The number one single today in 1958:
Today in 1963, the producers of CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew told Bob Dylan he couldn’t perform his “Talking John Birch Society Blues” because it mocked the U.S. military.
So he didn’t. He walked out of rehearsals and didn’t appear on the show.
The number one album today in 1973 was Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy”:
There is a false statement going around that if you don’t support Donald Trump, you support Hillary Clinton.
The counter to that, of course, is that choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing an evil.
The Weekly Standard reports on turning the first statement around:
On The Kelly File, Wisconsin talk show host Charlie Sykes gave an eloquent defense of why he remains against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Megyn Kelly asked, “Before I ask you about Paul Ryan, why? Because you know the argument against that is that’s a vote for Hillary Clinton.”
Sykes gave a powerful argument against the presumptive Republican nominee.
“Yeah, well, Donald Trump is a serial liar, a con man who mocks the disabled and women. He’s a narcissist and a bully, a man with no fixed principles who has the vocabulary of an emotionally insecure 9-year-old. So no, I don’t want to give him control of the IRS, the FBI, and the nuclear codes. That’s just me.”
Kelly joked, “Tell us how you really feel. It doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of wiggle room there, Charlie.”
“I do see the raft swimming towards the sinking ship,” Sykes explained.
“But at some point—if you understand, and this is not just ideological, it’s not just the fact that he’s abandoned one position after another or that he has the penchant for internet hoaxes or conspiracy theories. I mean a week ago tonight, remember, he was peddling the notion that Ted Cruz’s dad had something do with the JFK assassination. So there are people who say that just because of party loyalty we’re supposed to forget all of that. I just don’t buy that. Because I’ve cautioned my fellow conservatives, you embrace Donald Trump, you embrace it all. You embrace every slur, every insult, every outrage, every falsehood. You’re going to spend the next six months defending, rationalizing, evading all that. And afterwards, you come back to women, to minorities, to young people and say, that wasn’t us. That’s not what we’re about. The reality is, if you support him to be president of the United States, that is who you are, and you own it.
Jeffrey Tucker reports that whatever Donald Trump is (this moment), he’s not a fiscal conservative:
It was only days after Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination that the mask (such as it was) came off. Suddenly he was telling multiple interviewers that he could be talked into raising taxes, boosting the minimum wage, and printing enough money to pay the national debt in cheap dollars.
“On my plan [taxes are] going down. But by the time it’s negotiated, they’ll go up,” Trump said. “In my opinion, the taxes for the rich will go up somewhat.” (After the outcry, he claimed he meant up from his proposed cuts.)
As for the minimum wage, he talks like Obama, completely uninterested in market forces, as if what people are paid is purely at the discretion of political managers: “I think people have to get more… I don’t know how you live on $7.25 an hour.”
Oh, but he says he would leave it to the states to decide the height of the wage floor, which raises the question of why he is talking about it at all, since that can presumably happen now. The Department of Labor he would head as president possesses plenty of power to strongly nudge states however it wants. If Trump favors a higher wage floor, he is going to get it.
And, incidentally, such a higher floor could be an crucial part of an anti-immigration policy as well. If low-wage jobs become illegal, immigrants have no reason to cross the border at all. The eugenicists who passed the 1920s immigration laws understood this well.
As for the national debt, he says it can’t be paid, we can’t default, and so there is only one way forward: “print the money.”
Wow, what gives? Somehow this torrent of policy ideas has shocked even Vox tonotice “the left-wing economics movement that Trump is adopting.”
Being generally opposed to tax increases and holding the line on job-killing minimum wage increases are two of the things that Republicans at least pretend to be good at. In any case, no Republican presidential candidate in my lifetime has said he would increase taxes, so this is a departure. And certainly none has actually toyed with the idea of inflating away the debt, at least not publicly.
It’s a departure given his party, but no one should be startled at his willingness to grow government. If you think about the core of his program, it has always been about that. He wants to prevent American businesses from hiring people from abroad. He wants to take private property on the border and nationalize it by building a wall. He has praised Japanese internment, called for shutting down parts of the Internet, pushed for mass surveillance, and advocated vast new infringements on the right of Americans to buy products from abroad.
