."
We need better leaders.

And, as if we don't have enough trouble with stupidity, Catholic priests in Poland burned books they say are sacrilegious this weekend, including  J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series of fantasy novels. "We obey the Word," priests said in a Facebook post showing photographs of the public book burning and quoting Biblical passages from the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament.
They're on Facebook.

The most viewed old post this week: http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2018/09/reverie_5.html

80% of domestic ETF assets are managed by just three firms. 

On this day in 2005, John Paul II died.

                                      Birthers

The original smear against Obama was that he was a crypto-Muslim, floated in 2004 by perennial Illinois political candidate Andy Martin. Other related versions of this theory alleged that Obama was educated in an Indonesian “madrassa” or steeped in Islamist ideology from a young age, and the theories began to spread virally after Obama appeared on the national stage – to the casual observer, from nowhere – with his early 2007 presidential campaign announcement.
Obama’s controversial but emphatically Christian pastor emerged as a campaign issue and the belief that he was a Muslim seemed to lose traction.

Then, as Obama became a national candidate, the suggestion emerged that he was not eligible to serve. That theory first emerged in the Spring of 2008 as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama's citizenship.

"Barack Obama's mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother took him to Hawaii to register his birth," asserted one chain email that surfaced on the urban legend site Snopes.com in April 2008.
(From Smith and Tau in Politico, 2011)

That is, the smear came from the Clinton camp. Two supporters of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign reportedly shared the claim that then-rival Barack Obama was not born in the United States and thus was not eligible to be president.

One was a volunteer in Iowa, who was fired, Clinton’s former campaign manager said Friday. The other was Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, according to a former McClatchy Washington Bureau chief. (From McClatchy Bureau)

OFA

A guy named Sperry writes in the N.Y. Post that Obama is going back to his roots; he has been organizing a resistance movement through his old Organizing for Action group.
Since Donald Trump’s election, this  well-funded protesting arm has beefed up staff and ramped up recruitment of young liberal activists, declaring on its website, “We’re not backing down.” Determined to salvage Obama’s legacy, it’s drawing battle lines on immigration, ObamaCare, race relations and climate change.
Obama is intimately involved in OFA operations and even tweets from the group’s account.
According to him, this group is responsible for a lot of the demonstrations recently. It has more than 250 offices across the country.
I don't know if this is true but it is very unusual if it is. Nor am I keen on the technique of social and economic disruption.



More on Organizing for Action, Obama's community activist organization, as reported in the WashPo:

'Unlike parties, in the post-Citizen’s United era, 501(c)(4) groups like OFA can accept unlimited contributions. And they can advocate for policies in ways unregulated by campaign finance laws. Although such groups must spend more than half of their funds toward “social welfare” (read: not overtly political) purposes to be eligible for tax-exempt status, enforcing this provision is daunting. Just as parties once exploited the soft money loophole, 501(c)(4) groups like OFA can now take advantage of ambiguity over exactly what counts as a campaign-related expenditure.
In addition to advocating on issues and policies, OFA has taken on some of the campaign-related roles traditionally played by national party committees. In addition to maintaining and updating the databases and other digital assets that have been so critical to Obama’s campaign and policy successes, OFA has held numerous “community organizer workshops” and an annual Spring Fellows Program. Through these efforts, OFA mints new community organizers and trains a workforce for Democratic candidates and other progressive nonprofits.

Organizing for Action trained more than 10,000 organizers during its first two years, many of whom worked on the 2014 midterm elections and have joined 2016 presidential campaigns. These campaign and advocacy laboratories suggest how OFA – a pioneering presidential organization – might endure beyond 2016, seeking, as a recent organization e-mail trumpeted, to secure the “future of the Progressive movement.”'


So it's a takeoff on the old "soft money" contribution. Looks like the only potential fly in the ointment is the refusal of the Clintons to demur.

Backchannel

A report from the Innuendo Front.

