It’s Monday, April 9th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of the WSJ, Walter Russell Mead offers his thoughts on….

The Myth of America’s Decline

Washington now has added China, India, Brazil and Turkey to its speed-dial, along with Europe and Japan. But it will remain the chairman of a larger board.

 

The world balance of power is changing. Countries like China, India, Turkey and Brazil are heard from more frequently and on a wider range of subjects. The European Union’s most ambitious global project—creating a universal treaty to reduce carbon emissions—has collapsed, and EU expansion has slowed to a crawl as Europe turns inward to deal with its debt crisis. Japan has ceded its place as the largest economy in Asia to China and appears increasingly on the defensive in the region as China’s hard and soft power grow.

The international chattering class has a label for these changes: American decline. The dots look so connectable: The financial crisis, say the pundits, comprehensively demonstrated the failure of “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have sapped American strength and, allegedly, destroyed America’s ability to act in the Middle East. China-style “state capitalism” is all the rage. Throw in the assertive new powers and there you have it—the portrait of America in decline.

Actually, what’s been happening is just as fateful but much more complex. The United States isn’t in decline, but it is in the midst of a major rebalancing. The alliances and coalitions America built in the Cold War no longer suffice for the tasks ahead. As a result, under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, American foreign policy has been moving toward the creation of new, sometimes difficult partnerships as it retools for the tasks ahead.

From the 1970s to the start of this decade, the world was in what future historians may call the Trilateral Era. In the early ’70s, Americans responded to the defeat in Vietnam and the end of the Bretton Woods era by inviting key European allies and Japan to join in the creation of a trilateral system. Western Europe, Japan and the U.S. accounted for an overwhelming proportion of the international economy in the non-communist world. With overlapping interests on a range of issues, the trilateral powers were able to set the global agenda on some key questions.

Currency policy, the promotion of free trade, integrating the developing world into the global financial system, assisting the transition of Warsaw Pact economies into the Western World—the trilateralists had a lot to show for their efforts.

The system worked particularly well for America. Europe and Japan shared a basic commitment to the type of world order that Americans wanted, and so a more cooperative approach to key policy questions enlisted the support of rich and powerful allies for efforts that tallied pretty closely with key long-term American goals.

It is this trilateral system—rather than American power per se—that is in decline today. Western Europe and Japan were seen as rising powers in the 1970s, and the assumption was that the trilateral partnership would become more powerful and effective as time passed. Something else happened instead.

Demographically and economically, both Japan and Europe stagnated. The free-trade regime and global investment system promoted growth in the rest of Asia more than in Japan. Europe, turning inward to absorb the former Warsaw Pact nations, made the fateful blunder of embracing the euro rather than a more aggressive program of reform in labor markets, subsidies and the like.

The result today is that the trilateral partnership can no longer serve as the only or perhaps even the chief set of relationships through which the U.S. can foster a liberal world system. Turkey, increasingly turning away from Europe, is on the road to becoming a more effective force in the Middle East than is the EU. China and India are competing to replace the Europeans as the most important non-U.S. economic actor in Africa. In Latin America, Europe’s place as the second most important economic and political partner (after the U.S.) is also increasingly taken by China.

The U.S. will still be a leading player, but in a septagonal, not a trilateral, world. In addition to Europe and Japan, China, India, Brazil and Turkey are now on Washington’s speed dial. (Russia isn’t sure whether it wants to join or sulk; negotiations continue.)

New partnerships make for rough sledding. Over the years, the trilateral countries gradually learned how to work with each other—and how to accommodate one another’s needs. These days, the Septarchs have to work out a common approach.

It won’t be easy, and success won’t be total. But even in the emerging world order, the U.S. is likely to have much more success in advancing its global agenda than many think. Washington is hardly unique in wanting a liberal world system of open trade, freedom of the seas, enforceable rules of contract and protection for foreign investment. What began as a largely American vision for the post-World War II world will continue to attract support and move forward into the 21st century—and Washington will remain the chairman of a larger board.

Despite all the talk of American decline, the countries that face the most painful changes are the old trilateral partners. Japan must live with a disturbing rival presence, China, in a region that, with American support, it once regarded as its backyard. In Europe, countries that were once global imperial powers must accept another step in their long retreat from empire.

For American foreign policy, the key now is to enter deep strategic conversations with our new partners—without forgetting or neglecting the old. The U.S. needs to build a similar network of relationships and institutional linkages that we built in postwar Europe and Japan and deepened in the trilateral years. Think tanks, scholars, students, artists, bankers, diplomats and military officers need to engage their counterparts in each of these countries as we work out a vision for shared prosperity in the new century.

