Free Republic

The French have already announced that they are going to go ahead with the Climate Change conference scheduled for later this month. Of course, the correct thing to do would be to cancel the conference, not because security cannot be provided, but because if you are waging a "pitiless" war, that is what one must focus on, not as Steyn so aptly puts it, "talking about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century? By which time France and Germany and Belgium and Austria and the Netherlands will have been long washed away."

Yet despite all this, the gist of Nocera’s column is not to chastise the president for making a bad decision, he, instead, blames our “poisoned politics.” In fact, he explains away the president’s decision: "I realize that President Obama rejected Keystone because, politically, he had no choice. My guess is that, in his centrist heart of hearts, the president wanted to approve it. But to give the go-ahead before the election was to risk losing the support of the environmentalists who make up an important part of his base…" Of course, to say that President Obama “had no choice” is...

As such, the Obama/Clinton/Biden analogy rings hollow. Though every candidate might have his own specific plan, and one can prefer a candidate for myriad reasons, there was never any serious ideological split between these candidates. So handling the end of the primary season and attempting to unify the party, required massaging egos and satisfying personal ambition. Thus, the approach the Welches are proposing here – giving consolation prizes to the losers so they feel connected and valued – makes sense only in that context. When, however, there are substantive policy differences, the efforts to make the losers feel valued can...

Alan Blinder’s Wall Street Journal column today, “Our National Jobs Emergency,” unwittingly provides an answer to why all the Obama administration’s machinations to improve our economy have failed. Professor Blinder is surely a smart guy, but, like the president himself, he seems to view businesspeople as marionettes, thinking that politicians can pull a string and get people to respond in a specific way.

Unfortunately, most of those in a position to influence policy have no practical experience in business or creating jobs. As a result, they don’t really understand what will motivate action. Thus policymakers are frustrated; they honestly don’t understand why their trillion-dollar schemes aren’t producing the growth expected. As an employer, although I would welcome any payroll tax relief for my company and our employees, a law such as Frank proposes would actually make me very careful about hiring.

One big problem conservatives face in trying to develop and implement effective public policy is that conservative thinkers have gotten used to operating in an intellectual milieu that assumes activist government is the answer to every question. In his recent New York Times column, The Missing Fifth,” David Brooks exemplifies the point.

New York Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez is in the news again, this time for reasons having nothing to do with Cameron Diaz or baseball. It seems A-Rod has purchased a spiffy condo in a building newly constructed in Manhattan. The building’s developers took advantage of New York’s 421a program, which is designed to both encourage new construction and provide affordable housing. In exchange for constructing a new building on vacant or under-used land and creating affordable housing in the outer boroughs, developers get their real estate taxes on the improvements phased in over a period of years​—​in this case, ten.......

Today, the Senate is likely to vote on the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010 (S510). But the bill is little more than an enormous grant of money and power to the Food and Drug Administration and a lot of reporting burdens imposed on the private sector. Those who favor a smaller, leaner government should oppose it. Advocates for the bill point out that we need “change” as the food safety system is built mostly on laws passed over seventy years ago. They would like to transform the FDA from what they perceive as a mostly reactive agency – dealing...

If we truly want to create jobs, it is not enough to simply berate business to create them. We must address the dynamics that keep businesses from offering jobs and that keep people from accepting jobs. We can use policy to create jobs - we just have to care enough about the jobless to make creating jobs a political priority.

Those who want to see better public policy in America owe a high five to LeBron James. His highly publicized decision to sign with the Miami Heat brought forth a torrent of articles noting that the star basketball player stood to save a lot on state and local taxes by moving to Florida. Although conservative media noted the incentive early, eventually it hit the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets. It was a great teaching moment, in which the costs of a public policy – in this case high state and local taxes – could be clearly seen....

From a purely tactical stand-point, the implications of what Estrada is saying are obvious: If the Democrats block nominees on ideological grounds -- as they did with Estrada -- and the Republicans rely on traditional credentials, eschewing ideology, we will wind up with a court of well-credentialed liberals.

