A cliff of their own choosing

By George F. Will, Published: November 28

The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com

With a chip on his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his second term by replicating the mistake of his first. Then his overreaching involved health care — expanding the entitlement state at the expense of economic growth. Now he seeks another surge of statism, enlarging the portion of gross domestic product grasped by government and dispensed by politics. The occasion is the misnamed “fiscal cliff,” the proper name for which is: the Democratic Party’s agenda.
For 40 years the party’s principal sources of energy and money — liberal activists, government-employees unions — have advocated expanding government’s domestic reach by raising taxes and contracting its foreign reach by cutting defense. Obama’s four years as one of the most liberal senators and his four presidential years indicate that he agrees. Like other occasionally numerate but prudently reticent liberals, he surely understands that the entitlement state he favors requires raising taxes on the cohort that has most of the nation’s money — the middle class.
Mitt Romney as candidate and others before and since have suggested increasing revenue by capping income tax deductions. This would increase that tax’s progressivity, without raising rates that would dampen incentives. Obama’s compromise may be: Let’s do both. Remember the story of when the British Admiralty sought six new battleships, the Treasury proposed four, so they compromised on eight.
Those proposing higher taxes on the wealthy note that when the income tax began in 1913, the top rate was 7 percent. But in 1917, war brought a 67 percent rate. Between 1925 and 1931, the rate was 24 percent or 25 percent, but in only five of the subsequent 80 years — 1988-92 — was the top rate lower than it is today.
Republicans, however, respond that because lower rates reduce incentives to distort economic decisions, they promote growth by enhancing efficiency. Hence restoration of the higher rates would be a giant step away from, and might effectively doom, pro-growth tax reform. Furthermore, restoration of the Clinton-era top rate of 39.6 percent would occur in the very different Obama era of regulatory excesses and Obamacare taxes. Hence Republicans rightly resist higher rates.
Given liberals’ fixation with the affluent paying their “fair share,” it might seem peculiar that they are so vehemently against Paul Ryan’s “premium support” proposal for Medicare. Their recoil is, however, essential to the liberal project.
Ryan’s supposedly radical idea is that people should shop for health insurance, with government subsidizing purchases by the less affluent. This would introduce what soon will be inevitable — means testing, a.k.a. progressivity. But liberals reject it with a word, the incantation of which suffices, they think, as an argument — “voucher.”
This is peculiar because perhaps the most successful federal program of the 20th century was essentially a voucher program. The purpose of the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act — a.k.a. the G.I. Bill of Rights — was to facilitate demobilization by helping men and women acquire educations and buy houses — and hence form families. The government did not build universities or houses. It, in effect, gave individuals conditional cash — vouchers — by helping to pay for home loans and college tuition.
Liberals’ strenuous objection to vouchers is that vouchers, as the functional equivalent of cash, empower individuals to make choices. It is the business of the liberals’ administrative state, staffed by experts, to make choices for inexpert individuals. This is why, while Democrats in Washington are working to reduce the portion of Americans’ private income that is disposed of by private choices, two tentacles of the Democratic Party — the Indiana and Louisiana teachers unions — are in their states’ courts waging futile fights against school choice programs, lest thousands of low- and moderate-income parents be as empowered as millions of demobilized servicemen were.
Washington’s contentiousness about the “cliff” is producing a blizzard of numbers. The argument, however, is not about this or that tax rate but about the nature of the American regime. When the Republican House majority acts as though it has a mind — and a mandate — of its own, this is not Washington being “dysfunctional,” it is the separation of powers functioning as the Founders intended. Their system requires concurrent congressional majorities — one in the Senate, with its unique constituencies and electoral rhythms, another in the House, with its constituencies and rhythms. And at least 219 of the 234 House Republicans won in November by margins larger than Obama’s national margin.
georgewill@washpost.com
More on this debate: Ruth Marcus: Teetering over the ‘fiscal cliff’ Greg Sargent: Reasons to be encouraged about fiscal cliff endgame Joel Achenbach: Fiscal cliffing up a storm Marc A. Thiessen: The GOP should resist a ‘fiscal cliff’ down payment

The truth about gang rape in the U.K.

