Mark Steyn's Blog, page 50

'Pass This Jobs Bill!'

The president has taken to the campaign trail to promote his “American Jobs Act.” That’s a good name for it: an act. “Pass this bill now!” he declared 24 times at a stop in Raleigh, N.C., and another 18 in Columbus, Ohio, and the act is sufficiently effective that, three years into the Vapidity of Hope, the president can still find crowds of true believers willing to chant along with him: “Pass this bill now!”

Not all supporters are content merely to singalong with the prompter-in-chief. In North Carolina, a still-devoted hopeychanger cried out, “I love you!”

#ad# “I love you, too,” said the president. “But#...#”

Oh, no, here it comes: conditional love. “But, if you love me, you’ve got to help me pass this bill!” You’d be surprised how effective this line is: I tried it on Darlene in the back of my Ford Edsel when I was 17 and we didn’t get home till two in the morning.

Pass this bill now, or I’ll say “Pass this bill now!” another two dozen times! With this latest inspiration, Obama has taken the post-modern phase of democratic politics to a whole new level. “Pass this jobs bill”? Simply as a matter of humdrum reality, there is no bill, it won’t “create” any jobs, and it will be paid for with money we don’t have. But the smartest president in history has calculated that, if he says the same four monosyllables over and over, a nonexistent bill to create nonexistent jobs with nonexistent money will be yet another legislative triumph in the grand tradition of his first stimulus (the original Dumb and Dumber to the sequel’s Stimulus and Stimulusser).

The estimated cost of the non-bill is just shy of half a trillion dollars. Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that Washington was in the grip of a white-knuckle, clenched-teeth showdown over whether a debt-ceiling deal could be reached before the allegedly looming deadline. When the deal was triumphantly unveiled at the eleventh hour, it was revealed that our sober, prudent, fiscally responsible masters had gotten control of the runaway spending and had carved (according to the most optimistic analysis) a whole $7 billion dollars of savings out of the 2012 budget. The president then airily breezes into Congress and in 20 minutes adds another $447 billion to the tab. That’s what meaningful course-correction in Washington boils down to: Seven billion steps forward, 447 billion steps back.

This $447 billion does not exist, and even foreigners don’t want to lend it to us. A majority of it will be “electronically created” by the Federal Reserve buying U.S. Treasury debt. Don’t worry, it’s not like “printing money”: We leave that to primitive basket cases like Zimbabwe. This is more like one of those Nigerian e-mail schemes, in which a prominent public official promises you a large sum of money in return for your bank-account details. In the case of Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, one prominent public official is promising to wire a large sum of money into the account of another prominent public official, which is a wrinkle even the Nigerians might have difficulty selling.

But not to worry. On Thursday night, the president told a Democratic fundraiser in Washington that the Pass My Jobs Bill bill would create 1.9 million new jobs. What kind of jobs are created by this kind of magical thinking? Well, they’re “green jobs” -- and, if we know anything about “green jobs,” it’s that they take a lot of green. German taxpayers subsidize “green jobs” in their wind-power industry to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars per worker per year: $250,000 per “green job” would pay for a lot of real jobs, even in the European Union. Last year, it was revealed that the Spanish government paid $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar-panel assembly line. I had assumed carelessly that this must be a world record in terms of taxpayer subsidy per fraudulent “green job.” But it turns out those cheapskate Spaniards with their lousy nickel-and-dime “green jobs” subsidy just weren’t thinking big. The Obama administration’s $38.6 billion “clean technology” program was supposed to “create or save” 65,000 jobs. Half the money has been spent -- $17.2 billion -- and we have 3,545 jobs to show for it. That works out to an impressive $4,851,904.09 per “green job.” A world record! Take that, you loser Spaniards! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

So, based on previous form, Obama’s prediction of 1.9 million new jobs will result in the creation of 92,000 new jobs, mostly in the Federal Department of Green Jobs Grant Applications.

#page# Just to put it in perspective, the breezy $447 billion price tag for the Pass My Jobs Bill jobs bill is about 20 times higher than the most recent Greek government deficit currently threatening the stability of the entire eurozone. Indeed Greece’s projected 2011 deficit -- $24 billion at last count -- is little more than half of just one of Obama’s boutique, niche “green jobs” programs. As Churchill almost said, never in the field of human con tricks has so much been owed by so many to so little effect.

