Here. But I’m not sure she hasn’t already had her fifteen minutes of fame.
Sticking it to the streets of New York—and elsewhere
Recently when I was visiting my family in NY, I happened to look down and notice that those little dark circles that stud the sidewalks had become more numerous than ever.
You might be in New York and not even see them as you walk down the street, especially if you’re busy looking up at the buildings. But if you happen to glance in the general direction of your feet, you will see that there are wads of something-or-other seeded every few inches in seemingly random fashion on the concrete.
The culprit, of course, is chewing gum. You wouldn’t think there had been so much gum chewed since the world began, much less stuck to the sidewalks of one city. Here’s what it looks like:
New York isn’t the only city with the problem; far from it. Fittingly, Mexico City (in the vicinity of the birthplace of natural chicle chewing gum) is probably the worst offender, with an estimate of seventy wads of the stuff per paving square.
The days of the dominance of naturally biodegradable chicle are long gone, and although there have been attempts to revive them, the supply is inadequate to fill more than a fraction of the world’s needs, which are now met by the synthetic variety.
There are also machines made that specialize in the steam-cleaning of sidewalks marked with gum globs. But it’s clearly a tough task to keep up, one that New York is failing.
The world doesn’t lack for attempts at solutions. A non-sticky gum has been invented, but it has yet to crowd out the more tenacious—in every sense of the word—brands. Mexico City has suggested that people just swallow their gum if they can’t manage to use trash cans.
But Draconian Singapore has gone so far as to ban chewing gum, except for certain medicinal varieties. The ban began in 1992 and continues today:
This law was created because people disposed of gum incorrectly by sticking under places like chairs or tables…Chewing gum was causing serious maintenance problems in high-rise public housing flats, with vandals disposing of spent gum in mailboxes, inside keyholes and even on elevator buttons. Chewing gum left on floors, stairways and pavements in public areas increased the cost of cleaning and damaged cleaning equipment…
In 1987, the S$5 billion metro system, the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT), began operations…It was then reported that vandals had begun sticking chewing gum on the door sensors of MRT trains, preventing the door from functioning properly and causing disruption of train services. Such incidents were rare but costly and culprits were difficult to apprehend. In January 1992, Goh Chok Tong, who had just taken over as Prime Minister, decided on a ban.
Just as with the US Prohibition experience, there was upset at first. But, unlike Prohibition, the defiance died down:
When first introduced, the ban caused much controversy and some open defiance. Some took the trouble of traveling to neighbouring Johor Bahru, Malaysia, to purchase chewing gum. Offenders were publicly “named and shamed” by the government, to serve as a deterrent to other would-be smugglers. As time passed and the uproar died down, however, Singaporeans became accustomed to the lack of chewing gum.
Civil rights activists entered the picture for a while. But the softening of the ban, and the introduction of the “medicinal” exception (a gum that is supposed to whiten teeth, for example) was thanks to none other than our hero George Bush, who won the concessions in 2004 as part of a free trade agreement with Singapore.
And no, this is not an Onion article.
More on those terror truth commissions
If even Harry Reid says the idea of an independent truth commission on supposed torture by the previous administration is a bad idea, I guess it won’t be happening—even though Paul Krugman and much of the Left of the Democratic Party may disagree.
Krugman says truth commissions are necessary: they’re only way to regain our “moral compass.” In his op-ed on the subject, he completely ignores the shocking, precedent-setting, banana republic, show trial aspect of the proposal.
But then again, Krugman’s ignorance on everything except economic issues is no longer news. And yes, I realize that his ignorance may be feigned and strategic—but my guess is that he actually is ignorant of the significance of what he is recommending here, and what a terrible precedent it would set.
Wesley Pruden understands, only too well. Read his op-ed for contrast. Here’s an excerpt:
The president’s on-again, off-again, maybe-he-will and maybe-he-won’t decision to punish someone who loosened tongues of Islamist terrorists at Guantanamo suddenly threatens not only the CIA interrogators and Justice Department lawyers, but even members of Congress. Maybe it won’t stop there: if the lawyers who offered legal opinions are at risk of punishment for their legal advice, why not the members of Congress who knew what was going on? Why not the secretaries who typed up the transcripts? Why not the interns who fetched the coffee? All were accessories either before or after the fact.