By Bruce Bawer
http://frontpagemag.com
November 28, 2012

First of all, let me make it clear that I’m no fan of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Born in Uganda, she’s a British Muslim columnist who contributes regularly to the left-wing Independent, supports the Liberal Democrats, and has a habit of saying unpleasant things about white men. Her opinions on the issues of the day are, by and large, pretty much what you’d expect them to be given her religious, professional, and political affiliations. (Example: she complained on Question Time that Osama bin Laden hadn’t been given a proper burial.)
Still, I had to give her a cheer – not two or three cheers, mind you, but one – for an article that ran in the Daily Mail on Thursday.  It was occasioned by a new report from the British government’s Office of the Children’s Commission (OCC) summarizing the results of an investigation into the sexual abuse of young girls by gangs and groups. The report, noted Alibhai-Brown in her Daily Mail piece, “concludes that agencies that should have helped” many of these abused girls either “didn’t hear their stories or look after them as they should have.” Yet the OCC itself, Alibhai-Brown charged, was burdened by its own version of the same hear-no-evil affliction: as she put it, the authors of the report, headed up by Deputy Children’s Commissioner Sue Berelowitz, “try hard to side-step some difficult facts and even warn the rest of us from going where they have chosen not to tread.”
Alibhai-Brown illustrates her point by zeroing in on this sentence by Berelowitz & co.: “Perpetrators come from all ethnic groups, and so do their victims – contrary to what some may wish to believe.” In response to which Alibhai-Brown offers this comment: “Yes, we know they come from all backgrounds. But that rather cutting second line is directed at people like me who believe that in some British cities – especially in the North of England – circles of sexual hell for young girls are run by gangs of Muslim men (most of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage) who mostly prey on white girls….To generalise their crimes, and lump them in with all the other abusers across the country, is to deny what the victims of these men and their families are saying about the abuse that has gone on.”
Indeed. Of course, the OCC’s statement about perpetrators coming “from all ethnic groups” is yet another example of the handy PC dodge whereby the link between Islam and pretty much any of its more horrific aspects can be swept away by means of a simple rhetorical formula.  For example: “Honor killings occur in a wide range of religions.” Or: “Female genital mutilation is not an exclusively Islamic phenomenon.” Or: “The practice of forced marriages is not restricted to Muslim families.” All true – and all cynically designed to avoid the uncomfortable statistical reality, and to protect the speaker from being accused of racism or Islamophobia. (It’s no surprise that ITV’s brief online account of the OCC report actually made that insipid truism its headline: “Report: Child exploiters ‘come from all ethnic groups.’”)
“The report,” notes Alibhai-Brown, “points out that 28 per cent of the victims they found were of black and Asian background. But it doesn’t state what it should have: that some of the worst long-term abuse is carried out by mainly British Pakistani men targeting lost young white girls, often from troubled or poor families….The children are neglected and hungry for love. The men offer treats, car rides and kebabs, then drugs and alcohol; and then they corrupt them.” Alibhai-Brown argues that while authorities fear “that the racial aspects of child sex gangs will be hijacked by groups such as the English Defence League,” it is important to “confront some of the values that drive such men to prey on white females” and to look squarely at “some Asian cultural assumptions that make the paedophiles feel no guilt or shame about what they do.”
Exactly which “values” and “Asian cultural assumptions”  is Alibhai-Brown talking about? Alas, she doesn’t say. That’s where her article ends: with a gutsy-sounding call to face up to “values” and “Asian cultural assumptions” that, it appears, she would prefer not to identify at the present juncture.
