Barone: Big government forgets how to build big projects

Muslim leaders to abandon plans for Ground Zero community center?

Shlomo Shamir

After weeks of heated debate over plans for an Islamic community center near Ground Zero – the site of the 9/11 attacks on New York – it seems Muslim leaders will soon back down, agreeing to move to a new site.

The decision follows a high-profile campaign against the project that included advertisements on New York buses showing images of the burning Twin Towers, an iconic landmark razed when al-Qaida terrorists flew packed passenger planes into them in 2001. The New York Republican party is also said to be planning a hostile television campaign.

Sources in New York said on Monday that Muslim religious and business leaders will announce plans to abandon the project in the next few days.

New York Governor David Patterson said last weekend that Muslim leaders had rejected outright his proposal tto swap the site in for another in Manhattan.

But several people familiar with the debate among New York’s Islamic activists now claim that the leaders are convinced abandoning the site is preferable to unleashing a wave of bitterness towards Muslims.

They also hope the move will be seen as a show of sensitivity to families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and to the  American public generally.

Another factor in the apparent climbdown is a lack of funds to pay for construction of the center, estimated to cost a hundred million dollars. Backers hope moving it will lead to a wave of support, accompanied by cash donations.

It is also possible that the decision was also influenced by comments made by U.S. President Barack Obama on Sunday, in which he appeared to reverse an earlier show of support.

Obama said that when he went on record backing the center, he meant only that it was the right of every religious group to establish its own places of worship – but he did not intend to justify building the center specifically at Ground Zero .

Read the original article Haaretz

Social Security Is Not Risk-Free

Kevin D. Williamson
I was struck by a particularly interesting stream of nonsense emanating from the mouth of the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Rep. Chris Van Hollen of the extraordinarily poorly governed state of Maryland. If we were to privatize or partially privatize the nation’s public-pension system, he argued, that would be the equivalent of “gambling.” Not investing, but gambling.

“If you privatize Social Security,” he said, “the end result will be that that money is not there. There is not a stable source of retirement money because we’ll be literally gambling it on Wall Street.”

Gambling. Literally?

Representative Van Hollen, as a pampered member of Congress, one day will enjoy a very nice pension funded by taxpayers. But he’s also an alumnus of a powerful Washington lobbyist/law firm, the well-connected son of an ambassador, and, even though he is not particularly well off by the standards of congressional Democrats (his ethics filings show his net worth to be considerably less than the price-tag on John Kerry’s yacht or Charlie Rangel’s sundry real-estate holdings) he’s not going to starve to death. If ever he leaves Congress, he will have a very lucrative career ahead of him. Chances are, he’ll retire a rich man. Is he going to invest all the money he makes in Treasury bonds? Does he invest all of his money in Treasury bonds today?

Presumably not. Most wealthy people invest their retirement savings in a mix of stocks, bonds, and other investments. The smart ones start off investing aggressively when they are young, getting more conservative and more liquid as they get older. That’s how you retire rich. That is not gambling. That is investing.

But many Americans, particularly Americans of modest means, find it difficult to save and invest. One of the reasons that they find it difficult to save and invest is that Uncle Sam skims 12 percent off the top of their paychecks and forces them to “invest” in Social Security — which, for most Americans, is an investment that provides embarrassingly low returns; for many Americans (such as black men, who are relatively short-lived), Social Security is a money-losing proposition.

Americans should keep this in mind: There is risk when investing in stocks and bonds. But there is also risk — real, terrifying risk — when “investing” in Social Security. Social Security’s unfunded liabilities are $108 trillion; if it were a bank or an insurance company selling retirement annuities, it would have been shut down long ago, and its executives probably would have been charged with crimes.

There is no corporation in the world that I am aware of with $108 trillion in net liabilities.

If you invest in a diversified basket of corporate bonds, there exists a possibility that some of them might go bad and default. (Speaking of which, junk bond issues are at an all-time high; what is it going to take to get Ben Bernanke’s attention? A giant flashing neon sign in the sky? A personalized message from God? An unexplainable rash in the shape of Milton Friedman?) Stocks and bonds go bad sometimes; that’s why you don’t put all of your money into one company. But for people of modest means, who will be almost entirely dependent on Social Security, all of their eggs are in a red, white, and blue basket — and they’re about to get scrambled by Congress and the Obama administration. When the time for choosing comes, and Washington has to decide whether to pay its bondholders in Beijing or little old blue-haired ladies in Muleshoe, Texas, waiting for their Social Security checks, who do you think is going to get shorted? The bond markets have the power to end Congress’s ability to borrow money on amenable terms — and that prospect scares the political class more than anything short of manual labor.