We’re on unfamiliar ground now. No president before has sought to punish his predecessor for policy decisions, no matter how wrong or wrong-headed…Exacting revenge for unpopular policies is the norm in the third world, heretofore more likely in Barack Obama’s ancestral Kenya than in America, more in the tradition of gangland Chicago than in Washington, where we count on cooler heads to prevail when raw emotion threatens to overwhelm sobriety and the undisciplined senses.
The president hadn’t counted on the rage of the jackals on the leftmost fringe of his party, organizations like MoveOn.org, which want only the “unity” of the lynch mob. They demand a hanging and the president promises only to think about it. Ever confident that his golden tongue, with or without the teleprompter, would mesmerize all foes and vanquish all rancor, Mr. Obama then threw George W. Bush’s lawyers to the mob.
Perhaps the president imagines that nobody cares much about what happens to lawyers, but he has set in motion something neither he nor anyone else can control. Some of the Democrats in Congress, eager now to join the mob, will regret what they cry for. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, for one, was a member of the House intelligence committee and sat in on super-secret briefings after Sept. 11. She concedes that she heard about waterboarding but she doesn’t remember exactly what she heard. Just like Barack Obama sleeping through 20 years of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s rabid sermons, Ms. Pelosi dozed through the briefings. Her colleagues on the intelligence panel say they remember her demanding that the CIA do more to get the “intelligence” to prevent another attack.
Perhaps that’s what’s behind Harry Reid’s reluctance to go there: just in practical terms, it can come back to bite them all in the butt. And although that’s hardly the best or most lofty reason to oppose the truth commissions, it’ll do for now.
Some thoughts on Obama and the torture memos
On the topic of Obama’s decision to release the so-called “torture memos,” others have stated the basics already, and stated them well (see this and this, for example). In the latter article, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, writes:
…[L]ast week Mr. Obama overruled the advice of his CIA director, Leon Panetta, and four prior CIA directors by releasing the details of the enhanced interrogation program. Former CIA director Michael Hayden has stated clearly that declassifying the memos will make it more difficult for the CIA to defend the nation.
Ponder that for a moment: not only the previous, but also the present CIA director—Obama’s own recent appointee—warned him of the dangers of what he was about to do. And yet Obama disregarded the advice of all of them.
That’s hubris, because it sure isn’t good judgment. And to what purpose did Obama jeopardize our security against this advice? According to Hoekstra:
It was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002. We believed it was something that had to be done in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to keep our nation safe. After many long and contentious debates, Congress repeatedly approved and funded this program on a bipartisan basis in both Republican and Democratic Congresses.
But worse may still be to come [emphasis mine]:
Last week, Mr. Obama argued that those who implemented this program should not be prosecuted — even though the release of the memos still places many individuals at other forms of unfair legal risk. It appeared that Mr. Obama understood it would be unfair to prosecute U.S. government employees for carrying out a policy that had been fully vetted and approved by the executive branch and Congress… Unfortunately, on April 21, Mr. Obama backtracked and opened the door to possible prosecution of Justice Department attorneys who provided legal advice with respect to the enhanced interrogations program. The president also signaled that he may support some kind of independent inquiry into the program.
It doesn’t take expertise in intelligence-gathering to understand what an incredibly dangerous precedent Obama is setting here. It’s not even really about security, it’s about respect for the continuity of the office of the presidency and the acts of previous Congresses.
Not only is Obama showing how wedded he is to the far Left wing of his party, not only is he showing how little he understands the complexity of decision-making in the immediate post-9/11 period, but he is setting an extraordinary—and I believe unprecedented—precedent.
Ordinarily, decisions made by a previous administration, even ones with which a new administration markedly disagrees, are considered to have been made in good faith unless there is strong and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Mere disagreement on a point of law is hardly enough; there must be some sort of subversion of the ordinary process of policy-making itself in order to consider prosecuting those who served in previous administrations.
I cannot recall another example in which a new administration not only criticized the previous one at every opportunity, publicly and even (perhaps especially) while abroad, but also prepared to investigate and even prosecute those who made good faith decisions in that administration on the advice of properly appointed lawyers and in a process that was fully disclosed to Congress and approved by that body—or, as in this case, to prosecute the Justice Department lawyers themselves.
This is without any allegation of some sort of egregious misconduct, such as the withholding of evidence by prosecutors in the Stevens case. The sort of prosecution contemplated by the Obama administration is analogous to the show trials of Communist countries, or other dictatorships in which the new leader must stifle and punish the opposition in order to make sure his power is secure, and to sow fear in his rivals.