A panel segment on NBC’s “Meet The Press” Sunday morning was discussing reports that White House advisor Jared Kushner may have suggested establishing a communication back channel with Russian officials. Kimberly Strassel of The Wall Street Journal  interjected this information to place the dreaded "back channel" in some perspective:

"Let me set the scene for you: It’s 2008, we are having an election and candidate Obama, he’s not even president elect, sends William Miller over to Iran to establish a backchannel, and let the Iranians know should he win the election they will have friendlier terms. Okay? So this is a private citizen going to foreign soil, obviously in order to evade U.S. intelligence monitoring and establishing a backchannel with a sworn enemy of the United States who was actively disrupting our efforts in the military in the Middle East."

Not to say this is ok, just that it is common--our esteemed leaders see themselves well beyond our mundane restraints-- and criticism of our esteemed leaders is quite selective.

Sabotage

The Swamp Strikes Back


Do you remember when the Clinton people, stung by the Bush election, removed all the "W" keys from the White House keyboards before they left office?
Well, it appears that there are no less base but less juvenile and far more damaging sabotage outgoing administrations can conjure.

Daniel Henninger is no friend to Trump. But in a recent article in the WSJ he is a very unhappy guy.
His concern is the broad, shallow pool of accusations and innuendos connecting the Trump administration to the Russians. The KGB could not have dreamed of this kind of success.
First he quotes the esteemed NYT from their article on March 1:

"In the Obama administrations last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J Trump and Russians — across the government..........
At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American analysts to share information.

There was also an effort to pass reports and other sensitive materials to Congress. In one instance, the State Department sent a cache of documents marked “secret” to Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland days before the Jan. 20 inauguration. The documents, detailing Russian efforts to intervene in elections worldwide, were sent in response to a request from Mr. Cardin, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and were shared with Republicans on the panel."

So the Obama administration bundled the Russian Rumors and released them--released them!--to intelligence agencies and Congress under low levels of security, essentially making them available to all intel groups, foreign and domestic. This virtually assured the constant flow of unverified information on Trump from multiple anonymous but respected sites. Trump, characteristically, hit back and impugned the intel sources--not Obama--and isolated himself from the seventeen intel groups.

Trump is going to be awash with the innuendos and insinuations for the rest of his presidency. And the U.S. will be impaired with a diminished president and an isolated intel community. It will do this country a lot of damage.

Obama has stepped beyond the national interest and the effectiveness of the intel community for his own, higher personal motives. What a guy.

The NYT's Sorkin Interview

This is a summary of the NYT's Sorkin interview with some comments:

To be sure, the president was dealt a tough hand in 2009, and he played it brilliantly at first. His much-criticized Treasury secretary, Timothy Geitner, did what was necessary to pull the U.S. financial system back from the brink. Under intense pressure, the president’s team crafted a package of steps that saved the American automobile industry. The Obama administration’s stimulus package, despite its defects, helped slow a steep economic decline, which at its worst was destroying 800,000 jobs monthly.
Mr. Obama has every right to claim credit for preventing a second Great Depression that would have taken down the entire global economy.
This was a great first act. Unfortunately, there was no Act 2 and, as Mr. Sorkin reports, Mr. Obama knows it. The president laments, for example, “our failure in 2012, 2013, 2014, to initiate a massive infrastructure project” means that “there were folks who we could have helped and put back to work and entire communities that could have prospered that ended up taking a lot longer to recovery.”
The only problem with the president’s lament is its chronology. The failure occurred much earlier, in 2009 and 2010, when Mr. Obama still enjoyed the support of a Democratic-led Congress he needed to move boldly. Despite campaigning for a national infrastructure bank in 2008, he didn’t insist on including it in the 2009 stimulus bill. He didn’t even publicly raise the matter until September 2010, when the midterm election was looming and the chance of enacting new legislation was effectively nil.
This was part of a broader strategic decision to move from his initial focus on averting economic disaster to other concerns—notably, the Affordable Care Act and carbon cap-and-trade legislation. Whatever balance of benefits and opportunity costs the focus on health care may have entailed, the months the House spent in 2009 on an environmental bill that never had a chance in the Senate were a total loss. The exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party contributed to this loss of focus on core economic concerns.
When Republicans regained control of the House in November 2010, the moment for an infrastructure bank and an Act 2 economic plan had passed. The result: an economic recovery that was much slower than it had to be.
President Obama insists—rightly—that the U.S. has done much better than most other advanced economies. Unemployment has come down further than in Europe, and GDP has risen faster.
But most Americans are not comparing the U.S. performance with that of other countries. They are comparing it with previous recoveries in this country, and they are evaluating it in light of their own circumstances. They are painfully aware that their household income is still lower than it was at the end of the Clinton administration and that the jobs many of them have gotten during the recovery pay much less than the jobs they lost during the recession.
People intuit what economists have shown: that the share of overall income growth going to average Americans has been lower in recent years than in any prior economic recovery. They don’t understand why this is happening, but they do expect their leaders to acknowledge it and do something about it.
This is why Mr. Obama is wrong to suggest that his central problem has been an inability to communicate his economic success more effectively. As the old line goes, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” The people have given their answer in the form of the Bernie Sanders insurgency and the Republicans’ stunning turn to Donald Trump.
It will fall to President Obama’s Democratic successor to enact the long-deferred Act 2 of the recovery.