Fortunately, there is no “American Jobs Act.” Indeed, the other day, tired of waiting for Obama to turn his telepromptered pseudo-bill into a typewritten actual bill, the Texas congressman Louie Gohmert waggishly introduced an “American Jobs Act” all of his own. But back on the campaign trail the chanting goes on, last week’s election results in Nevada and New York notwithstanding. America has the lowest employment since the early Eighties, the lowest property ownership since the mid-Sixties, the highest deficit-to-GDP ratio since the Second World War, the worst long-term unemployment since the Great Depression, the highest government-dependency rate of all time, and the biggest debt mountain in the history of the planet. And the president has just announced to the world that he’s checked the more-of-the-above box. The Pass My Jobs Bill jobs bill proclaims that this is all he knows and all he wants to know.

#ad# In my new book, I point out that Big Government leaves everything else smaller -- and, when it’s bigger than anything ever attempted, the everything else is going to be way smaller. Maybe if you’re a “public service” worker or a tenured professor at Berkeley or a green-jobs racketeer or a New York Times columnist married to an heiress, you can afford Obama. But, if you’re not, look at your home, look at your savings, and figure out what’ll be left after another four years of “stimulus.”

“I love you!” squeals the Obammybopper in North Carolina. “I love you, too,” says Obama. “But#...#”

But: You gotta take this half-trillion-dollar bill, and the next one, and the one after that. Like Al Gore says in Love Story, love means never having to say you’re sorry.

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn

Attack of the AttackWatch!

Jonah, re the president urging his supporters to report dissenters to ThinSkinWatch.com, I was flattered to discover via  a reader that I am the only sinister foreigner to be honored with my own page of Presidential smears at TouchyAndInsecure.com. You can find it here -- http://www.attackwatch.com/tag/mark-steyn/ .

Imagine my disappointment, however, at finding my catalogue of hate crimes entirely blank.

C'mon, you TouchyWatch watchers. You've been in business for a good 48 hours. I've surely smeared the president at least a couple of times since then. And I believe that, if I manage three smears in one day, Uncle Onyango's deportation order gets transferred to me.

Fourth-Trimester Abortion

From the Court of Queen's Bench (the appellate court) in Alberta:

The Wetaskiwin, Alta., woman convicted of infanticide for killing her newborn son, was given a three-year suspended sentence Friday by an Edmonton Court of Queen's Bench judge.

Katrina Effert was 19 on April 13, 2005, when she secretly gave birth in her parents' home, strangled the baby boy with her underwear and threw the body over a fence into a neighbour's yard...

Effert will have to abide by conditions for the next three years but she won't spend time behind bars for strangling her newborn son.

Indeed. As Judge Joanne Veit puts it:

"While many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support," she writes... "Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant's death, especially at the hands of the infant's mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother."

Gotcha. So a superior court judge in a relatively civilized jurisdiction is happy to extend the principles underlying legalized abortion in order to mitigate the killing of a legal person - that's to say, someone who has managed to make it to the post-fetus stage. How long do those mitigating factors apply? I mean, "onerous demands"-wise, the first month of a newborn's life is no picnic for the mother. How about six months in? The terrible twos?

Speaking of "onerous demands", suppose you're a "mother without support" who's also got an elderly relative around with an "onerous" chronic condition also making inroads into your time?

And in what sense was Miss Effert a "mother without support"? She lived at home with her parents, who provided her with food and shelter. How smoothly the slick euphemisms - "accept and sympathize... onerous demands" - lubricate the slippery slope.

Like Squaresville, Jay!

Oh, c'mon, Jay. Re the almighty "like": You claim to be such an André Previn fan, and you don't know his grooviest hep-cat hit in the Fifties was "Like Young"?

Paul Francis Webster (who's best known for big movie ballads like "Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing" and the Spider-Man theme song) put a lyric to it:

I'm out doin' the usual places

And I'm livin' it

Like Young!

Then I dig me this face of all faces

She's the craziest

Like Young!

She drinks coffee at Cafe Espresso

She reads Kerouac

Like Young!

Like wow! -- as the lyric, in fact, goes on to observe:

We spin records on cloud number seven

And she's reaching me

Like wow!

I'm all unstrung

'Cause, man, she's got me feeling Like Young

If she were to brush me and go

I'd start wearing my hair again

Like a square again...