The closest analogy I can come to in this country is the work of the post-Vietnam War Church Committee, a Congressional body which investigated the CIA and made recommendations that ended such “rogue” practices as attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. The differences between then and now are huge, however; the clandestine CIA tactics investigated then were a far cry from today’s lawyer-generated memos and interrogation techniques, about which Congress was fully informed and of which Congress approved.
It is interesting, however, to note that the Church Committee’s work was mostly classified until the 1990’s; it did not involve the contemporaneous public release of CIA memos. In addition, the checks already in place for the so-called “torture memos” (lawyer approval, Congressional oversight) were exactly the sort of limits on unbridled CIA power and autonomy that were the results of the Church Committee’s work.
In addition, the Church Committee’s recommendations led to policies such as the “firewall” (which I discussed at length here) which hampered our ability to collect and share intelligence between government agencies, and paved the way for 9/11. It all seems rather ironic, doesn’t it?
Nailing jello to the wall
Life getting you down? Had enough of politics?
Think spring. Think….jello, and nailing it to the wall.
They said it couldn’t be done. But it can. Yes, it can!
Follow the link to get the full story and all the photos—you’ll be glad you did.
Supporting grids of different sorts were tried, with varying success. First we have Ramen Jello, a relative triumph:
But sadly, an idea that sounded fabulous at first, red vine licorice jello, turned out to lack the requisite intestinal fortitude.
Before:
After:
However, gridless perfection was finally achieved by adding two extra packages of Knox gelatin to regular Jello:
[NOTE: For those readers who may be unfamiliar with my series of jello posts, see this.]
A Freddie Mac suicide
Today’s headlines bring us the sad news that:
David Kellermann, the acting chief financial officer of money-losing mortgage giant Freddie Mac was found dead at his home Wednesday morning in what police said was an apparent suicide.”
So Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa may have gotten his wish: a prominent CEO of a failing corporation has committed suicide. Grassley’s remarks were widely quoted when he suggested that executives of mismanaged companies—especially AIG—ought to “resign or go commit suicide.” Then he backtracked and said he didn’t mean it, of course.
I would wager that he didn’t, and that he regrets his remarks. But Grassley is not the only one who has been calling for blood and for heads on pikes, although he may have been the only one to do it literally. The Obama administration, for example, has been quite busy condemning the rich (except, of course, for the liberal rich) and CEOs. The atmosphere created has fanned the flames of public rage at the titans of business.
What of Kellerman himself? A respected 16-year veteran of the company, he was appointed acting head of Freddie Mac back in September, after it had failed and the government had taken over and ousted the previous executives. He is neither under suspicion nor investigation, however, so if anyone at Freddie should have felt guilty about wrongdoings, it’s hard to believe that that person would have been Kellermann. And yet he bore the brunt of the day-to-day stress of running the company and dealing with the government as well.
The NY Times offers these details about certain recent events in Kellermann’s life:
In recent weeks, according to neighbors and company officials, Mr. Kellermann had received a bonus of about $800,000….According to neighbors, Mr. Kellermann hired a private security firm after reporters came to his house to ask about his bonus.
…Mr. Kellermann was also involved in recent tense conversations with the company’s federal regulator over its public disclosures. Freddie Mac executives wanted to emphasize to investors that the company was being run for the benefit of the government, rather than shareholders.
The company’s regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Authority, had reportedly pushed to play down that language.
The article goes on to say that Freddie Mac’s former chief executive, David M. Moffett, “resigned last month after apparently clashing with the company’s regulator over compensation issues and independence.”
My guess is that this sort of businessperson vs. government regulator “dialogue” is not unusual in the companies involved in takeovers and bailouts. Part of the stress for CEOs may very well be the attempt to serve both masters, and the fact that government demands often conflict with the executives’ perceptions of their responsibilities to shareholders and employees.
But to be honest, I have absolutely no idea what really drove this particular suicide. I know nothing about Mr. Kellermann except what I read in the newspapers today: family man, good guy, full of integrity. The cause for Kellermann’s tragic suicide may remain a mystery even if we learn more about him—as (despite the presence of suicide notes and supposed explanations) so many suicides ultimately do.
As a general rule, executive suicides are multiply-determined; few people kill themselves solely for business reasons, or even because of stress, although these can absolutely be important contributing factors. But people react quite differently to the same circumstances; it depends very much on personality, past experience, and other issues in their lives that might be troubling them.