Don’t fall for the false-choice argument: There is risk to investing in stocks and bonds, but there is risk — probably greater risk — in counting on Social Security. You own your stocks and bonds, but Social Security can be taken away from you at the whim of Congress — or its value diluted by inflation when we start printing money to pay for all of the spending that Obama & Co. have been up to for the past couple of years.

Americans understand this, I think. Let me ask you to engage in a little thought experiment: Imagine that you are 25 years old. Given a choice between having the value of your future Social Security benefits in-hand today, either in the form of cash or in the form of a soberly diversified investment portfolio, or the promise of a Social Security check in 40 years, which would you choose? Why? Once you answer that question, you will know that Representative Van Hollen is talking through his hat.

Read the original article National Review Online

Weekly Standard:Desperate Democrats

BY Fred Barnes
The Democratic strategy in the 2010 election is simple: Change the subject. And given the subject on everyone’s mind, who can blame them? That subject is the economy and related matters like spending, the deficit, debt, and President Obama. These are the last things Democrats want to talk about.
Instead they’d like to reduce each race for the House and Senate to the personal level. Their aim is to emphasize the individual flaws of Republican candidates. In the Democratic game plan, the economy and national issues are taboo.

This microstrategy is one of pure desperation. It’s all that’s left when macro-political trends are going against you. Indeed, Democrats start with two strikes against them. A midterm election is usually a referendum on the president’s performance, and this year’s is no exception. And the most important measure of the president’s success or failure is the condition of the economy.

Given this, the campaign is on a track that’s likely to produce a Republican landslide in November. So Democrats are eager to create a separate track, a parallel campaign aimed at minimizing their losses.

The strategy is clever in that it lures the media into playing along. Media types can’t help themselves. Those covering the campaign need new things to report on each day. And Democrats are prepared to supply or otherwise draw attention to just those things, the smaller and more marginal the better.

We saw numerous instances of this last week. When GQ magazine reported that Rand Paul, the Republican Senate candidate in Kentucky, had “kidnapped” a female student while he was in college, the story was widely disseminated by the media. Later, the “victim” came forward to explain there was no kidnapping, only a college prank that she went along with willingly. Despite its short life, the story distracted attention from bigger issues.
Then there was the Colorado primary, the results of which were interpreted by Politico as “good news for President Obama and Democrats.” This was a stretch, but it was a fresh angle on the campaign. The New York Times on its website said the president was “savoring one of the sweetest victories of the midterm election season.” The White House did everything it could to encourage this line of thinking.

Obama had supported appointed senator Michael Bennet, who handily defeated his primary foe, former state house speaker Andrew Romanoff. (Romanoff had the backing of former President Clinton.) White House political chief David Axelrod said the Bennet victory showed that “2008 Obama voters” would “participate in an off-year election.”

But that wasn’t all. The Colorado results undermined predictions of a “wave” election in 2010, a tide sweeping Republicans into office across the nation, Axelrod told the Hill. Elections “will be decided on a race-by-race basis, depending on the candidates and campaigns, and not some wave.” Get it? Axelrod was saying the small, personal stuff matters more than larger issues such as the economy.

For Democrats, Colorado brought another supposed benefit. “In an assessment that many independent analysts tend to agree with,” John Harris of Politico wrote, “[Democrats] said the most favorable news for them may have come from the results on the Republican side.” Harris was referring to the victory of local prosecutor Ken Buck over former lieutenant governor Jane Norton for the Republican Senate nomination.

Buck’s problem? He was supported by Tea Party activists and had committed a gaffe, a “caught-on-tape remark that he ought to be elected because he didn’t wear high heels.” Yet Bennet’s weaknesses appear to be greater than Buck’s, a fact the media overlooked.

The Republican primary attracted 68,573 more voters than the Democratic primary, and Bennet got fewer votes than Jane Norton, the Republican runner-up. The first postelection poll, conducted by Scott Rasmussen, gave Buck a 46 percent to 41 percent lead over Bennet. And Bennet is anxious about the possibility of an Obama campaign appearance. “We’ll have to see,” he told ABC. “We’ll obviously do what’s right for the campaign.” This is a signal to Obama to stay away. And it came from a candidate who’s not brimming with confidence.
The Buck victory touched off a whole series of stories about the “offbeat” Republican candidates, as Politico called them. The list includes Senate candidate Linda McMahon in Connecticut, Rand Paul, and Colorado gubernatorial nominee Dan Maes. Politico referred to them as “a former professional wrestling executive, a libertarian ophthalmologist, and a man who thinks bicycle use could empower the United Nations.”