That’s just for starters. From the very beginning of his campaign this past summer, he has worked to build up a case for bigger and more intrusive government. He began with rhetorical assaults on immigrants and international trade, while extolling his managerial prowess as a much-needed CEO for the whole country.
Usually presidents run on a platform of reforming government, cutting government, improving government, controlling government, etc.. After all, government — not the whole country — is their bailiwick.
But not Trump. He posits himself as the head of the whole country, running America the same ways he runs his businesses. He would stamp his name brand on the nation, as he does with everything else he owns, thereby imparting it with his own purported greatness. Probably the last president who was so open about his belief that he runs the nation was FDR himself.
That Trump casually mentioned the possibility of raising taxes on the “rich” (we know how that goes), or inflate away the debt, should have caused no shock or alarm. It follows from his own philosophy of government, which is not that we live under a rule of law, but rather than we should be living under the rule of one man.
Why would anyone believe that Trump is anything but a state builder? Much of it has to do with the strange way in which people infuse candidates with their own ideological longings, hoping against hope that Trump shares their values.
Trump has fashioned himself as anti-establishment, a classic populist. You might think that has something to do with being anti-government, but you would be terribly wrong. For him, “anti-establishment” has always simply meant that the wrong people are in charge.
He has been disdainful of political correctness, made the right noises on guns and global warming, and so on. He opposes the left, which the naive observer might misinterpret as opposing government overreach.
Surely we should know better. The twentieth century, during which time fascism wreaked havoc on liberty, and did so in the name of opposing the communist threat, was not that long ago. In any case, illustrious minds like F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises bore witness to this and tried to tell the world about the dangers of rightest authoritarians.
They both published books in 1944 (Road to Serfdom and Omnipotent Government, respectively) that pointed out that despotism comes in many flavors. It can be left and it can be right. Opposing one and favoring the other is not the same as backing liberty.
The right and left legs of statism dance in a devil’s ballet. One gains control and fosters resentment and reaction. The other takes over and wages war on its political enemies. The population is divided. It becomes a struggle over power, but each has an interest in gaining more. It’s better to think of right and left as factions of the same party. They can be right about some things some of the time but neither pushes simple freedom as an answer to social and economic problems.
For generations, the Republican Party has tolerated within its ranks a liberty-leaning minority. There have been many iterations: the supply siders, the “leave-me-alone” coalition, the Tea Party, and so on. Their interests have generally aligned with the merchant class and rank-and-file bourgeoisie that is fed up with regulation, taxes, and wars.
With the traditional Republican coalition now shattered, Americans are newly acquainting themselves with a different and more consistent authoritarianism that has a right-wing flavor. I’ve argued elsewhere that this is accurately called fascism. It might seem like a movement organized to stop the march of the left, but it uses the same means to achieve ends that are only slightly different in cultural tone and appeal.
You can read a thousand definitions on what this is, but I favor Ludwig von Mises’s own analysis. He says that at minimum fascism is nativist on trade and migration and extols the leadership principle over national life. It is a form of socialism: it necessarily intervenes in the market. But its socialism dispenses with the parts that the middle class finds so annoying about the left. You can nominally keep your property, although in reality you merely administer it for the state. Family and religion can remain intact. What is required is that you direct your primary loyalties to the central state.
In Mussolini’s immortal words: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
Trump has said something similar: “The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.” …
True liberals should never be enticed by their seeming promise. In order to see and understand the danger, we have to look beyond the red scare and realize that politics is more complicated than merely opposing the worst evil. Those “lesser evils” who lower our guard by exploiting our fears of “greater evils” are often the greatest evil of all.
The number one British single today in 1958 was a cover of a song written in 1923:
The number one British album today in 1963 was the Beatles’ “Please Please Me,” which was number one for 30 weeks:
Five Thirty Eight writes:
The Democratic primary will technically march on, but Hillary Clinton is almost certainly going to be her party’s nominee. Same with Donald Trump. And voters don’t appear thrilled at the prospect: Clinton and Trump are both more strongly disliked than any nominee at this point in the past 10 presidential cycles.