Obama Said What?

In Argentina, Obama responded to a question about nonprofit community organizations and the necessity of attracting funding from both the public and private sectors. This is what he said:

“So often in the past there has been a division between left and right, between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate,” Obama said.

“Those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it really fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory. You should just decide what works,” he added.

Obama went on to praise Cuba’s socialist system under dictator Raúl Castro, touting the country’s free access to basic education and health care, although he acknowledged that Havana itself “looks like it did in the 1950s” because the economy is “not working”.

Obama concluded his comments by arguing that a market-based system “has to have a social and moral and ethical and community basis.”

What could he possibly mean by all this? Was this his saying you, as a non-profit, can take money from profiteering people? Do people have moral qualms about taking people's gifts but not their taxes? Does this mean that taxes from profiteering people is money distinctive from gifts from profiteering people? Most important, is the President of the United States, with its highly structured laws and constitutional foundation and its obsession with individual rights and values, a utilitarian regarding economics and politics?

This is seriously strange stuff. And worse from a guy rumored to be educated. 

But, finally, we have an answer regarding torture of terrorists. If it works, Obama's for it.

"You didn't build that"

For some reason Obama usually gets a pass.
"You didn't build that" is a notion that deserves some thought for, though it is very shallow thinking, it is quite defining. It essentially dismisses basic ownership rights because there was more than one creator involved. So you may not own your shoes. But it is bigger; it implies that those basic rights that we all assume actually have no real basis because you did not create them either. So freedom of speech comes from where? You didn't create that.
Strangely, the idea implies something even weirder. Somehow the ownership of what you did not create falls to the collective who had a part in it. But, since they did not do it all, nothing is specifically theirs. The shoemaker did not make the nails for the shoes or raise the cows that were the source of the leather for the shoes you mistakenly assumed were yours so....the shoemaker didn't build that either. Conveniently this ownership then falls upon the functionaries of the government, the presumed organizers of the band that contributed to the making of those shoes.
So, I suppose, like Jasay, the guard dog owns the house.

State of the Union

A few years ago we were having a holiday party and I had set aside a few nice white wines. A red wine got accidentally mixed in with the whites and as I announced that these whites were really good, I poured the red one. My son looked at me and asked with painful politeness, "How is that white?"


The President in his State of the Union address was upbeat. He felt the U.S. was in good shape and he had a lot to be proud of. He cited, for example, the 14 million jobs created since he took office.
But there is another side.
America is more than $8 trillion in debt (a 77% increase) that has been accumulated since he was inaugurated seven years ago. If the President truly wants to take credit for the jobs created, the basic math works out to be nearly $600,000 in government debt for every single job created.
While debt in the US has increased 77% over the last seven years, GDP has only increased by 13%.
Now, you’d think that for each additional dollar the US government was spending and compromising future generations, there would be at least $1 in GDP growth. In the ledger, government spending is put dollar for dollar into the GDP. Ideally you’d get more than $1 in GDP growth. Businesses have to do this every single day. If someone borrows $10 million to buy and develop agricultural farmland, obviously the net effect once finished should result in a property that’s worth MORE than $10 million. But it took them $3.71 of debt to buy just $1 of GDP growth.
How is that good?