For sure, these are candidates with peculiarities, and it’s the idiosyncrasies and quirks and tendency to say unusual things that Democrats and the press are concentrating on. But there’s no reason to believe the Republicans who lost to these alleged oddballs would fare better against Democrats in the fall.

While Democrats and the media are codependents here, a few journalists deserve credit for exposing the strategy. “Obama and his party are seizing on gaffe after GOP gaffe, intent on making the election anything but a referendum on the majority,” Politico’s Jonathan Martin wrote. Democrats are “moving faster and more aggressively than in previous election years to dig up unflattering details about Republican challengers,” Philip Rucker reported in the Washington Post.

Will the strategy work? With a powerful anti-Obama, anti-Democrat, antiliberal storm brewing, it won’t help much. Democrats are pursuing it for lack of an alternative. In 2010, it’s a strategy for losers.

IBD:Rose Garden Thorn

Editorial:

Federal Spending: When the president urged Congress last week to pass $26 billion in emergency aid to help save the jobs of laid-off teachers, one of his human props was out of place. It was a mistake he may regret.

Flanked in the Rose Garden by teachers, President Obama said last Tuesday: “We can’t stand by and do nothing while pink slips are given to the men and women who educate our children or keep our communities safe.”

Later in the day, Obama signed the bill that Democrats say will save the jobs of 300,000 teachers and police officers who’ve been laid off due to budget problems in state and local governments.

While that claim is debatable — so far, federal spending legislation intended to save jobs has failed miserably — this one isn’t: The Obama team made a mistake with one of its human props, an error that will draw attention to an uncomfortable issue .

The scene didn’t look unusual. Next to Obama during his morning plea from the Rose Garden were two teachers, one of them Shannon Lewis, who had been laid off at Hampshire High School in West Virginia. Everything looked so normal that we even included in our I&I pages a photo of her at the evening bill signing.

But Lewis wasn’t laid off because the government could no longer afford to pay her. She was laid off “because of an enrollment decline in Hampshire County,” the Charleston Daily Mail reports.

“Even if the state were in boom times, the current school aid formula would not support her salary.”

Which brings up a question the White House is going to wish hadn’t been asked: How many other teachers are there who, like Lewis, lost their jobs not because of low tax revenues but simply because they were not needed, and will now be paid … for what?

There might not be many. But this question leads to another place the White House doesn’t want to go:

Public school employment, the Cato Institute reported in its @ Liberty blog, has increased 10 times faster than public school enrollment since 1970 — and the result has been stagnant test scores.

Despite these facts, Democrats continue to funnel money into teachers’ pockets, rewarding them for a job poorly done. And the party is getting a rich return. Democrats are heavily supported by teachers union money — the top two teachers unions make 95% of their political donations to Democrats, according to opensecrets.org — and union members’ votes.

This is another set of unsavory facts the Democrats want the public to forget. But when the party’s top operator tries to hoodwink voters by bringing in what amounts to a shill for a photo op, he reminds everyone of this unwholesome alliance.

Reaad the original article IBD Editorial

Mosque near Ground Zero: The Taboo of the Intellectuals

CLIFF MAY

The controversy over plans to build a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan has taken an odd twist. On one side are those making arguments in opposition to the project, along with those who merely have questions they would like answered so they can decide for themselves whether this project will honor the victims of 9/11 – or mock them. On the other side are those who support the project wholeheartedly and who respond to both arguments and questions by saying: Shut up.
Most prominent among the second group is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It would be one thing if Hizzoner were saying: “I hear your concerns and I have questions, too, but municipal laws and the First Amendment permit this project to go forward.” But he is not saying that. He is saying instead that those with misgivings about the 13-story Islamic center that is to rise near where the Twin Towers collapsed “ought to be ashamed of themselves. … It is a shame that we even have to talk about this.”

Last week on CNN, I debated the issue with Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic. As soon as we were off the air he called me – at a high decibel level — a “bigot.” I suggested it might be more persuasive were he to frame an argument for me to consider. Echoing Bloomberg, he replied that I should be “ashamed of myself.”

To Peter’s credit, he later apologized for “losing his cool.” But when I sent him some thoughts on the controversy by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer, he emailed back that I should “please stop” because he was “appalled.”