Unlike the Japanese society that Senator Grassley referenced in his remarks, where it is (or at least it used to be) culturally accepted or even expected that a disgraced executive might kill himself to retain his honor and that of his company, our society does not require this sort of act (Grassley’s remarks excepted), and even disapproves. Suicides in general remains relatively rare in this country, thank goodness, as compared to other nations such as Japan (as you’ll see if you look at this chart).
But that’s no consolation to the family of David Kellerman, who must be deeply traumatized and reeling from this loss, as well as the ensuing press scrutiny and notoriety. I offer them my condolences in this sad time.
The gymnastics of defending Obama
Here’s what it’s like to try to reconcile personal admiration for Obama with the contradictions of his economic agenda. One is forced to argue that he’s “the right man at the wrong time.”
This is the way it goes: Obama’s got wonderful intentions. It’s not his fault that there’s not enough money to fulfill them—and that, by stubbornly going forward with them in spite of that, he is set on a course to bankrupt the US and “topple the dollar, and with it American power.”
No, we can’t blame Obama for clinging to his agenda despite the fact that he’s driving us all over a cliff. He’s the right man; it’s only the times that are wrong.
But isn’t flexibility and judgment part of being the right man—at any time? How can a person be the “right man” if he is unable to evaluate a situation or react to it properly? That’s the mark of a fanatic, an ideologue who sticks to his plan in the face of utterly changed circumstances. A megalomaniac. And it’s hard to see how a person such as that could be the right man for any time.
I didn’t know I was pregnant: you be the judge
For those of you who read this post of mine—including all those doubters—and who want to judge for yourselves whether those women who gave birth without having known they were pregnant are ignoramuses or whether their stories make sense, the show that featured them is on again this evening at eight o’clock Eastern Time. Tune in to TLC.
The Chavez-Obama Book Club
Taking advantage of Obama’s naivete and burst of warm camaraderie, Hugo Chavez handed him a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Obama graciously accepted.
That’s somewhat the propaganda equivalent of the Israeli Prime Minister meeting with the Palestinian President in the West Bank and being given a copy of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—and graciously accepting it.
Once again, we have the “either-or” question: either Obama is abysmally ignorant of what the book is and what his acceptance of it signifies, or he knows and doesn’t care, or he knows and embraces the “blame the imperialist US for all of Latin America’s woes” philosophy the book promotes.
You can bet that Chavez, at least, is well aware of the propaganda coup he has scored. And not only that, it was a great advertisement for the book itself, which has subsequently soared to number two on Amazon.
Chavez is pleased as punch, and thinks his new-found friend and he should become a sort of “Oprah’s Book Club of the Americas:”
So I said, ‘Obama, let’s go into a business,'” Chavez told reporters at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. “We’ll promote books – I’ll give you one, you give me another.”
Hope. Change. Ain’t it great?
Obama as Gorby
AP writer Steven R. Hurst compares Obama to Gorbachev. The entire article is somewhat bizarre, beginning with the very first sentence:
President Barack Obama has gone abroad and gored an ox””the deeply held belief that the United States does not make mistakes in dealings with either friends or foes.
“Gored an ox?” More like a strawman.
While I’m sure that there is someone, somewhere, who holds that mighty strange “belief,” such a person would be exceedingly rare. I neither know of anyone who holds such a belief in American infallibility (either “deeply” or shallowly), nor have I read the work of anyone espousing it.
But that doesn’t stop Mr. Hurst from asserting that it’s what Obama is countering. In doing so, Mr. Hurst is taking a leaf from Obama’s book by misrepresenting his opponents’ beliefs as something quite different—and far sillier—than they actually are.
Hurst goes on to write:
Obama’s stark efforts to change the U.S. image abroad are reminiscent of the stunning realignments sought by former Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev. During his short””by Soviet standards””tenure, he scrambled incessantly to shed the ideological entanglements that were leading the communist empire toward ruin.
The analogy seems to be that Obama is interested in shaking up our foreign policy by proposing “stunning realignments.” If he is referring to Obama’s tendency to make nice to the likes of such luminaries as Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Castro, and Ortega,, I’d have to agree.
But what are the signs that we are heaing toward ruin, as the Soviet Union was? The real estate bubble and derivatives? Really? And what on earth does that have to do with sucking up to Hugo Chavez? And does Obama really think Chavez has anything to offer us? How do such “realignments” help us in any way?
