Commentary Magazine

Posts For: April 11, 2012

Persona Non Grass

| @tobincommentary 04.11.2012 - 5:58 PM

German writer Gunter Grass is making the most of his recent disgraceful poem in which he sought to demonize Israel while portraying Iran as an innocent victim of aggression. In response to Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai’s declaration that the author of The Tin Drum was now persona non grata, Grass made a gratuitous comparison of the Jewish state to the former Soviet satellite state in East Germany and the current regime in Myanmar.

This exchange illustrates that paying too much attention to someone like Grass can be a big mistake. While the writer’s poem was worthy of condemnation, raising him to the status of a special case for exclusion as Yishai did merely allowed him to drag out the controversy and play the martyr. However, it bears mentioning that Israel actually has a valid reason to consider Grass ineligible for entry that has nothing to do with his views about the Iranian or Israeli nuclear programs because he is a veteran of the Waffen SS.

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Large Wage Discrepancy in the White House

| @alanagoodman 04.11.2012 - 5:14 PM

Talk about a perfect follow-up to the story about women losing seven times as many jobs as men since President Obama’s taken office. The Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles reports on the gender pay gap in the White House:

Female employees in the Obama White House make considerably less than their male colleagues, records show.

According to the 2011 annual report on White House staff, female employees earned a median annual salary of $60,000, which was about 18 percent less than the median salary for male employees ($71,000).

The Obama campaign on Wednesday lashed out at presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney for his failure to  immediately endorse the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, a controversial law enacted in 2009 that made it easier to file discrimination lawsuits.

President Obama has frequently criticized the gender pay gap, such as the one that exists in White House.

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Rep. West’s Incendiary Comments

| @alanagoodman 04.11.2012 - 3:40 PM

There has been a lot of chatter about Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) as a potential vice presidential nominee. These comments he made at a town hall meeting yesterday are a good example of why that’s unlikely to happen:

Moderator: What percentage of the American legislature do you think are card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists?

West: It’s a good question. I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

To be fair, it’s hard to tell whether or not West is joking. His last sentence seems like it could be some sort of punch line, i.e. “Sure, there are Communists in Congress” [beat] “they’re called progressives.” Unfortunately, in all the videos I’ve seen, West’s last sentence is cut out, and it’s impossible to determine without actually hearing it.

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The Bipolar Obama Presidency

| @Peter_Wehner 04.11.2012 - 2:51 PM

Yesterday, President Obama informed us that that he was not prepared to question the patriotism or love of country of any of his political rivals. “I’m a firm believer that whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, that you’re a patriot, you care about this country, you love this country,” Obama said at a fundraiser in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. “And so I’m not somebody who, when we’re in a political contest, suggests somehow that one side or the other has a monopoly on love of country.”

Except that he is.

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Brotherhood May Get Unlimited Power

| @tobincommentary 04.11.2012 - 2:00 PM

The latest news out of Egypt constitutes, at least on the surface, a setback for the Muslim Brotherhood’s drive to obtain a monopoly on power in the world’s most populous Arab country. An Egyptian court suspended the proceedings of a committee that was drafting a new constitution. Considering that the Muslim Brotherhood dominated the body working on the constitution, this represents a victory for the embattled secularists and religious minorities that view the group’s rise with alarm. But in doing so, the court flipped the timetable under which Egypt was supposed to move toward a new government. The president Egyptians elect next month will now come to office prior to the adoption of a new constitution.

That means that person will be vested with the same powers held by authoritarian dictator Hosni Mubarak, whose fall last year during the Arab Spring protests set in motion these events. Should the new president be the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Khairat el-Shater or that of one of the other Islamist parties, he won’t need to write a constitution to fit his whims, the new leader will be able to transform the country via executive fiat. In which case the Obama administration’s faltering attempts to portray the Brotherhood as moderates or to work with a military that is rapidly losing control of the situation will all have been in vain.

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Why Do Americans Favor Lower Taxes for Lotto Winners?

| @alanagoodman 04.11.2012 - 1:35 PM

Americans may favor raising taxes on the rich (at least according to some polls), but apparently that stance doesn’t cross over to lottery winners. Brian J. Gaines and Douglas Rivers explain the odd discrepancy in the Wall Street Journal today:

Polls often show that the public favors raising taxes on “the rich,” “millionaires” or “families earning over $250,000.” Last year, billionaire Warren Buffett demanded that we “stop coddling the super rich” and impose higher tax rates on incomes over $1 million per year (and higher rates still on incomes over $10 million). President Obama and most Democrats have endorsed raising taxes on high earners. …

In February, the online pollster YouGov asked a representative sample of 3,500 American adults what they thought would be a “fair amount of tax” to pay on lottery winnings. The survey specified different amounts of winnings, ranging from $1 million to $100 million. …

Less than a quarter of respondents chose a tax rate of 30 percent or higher on any level of lottery winnings. The vast majority thought that a reasonable amount to pay was much lower, with the average being only 15 percent. Democrats and Republicans differed only a little: The average rate preferred by Republicans was 14 percent, compared with 17 percent for Democrats.