But, he declared, "Anyone claiming that America's economy is in decline is peddling fiction." Yet....

The government’s own numbers show that they are completely insolvent, to the tune of nearly $18 trillion. Does this mean nothing?
The annual reports for the Social Security trust funds show that they are rapidly running out of money. Where will the new money come from?
The Census Bureau’s data shows that the earnings for middle class Americans are stagnating. For years. What's the plan? Is it something as yet undone?
The Labor Department’s numbers show that the number of Americans who have dropped out of the work force hasn’t been at this level since the Carter administration.
USDA figures show that the number of food stamp recipients is near an all-time high, simultaneously when the number of homeless children in America is at a record high.
And all of this, at a time when trust in government is near an all-time low.

A lot of people are pleased with the last seven years. But it is hard to understand. And it's unfortunate that any questions raised are not taken seriously and just dismissed as "peddling fiction."

Hard Men and Brittle Men

"Apparently, they're scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America."
That was how Obama, in Manila, rebuked Republicans on Tuesday for expressing concern about ISIS terrorists slipping into America amid the 10,000 Syrian refugees he wants to bring here. He may be lukewarm about ISIS but he is flat out furious at Rube-publicans.
I have not heard a single idea from the Rube-publicans that would solve the terrorist problem but there are some concerns that simply cannot be ignored. Even if one accepts the nihilistic notion that terrorism, like the flu, is inevitable and will cause its mortalities, if the state has any value, one would expect it to accept some responsibility for prevention and contagion.
Obama's response here is simply inadequate. And, as his peculiarities mount, I think insincere. He is besieged by events, by malignant men, by rivals on a stage that gradually is dwarfing him. Putin is rising, an almost comic foil for Obama, placing him in an increasingly ludicrous position.
My bet is that in the future his grand presentation of himself amidst the Greek columns will be the universal example of bathos.
Thoughtful men hate to become silly but not every uncertain man is Hamlet.

David and Me on the Middle East 2

What Putin is doing in the Middle East has little to do with anything other than Russia. They are now militarily supporting Assad, who the U.S. through both Obama and Kerry insisted must go--(and the dreaded 'red line" even implied the Americans might intervene.) So the Russians have backed the horse the Americans have vigorously opposed and are now pursuing military action against all Assad's opponents--ISIS, true, but also the moderates the Americans support. Not only is this defiant, nationalistic behavior but it creates a war zone where accidents happen.
So Obama is pursuing some altruistic international law concept that no one else has signed on to nor has he ever clarified and the Russians are pounding their client's enemies---and our clients. Their attacks on ISIS is a coincidence.
This is in most respects a conflict between a nation with its nationalistic aims and a nation with some vague concept of how things should be, even if not to their benefit. Putin's success is staggering as is the American naivety. We are behaving like we did in the early 1900s when our sole contribution to international meetings was "Gosh."
Niall Ferguson had an interesting take in the WSJ--again invoking Kissinger as he has written a book about him--saying that foreign policy in America has become a function of three separate strands: A leader elected for qualities other than international policy, a tremendous number of advisors who are lawyers and  a “quest for minimum risk.” "Minimum risk" allows for a lot of bad things in the long run.
What emerges here is hard to imagine but, in a pinch, who would you want on your side, Putin or Obama? And who would you not want to offend?

David and Me on the Middle East

David wrote:

Over the last few years the US and its allies have conducted over 7000 air strikes in Iraq and Syria, and during this time ISIS has grown stronger.

Since September 30 Russia has conducted far fewer air strikes in Syria and the West is in uproar.

Are the Russian air strikes more effective?