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol describes such responses as stemming from the “self-deluding pieties and self-destructive dogmas that are held onto, at once smugly and desperately, by today’s liberal elites.” Ironically, it is a liberal intellectual historian, Paul Berman, who has thought hardest about this phenomenon. In his latest book, “The Flight of the Intellectuals,” he ponders why so many academics and journalists refuse to grapple seriously or honestly with Islam and Islamism.

By the way: Moderate Muslim intellectuals have not put their critical faculties on hold. I asked Akbar Ahmed, a professor at American University and the author, most recently, of “Journey Into America: The Challenge of Islam,” his perspective on the controversy. “Muslim leaders need to understand,” he said, “that 9/11 remains an open wound for Americans. And it is wrong to rub salt into an open wound.”

Both by disposition and training, journalists and intellectuals are supposed to be inquisitive. Yet Beinart — who continues to write for prestige publications – and Bloomberg — whose name adorns a great journalistic institution — have made it clear that they do not want to know whether the $100 million needed for the “Muslim facility” (that’s the term that Oz Sultan, a consultant to the project, used when describing it to me) will come from individuals who also support terrorism and the ideologies that drive terrorism.

This week, Newsweek editor and CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria returned an award given to him five years ago by the Anti-Defamation League in protest of the ADL’s opposition to the project. Zakaria called the ADL’s decision “bizarre” and a form of “bigotry.” I’ll wager that Zarkaria has spent not one hour investigating those behind this project, their finances and their motives. I know: It’s so retro of me to expect elite reporters to report.

Or even to read much. It’s hardly a secret that some mosques in America, Europe and the Middle East are centers of extremism. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has chronicled, the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center and mosque in Falls Church, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., has provided a pulpit for several radical imams, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda terrorist now hiding out in Yemen. Among those Awlaki is said to have inspired: Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a plane on Christmas, Fort Hood massacre suspect Nidal Hassan and at least two of the 9/11 hijackers.

Terrorists who would go on to take part in the 9/11 attacks also made their base at the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles. As Nina Shea noted, “the mosque’s imam, Fahad al Thumairy, a former Saudi diplomat, was finally expelled by the U.S. in 2003 for suspected terror connections.”

The Al Farouq mosque in Brooklyn is where Omar Abdel Rahman, the Blind Sheik, delivered sermons. Andy McCarthy eventually sent him to prison in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

And just this week, as my colleague Ben Weinthal reported, German authorities banned the Masjid Taiba mosque of Hamburg. It had been a launching pad for the 9/11 terror attacks and “had long served as a hotbed for training jihadists and stoking anti-Western ideology.”

Why wouldn’t Zakaria – before slapping the ADL in the face – at least invite the key organizers of the Ground Zero project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan, on his TV show and ask them about all this? Why it is that hardly anyone in the mainstream media has yet to ask them any uncomfortable questions?

In his Newsweek column, Zakaria asserts that Rauf “is a moderate Muslim clergyman. He has said one or two things about American foreign policy that strike me as overly critical — but it’s stuff you could read on The Huffington Post any day.”

Among Rauf’s Huffingtonian statements: that American policy was “an accessory to the crime” of 9/11 and that Osama bin Laden was “made in America.”

Rauf will not say whether he views Hamas – which intentionally slaughters civilians, has been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, and advocates the extermination of both Israelis and Jews – as a terrorist organization.

He explains his reticence by saying that “the issue of terrorism is a very complex question.” No, actually, it’s quite simple: Whatever your grievances, you do not express them by murdering other people’s children. Not accepting that proposition does not make you a terrorist. But it disqualifies you as an anti-terrorist and identifies you as an anti-anti-terrorist.

A thought experiment: I am grieved by Saudi policies, for example Saudi religious discrimination, oppression of women and persecution of homosexuals. If I were to express these grievances by blowing up a Saudi kindergarten, do you think Imam Feisal would say (1) the Saudi Royal family must share responsibility for the carnage, and (2) whether or not I had committed an act of terrorism is a “very complex question”?

Rauf also has ties to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), organizations created by the Muslim Brotherhood and named by the U.S. Justice Department as unindicted co-conspirators in a terrorism-financing case.

A note on the Muslim Brotherhood: It is not a college fraternity. Its founder, Hasan al-Banna, famously said: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” In 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood’s American leadership prepared an internal memorandum describing its mission as a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

For Zakaria, Beinart, Bloomberg and so many other members of the intellectual elite, it’s as though such information were either too trivial to bother with, or so personal that no gentleman would mention it in polite company.

Of course, that can’t be the real explanation. So what is? Paul Berman concludes that multiculturalism and moral relativism, doctrines devoutly embraced by the intellectual classes, render “everything the equal of everything else.” As a consequence, some very smart people have “lost the ability to make the most elementary distinctions.” Except one: They reflexively regard those from the Third World as virtuous and those from the West as steeped in blame, shame and guilt.

