Ann Coulter on Obama, Iran and the Middle East

This has to be one of Ann Coulter's best recent articles: Welcome Back, Carter!
A few excerpts:

Obama bravely told the Cairo audience that 9/11 was a very nasty thing for Muslims to do to us, but on the other hand, they are victims of colonization. Except we didn't colonize them. The French and the British did.

In another sharks-to-kittens comparison, Obama said, "Now let me be clear, issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam." No, he said, "the struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life." So on one hand, 12-year-old girls are stoned to death for the crime of being raped in Muslim countries. But on the other hand, we still don't have enough female firefighters here in America.

Obama also said that it was unfair that "some countries have weapons that others do not" and proclaimed that "any nation -- including Iran -- should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty." Wait -- how about us? If a fanatical holocaust denier with messianic delusions can have nuclear power, can't the U.S. at least build one nuclear power plant every 30 years?

But back to Iran, what precisely do Iranians need nuclear power for, again? They're not exactly a manufacturing powerhouse. Iran is a primitive nation in the middle of a desert that happens to sit on top of a large percentage of the world's oil and gas reserves. That's not enough oil and gas to run household fans?

Quote of the day: On war and peace

"In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

- Orson Welles as Harry Lime in Graham Greene's The Third Man

This is in relationship to the current left's obsession with peace, every anti-American on Earth wants peace, every liberal radical group has "peace" in its name, even the church of global warming is rewarded with a peace prize. Like Samuel Huntington said in The Clash of Civilisations, it's weird how, while Americans usually love competition between companies as the only way to progress, they seem so repulsed by the idea of competition between countries.

The Myth of Scandinavian Wealth

In a New York Times article titled We're Rich, You're Not. End of Story, Bruce Bawer (a Times contributor currently working in Norway) debunks the fairy tale of Nordic states abundance:

In Oslo, library collections are woefully outdated, and public swimming pools are in desperate need of maintenance. News reports describe serious shortages of police officers and school supplies. When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine. Drug addicts crowd downtown Oslo streets..... After I moved here six years ago, I quickly noticed that Norwegians live more frugally than Americans do. They hang on to old appliances and furniture that we would throw out. And they drive around in wrecks. In 2003, when my partner and I took his teenage brother to New York - his first trip outside of Europe - he stared boggle-eyed at the cars in the Newark Airport parking lot, as mesmerized as Robin Williams in a New York grocery store in "Moscow on the Hudson."..... Even the humblest of meals - a large pizza delivered from Oslo's most popular pizza joint - will run from $34 to $48, including delivery fee and a 25 percent value added tax. Not that groceries are cheap, either. Every weekend, armies of Norwegians drive to Sweden to stock up at supermarkets that are a bargain only by Norwegian standards. And this isn't a great solution, either, since gasoline (in this oil-exporting nation) costs more than $6 a gallon.

Mr. Bawer mentions a study which ranked the 50 US states and 15 EU members based on GDP and purchasing power. Here are some of the results:

The only European country whose economic output per person was greater than the United States average was the tiny tax haven of Luxembourg, which ranked third, just behind Delaware and slightly ahead of Connecticut. The next European country on the list was Ireland, down at 41st place out of 66; Sweden was 14th from the bottom (after Alabama), followed by Oklahoma, and then Britain, France, Finland, Germany and Italy. Alternatively, the study found, if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi.

There is an explanation for these rankings:

Economic growth in the last 25 years has been 3 percent per annum in the U.S., compared to 2.2 percent in the E.U. That means that the American economy has almost doubled, whereas the E.U. economy has grown by slightly more than half. The purchasing power in the U.S. is $36,100 per capita, and in the E.U. $26,000 - and the gap is constantly widening.

And there is another report from the international accounting company KPMG, which took into account actual disposable income (after taxes) and adjusted cost of living.

Scandinavians were the poorest people in Western Europe. Danes had the lowest adjusted income, Norwegians the second lowest, Swedes the third.

On "Greed" and Economic Success

Two articles drew my attention today. First one is Thomas Sewell's The “Greed” Fallacy which counters the Marxist-inspired viewpoint that equivalates business success with greed. It explains that the labor market for CEO's is what's driving compensations so high (to the outrage of the socialists). And in the end he turns to oil prices: Every time oil prices shoot up, there are cries of “greed” and demands by politicians for an investigation of collusion by Big Oil. Now that oil prices have dropped big time, does that mean that oil companies have lost their “greed”? Or could it all be supply and demand — a cause and effect explanation that seems to be harder for some people to understand than emotions like “greed”?

