China may raise rates when CPI above 2.25 percent: adviser | read this item
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China might increase interest rates once consumer inflation exceeds the one-year benchmark deposit rate of 2.25 percent, a prominent government adviser said on Monday.
Francis Schaeffer's Struggle for Spiritual Reality | read this item
Francis Schaeffer had become a joyless Christian man. Then something profound happened. How did he honestly face down his severe crisis of joylessness? How can we do the same?
Land and Liberty is an enlightening and informative introduction to certain events in early 20th Century Mexican (and US) political and social history put together by gjohnsit. (claude)
kerfuffle c writes about likely MO-08 congressional candidate Tommy Sowers in Sowers on the Road to Congress? More please!(vcmvo2)
davidseth tells us it’s only the beginning of the rainy season and we already have Peru’s Natural Disaster. (jlms qkw)
American Lives & Literature
Cabbage Rabbit provides some context for why JD Salinger’s masterpiece touched (and still touches) so many of us, in Holden Caulfield, Guru. (sunspark says)
Condescender in Chief -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez | read this item
EDITOR’S NOTE:This column is available exclusively through United Media. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact Carmen Puello at cpuello@unitedmedia.com.
They called it a “miracle.” Maybe it wasn’t the Spirit of 1776, but something derivative of that was in the air as Republican Scott Brown was elected to the U.S. Senate seat that had been held by Edward M. Kennedy for five decades. Running on resetting health-care reform in Washington, tax cuts, fiscal responsibility, and not trying enemy combatants in criminal courts, Brown did what really was considered impossible.
It was a safe Democratic seat, we were to believe. But one of the messages the Brown victory sent was: There are no safe seats. There is no inevitability in politics. Even the memory of Teddy Kennedy, a liberal icon, with all the weight of America’s Camelot romance — with his wife on the campaign trail — couldn’t drag this election away from issues. No one’s entitled to any seat. No party is. Election Day actually matters.
It was a powerful statement. An inspiring statement. From around the country that special-election day in Massachusetts, I received e-mails from Americans who felt a newfound connection to what happens in Washington. They felt a newfound power. They, in some cases, even wondered, for the first time in their lives, whether they should run for office.
But there was an entirely different spirit emanating from the teleprompter during Pres. Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address (he decided not to give last year’s speech that name). Barack Obama seemed determined to squash that spirit like a bug. Without using the not-yet-sitting senator’s name, he dismissed growing frustrations with the president and his party and their policies, as represented by the Brown victory, as a “campaign fever” that acts as an obstacle to the ability to govern.
Characteristically, the president swatted his critics like pests. He chided them, for instance, as if they had no plans of their own to offer — most prominently, on health care. But it’s not that they have no plans: It’s that he has no interest in them. They are not legitimate in his mind. They all simply represent obstacles in the way of his agenda.
This is the wrong attitude. These are the wrong lessons.
The (un)presidential attitude seemed to be: Oh, what silly children you are, you American voters. If only you’d listen to me more carefully; perhaps if I spoke slower and used USA Today graphs, you’d get it.
With his condescending attitude, President Obama takes whole new ownership of the paternalistic, nanny-state ideology that is his own, and that is at the root of his domestic-policy priorities. Even as he tries wearing a more centrist cloak, waving rhetorical concessions like a year-off limited spending freeze and a primetime Ronald Reagan hat tip as a cover.
He also functions as the worst kind of leader of his party — one who is willing to let his party fall on its sword in the midterm elections because he wants it all the way he wants it all. In New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts, the White House has lost dramatically. The Associated Press paints a worse picture: “The list of White House failures is growing: It hasn’t galvanized the legions of 2008 Obama backers in three major statewide losses. It hasn’t prevented primary challenges for at least two vulnerable Senate Democrats even though Obama endorsed them. And it hasn’t recruited strong candidates for Senate seats once held by Vice President Joe Biden and the president himself.” And so when he talks about “a stubborn resilience in the face of adversity” that Americans share, one gets the impression he’s really talking about himself. (Perhaps his use of the pronoun “I” over a hundred times was the hint.) His adversity is those who dare to criticize his approach to health care — and anything else. They stand in his way — the reputed “party of no” and members of his own party too. But he will not take a deep breath and start again; he will not take a little more time to actually listen to his critics and negotiate.
As he said during the speech, on health care: “This is a complex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, the process left most Americans wondering, ‘What’s in it for me?’”
But Americans are not only asking, “What’s in it for me?” They are wondering: Why does the federal government have to do it? They can legitimately wonder: Don’t we have a limited government that serves a natural law, based on a moral law? Why then has the president watched as the U.S. Senate passed a bill — his signature bill — that unprecedentedly includes federal-taxpayer funding of abortion? That violates the moral consciences of millions of Americans. That’s not merely, “What’s in it for me?” It’s, “What are we doing to ourselves here, people?”
The one takeaway from the president’s first State of the Union was: “We do not give up. We do not quit. We do not allow fear or division to break our spirit.” That could have been inspirational. But, although his speech was salted with an uncharacteristic American exceptionalism, this was just an extra, seemingly made to order from some focus-group testing. It is not a routine part of his speeches. It didn’t emanate from his being as much as it rang as a well-crafted line, one lesson actually learned from a year’s worth of feedback.
The president tells us that “when I ran for president, I promised I wouldn’t just do what was popular — I would do what was necessary.” Fine. A leader who governs based on what his polling is telling him is no leader worth following. But neither is one who seems to express “contempt,” as former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum put it to me the morning after the speech, for the very Americans he represents in Washington.
In a new poll of likely voters commissioned by the National Review Institute (NRI), John McLaughlin and Associates found that, by 57to 25 percent, people worry about big government over big business. As NRI board member Ramesh Ponnuru puts it: “Likely voters do not believe that this administration knows how business works or how to help it succeed, by 53 to 42 percent; independents and people who own small businesses were even more skeptical. Seventy-nine percent of voters agree that Congress has lost sight of its constitutional limits; 53 percent of them ‘strongly’ agree.”
Americans are not victims who need handouts. Americans need the freedom to flourish. And until our president embodies that, he will be losing — and out. – Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of NRO. Copyright 2010, Kathryn Jean Lopez. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