So if Imam Feisal says he’s a moderate, he must be a moderate. Why read his books or inquire into what he preaches in his mosque or with whom he associates on his frequent trips to Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and other exotic locales? Would we ask such questions of a Baptist minister building a church near Ground Zero?

That the terrorists responsible for the atrocities of 9/11 – and more than 1,500 other acts of terrorism since – proudly proclaim that they act in the name of Islam is irrelevant! Anyone who says that Rauf’s project is “confrontational” or “in bad taste” or disrespectful of non-Muslims – to borrow a few descriptions from Raheel Raza, board member of the Muslim Canadian Congress – is intolerant and a bigot and an Islamophobe! Shame on her! She is appalling! End of discussion.

Read the original article TownHall

For Michelle Obama, extravagance dents popularity

Byron York

After a widely admired start in the White House, first lady Michelle Obama’s popularity is falling and, if the current downward trend in her approval ratings continues, could touch lows not seen since the scandal-tainted days of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 50 percent of those surveyed say they have a positive opinion of Mrs. Obama. That’s down from 64 percent in April 2009 and 55 percent in January of this year. The first lady’s positive rating is barely ahead of her husband’s personal approval figure, which stands at 46 percent in the new poll.

The survey was taken from Aug. 5-9, which happened to coincide with Mrs. Obama’s vacation in Spain, where she, along with daughter Sasha and several friends, stayed in a posh five-star resort. It was a luxurious getaway for the first lady of a nation with nearly 10 percent unemployment and widespread economic anxiety, and it fed an image of extravagance that Mrs. Obama has created by, among other things, patronizing chichi restaurants and wearing $775 boots to break ground at her White House garden. A new name — “Michelle Antoinette” — was born.

The first lady’s falling numbers stand in opposition to the still-strong belief among some Washington political insiders that she will be a big asset for Democrats on the campaign trail this fall. After the Spain trip brought the first extended bad press of her time as first lady, the White House, and some of its allies in the press, pushed back by claiming Mrs. Obama will still be much in demand. News accounts suggested her “sky-high popularity,” her role as “cultural and fashion icon” and her “incredible force” will boost Democrats across the country. Now, with the Wall Street Journal/NBC numbers, that’s not so clear.

Mrs. Obama’s ratings are decidedly different from predecessor Laura Bush. In December 2001, as George W. Bush’s popularity soared after the 9/11 attacks, Mrs. Bush’s positive rating stood at 76 percent in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. Nearly four years later, in 2005, it was 65 percent. Still later, when President Bush’s job approval rating hit bottom, Mrs. Bush fell briefly to 54 percent — still above where the current first lady is today.

Even after Mrs. Obama’s European vacation, some former Bushies are slow to criticize the first lady. “I defended her on her trip to Spain because the first wave of anger was about the cost of her friends’ travel expenses, which wasn’t the case,” says former Bush White House press secretary Dana Perino. “But then I realized — and I was surprised by how strong it was from the Left — that people were mad about the appearance of it. And I don’t think that’s about her trip in particular. I think people seized on the trip to channel their more general anger and frustration with the administration’s policies and approach.”

Perino is probably more understanding than the public as a whole. In the coming campaign, Mrs. Obama’s expensive tastes invite the charge that the Obama White House, with its fondness for Wagyu beef, glitzy parties, and celebrity hobnobbing, is out of touch with regular people. That can hurt at a time when 66 percent of those surveyed in the new poll believe President Obama has fallen short of their expectations for dealing with the economy.

Where do Mrs. Obama’s ratings go from here? The White House is certainly hoping she won’t end up in the territory last occupied by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who began her time in the White House with a 57 percent positive rating but quickly fell into the 40s after the Travelgate scandal and into the 30s with the Whitewater investigation.

The administration is also hoping Mrs. Obama doesn’t get an extended version of the treatment handed to first lady Nancy Reagan. There’s no comparable polling from that era, but during the economic downturn of the early 1980s Mrs. Reagan’s image was hurt by relentless criticism from the press. The New York Times lashed out at her for “exercising her opulent tastes in an economy that is inflicting hardship on so many.”

Back then, the pundits didn’t hit Mrs. Reagan for the mere “appearance” of extravagance. So far, Mrs. Obama has mostly escaped that kind of searing criticism. But one more lavish outing and nobody will be talking about her as the White House’s best asset.

Read the original article Washington Examiner