Columnist.
Andy Ferguson, one of America's most engaging and perspicacious journalists, has not -- as Andre Malraux said of Whittaker Chambers -- returned from the hell of college admissions with empty hands. In "Crazy U," his chronicle of his son's senior year of high school -- a year of college visiting, application, essay writing, open-house attending, interviewing, financial aid seeking, and waiting, waiting, waiting -- is by turns hilarious, shrewd, and revealing. The "crazy" in the book's title refers to our national obsession with college -- a little piece of insanity to which Ferguson is more prone than most. Preoccupied by his son's prospects of being admitted to a good college, Ferguson devours advice books, college guides, and, in weak moments, websites like College Confidential, prompting this reflection about anonymous advice websites:
Around Washington, D.C., if you mention Iowa, the first thing that will pop into most people's minds is "caucuses." But in Iowa, if you asked a local about the matchups, he'd most likely assume you were talking about wrestling. That's right, the non-metaphorical, sweaty, rough-and-tumble on the mat sort of wrestling. This year's Iowa state championships attracted attention nationwide when the promising high school sophomore Joel Northrup (the fifth-ranked wrestler in the state) defaulted on his first match. He had drawn Cassy Herkelman, a female freshman, as his opponent, and he could not, in good conscience, wrestle a girl.
It's hard to imagine the level of outrage that would be flowing in the direction of the Republican Party today if Republicans had behaved the way the Democrats have over the past week. Who can doubt that The New York Times, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the left-wing choir would be chorusing "anti-democratic," "obstructionist," and "radical"? In early 2009, when the Democrats were triumphant in Washington, President Obama dismissed Republican objections to his stimulus bill (now estimated, by the way, to have cost $821 billion -- $34 billion more than initially projected) with a pithy "We won." Elections have consequences, he explained, and there were limits to his openness to ideas from the defeated opposition.
The particular defunct economist who most dominates the minds of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party is Keynes himself. But events in Wisconsin and a few other states are bringing other economists -- some still very much alive -- to the fore. In Wisconsin and other states facing severe budget crises, we are witnessing the clash of special interests versus the public interest. Though the term "special interests" is usually deployed as an epithet by Democrats and is meant to refer to oil companies, "the rich," or other undesirables, in fact, as economist James M. Buchanan and other "public choice" theorists explain, a special interest is any community that attempts to gain a particular advantage from government.
Well, now we have the answer to the question posed Nov. 2: Will President Obama, faced with an electorate infuriated by big government overreach, pivot as Bill Clinton did in 1995 and become a centrist? By offering a budget that adds a gob-smacking $8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, the president has answered that question in the negative. At his press conference, the president displayed all the classic symptoms of what could be called Liberal Obduracy Syndrome (or LOS). For Obama, every single appropriation in the monster we call a federal budget is precious -- so that he must approach it with "a scalpel, not a meat ax," as he once put it.
Conservatives have been chastised in some quarters over the past week for their lack of enthusiasm for the "revolution" in Egypt. "... Fear and loathing -- of Muslims especially -- rules the Right" declared John Guardiano, on the FrumForum. "Within some conservative precincts," chided Commentary's Peter Wehner, "there has been reluctance even to share in the aspirations of the Egyptian people." Paul Wolfowitz has been utterly unambivalent: "I think it's a terrific vindication for the Egyptian people ... And the people who said for years that somehow Arabs didn't care about freedom are just dead wrong."
Companies are quietly redesigning their products to accommodate the needs of (shh, don't say it aloud) aging baby boomers. So reports the Wall Street Journal: "The generation that sent diaper sales soaring in the 1960s, bought power suits in the 1980s and indulged in luxury cars in the 2000s is getting ready to retire: The oldest boomers turn 65 this year ... But there's a catch: Baby boomers, famously demanding and rebellious, don't want anyone suggesting they're old." Marketers, always alert to the sensitivities of this most self-absorbed of cohorts, are developing products and shopping environments that will appeal to the needs of, let us say, ripening baby boomers without ever using the "o" word. "Surreptitiously, companies are making typefaces larger, lowering store shelves to make them more accessible and avoiding yellows and blues in packaging -- two colors that don't appear as sharply distinct to older eyes."
As Egypt staggers toward an uncertain future, a familiar complaint is making the opinion rounds in the United States -- namely that Egypt's current predicament is at least in part traceable to the supposed American fondness for propping up corrupt dictators around the globe. From the left, Salon magazine offered that "this is a good moment to take a look at where else in the world American taxpayer dollars are helping to prop up dictatorships with poor human rights records," while on the center/right, Robert Kagan demanded, "What are we going to do -- support dictators for the rest of eternity because we don't want Islamists taking their share of some political system in the Middle East?"
In a suit filed in federal court in New York, former president Jimmy Carter, along with his publisher, Simon & Schuster, is being sued by five readers of his 2006 book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." The suit alleges that the defendants violated New York's consumer protection laws by committing "deceptive acts in the conduct of business, trade, or commerce."
Do we sympathize with the tens of thousands of Egyptians marching to topple the regime of Hosni Mubarak? It would be churlish not to. Poverty, insecurity, lack of basic services (the tap water in Cairo is reportedly unsafe to drink), endemic corruption, and political repression have characterized life there for as long as anyone can remember. The military regime lacks legitimacy, having governed since 1967 under a state of emergency.