Normally, when we talk about candidate likability, we use favorability ratings, which combine “strongly favorable,” “somewhat favorable,” “somewhat unfavorable” and “strongly unfavorable.” But that didn’t work so well in the Republican primary, where Trump was able to win despite arelatively low net favorability rating because his “strongly favorable” rating with Republican primary voters was among the highest in the field. So let’s look at Trump and Clinton’s “strongly favorable” and “strongly unfavorable” ratings among general election voters.
These are people who don’t just like or dislike the candidates, they reallylike or dislike them.
No past candidate comes close to Clinton, and especially Trump, in terms of engendering strong dislike a little more than six months before the election.
Clinton’s average “strongly unfavorable” rating in probability sample pollsfrom late March to late April, 37 percent, is about 5 percentage points higher than the previous high between 1980 and 2012. Trump, though, is on another planet. Trump’s average “strongly unfavorable” rating, 53 percent, is 20 percentage points higher than every candidate’s rating besides Clinton’s. Trump is less disliked than David Duke was when Duke ran for the presidency in 1992, but Duke never came close to winning the nomination. In fact, I’ve seen never anything like Trump’s numbers heading into a general election for someone who is supposed to be competitive.
Part of the negativity voters feel toward Clinton and Trump probably has something to do with growing political polarization in our country. But polarization doesn’t explain everything. If Trump and Clinton’s strongly unfavorable ratings were simply a byproduct of polarized politics, you’d expect them to have high “strongly favorable” ratings too. They don’t. You can see this in their net strong favorability ratings (the “strongly favorable” rating minus the “strongly unfavorable” rating):
No major party nominee before Clinton or Trump had a double-digit net negative “strong favorability” rating. Clinton’s would be the lowest ever, except for Trump.
In previous cycles, the nominees of each party almost always had a strongly favorable and unfavorable rating within 10 percentage points of each other. The only exception was Michael Dukakis in 1988; only 19 percent of Americans felt strongly about Dukakis, either favorably or unfavorably. Over 50 percent of Americans give Clinton and Trump either a “strongly favorable” or “strongly unfavorable” rating, and most of that feeling is negative.
Maybe it’s because Clinton is a pathological liar …
… but so is Trump:
Perhaps some smart person out there can explain how we Americans get past this after Nov. 8, when half or more of the American people will hate whoever wins.
The more I speak to supporters of Donald Trump, the more convinced I become that a significant portion of the man’s apologists are blissfully unaware of what is actually at stake in 2016. Time and time again, I’m told blithely that it doesn’t really matter if Trump loses in 2016, because a loss could not possibly be worse than the status quo. Trump, I am informed, is a “Hail Mary.” And if the Senate and the House go down, too? Well that’s just the price of trying to shake things up.
This, I’m afraid, is flat-out wrong. Disastrously wrong. Apocalyptically wrong. The Republican party is an imperfect vehicle and it has, of course, made mistakes. But the idea that it hasn’t effectively and consistently opposed President Obama’s agenda is little more than a dangerous and ignorant fiction. Had the GOP not been standing in the way — both from 2008, when it was in the minority everywhere, and from 2010, when it regained the House — the United States would look dramatically different than it does today. Without the GOP manning the barricades, Obamacare could well have been single payer, and, at the very least, the law would have included a “public option.” Without the GOP manning the barricades, we’d have seen a carbon tax or cap-and-trade — or both. Without the GOP manning the barricades, we’d have got union card check, and possibly an amendment to Taft-Hartley that removed from the states their power to pass “right to work” exemptions. Without the GOP standing in the way, we’d now have an “assault weapons” ban, magazine limits, background checks on all private sales, and a de facto national gun registry. And without the GOP standing in the way in the House, we’d have got the very amnesty that the Trump people so fear (it’s fine to oppose Marco Rubio for his support for the “Gang of 8″ bill, but it’s not fine to pretend that it didn’t matter that the Republicans ran the House when the reform bill left the Senate; it did).