Do the Russians have better Syrian intelligence on the ground, advising where and when to strike?

Have the Russians caught the West off guard, and is now embarrassing them?



I wrote this:
A tenet in U.S. policy has been to keep the Russians out of the Middle East. Now the Russians are violently supporting the guy that Obama drew the dreaded "red line" over. Russia is now a presence whose word must be taken into account. The U.S. less so.
A few years ago Kissinger wrote a book called "Diplomacy" on the history of how nations managed their relationships with each other. After the American isolationist period he said two approaches vied for how the Americans would behave. First was Teddy Roosevelt who adapted the European concept of national interest through sphere of influence and balance of power. His opponent was Wilson who relied on some concept of universal law--not equilibrium, national trustworthiness--not national self-assertion, as the foundation of international order. Obama looks to be following Wilson; the problem is that no one else is.
Obama reminds me of that governor who, when criticized about the recidivist rate in his state said they needed to get a better sort of criminal. Obama seems to be a Wilsonian waiting for the other powers to mature and come to their senses.
So Roosevelt held to a notion of national interest, Wilson, and Obama, I think, to a sort of altruism--certainly harder to define and difficult to enforce. Putin, on the other hand, is in Syria advancing his and Russia's cause.
More than just benignly abstract, I don't think Obama has the mind, the heart or the stomach for dealing with nasty guys. And I have no idea how his successor--or the nation--will recover.

Asking Us to Put Our Energy and Brains on Hold

 

Obama's new energy plan is to "reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030."
Simple examination of Obama's pronouncements continue to reveal a most disturbing pattern which cannot be easily explained unless one invokes insincerity or stupidity. In either case it does not inspire confidence.

Natural gas through market forces has begun to supplant coal. The CO2 intensity of coal is 2.13 pounds of CO2 per KWh and natural gas 1.21 pounds of CO2 per KWh (DOE-EIA). Hence the substitution of coal by natural gas reduces CO2 emissions quite significantly. DOE-EIA has already documented this.

The DOE-EIA report:

2005 electric power emissions = 2417 million tons (Mt)
2005-2013 lower demand = 402 Mt reduction (16.6% reduction)
2005-2013 substitution of coal with gas = 212 Mt reduction (8.8% reduction)
2005-2013 addition of low carbon sources i.e. other renewables = 150 Mt reduction (6.2% reduction)

So....the reductions already achieved = 31.6%!
So.....is that it? Mission accomplished?

Then he said--or wrote--this:
"Due to these improvements, the Clean Power Plan will save the average American nearly $85 on their energy bill in 2030, and save consumers a total of $155 billion through 2020-2030, reducing (typo?) enough energy to power 30 million homes."

What could this mean? Coal is the cheapest energy source in the world. That is why we have had the success we have had and the reason the Third World is building coal fired plants at the rate of more than one a week. How could moving away from the cheapest source to the expensive, inefficient, uncertain--and unbuilt--wind and solar sources be cheaper?

What is he saying.? And doing? And what are those of us paying attention supposed to think?

Figures 2 and 3 show how the generation mix has evolved from 2005 to 2014:

Figure 2 Pie chart showing the percentage distribution of electricity generating sources in the USA in 2005. 

Figure 3 Pie chart showing the percentage distribution of electricity generating sources in the USA in 2014. 

Nuclear Deals: Different Dealers, Same Cards‏

In 1994, President Clinton said the framework of a deal reached with North Korea would lead to the end of that country’s nuclear program.
12 years later, North Korea exploded a nuclear device in an underground test.

On April 2, 2015, President Obama said his framework of a deal reached with Iran meant the country would never develop a nuclear weapon.
Less than a week later, Obama admitted that, under his deal, virtually nothing could stop Iran from getting the bomb after 12 years.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of what Clinton and Obama--both in the Rose Garden and to the NYT-- said about their respective deals:

Clinton: This agreement will help to achieve a longstanding and vital American objective: an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula.
Obama: …Iran will never be permitted to develop a nuclear weapon.