In An Excellent Economic State of the Union, Larry Kudlow tries to point out something that the media is struggling to avoid: that the economy is doing exceptionally well. Jobs continue to boom. So do real incomes, productivity, and profits. Economist Michael Darda points out that real wages over the first five years of the Bush expansion are actually growing more rapidly than over the first five years of the Papa Bush/Bill Clinton boom. Meanwhile, unemployment today is only 4.5 percent. Federal, state, and local tax collections are soaring through the roof. Budget deficits are plunging. Inflation-adjusted GDP is averaging just more than 3 percent. Family wealth stands at a record of slightly more than $54 trillion. Total employment is at a record 146 million.

Then, defying the liberal dreams that America doens't matter in the world anymore, he says that in fact, this America boom is spearheading a global economic surge. While the American free-market model is often derided as “cowboy capitalism,” imitation remains the sincerest form of flattery. And it isn’t just China, India, and Russia who are acquiescing to the worldwide spread of American capitalism. It’s also Eastern Europe and parts of South America. Heck, even the socialists in Old Europe — like France and Germany — are getting into the act by reducing individual and corporate tax rates to promote growth. Mr. Kudlow takes on Kyoto as well: As for the global-warming alarmists, imposing carbon caps or carbon taxes won’t do anyone any good. On the economic side of things, this will severely depress production and employment. And for what? An estimated global temperature reduction of 4/100ths of 1 degree Fahrenheit?

Cultural degeneration and anti-war sentiment in Europe

Thomas Sowell had a very interesting article yesterday, titled Going Quietly? It's about the decline of the European society as it's losing it's worldwide power. Here are some excerpts from Mr. Sowell's article:

Two generations of being insulated from the reality of the international jungle, of not having to defend their own survival because they have been living under the protection of the American nuclear umbrella, have allowed too many Europeans to grow soft and indulge themselves in illusions about brutal realities and dangers. The very means of their salvation have been demonized for decades in anti-nuclear movements and protesters calling themselves "antiwar." But there is a huge difference between being anti-war in words and being anti-war in deeds. How many times, in its thousands of years of history, has Europe gone 60 years without a major war, as it has since World War II? That peace has been due to American nuclear weapons, which was all that could deter the Soviet Union's armies from marching right across Europe to the Atlantic Ocean. Having overwhelming military force on your side, and letting your enemies know that you have the guts to use it, is being genuinely antiwar. Chamberlain's appeasement brought on World War II and Reagan's military buildup ended the Cold War. The famous Roman peace of ancient times did not come from negotiations, ceasefires, or pretty talk. It came from the Roman Empire's crushing defeat and annihilation of Carthage, which served as a warning to anyone else who might have had any bright ideas about messing with Rome. Only after the Roman Empire began to lose its own internal cohesion, patriotism, and fighting spirit over the centuries did it begin to succumb to its external enemies and finally collapse. That seems to be where Western civilization is heading today.

The achievements of Western civilization are buried in histories that portray every human sin found here as if they were peculiarities of the west. The classic example is slavery, which existed all over the world for thousands of years and yet is incessantly depicted as if it was a peculiarity of Europeans enslaving Africans. Barbary pirates alone brought twice as many enslaved Europeans to North Africa as there were Africans brought in bondage to the United States and the American colonies from which it was formed. How many people have any inkling that it was precisely Western civilization that eventually turned against slavery and began stamping it out when non-Western societies still saw nothing wrong with it?

American policies in the Arab world

There's been a lot of talk in recent days about how fighting terror only produces more terror, adding to the old cliche that Muslims turn terrorist because of American policies in the Middle East. Now let's go back in history, to the 1990's, and let's see what the US policies were back then. US liberated Islamic Kuwait from secular Iraq and protected Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Islam, from the same enemy. America went to war along the Bosnian Muslims against their Catholic and Orthodox foes. America attacked Yugoslavia in order to protect Kosovo Muslims. American troops went to Macedonia to protect ethnic Muslims. (Actually, there still are thousands of American soldiers in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia, and nobody is asking for a timetable for their return and a rapid redeployment).

Then, America suffered losses while providing relief to poor Muslims in Somalia. It's been giving out over 10 billion dollars in foreign aid every year to Muslim countries like Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and even Afghanistani Taliban. And what was the Islamic reward for all this? It was the '93 World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers, the embassies in Africa, the USS Cole and ultimately the 9/11. After 9/11, America changed its attitude and reduced many of those Islamic support activities, and what is the result? No attack on America has occured ever since, outside of the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.