What to say about this? Well, first of all, anyone who is genuinely interested in facing up to the truth of these matters needs to stop talking, as Alibhai-Brown does incessantly in her article, about race. This is not about race but about religion – not about black and white but about Muslim and infidel. Alibhai-Brown wants to be seen as bravely pulling back a curtain on an ugly reality, but her repeated reference to dark-hued men and “white girls,” and her use of that cowardly, dishonest (and, alas, ubiquitous) British euphemism “Asian” is nothing more than a way of skirting the truth – namely, that the “cultural assumptions” at work here aren’t “Asian” – aren’t Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mongolian, or Thai – but Islamic. As she and most of her readers well know, countless Muslim boys are brought up to view infidel females as little more than whores whose “immodest” attire makes them legitimate targets for physical assault. Most Westerners who are seriously concerned about these matters have long since learned that the Koran itself condones such conduct, and that in cases of rape it is the victims, not the perpetrators, who are considered the guilty parties. These repulsive facts have been widely known in Europe for many years now.
For heaven’s sake, as long ago as September 6, 2001 – I’ve cited this article before, and I’ll cite it again – the social anthropologist Unni Wikan told the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet that it didn’t surprise her that 65 percent of rapists in Oslo were “non-Western men” (that’s the Norwegian version of “Asian”), because, as she explained, “many immigrants” (that’s another euphemism – she’s not talking about immigrants from Canada) “think that Norwegian women are sending them signals that they want sexual contact.” Wikan, while serving up a rather pro forma-ish acknowledgment that rape is “never acceptable,” went on to make it sound, well, pretty darn acceptable. Noting that “rapists in most Muslim countries are hardly punished” and that most people in those places “feel that women are responsible for the rape,” she argued that “it’s reasonable for immigrants to bring such attitudes with them when they move here.” Their misunderstandings, in short, are “understandable.” By contrast, the naivete of many Norwegian women about Muslim views on rape is notunderstandable but, contrarily, “startling”; those women, Wikan insisted, “must realize that we live in a multicultural society, and adapt themselves to it.”
Wikan’s position – she actually declared that Western women raped by Muslim men are partially responsible for their own fate – may have been reprehensible, but in retrospect, at least, one has to admire her frankness about the Islam-rape nexus. But then, that Dagbladetarticle appeared before 9/11 – a full five days before. Since that fateful day, the willingness of Westerners in the public eye to connect these particular dots has declined significantly. Back in 2007, for instance, the London Times reported that a number of “Asian” men in Britain were forcing their attentions upon perhaps hundreds of “white girls as young as twelve,” but that the police weren’t doing anything about it because they feared “upsetting race relations.” “Asian,” “white,” “race”: how stubbornly determined the Times was to avoid the topic of Islam! Then, in 2010, as Alibhai-Brown herself points out, a police report noted that “gangs of Asian males” were “exploiting young white females,” one of whom told the Daily Mail at the time that most of these gangsters “are Asians of Pakistani origin. But very few of the authorities will say this.” And in this context, needless to say, virtually none of them would breathe the word Muslim.
So it goes, year after year. All that changes is the incidence of these crimes, which continues to climb along with the population of European Muslims. And year by year the government reports keep coming – providing a pleasant illusion that something is actually being done, even as they persist in delicately sidestepping the one little detail that explains everything.
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The Backlash Against Big Wind