A similar truth obtains at the state level. Had the GOP not taken over the vast majority of the country’s local offices since 2010, we’d have seen significantly less progress on right to work, the protection of life, school choice, and the right to keep and bear arms; we’d have seen a whole host of new sanctuary cities; we’d have had considerably fewer attorneys general rising up against Obama’s executive overreach; and, perhaps most importantly, we’d have seen Obamacare entrenched almost everywhere as state after state chose to expand Medicaid.
If the general election polls prove to be as accurate as were those that marked the primaries, Donald Trump is likely to lose in a blowout in November, and possibly to take the House and the Senate and a whole host of states with him. Or, put another way, a Trump nomination is likely to return the GOP to where it was back in 2008. And then? Well, then you can count on all of the above items being passed permanently into law.
Truth be told, the vast majority of the criticisms of the GOP’s performance since 2010 revolve around a willful misunderstanding of how the American constitutional system actually works, often coupled with a preference for saying — absent any real evidence — that Republicans just haven’t “fought hard enough.” Like it or not, the Constitution gives President Obama a veto, and that veto can be used both to kill legislation (as it was when Congress repealed Obamacare and defunded Planned Parenthood last year), and to force a shutdown in such cases as the president dislikes the budget. Simply saying that Congress enjoys the “power of the purse” does not change this. Yes, the House can refuse to include the president’s priorities in its spending bills. But, by virtue of the powers he is granted by the same document, the president can then refuse to sign off on those spending bills. At the moment, at least, Republicans are simply not popular enough to win the fights that result. To acknowledge this is not to “cave,” it is to accept political reality.
Which is to say that, absent super-majorities in both houses (super-majorities that the Republican party has enjoyed at no time since 2010), the scope for reversing rather than blocking Obama’s gains has always been slim. There is only one way in which the Republican party is going to usher in the sort of sweeping change that its voters would like to see, and that is to add the White House to its collection of public offices. Sadly, the party’s voters seem to have chosen another course. Worse still, they seem to have decided to risk their backstops as well, thereby rendering it likely that a loss at the presidential level will be transmuted into a loss everywhere else. I suspect that those responsible for this approach will only come to understand how utterly foolish is the idea that the GOP doesn’t matter when, having weakened it to an ignominious rump, they are forced to sit and watch in horror as the dam finally breaks.
One wonders if Trump supporters think Obama should have been overthrown in a coup d’etat.
You may remember a couple weeks ago I noted the first known meeting of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Today in 1963, upon the advice of George Harrison, Decca Records signed the Rolling Stones to a contract.
Four years to the day later, Stones Keith Richard, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones celebrated by … getting arrested for drug possession.
I noted the 54th anniversary May 2 of WLS in Chicago going to Top 40. Today in 1982, WABC in New York (also owned by ABC, as one could conclude from their call letters) played its last record, which was …
Four years later, the number one song in America was, well, inspired by, though not based on, a popular movie of the day:
David Samuels’s lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, is meant to be a puff piece. In some ways it is: Rhodes comes across in the New York Times magazine story as very effective and powerful, but also as morally dubious. Even more dubious, in Samuels’s presentation, is the state of American journalism in the Obama era.
Consider this passage:
Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies.
To put it less flatteringly, Rhodes is a masterful propagandist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—an administration, like any large organization, needs people to speak to the public on its behalf, and to engage in such advocacy is not, in itself, dishonorable.
But lying to the public is. The describes what Samuels calls the “innovative campaign to sell” Obama’s Iran nuclear deal:
The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented . . . was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false. . . .
In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the “story” of the Iran deal began in 2013, when a “moderate” faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat regime “hard-liners” in an election and then began to pursue a policy of “openness,” which included a newfound willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program. The president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14, 2015. . . . While the president’s statement was technically accurate . . . it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
This is the section of Samuel’s profile that has received the most attention, and understandably so. “Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers,” writes John Podhoretz in the New York Post. “We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so.” Make that the Obama White House and the New York Times!
The campaign for the Iran nuclear deal will likely draw comparisons with the Bush administration’s effort to promote military action in Iraq. There are similarities, but also key differences. Before joining the Obama campaign in 2007, Rhodes had worked as “chief note-taker” for the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, where, Samuels writes, he “developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour.”
