h/t Instapundit
I have been somewhat skeptical of the claims that the Murdoch scandals are going to jump the Atlantic, because my sense has always been that the British press really is different--far more aggressive and edgy than their American cousins. This sort of phone hacking has been widespread there for a long time. Scotland Yard has now expanded its investigation to 31 publications and hundreds of journalists, a fact that has gone largely unremarked by those who were extremely interested in the case right up to the point where the evidence started suggesting that this was a British problem, not a Murdoch problem.
A bomb targeting the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi has been linked, by Georgian intelligence, to a series of bombings around the country over the last 12 months that all lead back to Russia's GRU.
A bomb blast near the U.S. Embassy in Tblisi, Georgia, in September was traced to a plot run by a Russian military intelligence officer, according to an investigation by the Georgian Interior Ministry.
Shota Utiashvili, the most senior official in charge of intelligence analysis for the ministry, said in an interview with The Washington Times that the recent spate of bombings and attempted bombings - including what he said was a blast targeting the U.S. Embassy - was the work of Russian GRU officer Maj. Yevgeny Borisov.
"These are extraordinarily specific and detailed allegations delivered by the government of Georgia," said Sen. Mark Kirk, Illinois Republican. "On the basis of this report, the Congress should examine these allegations of a Russian-sponsored attack on a U.S. Embassy and its personnel.
"If true, a Russian-sponsored attack on a U.S. Embassy would constitute the most serious crisis in U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War and put to lie any 'reset' in bilateral relations."
Obama has done his best to pretend to take them seriously. He claimed to have a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. The court eunuchs of the press corps were impressed, and went off to file pieces hailing the president as "the grown-up in the room."
There is, in fact, no plan. No plan at all. No plan whatsoever, either for a deficit reduction of $4 trillion or $4.73. As is the way in Washington, merely announcing that he had a plan absolved him of the need to have one.
So the president's staff got out the extra-wide teleprompter and wrote a really large number on it, and simply by reading out the really large number, the president was deemed to have produced a serious blueprint for trillions of dollars in savings.
For his next trick, he'll walk out on to the stage of Carnegie Hall, announce that he's going to play Haydn's Cello Concerto No. 2, and, even though there's no cello in sight and Obama immediately climbs back in his golf cart to head for the links, music critics will hail it as one of the most moving performances they've ever heard.
#2
Mark Steyn makes many good points in this article. The ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more. No rating agencies are downgrading it. The media coverage of this story has been fraudulent. MSM coverage of this issue is a DISGRACE.
One structural problem Steyn did not mention is energy. Modern economic growth is depend on cheap / abundant energy sources. Note the 'cheap' and 'abundant' part - they must be linked. This excludes all 'green' energy initiatives. The US government has been actively working at making US energy supplies more expensive and less available than ever before. Its only contribution to making conventional energy sources more available are all our troops in the Middle East and central Asia. Much of the worldwide economic malaise is related to increasingly more expensive and scarcer energy supplies, and this is the weakest link in our 'shaky business model.'
#3
Respectfully disagree. Our economic "growth" has been premised on an expanding labor pool filled with illegal aliens and women, with all the attendant problems caused and new private and public services formed to deal with such a social/political calamity.
The national and state governments have benefited mightily from the largesse of this "growth" that has finished working its way through the economic system, and there is simply nothing more that can be done to ever expand the economy or the government.
Don't take my word for it. Cuts or no cuts; tax increases or not, under the current circumstances our economy will begin to grow at its "natural" rate conforming to population growth (the only real engine of economic growth), which will probably be less than 2 percent for the foreseeable future.
The political question is, will the US and state governments continue to demand an ever larger share of whatever is left, or will we finally be forced to reign in government at all levels and limit its role in our daily lives?
Seems to me we are at the point now where there is little choice.
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/23/2011 14:56 Comments ||
Top||
#7
Consumers & population growth won't help much without key ingredients like cheap/abundant energy, rule of law, innovation unhampered by stupid bureaucracies, etc. China in the 1500's had plenty population, but accounted for very little on the world scene. Britain in the 1700's outstripped the French in the industrial revolution partly due to their cultural / constitutional advantages & partly due to cheap/abundant coal.
#8
To paraphrase a famous saying "Before wealth can be consumed, it has to be produced."
Or, to put it another way---which country is wealthier: Israel with 7 million people, or Egypt with 80?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