By Robert Bryce
http://www.nationalreview.com
November 26, 2012

Last month, 60 residents of New York’s Herkimer County filed a lawsuit in Albany that provides yet another example of the growing backlash against the wind-energy sector. It also exposes the double standard that exists in both the mainstream media and among environmental groups when it comes to “green” energy.

The main defendant in the lawsuit is the Spanish electric utility Iberdrola, which is the second-largest wind-energy operator in the U.S. The Herkimer County residents — all of whom live within a mile or so of the $200 million Hardscrabble Wind Power Project — are suing Iberdrola and a group of other companies because of the noise and disruption caused by the wind project.
The lawsuit comes at a touchy time for the wind industry, which is desperately trying to convince Congress to extend the industry’s production tax credit that expires at the end of this year. The subsidy gives wind-energy companies 2.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour of electricity that they produce.
Wind-energy proponents claim that an elimination of this tax credit could result in the loss of 37,000 jobs, but they have not been able to silence the dozens upon dozens of groups that have sprung up to fight expansion of the wind sector. And few places in the U.S. have seen a bigger backlash than New York State. About two dozen New York towns have passed rules banning or restricting wind-energy development, and many rural residents have expressed ongoing concerns about turbine noise.
The noise issue is front and center in the Hardscrabble lawsuit. Neighbors of the project have been complaining about noise from the turbines since last year. Two noise studies done on the Hardscrabble facility found that the turbines sometimes exceed their permitted limit of 50 decibels. In response to the complaints, Iberdrola Renewables — which owns the Hardscrabble project — installed noise-reduction equipment on a handful of the turbines.
In the lawsuit, the residents claim that the noise produced by the turbines on the 74-megawatt facility causes headaches and disturbs their sleep. Some of the residents say they have abandoned their homes because of the noise. Others are claiming that the project has hurt their property values. The key paragraph in the suit says that the defendants “failed to adequately assess the effect that the wind turbines would have on neighboring properties including, but not limited to, noise creation, significant loss of use and enjoyment of property . . . diminished property values, destruction of scenic countryside, various forms of trespass and nuisance to neighboring properties, and health concerns, among other effects.”
For years, the wind industry and its many supporters on the “green” left have been trying to dismiss the turbine-noise issue — and the nearby residents who are complaining about the problem. In late 2009, the American Wind Energy Association and the Canadian Wind Energy Association published a paper that attempted to quiet critics of the noise problem; they stated in the paper that “there is no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds emitted by wind turbines have any direct adverse physiological effects.” The paper also suggested that the symptoms critics were attributing to wind-turbine noise were psychosomatic and declared flatly that the vibrations from the turbines were “too weak to be detected by, or to affect, humans.”
The Herkimer County lawsuit — Abele et al. v. Iberdrola et al. — will bring the noise issue into the legal arena where it can be properly adjudicated. But it’s not yet clear what the plaintiffs might get if they win, because the lawsuit doesn’t name a specific dollar amount in damages. Jeff DeFrancisco, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said that New York State doesn’t allow plaintiffs to put a dollar value on the damages. Further, DeFrancisco said the plantiffs cannot seek injunctive relief because the turbines are already in place. “All we can do is seek compensation,” he says.
DeFrancisco said the litigation was necessary because the residents living near the turbines had no other options. The plaintiffs, he says, “can’t live peacefully” in their homes. “These are people who never had a problem before.” Some of them, he says, “would like to move but can’t because they can’t sell their homes.”
In addition to illustrating the backlash against the wind industry, the Herkimer County lawsuit provides yet another example of the double standard that exists in media coverage of “green” energy. Rural newspapers in New York and a few anti-wind websites have covered the lawsuit, but it has not been mentioned in mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times.
It’s easy to imagine what the coverage in theTimes might look like if a lawsuit similar to the one in Herkimer County was filed against a company that was drilling for oil or natural gas. Last year, the Times ran a number of stories under a banner called “drilling down” — some of them were published on the front page — spotlighting hydraulic fracturing and the possibility of water contamination due to drilling.
The issues involved in oil and gas drilling and wind-turbine development are similar. They all entail new industrial activity in rural areas. All bring friction — truck traffic, noise, and other disruptions — to regions that are not accustomed to energy development. But the Times has never published a story on the backlash against the wind industry, even though New York is home to much of the backlash.
Although it’s easy to get riled about the newspaper of record, it’s mainstream environmental groups that display the most pernicious double standard. Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and other groups were founded on the notion of environmental protection. The Sierra Club’s mission statement declares that it wants to “educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment.”
If that’s true, why isn’t the Sierra Club campaigning for the rights of the residents in Herkimer County? Don’t rural landowners have the right to a high-quality natural and human environment that is free from industrial intrusions, like, say, 470-foot-high wind turbines that are built within a few thousand feet of their homes?
The hard reality is that for groups such as the Sierra Club and their fellow travelers, the issue of climate change — and their near-religious belief that wind turbines are an effective method of cutting carbon dioxide emissions — trumps nearly every other concern. If rural residents in Herkimer County and elsewhere are getting steamrolled by wind-energy developers, well, then, that’s just too bad.
It will take months for the Herkimer County lawsuit to wend its way through the courts. But the lawsuit shows, once again, that the anti-wind backlash is growing. And that blowback will only get worse — with or without the help of the self-proclaimed “environmentalists.”
— Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. 