The Iraq effort was promoted using false information, but even Rhodes does not claim the deception was deliberate. As Samuels writes: “For Rhodes . . . the Iraq war was proof, in black and white, not of the complexity of international affairs or the many perils attendant on political decision-making but of the fact that the decision-makers were morons.” The Obama administration decision-makers aren’t morons, just con artists.
Not that the public fell for the con. Most polls found the public skeptical of the deal, and the administration succeeded in attracting only the bare minimum of support (all from Democrats) necessary to avoid rejection by Congress. In those respects it is similar to ObamaCare, passed with only Democratic votes and over strong public opposition—and sold, as we now know, though a campaign of deliberate deception that implicated the president himself.
Another similarity with ObamaCare is that the administration can count on its allies in the press to relay its propaganda uncritically. The Samuels piece describes this in especially stark terms:
Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them—”
“I can name them,” I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.
The fault here lies not with the ventriloquist but with journalists who decide to be dummies.
Samuels observes that we no longer live “in a world where . . . carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power.” That last qualification is telling: It suggests that the Washington press corps is partisan as well as (selectively) servile, and leaves open the possibility that the journalists would some of their adversary spirit in the event of a Trump administration.
That seems likely to us, though the effect might be surprisingly similar. Candidate Trump has proved rather effective at using the press’s hostility to advance his “narrative” and “messaging.”
John Podhoretz is more scathing:
Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers. We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so. …
The mastermind of the Obama machine is Ben Rhodes, a New Yorker who joined the Obama campaign as a speechwriter in 2007 and has risen to become the most influential foreign-policy hand in the White House.
Rhodes drips with contempt for almost everyone but his boss. He consigns all those who do not share every particular of the Obama-Rhodes foreign-policy perspective to a gelatinous mass called “The Blob” — including, Samuels writes, Hillary Clinton.
He thinks as little of them as he does of the journalists he and his team must spoon-feed. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes says. “They literally know nothing.”
Then there are others his assistant Ned Price refers to as “force multipliers,” more senior reporters and pundits who parrot what they’re told. “I’ll give them some color,” Price says, using the journalistic term for juicy bits of inside-baseball detail, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.” …
Why on Earth was such conduct remotely acceptable? Because, Samuels makes clear, Rhodes and Obama believe they’re the only sensible thinkers in America and that there’s no way to get the right things done other than to spin them. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he tells Samuels. “But that’s impossible.”
Impossible? There was a sober, reasoned public debate over the Iran deal. Its opponents were deadly serious. In the end, 58 senators voted against it on sober, reasoned grounds.
What the Samuels piece shows is that the Obama administration chose to attempt to get its way not by winning an argument but by bringing an almost fathomless cynicism to bear in manipulating its own clueless liberal fan club.
The headline says it all in Foreign Policy’s piece, which is not written by a conservative:
A stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the asshole who is the president’s foreign policy guru
The profile of one Ben Rhodes running in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is not unsympathetic, which makes it all the more devastating.
Perhaps the key sentence is this: “His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.”
Rhodes comes off like a real asshole. This is not a matter of politics — I have voted for Obama twice. Nor do I mind Rhodes’s contempt for many political reporters: “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
But, as that quote indicates, he comes off like an overweening little schmuck. This quotation seems to capture his worldview: “He referred to the American foreign policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.” Blowing off Robert Gates takes nerve.
I expect cynicism in Washington. But it usually is combined with a lot of knowledge — as with, say, Henry Kissinger. To be cynical and ignorant and to spin those two things into a virtue? That’s industrial-strength hubris. Kind of like what got us into Iraq, in fact.
Rhodes and others around Obama keep on talking about doing all this novel thinking, playing from a new playbook, bucking the establishment thinking. But if that is the case, why have they given so much foreign policy power to two career hacks who never have had an original thought? I mean, of course, Joe Biden and John Kerry. I guess the answer can only be that those two are puppets, and (as in Biden’s case) are given losing propositions like Iraq to handle.