What I always liked about the song is the way it walks such a fine line between cool and ridiculous. You've got to be very sure-footed to get away with a line like, "Now we're ridin' a rainbow to Cloudsville." My favorite version is by Buddy Greco, who manages to give you the impression he doesn't just sing the song, he lives it. Can't seem to find that on YouTube, but here's Ella doing it.

Mittle Earth

Andy, Michael, re Romney/Perry granny-scaring:

First, in a two-party system, there ought to be room for one party that doesn't reflexively accuse anyone who wants to discuss Social Security honestly of wanting to push Gran'ma off the cliff.

Second, this was a foolish tactic by Mitt, since whatever short-term advantage it gains him it reinforces his chief defect in the eyes of the base -- and the reason his numbers are so soft: The suspicion that he's an opportunist with no coherent worldview. His attack on Perry for saying something little different to what he said last year has just added an entirely new topic to the old flipflopper critique, and an entirely new policy area on which, as with health care, Barack Obama will be able to say that he and his opponent are in basic agreement.

Third, the "granny card" is especially contemptible. I see even the Wall Street Journal worries that "the danger is that his rhetoric will scare the elderly." Why? Perry's said that those already receiving benefits and those within a few years of doing so will see no change. Still too "scary"? How about if he pledges that those in early middle-age will see no change? How about those in the final year of their half-decade Bachelor's Degree in Complacency Studies?

Throughout 2009/2010, while the media were running stories about how the Republican Party was leaderless and rudderless, the tea party guys and the town hall meetings moved the meter of public discourse in the direction of sanity. For 2011/2012, the GOP's heir presumptive is proposing to move it back to bipartisan somnolence. Not a good sign. The very minimum Republicans are entitled to in their candidate is a guy who gets the urgency.     

Let's Roll Over

Waiting to be interviewed on the radio the other day, I found myself on hold listening to a public-service message exhorting listeners to go to 911day.org and tell their fellow citizens how they would be observing the tenth anniversary of the, ah, “tragic events.” There followed a sound bite of a lady explaining that she would be paying tribute by going and cleaning up an area of the beach.

Great! Who could object to that? Anything else? Well, another lady pledged that she “will continue to discuss anti-bullying tactics with my grandson.”

#ad# Marvelous. Because studies show that many middle-school bullies graduate to hijacking passenger jets and flying them into tall buildings?

You should never feel left out

You are a piece of a puzzle

And without you

The whole picture can’t be seen.

And if that message of “healing and unity” doesn’t sum up what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, what does? A painting of a plane flying into a building? A sculpture of bodies falling from a skyscraper? Oh, don’t be so drearily literal. “It is still too soon,” says Midori Yashimoto, director of the New Jersey City University Visual Arts Gallery, whose exhibition “Afterwards & Forward” is intended to “promote dialogue, deeper reflection, meditation, and contextualization.” So, instead of planes and skyscrapers, it has Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree,” on which you can hang little tags with your ideas for world peace.

What’s missing from these commemorations?

Firemen?

Oh, please. There are some pieces of the puzzle we have to leave out. As Mayor Bloomberg’s office has patiently explained, there’s “not enough room” at the official Ground Zero commemoration to accommodate any firemen. “Which is kind of weird,” wrote the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, “since 343 of them managed to fit into the exact same space ten years ago.” On a day when all the fancypants money-no-object federal acronyms comprehensively failed -- CIA, FBI, FAA, INS -- the only bit of government that worked was the low-level unglamorous municipal government represented by the Fire Department of New York. When they arrived at the World Trade Center the air was thick with falling bodies -- ordinary men and women trapped on high floors above where the planes had hit, who chose to spend their last seconds in one last gulp of open air rather than die in an inferno of jet fuel. Far “too soon” for any of that at New Jersey City University, but perhaps you could reenact the moment by filling out a peace tag for Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree” and then letting it flutter to the ground.

Upon arrival at the foot of the towers, two firemen were hit by falling bodies. “There is no other way to put it,” one of their colleagues explained. “They exploded.”

Any room for that on the Metropolitan Museum’s “Peace Quilt”? Sadly not. We’re all out of squares.

What else is missing from these commemorations?

“Let’s Roll”?

What’s that -- a quilting technique?

No, what’s missing from these commemorations is more Muslims. The other day I bumped into an old BBC pal who’s flying in for the anniversary to file a dispatch on why you see fewer women on the streets of New York wearing niqabs and burqas than you do on the streets of London. She thought this was a telling indictment of the post-9/11 climate of “Islamophobia.” I pointed out that, due to basic differences in immigration sources, there are far fewer Muslims in New York than in London. It would be like me flying into Stratford-on-Avon and reporting on the lack of Hispanics. But the suits had already approved the trip, so she was in no mood to call it off.