...they do something almost totally irrelevant, such as hire one person to coordinate with different city agencies in ways that will help fathers or fatherhood or something kind of like that. In reality, of course, these efforts only distract attention and steal resources from efforts that might actually help -- say, improving the public schools, so more fathers who go to school can graduate, gain productive employment, feel as though they are making a contribution, and be valued by their wives and girlfriends for making a contribution.

The Washington Examiner's Byron York asked an astute question after listening to President Obama’s speech on the Gulf oil spill: Who told Obama drilling is ‘absolutely safe’? York points out that engineers and scientists don’t speak in such absolute terms, and he can’t get anyone in the political chain to acknowledge saying that drilling oil is absolutely safe, and he even raises the possibility that the president was never actually told such a thing. York gets right to the most troubling possibility by asking what it would say about the president’s judgment – no matter who said such a thing...

The “idiot” is not the mortgage holders, it is Fannie Mae -- either for not pursuing its rights or buying mortgages that were non-recourse loans. Contracts of all types typically include either explicitly or by the incorporation of law the penalty for ending the contract early. You might sign a lease and it might be a ten-year lease but give the tenant the right to cancel at any time by paying six months’ rent. A tenant who seizes that option to get out of its lease is not behaving unethically. Every mortgage out there is either a recourse or non-recourse...

Bolden really seems to have no sense of national pride. No notion that America is an extraordinary country and that we can do extraordinary things. Bolden goes on to explain that the U.S. alone could never go to Mars, as if it were just obvious a half century ago that we could go to the moon. He articulates a defeatist vision of America so different from John F. Kennedy speaking at Rice University in 1962:

William Kristol has noted that conservatives may have to be ready to govern sooner than many expected: “A year and a half ago, it seemed that conservatives would have years in the wilderness to lick their wounds and gather their forces. Now, suddenly, conservatism is being called on to be intellectually robust and politically adept.” We simply can’t count on having principled politicians in the mode of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Typically, presidents of both parties come to the office as politicians, not ideologues. Yet it seems somewhat unsatisfying to say the difference between conservatives and liberals is that...

USDA Under Secretary for Rural Development Victor Vasquez justified the loan guarantees for the Nebraska greenhouse and the Oregon winery – and a group of other food producers from a potato chip maker to a cheese factory – by explaining that “This funding will help create and save jobs and build on America's economic recovery.” But it won’t. It can’t. It can only reshuffle jobs from other producers. The Obama administration is acting as if it doesn’t know the difference between local economic development and a national increase in jobs. Fortunately, “Recovery Summer” tours notwithstanding, American voters do seem to...

At one point toward the end of his article, Professor Blinder downplays conservative concerns over the disincentive to work that unemployment insurance creates: “As the unemployment rate rises, the disincentives that worry conservatives become less important because there are fewer jobs to find…” In this line, we see a true conflict of visions about the way the world works. Professor Blinder sees some fixed number of jobs out there and too many people fighting for them. He thinks that businesses don’t hire more because there is not enough demand for their products. Yet this is an impoverished view of the...

The recent recall of fresh-cut romaine lettuce processed in an Ohio facility...has given a new rallying cry to activists trying to spur quick Senate passage of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a self-proclaimed consumer advocacy group, made this statement: "While consumers wait for Congress to pass food safety legislation, the plants that process and bag lettuce and the farms that grow it are operating under an industry honor system which clearly failed in this case. The FDA can’t tell us when it last had inspectors in the plant where this...

Although one can understand Estrada’s personal desire to be magnanimous in defeat, his letter is ill-advised. From a purely tactical stand-point, the implications of what Estrada is saying are obvious: If the Democrats block nominees on ideological grounds -- as they did with Estrada -- and the Republicans rely on traditional credentials, eschewing ideology, we will wind up with a court of well-credentialed liberals.