Fact check: Obama’s hasn’t been an original foreign policy as much as it has been a politicized foreign policy. And this Rhodes guy reminds me of the Kennedy smart guys who helped get us into the Vietnam War. Does he know how awful he sounds? Kind of like McGeorge Bundy meets Lee Atwater.
The Wall Street Journal:
The Flint, Michigan, water crisis began in April 2014. This week, two years later, President Obama stood before a crowd of Flint residents and said: “I’ve come here to tell you that I’ve got your back, that we’re paying attention.”
And people wonder why Bernie Sanders is doing so well.
This being Barack Obama, he went on, embellishing his commitment to the people of Flint: “I will not rest, and I’m going to make sure that the leaders at every level of government don’t rest until every drop of water that flows to your home is safe to drink and safe to cook with and safe to bathe in, because that’s part of the basic responsibilities of a government in the United States of America.”
It’s worth parsing that last sentence about clean water being a basic responsibility “of a government in the United States of America.”
A government? Which government? Flint’s, or Michigan’s, or Barack Obama’s government in Washington?
After two years, what we know about this water crisis is that governments indeed failed at the local, state and federal level. That may have something to do with why the presidential campaign is overflowing, from right to left, with the idea that government is “failing” in virtually every imaginable respect. So maybe Mr. Obama has touched on something important, to wit: Why is it that government, whether in Flint or Washington, is in a failed state?
It looks to us as if Mr. Obama sensed that the narrative of the Flint failure was turning against his view of government, so he decided it was necessary to reframe the problem. He told the Flint residents that their crisis was the result of “a larger issue,” which was a certain mindset toward government. “It’s a mindset,” Mr. Obama said, “that believes that less government is the highest good no matter what.”
No matter what? No one believes that. The anger coursing through the electorate now is over a government that doesn’t seem to be able to do its job—no matter what.
The Flint water crisis is a case study in government that has become a morass of conflicting regulations and authorities, which in turn ensures that instead of responsibility or accountability—at any level—the agents of government spend their time buck-passing.
At congressional hearings in March, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy bucked it over to the state of Michigan, which had given her people “confusing, incomplete and incorrect information.” And so EPA staff was “unable to understand the problem” until it was too late.
But the EPA Region 5 administrator who later resigned, Susan Hedman, told Congress at that hearing she didn’t intervene in September 2015 for fear the Michigan Attorney General might sue her agency.
Worth noting here is the Clean Water Rule that Mr. Obama waved into existence in May, and with which the EPA now claims federal dominion over ditches and prairie potholes. But for Flint’s purposes, the more relevant directive is the 1991 federal Lead and Copper Rule, which gave EPA authority to control lead and copper in drinking water. Scientists have been urging a clarifying revision of that rule for the last decade. The update isn’t expected until sometime in 2017.
As to Ms. Hedman’s fear of being sued by Michigan, maybe she had a point. Another recent Obama directive, the Clean Power Plan, is creating tension with the states and has made state officials defensive about their turf.
In Mr. Obama’s telling, Flints happen because of a “corrosive attitude” that forces us to “underinvest” in pipes, bridges and roads. That is, any government failure is due to a lack of funding. And the opposite: Spend more and government failure goes away.
A counter-view would be that “we” underinvest in better infrastructure because entitlement spending has first claim on so much of the revenue taxpayers send government, at every level. In Flint, pensions and retiree health benefits consumed one-third of the city’s budget.
The default solution, for Mr. Obama, is that Washington’s rainbow pot can be expanded to pay for Flints everywhere. This is what he means by, “I’ve got your back.” The prudent might slip a hand around to their back pocket.
Last week a supposed conservative claimed the state needs to invest more in its roads. The counterargument is that (1) road construction costs are inflated by the prevailing-wage law, and (2) the state spends tax dollars that are supposed to go to roads to non-roads such as bike trails and mass transit. Near Presteblog World Headquarters the state is spending more than $600,000 to pave (an impermeable surface, of course) and light (with non-solar lights) a bike trail.
The number one single today in 1964 was performed by the oldest number one artist to date:
The number one single today in 1970:
The number one British single today in 1981:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 