Clinton: It does not rely on trust.
Obama: So this deal is not based on trust, it’s based on unprecedented verification.

Clinton: Compliance will be certified by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Obama: …what we’re going to be doing is setting up a mechanism whereby, yes, I.A.E.A. (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspectors can go anyplace.

Clinton: Under the agreement, North Korea has agreed to freeze its existing nuclear program and to accept international inspection of all existing facilities.
Obama: …a deal to stop the progress of Iran’s nuclear program and roll it back in key areas.

Clinton: This agreement represents the first step on the road to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
Obama: This framework would cut off every pathway that Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon.

Clinton: …we have completed an agreement that will make the United States, the Korean Peninsula, and the world safer.
Obama: …if this framework leads to a final, comprehensive deal, it will make our country, our allies, and our world safer.

Clinton: The United States and North Korea have also agreed to ease trade restrictions and to move toward establishing liaison offices in each other’s capitals.
Obama: In return for Iran’s actions, the international community has agreed to provide Iran with relief from certain sanctions — our own sanctions, and international sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council.

Clinton: These offices will ease North Korea’s isolation.
Obama: …if Iran complies with its international obligations, then it can fully rejoin the community of nations…

Clinton: This agreement is good for the United States, good for our allies, and good for the safety of the entire world.
Obama: And it is a good deal, a deal that meets our core objectives … we are more likely to be safe, more likely to be secure, in a better position to protect our allies.

Clinton: It’s a crucial step toward drawing North Korea into the global community.
Obama: …there was an appetite among the Iranian people for a rejoining with the international community.

Clinton: And the United States has an unshakable commitment to protect our ally and our fellow democracy South Korea.
Obama: …a very clear message to the Iranians and to the entire region that if anybody messes with Israel, America will be there.

           Clinton: We will continue to work closely with our allies and with the Congress as our relationship       with North Korea develops.
           Obama: But I say that hoping that we can conclude this diplomatic arrangement — and that it ushers a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations — and, just as importantly, over time, a new era in Iranian relations with its neighbors.

Barach and Frank

President Obama has had an international approach in meetings, statements and policy that is, at least, difficult to understand. Giuliani accused him of not liking the country much, a rather dangerous accusation of a U.S. President. But there is a definable problem here. We learned a lot about Romney in the last election; rumors about his high school behavior were openly discussed. Rumors. We are now being inundated with Scott Walker's college career. Bush's youth is known by all, even the highly publicized made-up parts. But little about Obama's background is ever discussed and that background is well documented. And it is top-heavy with radicalism, really ancient radicalism, like Frank Davis. Davis was a guy with a very rugged political philosophy; he was a card carrying communist when communism was fading as a reasonable political option. Davis was a profound influence on Obama, according to his auto biography. Now if Scott Walker had a close affiliation with someone like David Duke, we would be out of our collective minds.
There is a study on this by the admittedly conservative professor, Paul Kengor, who makes an interesting point in The American Thinker regarding Obama and Davis. Barack Obama expunged all 22 references to “Frank” in the audio version of Dreams from My Father that was released in 2005, as he prepared for a run for the presidency and no doubt feared being tied to closely to a man who joined the Communist Party under Stalin and had been so radical that the federal government placed him on the Security Index. By completely scrubbing all mentions of “Frank” from the audio version of Dreams, which Obama himself personally approved (as the jacket design says) and narrates in his own voice, Obama deliberately concealed Davis.

Mandatory Voting

The WashPo reported recently that President Obama endorsed the idea of mandatory voting, that is, fining people who do not vote. He gave Australia as an example. The Americans have about 60% turnout at elections. Before Australia adopted compulsory voting in 1924 it had turnout rates similar to those of the U.S. After voting became mandatory, participation immediately jumped from 59 percent in the election of 1922 to 91 percent in the election of 1925.

Is there any connection between high voter turnout and good government? Australia's neighbor New Zealand does not have compulsory voting and has a political system that functions just as well or better. Such paragons of civic virtue as Argentina, Egypt, Congo, and Lebanon have mandatory voting. By contrast, one of the few democracies with lower turnout rates than the United States is Switzerland which is often considered one of the best-governed nations in the world.