The American world vision isn’t powerful because it is American; it is powerful because it is, for all its limits and faults, the best way forward. This is why the original trilateral partners joined the U.S. in promoting it a generation ago, and why the world’s rising powers will rally to the cause today.

But while the concept of American decline on the international stage is indeed mythical (unless of course The Obamao is re-anointed to a second term), the continued domestic dissolution of the once-Golden State is accepted fact:

California Declares War on Suburbia

Planners want to herd millions into densely packed urban corridors. It won’t save the planet but will make traffic even worse.

 

It’s no secret that California’s regulatory and tax climate is driving business investment to other states. California’s high cost of living also is driving people away. Since 2000 more than 1.6 million people have fled, and my own research as well as that of others points to high housing prices as the principal factor.

The exodus is likely to accelerate. California has declared war on the most popular housing choice, the single family, detached home—all in the name of saving the planet. Metropolitan area governments are adopting plans that would require most new housing to be built at 20 or more to the acre, which is at least five times the traditional quarter acre per house. State and regional planners also seek to radically restructure urban areas, forcing much of the new hyperdensity development into narrowly confined corridors.

In San Francisco and San Jose, for example, the Association of Bay Area Governments has proposed that only 3% of new housing built by 2035 would be allowed on or beyond the “urban fringe”—where current housing ends and the countryside begins. Over two-thirds of the housing for the projected two million new residents in these metro areas would be multifamily—that is, apartments and condo complexes—and concentrated along major thoroughfares such as Telegraph Avenue in the East Bay and El Camino Real on the Peninsula.

For its part, the Southern California Association of Governments wants to require more than one-half of the new housing in Los Angeles County and five other Southern California counties to be concentrated in dense, so-called transit villages, with much of it at an even higher 30 or more units per acre.

To understand how dramatic a change this would be, consider that if the planners have their way, 68% of new housing in Southern California by 2035 would be condos and apartment complexes. This contrasts with Census Bureau data showing that single-family, detached homes represented more than 80% of the increase in the region’s housing stock between 2000 and 2010.

The campaign against suburbia is the result of laws passed in 2006 (the Global Warming Solutions Act) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and in 2008 (the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act) on urban planning. The latter law, as the Los Angeles Times aptly characterized it, was intended to “control suburban sprawl, build homes closer to downtown and reduce commuter driving, thus decreasing climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions.” In short, to discourage automobile use.

If the planners have their way, the state’s famously unaffordable housing could become even more unaffordable.

Over the past 40 years, median house prices have doubled relative to household incomes in the Golden State. Why? In 1998, Dartmouth economist William Fischel found that California’s housing had been nearly as affordable as the rest of the nation until the more restrictive regulations, such as development moratoria, urban growth boundaries, and overly expensive impact fees came into effect starting in the 1970s. (Ahhh!  As in the Big Apple, the heavy hand of government regulation benefits the few at the expense of the many, including those their regulations were intended to aid.) Other economic studies, such as by Stephen Malpezzi at the University of Wisconsin, also have documented the strong relationship between more intense land-use regulations and exorbitant house prices.

The love affair urban planners have for a future ruled by mass transit will be obscenely expensive and would not reduce traffic congestion. In San Diego, for example, an expanded bus and rail transit system is planned to receive more than half of the $48.4 billion in total highway and transit spending through 2050. Yet transit would increase its share of travel to a measly 4% from its current tiny 2%, according to data in the San Diego Association of Governments regional transportation plan. This slight increase in mass transit ridership would be swamped by higher traffic volumes.

Higher population densities in the future means greater traffic congestion, because additional households in the future will continue to use their cars for most trips. In the San Diego metropolitan area, where the average one-way work trip travel time is 28 minutes, only 14% of work and higher education locations could be reached within 30 minutes by transit in 2050. But 70% or more of such locations will continue to be accessible in 30 minutes by car.

Rather than protest the extravagance, California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris instead has sued San Diego because she thinks transit was not favored enough in the plan and thereby violates the legislative planning requirements enacted in 2006 and 2008. Her predecessor (Jerry Brown, who is now the governor) similarly sued San Bernardino County in 2007.

California’s war on suburbia is unnecessary, even considering the state’s lofty climate-change goals. For example, a 2007 report by McKinsey, co-sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, concluded that substantial greenhouse gas emissions reductions could be achieved while “traveling the same mileage” and without denser urban housing. The report recommended cost-effective strategies such as improved vehicle economy, improving the carbon efficiency of residential and commercial buildings, upgrading coal-fired electricity plants, and converting more electricity production to natural gas.