#page# How are America’s allies remembering the real victims of 9/11? “Muslim Canucks Deal with Stereotypes Ten Years After 9/11,” reports CTV in Canada. And it’s a short step from stereotyping to criminalizing. “How the Fear of Being Criminalized Has Forced Muslims into Silence,” reports the Guardian in Britain. In Australia, a Muslim terrorism suspect was so fearful of being criminalized and stereotyped in the post-9/11 epidemic of paranoia that he pulled a Browning pistol out of his pants and hit Sgt. Adam Wolsey of the Sydney constabulary. Fortunately, Judge Leonie Flannery acquitted him of shooting with intent to harm on the grounds that “‘anti-Muslim sentiment’ made him fear for his safety,” as Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported on Friday. That’s such a heartwarming story for this 9/11 anniversary they should add an extra panel to the peace quilt, perhaps showing a terror suspect opening fire on a judge as she’s pronouncing him not guilty and then shrugging off the light shoulder wound as a useful exercise in healing and unity.

#ad# What of the 23rd Psalm? It was recited by Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer and the telephone operator Lisa Jefferson in the final moments of his life before he cried, “Let’s roll!” and rushed the hijackers.

No, sorry. Aside from firemen, Mayor Bloomberg’s official commemoration hasn’t got any room for clergy, either, what with all the Executive Deputy Assistant Directors of Healing and Outreach who’ll be there. One reason why there’s so little room at Ground Zero is because it’s still a building site. As I write in my new book, 9/11 was something America’s enemies did to us; the ten-year hole is something we did to ourselves -- and in its way, the interminable bureaucratic sloth is surely as eloquent as anything Nanny Bloomberg will say in his remarks.

In Shanksville, Pa., the zoning and permitting processes are presumably less arthritic than in Lower Manhattan, but the Flight 93 memorial has still not been completed. There were objections to the proposed “Crescent of Embrace” on the grounds that it looked like an Islamic crescent pointing towards Mecca. The defense of its designers was that, au contraire, it’s just the usual touchy-feely huggy-weepy pansy-wimpy multiculti effete healing diversity mush. It doesn’t really matter which of these interpretations is correct, since neither of them has anything to do with what the passengers of Flight 93 actually did a decade ago. 9/11 was both Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid rolled into one, and the fourth flight was the only good news of the day, when citizen volunteers formed themselves into an ad hoc militia and denied Osama bin Laden what might have been his most spectacular victory. A few brave individuals figured out what was going on and pushed back within half an hour. But we can’t memorialize their sacrifice within a decade. And when the architect gets the memorial brief, he naturally assumes that there’s been a typing error and that “Let’s roll!” should really be “Let’s roll over!”

And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were enjoined to ask, “Why do they hate us?” A better question is: “Why do they despise us?” And the quickest way to figure out the answer is to visit the Peace Quilt and the Wish Tree, the Crescent of Embrace and the Hole of Bureaucratic Inertia.

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn.

Re re re: Maggie Gallagher is "Right"

I incline more to Michael Walsh's side of this debate - that we need urgently to move the meter in the direction of reality on this issue. The fact that Rick Perry's statement of the obvious is even "controversial" is testament to how diseased our public discourse is. Nevertheless, Maggie concludes by saying we should cut everything else until we've "fully funded Social Security for the next 50 years":

 A pension plan with an army. From a libertarian perspective, is that so bad?

Assuming that's a serious question, I'll rise to the bait. Taxing young people ever more onerously to prop up entitlements for older generations who enjoyed all the benefits of a prosperous America their grandchildren will never know is a great way to sever what little is left of the social compact. Think Wisconsin State Fair writ large: Mobs of the able-bodied preying on the more walker-intense quartiers of Florida. Seniors with terrific government checks but terrified to venture out for Parcheesi Night at the Lodge, because the parking lot isn't as well lit as you might like. You better hope your gated community is seriously gated.

In my new book, I have a throwaway line about a world in which "hospitals are prone to sudden power outages, tragic but economically beneficial." If you want a society in which you'll never quite know whether the night-shift cleaner is going to "accidentally" unplug you, then "a pension plan with an army" is a pretty good way to guarantee it. Whether or not, as Maggie says, 25-year-olds vote for Social Security, more and more Americans understand that we have looted the future to bribe the present, and that Social Security is Exhibit A in that indictment.   