This could be a metaphor for Mr. Obama. The idea has no real foundation, intrudes into the individual decision process, has a scolding busybody element and would be impossible to create but gives him the appearance of a caring, optimistic big thinker.

The coffee house at its best.

Obama and the Mad Co-Pilot

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. -Paul Valery, poet and philosopher (1871-1945)

There is a funny e-mail making the rounds comparing the recent suicidal co-pilot crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 to the Obama administration. The notion is that, like the crash scenario, the American public is locked out of the governing cockpit as Obama, the pilot, does his evil work. Vaguely the idea is that through executive action and treaty negotiations Obama has hijacked the political system. A close examination, of course, shows the analogy--as so many analogies--is a bit of a reach. The pilot is hired, Obama is elected; the co-pilot is nuts, Obama is not; the locked out pilot is in no way like the American electorate in an indirect republic nor is the passive passenger. Nonetheless the notion is a funny one and hangs together enough to be coherent, amusing and suggestive--which was its only intent.
But, of course, vituperative debate over the specifics has emerged proving once again the unwritten constitutional requirement that every single wacko notion be taken deadly seriously. Angry letters have gone back and forth accusing one side and the other over the analogy's accuracy, as if Burns really had some agricultural lust for his love as "a red, red rose."
Anyone outraged over inaccuracies might be better served staying away from literary devices all together and focusing instead on totally fictitious handling of non-fiction accounts that have been enhanced or changed to fit a political narrative.
This culture really needs a satirist like Swift or Mencken but he would probably stimulate the first and only merger of the two political extremes in the culture for the purpose of lynching him. Then they could quickly pass a constitutional amendment against humor before returning to their furious and combative  high-minded fervor.

Excess of XL

The President has vetoed the authorization of the Keystone XL pipeline. The project would build a pipe system from the Alberta tar sands in Canada to refiners on the Gulf coast. It would create 40,000 jobs in construction and pipe-fitting over the two years it would take to finish it. Unions strongly backed the Keystone XL project, while environmentalists strongly opposed it. It had bipartisan support in the Congress and in the nation. A CNN poll in January showed that 57 percent of Americans wanted it approved, while only 28 percent opposed it. The bill had majority or double-digit plurality support in almost every demographic – age, region, gender, income, education. Only among Democrats and self-described liberals did opposition exceed support, and in those cases only by single digits. For some reason the State Department saw fit to evaluate the environmental impact of the pipeline--twice--and found that the pipeline project would be neutral on climate change and would not have a serious impact on the environment.
The truth of the matter is that this is a pretty innocuous thing but nothing is small to the ideologue.

Domestic Security

In his 2008 campaign, Obama said,  "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." At the time, the Army alone had nearly 500,000 troops, not including reserves or the National Guard. In 2007, the Defense Department's budget was $439 billion. Now this was a very strange, and generally under reported and under investigated, pledge. But, when the fighting started in Ferguson, some very well armed and well provisioned men showed up as police. This was unlike anything the public has seen by domestic police before.
The meaning of all this, as usual with this president, is unclear. But the behavior of the police in the last months, along with these other hints, implies one thing for sure: The police, at least, and perhaps the government itself, is unsettled by its citizenry and, perhaps, afraid of them.

Obama at the U.N.

Obama made a speech to the U.N. about the problems in the world, especially those problems he sees as stimulating some international efforts to rectify.
He spoke about the Ebola epidemic, the situation in Ukraine, and terrorism in Iraq and Syria, and described “a pervasive unease in our world – a sense that the very forces that have brought us together have created new dangers, and made it difficult for any single nation to insulate itself from global forces.”
Then he said this:
"I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within our own borders. This is true. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri – where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions. And like every country, we continually wrestle with how to reconcile the vast changes wrought by globalization and greater diversity with the traditions that we hold dear."

Ebola. Ukraine. ISIS. Ferguson, Missouri. What are people to make of this guy?