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The New Editor highlights additional proof that the federal government has taken care of its own while the country has suffered.
According to this list from Forbes magazine, four of the top five richest counties in the US are in the Washington, DC, area. Five of the top ten are in the Washington, DC, suburbs.
Number six on the list is Los Alamos County, NM, where about 60% of those employed work for the federal government.
Here is the list…
…Is there anyone who actually thinks this is healthy for the country?
Mark Steyn enjoys joking about the latest lewd topic.
…”British intelligence has hacked into an al-Qaida online magazine and replaced bomb making instructions with a recipe for cupcakes.”
True. If MI6 can break into a Yemeni website run by Anwar al-Awlaki and infect it with home-baking favorites from “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” I don’t doubt that the same spooks could easily hack into Anthony Weiner’s computer and Tweet his cupcake to that poor college girl in Seattle.
But Congressman Weiner then retreated from the sinister hacking line, and protested that all this fuss about a mere “prank” involving a “randy photo” (his words) was an “unfortunate distraction” from real issues like raising the debt ceiling. Like Bill Clinton in the Nineties, Rep. Weiner needs to “get back to work for the American people.”
It’s the political class doing all this relentless “work for the American people” that’s turned this country into the brokest nation in the history of the planet …
In the WaPo, Kevin Chavous has an amazing story of the NAACP working against better education opportunities for African Americans, and Harlem parents protesting against the NAACP.
…How did it get to the point that the country’s foremost civil rights organization is the target of a protest by the people it was created to serve? Forty years ago, Harlem was marching alongside NAACP leaders in the fight for justice and education equity for African Americans. So what happened?
Harlem residents gathered last month to urge the NAACP to drop a lawsuit it had filed with the teachers union against the New York City Department of Education. That lawsuit seeks to stop the closure of 22 bad schools as well as the placement of several charter schools in district school space. The lawsuit essentially could lead to the closing of several high-performing charter schools that primarily serve black children in Harlem. Seeing this threat, thousands of parents took to the street against those who would deny their child a good education — even if that meant marching against the NAACP.
In response, an NAACP spokesman says that the group supports alternative schools but doesn’t want the city to neglect its public schools. But wait a minute. Charter schools are public schools. What the NAACP seems intent on preserving is the “system” of New York public schools that has failed kids in Harlem for far too many years. System preservation has emerged as the common refrain from those fighting expanding charter schools and quality educational options for parents. Preserving such a system in its current form would ensure that thousands of low-income minority children fail to get the education they deserve. Ironically, the NAACP has become the protector of the status quo it once fought. …
Clive Crook talks about what the government can do to help the economy, including more stimulus.
…Within weeks, federal borrowing will collide with the statutory debt ceiling, raising the possibility of default; talks to prevent this are getting nowhere. The Federal Reserve’s second programme of quantitative easing, or QE2, is at an end. Higher commodity prices have caused a blip in inflation. All these factors should have lowered the price of US government debt, pushing long-term interest rates higher. But such is the concern about the flagging recovery that 10-year rates fell to less than 3 per cent last week, lower than they have been all year.
Even with a government that worked, remedial action would be hard to devise. Fiscal and monetary policy are both stretched, the options for more action limited and risky. But the very notion of optimal policy just now is Utopian because the US does not have a government that works. If it did, the clock would not be ticking down to a congressionally mandated default even as the economy stalls.
Though asking the question is no more than an academic exercise, what ought US fiscal policy to do? It should combine renewed short-term stimulus (in forms that subsidise jobs) with measures to reduce borrowing (revenue increases and entitlement reforms) in the longer term. How could something so obvious be controversial? In a way, in fact, there is no controversy: Democrats and Republicans are agreed in rejecting this out of hand. …
In the Economist, W.W. blogs about the lack of recovery and offers an explanation that will give liberals fresh reason to blame Republicans.
MITT ROMNEY officially threw his hat in the ring yesterday. That “Barack Obama has failed America” by exacerbating and prolonging the recession is emerging as a main theme of Mr Romney’s campaign. Last week I reported on Mr Romney’s speech in Des Moines, in which he pressed hard on the claim that Mr Obama’s policy initiatives have retarded recovery by sowing uncertainty precisely when certainty about “the rules of the game” was most needed. In a Bloomberg column earlier this week Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, offers some anecdotal evidence in favour of the “regime uncertainty” argument collected from a guy he sat next to on an airplane:
The man in the aisle seat is trying to tell me why he refuses to hire anybody. His business is successful, he says, as the 737 cruises smoothly eastward. Demand for his product is up. But he still won’t hire.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know how much it will cost,” he explains. “How can I hire new workers today, when I don’t know how much they will cost me tomorrow?”
He’s referring not to wages, but to regulation: He has no way of telling what new rules will go into effect when. His business, although it covers several states, operates on low margins. He can’t afford to take the chance of losing what little profit there is to the next round of regulatory changes. And so he’s hiring nobody until he has some certainty about cost. …
The Economist interviews historian Timothy Snyder about his book, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.
SOME topics are so dark that even scholars feel intimidated. Yet Timothy Snyder is not so easily daunted. A professor of Eastern European history at Yale, his most recent book, “ Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin”, examines some of the most devastating collective memories of the modern world. With scholarly rigour and engaging prose, he seeks to explain both the causes and effects of the two most haunting mass murderers of the 20th century. The “bloodlands” of the title describes the area where the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered 14m civilians. The Economist has praised the book for being a “revisionist history of the best kind”, one that “makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe’s modern history.”
…What are some of the most common misconceptions of the history of the so-called “bloodlands”?
The first is that there’s something that people think they understand and it turns out that they don’t, and that thing is the Holocaust. The reality of it is, if anything, worse than they think, much more face-to-face, much more barbaric, much more unforgettable. People think that the Holocaust is something that happened in Germany, generally to German Jews. They think it’s something that happened only in Auschwitz. They generally don’t know about any of the other death facilities besides Auschwitz; they generally don’t know that half of the Jews who were killed were shot rather than gassed.
Hitler and Stalin killed virtually in the same place, and that is Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Baltic states, western Russia. The Holocaust happened in a place where millions and millions of people have just been killed due to the Soviet policies. …
Gerald Traufetter, in Der Spiegel, has an excellent explanation of the information overlooked by the French investigation into the crash of flight Air France 447.
…Lawyers and technical experts for the families of German crash victims suspect that a hidden software error in the automated flight control system — specifically concerning a vital stabilizer flap on the plane’s tail — doomed to failure all pilot efforts to regain control of the plane. They are demanding that the Parisian court investigating the crash take action. “We petition that appropriate action be taken to prevent a catastrophe similar to that which befell AF 447 from happening again,” reads the letter submitted to Judge Sylvie Zimmermann, which SPIEGEL has obtained.
The families’ attorneys are demanding that the court require Airbus to undertake “technical improvements” so that “speed sensors can no longer ice up in the future.” Should that not be possible, then Airbus planes must be “outfitted with software for the electronic flight control system that precludes the sudden occurrence of an uncontrolled flight situation.”
The letter also raises the possibility that the entire fleet of Airbus A330s as well as that of the sister model A340 might have to be temporarily grounded. More than 1,000 planes would be affected by such an order. …