Why Johnny Can't Figure Out Which End of the Hammer to Hold

I see that the president, in a spirit of bipartisan compromise, is proposing this time round to toss a mere third of a trillion dollars into the Potomac and watch it float out to sea, all in the interests of what the Associated Press calls "jump-starting" jobs.

David Espo and Jim Kuhnhenn are using "jump-start" metaphorically. In fact, I would be interested to know whether Barack Obama has ever in his life jump-started anything in a non-metaphorical sense. Or whether Messrs Espo and Kuhnhenn have. In my (ahem) new book, I have a little section on how so much of our language has decayed from the practical to the metaphorical -- a somewhat predictable by-product of an age which values six-and-a-half years of a leisurely Bachelor's in Whatever Studies over the ability actually to do anything. So I was interested to see this piece from my pals at Maclean's up in Canada on how our present generation is "mechanically challenged":

Shop classes are all but a memory in most schools—a result of liability fears, budget cuts and an obsession with academics. Still, even in vocational high schools where shop classes endure, a skills decline is evident. One auto shop teacher says he’s teaching his Grade 12 students what, 10 years ago, he taught Grade Nines. “We would take apart a transmission, now I teach what it is.” Remarkably, most of his Grade 11 students arrive not knowing which way to turn a screwdriver to tighten a screw. If he introduces a nut threaded counterclockwise, they have trouble conceptualizing the need to turn the screwdriver the opposite way. That’s because, he says, “They are texting non-stop; they don’t care about anything else. It’s like they’re possessed.”

At home, spare time is no longer spent doing things like dismantling gadgets, building model airplanes or taking apart old appliances with dad; there’s no tinkering with cars, which are so computerized now you couldn’t tinker if you wanted to. A 2009 poll showed one-third of teens spend zero time per week doing anything hands-on at all.

Even if we avoid total societal collapse and/or an Iranian nuclear strike and so will not be required to build a rude dwelling in the wilds, in a post-prosperity America a lot of us will have to figure out how to make stuff last longer. Doesn't sound like we're up to it.

Beyond that, almost all the great transformative breakthroughs of the last half-millennium were made not by eminent scientists but by tinkerers. (Derb is very good on this stuff, so I hope he'll take it from here.) But nobody tinkers any more, and we are ruled by thinkers. Who think the answer is to dump another third of a trillion bucks into trying to jump-start seized-up metaphors. 

The Children Are Our Future!

Readers may recall that Greeley, Colorado is where a church social and a Ricardo Montalban/Esther Williams song drove a disgusted Sayyib Qutb to become the intellectual godfather of modern Islamic imperialism.

He'd be relieved to hear the neighborhood's changed a bit these last sixty years. From The Greeley Gazette:

The principal of a Ft. Collins school has said a picture of the American flag lowered in the presence of the Saudi Arabian flag, was not done by his staff and that he promptly resolved the issue once he was made aware of it.

The picture, first published on the blog www.greeleyreport.com adn taken by a reader,  shows the American flag at Bauder Elementary School in Ft. Collins lowered while the Saudi Arabian flag was elevated.

In other news from the grade schools of the west, in the United Kingdom this cute little moppet invites his fellow Britons to embrace Sharia; and at the Ontario legislature in Queen's Park a young Toronto lad models for his fellow Canadians the latest in mujahid chic.

Celebrate diversity!

Two Americas

On the one hand, Teamsters mob boss Jimmy Hoffa Jr. can stand on stage, at a podium bearing the presidential seal and with the chief of state sitting a few feet away, and make his Hoffa-you-can't-refuse pledge to "take these sons-of-bitches out," and President Obama responds by saying how "proud" he is of Hoffa.

On the other hand, every week "edgy," "dangerous," "transgressive" comedians stand on stage, trip over some pansified PC nicety, and find themselves forced into groveling apology tours and counseling and awareness raising.

Strange. Underneath the blizzard of f-words, the comedy industry is decaying into an interminable rainbow-coalition version of the closing homily in "My Three Sons" when Fred MacMurray explains that a man is never so tall as when he stoops to pick up his fellow man's hat.

Meanwhile, if you want to see edgy, dangerous stand-up, you're better off at an Obama fundraiser.