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Approval of Mob Rule on Speech Depends on Which Mob is to Rule

| @tobincommentary 04.11.2012 - 1:00 PM

It was perhaps predictable that the New York Times editorial page would leap to the defense of embattled Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen. The Times takes a dim view of the Marlins’ decision to suspend their now contrite field boss for telling Time Magazine how much he loved Fidel Castro. Guillen, they believe, is being penalized for exercising his constitutional right to engage in political speech. The paper thinks the team is bowing to the dictates of a “mob,” and rightly note this wouldn’t have happened anywhere else but in South Florida where Cuban-Americans–who have good reason to view any love given Castro as deeply offensive–predominate.

But the question here is neither one of law (the Times concedes the team is within its right to discipline any employee for statements that embarrass the franchise) nor of double standards (because other sports figures have been punished, sometimes far more harshly for saying things that others believe to be offensive). Rather, it is one of which mob is crying for Guillen’s blood. Because the Times and the rest of the liberal media establishment has nothing but contempt for the desire of Cuban-Americans to overthrow the Castro-led Communist dictatorship of their homeland, they are quick to characterize those calling for Guillen’s head as censors. But though the newspaper attempts to draw a distinction between Guillen and others who have been punished for expressing other hateful sentiments, the only thing different here is whose feathers have been ruffled.

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Are Women Hurt the Most in Job Market?

| @alanagoodman 04.11.2012 - 12:30 PM

Mitt Romney said yesterday that women lost 92.3 percent of all jobs lost under the Obama administration, a claim that earned the suspicious distinction of “true but false” from the Washington Post fact-check team. The reason for this contradictory finding? While WaPo conceded the statistic was mathematically accurate, they added the odd, squishy disclaimer that it “may simply [be] a function of a coincidence of timing — a brief blip that could have little to do with ‘Obama’s job market.’”

But while it might be unfair to say Obama’s policies are fully responsible for the disproportionate impact the recession has had on women, there’s no denying that fact that women have been hit hardest. Even WaPo fact-checker Glenn Kessler notes this in his analysis:

In other words, men did lose more jobs in the recession. Now that the economy is growing again, men are recovering jobs at a faster pace than women.  In fact, the latest employment report shows that male participation in the work force was up 14,000 while female participation fell 177,000, in part because women tend to work in retail or government jobs (such as teaching), which have been cut in recent months.

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Return Abbas Letter to Sender

| @jpundit 04.11.2012 - 12:00 PM

Asked about the Palestinian letter reportedly coming next week, in which Mahmoud Abbas — currently in the 88th month of his 48-month term as Palestinian president, having failed to hold the elections he promised a year ago (when he entered into still another reconciliation agreement with the terrorist group he previously promised to dismantle) — will demand that Israel stop construction in the disputed territories, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak noted that “Not a single new settlement has been built in the last three years since this [Netanyahu] government is in power.”

The only authorized Israeli construction is in existing settlements that will be part of Israel in any conceivable peace agreement, pursuant to the understanding reached a decade ago with the U.S. that a “settlement freeze” meant no new settlements and no expansion of the boundaries of existing ones – what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the “Google Earth Test” – not construction within established settlements. In her recent memoir, Rice confirmed both the informal understanding and Israeli compliance with it throughout the Bush administration.

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Texas Public Policy Is Case Study

| @SethAMandel 04.11.2012 - 11:38 AM

Labor-related immigration to the United States has always been driven by basic economics. Border security is certainly essential to any country’s obligation to safeguard its homeland, but the volume of immigration from Mexico was a blaring message from the labor market that even (sometimes especially) self-described free marketers chose to ignore.

Hopefully those politicians will heed the lessons in a new report, mentioned approvingly here by Michael Barone at the Washington Examiner, that net illegal immigration from Mexico is now zero–that is, immigration has tapered off and is now below replacement levels. Barone says he cannot vouch for the exact numbers in the report, but he thinks “they’re very much in the ballpark.” Falling birthrates in Mexico and an American recession have contributed to the change, but they do not seem to be the main drivers. Here’s Barone:

For some years I feared that Mexico could not achieve higher economic growth than the United States since our economies have been tied so tightly together by NAFTA since 1993. But in the past two years, Mexico’s growth rate has been on the order of 5 percent to 7 percent. It’s looking like Mexico’s growth rate is tied not to that of the United States but to that of Texas, which has been a growth leader because of its intelligent public policies which have prevented public employee unions from plundering the private sector economy.

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The Gingrich Sideshow Needs to Exit the Carnival

| @tobincommentary 04.11.2012 - 10:29 AM

Anyone who thought Rick Santorum’s dramatic suspension of his presidential campaign would cause Newt Gingrich to fall into line and give up his own quixotic quest for the Republican nomination doesn’t understand the former Speaker of the House. Gingrich may have acknowledged that Mitt Romney was the likely GOP nominee in an interview just this past Sunday on Fox News, but he reacted to the Santorum announcement as if it was an opportunity by asking the senator’s supporters to jump over to his camp. Though it is unlikely that not many will join a cause that was lost months ago, this was all the excuse Gingrich needed to resume his pointless candidacy.

While there was a moment back during the winter when the withdrawal of either Gingrich or Santorum would have had an impact on the GOP race, that boat sailed sometime in February. Gingrich lost the contest for the title of the leading conservative “not Romney” to Santorum but has been hanging around giving the impression he has nothing better to do with his life than attempt to masquerade as a credible candidate. While most Republicans understand that for all intents and purposes this is the first day of the general election campaign, for Gingrich it represents the hope that he can squeeze a little more attention out of an American public that has already demonstrated it is sick and tired of him.

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