Philadelphia: The Key

Nov 27, 2012 

By Daniel Pipes

http://www.nationalreview.com

The Second Hamas–Israel War, of November 10 to 21, inspired a mighty debate over rights and wrongs, with each side appealing to the large undecided bloc (19 percent of Americans according to CNN/ORC, 38 percentaccording to Rasmussen). Is Israel a criminal state that has no right to exist, much less to deploy force? Or is it a modern liberal democracy with the rule of law that justifiably protects innocent civilians? Morality drives this debate.

To any sentient person, it is obvious that Israelis are 100 percent justified in protecting themselves from wanton attacks. A cartoon from the First Hamas–Israel War, of 2008 to 2009, symbolically showed a Palestinian terrorist shooting from behind a baby carriage at an Israeli soldier in front of a baby carriage.
The tougher question is how to prevent further Hamas–Israel wars. Some background: If Israelis are 100 percent justified in protecting themselves, their government also bears complete responsibility for creating this crisis. Specifically, it made two misguided unilateral withdrawals in 2005.
From Gaza: Ariel Sharon won reelection as prime minister in January 2003 in part by mocking a rival who called for the unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli residents and soldiers from Gaza; then,inexplicably, he adopted this same policy in November 2003 and put it into effect in August 2005. I dubbed this at that time “one of the worst errors ever made by a democracy.”
From the Philadelphi Corridor: Under pressure from the U.S., especially from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Sharon signed an agreement in September 2005, called “Agreed Arrangements,” that withdrew Israeli forces from the Philadelphi Corridor, a 14-kilometer-long and 100-meter-wide area between Gaza and Egypt. The hapless “European Union Border Assistance Mission at the Rafah Crossing Point” (EUBAM Rafah) took their place.
Trouble was, the Egyptian authorities had promised in their 1979 peace treaty with Israel(III:2) to prevent “acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, or violence” but in fact permitted massive smuggling of armaments to Gaza via tunnels. According to a former head of Israel’s Southern Command, Doron Almog, writing in early 2004, “smuggling has a strategic dimension” because it involves sufficient quantities of arms and materiel “to turn Gaza into launching pad for ever-deeper attacks against Israel proper.”
Almog considered these policies “a dangerous gamble” by the Mubarak regime and a “profound strategic danger” that could “endanger the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord and threaten the stability of the whole region.” He attributed the lax Egyptian attitude to a mix of anti-Zionist views among officialdom and a readiness to vent the Egyptian public’s anti-Zionist sentiments.
Sharon arrogantly signed the “Agreed Arrangements,” contrary to the strong opposition of Israel’s security establishment. Of course, by removing this layer of Israeli protection, an “exponential increase” in the Gaza arsenal predictably followed, culminating in the Fajr-5 missiles that reached Tel Aviv this month.
To permit Israeli soldiers effectively to prevent armaments from reaching Gaza, David Eshel of Defense Update argued in 2009 for the IDF taking back the Philadelphi Corridor and increasing its size to “a fully sterile security line of about 1,000 meters,” even though this would mean having to relocate about 50,000 Gaza residents. Interestingly, the Palestinian Authority’s Ahmed Qurei privately endorsed similar steps in 2008.
Almog goes farther: Noting deep Iranian involvement in Gaza, he advocates making the Philadelphi Corridor into a no-man’s-land by widening it to about ten kilometers. Ideally, he writes me, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will build this anti-smuggling obstacle and the American military will have a continued role policing the border. Second best, Israelis do this alone. (The still-operational Gaza-Jericho Agreement of May 1994 establishes a “Military Installation Area” under Israel’s full control — in effect, the Philadelphi Corridor — that provides Jerusalem with the legal basis to take back this crucial border.)
In contrast, Michael Herzog, formerly a high-ranking official in Israel’s defense ministry, tells me it is too late for Israel to take back the Philadelphi Corridor, that international pressure on Egypt to stop the flow of arms to Gaza is the solution. Likewise, former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Dore Gold backs joint U.S.-Israel “arrangements” to keep out new weaponry.
I am skeptical about an effective American role, whether military or diplomatic; Israelis alone have the incentive to close down the arms transfers. Western governments should signal Hamas that they will encourage Jerusalem to respond to the next missile attack by retaking and enlarging the Philadelphi Corridor, thereby preventing further aggression, humanitarian tragedy, and political crises.
— Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2012 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.