"This is our generation's Sputnik moment," declared President Obama in his State of the Union address. It was the first of several references -- some oblique, some direct -- to the Kennedy presidency. He issued a "challenge" to America's scientists and engineers, offering to fund an "Apollo" project for clean energy. Echoing Kennedy's iconic 1961 call to put a man on the moon "by the end of this decade," Obama set the year 2035 as the date by which America should obtain 80 percent of its power from clean energy sources. By 2015, he proclaimed, America should have a million electric cars on the road. Within 25 years, he declared, 80 percent of Americans should have access to high-speed rail. "We do big things," said the president.
I began noticing the white coating, dull film, and simply unclean dishes a few weeks ago. Naturally, I suspected that other members of my clan were failing to place dishes on the racks of the dishwasher properly. "If the water can't reach it, it won't get clean," I lectured (not, ahem, for the first time), ostentatiously removing a small bowl that had been slipped under a larger one, no doubt by a person who clings to the discredited idea that dishwashers should be loaded to the gills. And those little separators in the utensil caddy -- they are there for a reason, gentlemen! But the crisis persisted. And, as the days passed, it became clear that the matter was beyond poor placement. Bits of spaghetti, stiff and stubborn, stuck like stalactites to bowls. The walls and doors of the machine emerged waxy and coated from each wash, in contrast to the gleaming surfaces of the past. Between the tines of forks, ugly bits of hardened remains resembled something you'd see on "NCIS" -- if not quite repellent, then certainly unwelcome from what should have been a disinfected, pristine dishwasher!
He seems to have achieved a kind of religious exultation by decapitating Daniel Pearl. That's what emerges from a new report from Georgetown University and the Center for Public Integrity. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 "mastermind" whom the Obama administration abortively planned to try (with the full protections of our Constitution) in a civilian court in Manhattan, was the man who did it. By studying the videotape of Pearl's unbearably cruel and barbarous murder (in a more innocent time -- 2002 -- Americans became nauseated just hearing about it), U.S. investigators were able to compare the vein structure of the hand that appears in the video with KSM's. Though Mohammed had acknowledged being the killer, some had doubts. This report should quiet them.
Amy Chua may or may not be a superior mother, but she is a superb marketer -- and I say that with admiration. Who among the literate has not heard of her defiant declaration of independence from the American style of cosseted childrearing -- "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother"? My 17-year-old son demanded to know whether I had seen the Wall Street Journal excerpt -- "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." I hadn't. Before I could catch my breath, he had uncovered research showing that Asian females ages 15-24 have the highest suicide rate of any race or ethnic group.
Some good has come of the tragedy in Tucson. President Obama has issued a de facto rebuke to those in his camp who attempted to use the murders to discredit and smear their political opponents. It was no more than decency for the president to rise above that extremely low threshold -- but rise he did and for that he deserves credit. But a call to high-mindedness such as the president issued is, in the nature of things, not likely to be effective for very long. If any lasting good is to be achieved out of this horrible episode, it will require addressing the question that Obama mentioned only glancingly, but that really is the heart of the matter -- mental illness.
It doesn't require actual violence for the left in America to malign the right as bloodthirsty. So fertile are their imaginations -- or so flexible their ethical constraints -- that even the most orderly and irenic gathering can be twisted into something sinister. Throughout the spring and summer of 2009, as peaceful tea party protesters, clutching their copies of the Constitution, demonstrated against what they regarded as government overreach, the left erupted with bug-eyed warnings that the movement was inciting violence and extremism.
The late Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan once coined a pithy test for whether you have landed in a free country or not. Take a look at the newspapers, he suggested, "If all the news is good, you're not in a free country. If all the news is bad, you are." A corollary to Moynihan's test could apply today: If a nation is beset by concern about human rights violations and injustice within its borders, it is a free country. If it concerns itself only with the supposed human rights violations of other nations, it is not.
JERUSALEM -- "All of these correspondents," IDF spokeswoman Avital Leibovich notes, referring to the hundreds of reporters, photographers, and producers from world press organizations stationed in Jerusalem, "are not here to report on Tel Aviv's beaches or the wineries of Judea and Samaria. They are here to report the conflict."
It was always for our own good. It was always for a very good reason. It was always within the American tradition of this, that, or the other. That's what they've told us, that's how they've patronized us, for generations, as the long tendrils of the federal government have spread and multiplied into every realm of American life. It had become so utterly unremarkable, this robotic and seemingly inexorable aggrandizement of federal power, that when Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked, in 2009, where in the Constitution Congress was granted the authority to force people to buy health insurance, she didn't even seem to understand the question. "Are you serious?" she asked. "Are you serious?"
The first lady got a bit of a bum rap last week when some on the right wrenched her comment on the new school lunch program out of context. Justifying an expanded federal program to feed kids healthy breakfasts and lunches at school, Michelle Obama said, "We can't just leave it up to the parents." Some radio shouters let fly at her for that. But immediately before that statement, Mrs. Obama had said, "I meet parents who are working very hard to make sure that their kids are healthy ... They're trying to teach their kids the kind of healthy habits that will stay with them for a lifetime. But ... it's clear that we as a nation have a responsibility to meet as well. We can't just leave it up to the parents."