Even Obama’s adviser David Axelrod is unable to explain it, except in a vague touchy-feely way:
You plant, you cultivate, you harvest. Over time, the seeds that were planted here are going to be very, very valuable.
Straight from the mouth of David Axelrod, a man with absolutely no foreign policy training or experience whatsoever. Oh well; perhaps he knows a bit about gardening.
Obama himself had this to say about the Chavez handshake—at least it didn’t hurt much:
At his news conference Obama said he didn’t think he did much damage to U.S. security or interests by shaking the hand of Chavez, whose country has a defense budget about one-six hundredth the size of the United States, and depends upon its oil reserves for solvency.
But of course, no one is suggesting that Venezuela is some direct threat to the US. Another strawman; what else is new? The point critics are making is that Chavez is a tyrant, a socialist, a bombastic America-hater, and a statist who has suspended much of Venezuela’s constitution in his power grab, and that the Obama handshake gives him legitimacy and sends a message to the rest of the world that the US is more than willing to cozy up to such people.
But maybe—now that Obama’s in charge—it is. So maybe Hurst’s Gorbachev analogy isn’t so poor, after all—although it would perhaps be better to say that Obama is the un-Gorbachev. Gorbachev presided over the waning days of Communism in the Soviet Union. Perhaps Obama will preside over the waning days of capitalism in ours—a waning due in large part to his own policies.
VDH again
Here’s another excellent article by Victor Davis Hanson.
Obama proves conclusively that the position he is best suited for is UN Ambassador
Aren’t they the ones who are supposed to be good at listening to hateful diatribes against the US and all its evils, sitting there looking bored while taking notes, and then pretending the whole thing never happened?
Presidents, on the other hand, are not supposed to do that. They are supposed to respond, to point out the good things about their own country and its history. They are supposed to…but hey, wait a minute, isn’t this the man who not only silently listened to ferocious America-bashing for twenty long and admiring years spent in the pews of his Chicago church, but who indulges quite regularly in the practice himself?
So I suppose it was hardly a stretch for Obama to listen to the fire-breathing Ortega dump on the US for fifty minutes at the Summit of the Americas, and to not make a peep in return about it, even when asked later at a press photo-op.
Actually, my bad—Obama did utter a peep. This was his response when queried as to what he thought about Ortega’s speech:
It was 50 minutes long. That’s what I thought.
During his own summit address, Obama added the following telling words [emphasis mine]:
To move forward, we cannot let ourselves be prisoners of past disagreements. I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old. Too often, an opportunity to build a fresh partnership of the Americas has been undermined by stale debates. We’ve all heard these arguments before.
No doubt Obama thinks this is an example of turning the other cheek, of opening up a dialogue in a helpful and receptive way. And I might even have agreed with him—that is, if summits such as this were family therapy sessions among people who love each other and just want to get along, but have been squabbling recently.
But nations do not follow that model. Power and influence, strength and weakness, are the only coin of their realm.
And once again Obama is sending a message of weakness. The fact that he will not stand up for his country verbally suggests he will fail to do so in action as well. Whether the leaders of other nations are correct or not in that assumption about him remains to be seen; I suppose he could surprise them by acting stronger than he sounds. But his words signal dangerously that he—and this country, despite our vast strength—will be easy to take advantage of for at least the next four years.
The narcissistic sentence I highlighted was probably Obama’s idea of a sarcastic joke (I believe so, anyway; since I haven’t seen a video, I can’t be sure of his tone of voice). But even as a quip it was juvenile, inane, and self-referential. However, as Ann Althouse points out, that’s what we’ve come to expect of Obama—after all, he was only eight when terrorist Bill Ayers was setting his bombs.
It has become clear to me that Obama does not identify with this country and its interests on a gut level. It has also become clear that, although most presidents and politicians are somewhat narcissistic, there has never been such a pure and unabashed narcissist in the White House before in my lifetime—perhaps ever. This does not bode well for this country. Or the world.
[ADDENDUM: Speaking of Obama’s self-referential narcissism, here’s another example from the same summit. After his new good buddy Hugo Chavez gave him a book that was a Leftist analysis of European and US exploitation of Latin America, Obama responded to a press query this way:
I thought it was one of Chavez’s books. I was going to give him one of mine.
If I were doing the gifting, I’d give Obama a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. No need to give one to Chavez—I’d wager he’s already read and digested it.]