Ali Modarres of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles has shown that a disproportionate share of migrating households are young. This is at least in part because it is better to raise children with backyards than on condominium balconies. A less affordable California, with less attractive housing, could disadvantage the state as much as its already destructive policies toward business.

Californios should look at the bright side; when all the businesses are gone, housing prices….as well as availability….won’t be nearly as much of a problem.  Progressives: give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile….telling you how to eat, drive and live every foot of the way.

Since we’re on the subject of prevaricating Progressives….

Senate budget leader predicts budget stalemate through 2012 campaign

 

The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee said Sunday that the two parties probably will not be able to agree on a budget plan before the election, even as his panel prepares to hammer out a fiscal 2013 blueprint.

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” made clear that he is at peace with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid’s position that the chamber does not need to bring a budget to the floor. “I think Senator Reid has made the judgment, probably quite correctly, that there is very little chance that we’re going to get the two sides together before the election,” Conrad said.

Then again, Kent was also at peace….

….taking that sweetheart loan from Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo!

And though we’re certain lying is beneath a member of the Greatest Debilitative Body in the World known to have taken a bribe (wink, wink!), we must dispute Conrad’s conclusion the prospects of not reaching an agreement with the House somehow relieves the Senate of its duty to actually pass a budget.

Here’s the juice: Conrad’s lying through his teeth; this is partisan politics, pure and simple.  However, the greatest breach of trust lies not with Senate Dimocrats like Conrad, but the MSM, who have sacrificed every ounce of their credibility and integrity in the service of a party and philosophy long bereft of both.

Speaking of Dimocrats willfully ignorant of the rampant corruption in their ranks, here’s a headline that can hardly be classified a surprise:

White House Pushing Blame for GSA Spending onto Bush

 

Soooo….why wasn’t Bush up on stage when the GSA presented this award?

In a related item forwarded by Speed Mach, i.e., other Liberals canned for dishonorable conduct, we learn….

NBC fires producer over edited Trayvon Martin call

 

NBC News has fired a producer following a probe into its broadcasting of a misleading edit of an audio clip of a 911 emergency response call during coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting, two sources at the network said. The producer, who was not identified by the sources, is Miami-based. NBC News declined to comment when asked about the dismissal, which the sources said took place on Thursday. Reuters had previously reported that the “seasoned” producer was at the center of the probe.

Public pressure has been building on the network to fully explain the incident – which critics charge has inflamed racial tensions in an already volatile situation. On Thursday, a New York Post editorial characterized the edited 911 call as “pretty damning evidence of willful misconduct by NBC News” and suggested that racial violence could ensue over irresponsible news coverage.

The Today show’s editorial control policies – which include a script editor, senior producer oversight, and in most cases legal and standards department reviews of material to be broadcast – missed the selective editing of the call, said an NBC executive. The network’s executives have vowed to take rigorous steps to formalize editorial safeguards in the news division following the incident, one source at NBC said on Thursday.

News of the firing – which was reported by The New York Times late on Friday – surprised and dismayed some NBC News employees involved in the network’s ongoing coverage of the case, according to two sources, who said the producer was highly regarded within the organization.

No doubt….and more than likely even MORE highly regarded after he or she deliberately misrepresented the contents of the 911 tape in pursuit of racial “justice”!

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to today’s installment of Tales From the Darkside, brought to you by FOX News and the undeniably racist manager of MLB’s Miami Marlins:

Guillen apologizes for Castro comment

 

Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen apologized Saturday for saying he “loved” Cuba’s former president Fidel Castro. Guillen made the comment to Time magazine, adding, “I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that mother(expletive) is still there.”

On Saturday, Guillen spoke to members of the South Florida media, clarifying his remarks and apologizing for any offense they may have caused. “If [people] are disappointed or upset with what I said, I don’t blame them, but I’m with them,” Guillen said, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. (Saaaayyy WHAT?!?)

“I lived in Miami for 12 years. I know exactly what [Castro] means to the town … Everybody is upset and kind of sad with what I said. I’m a grown man. I can take it. “I want to let them know I apologize, but in the meanwhile I was not talking about politics. The reason I say I admire him is because a lot of people want to get rid of this guy and they couldn’t yet.

“That was personal, not politics. (Who is this guy; Michael Corleone?!?) If you don’t read the article, it sounds ugly. The first time I read it I was like, ‘Wow, that’s going to get me in trouble.’ I understand that. I’m not hiding from anybody, especially people in Miami.”

On Friday, the Marlins issued a statement regarding Guillen’s comments. “There is nothing to respect about Fidel Castro. He is a brutal dictator who has caused unthinkable pain for more than 50 years,” the team said. “We live in a community filled with victims of this dictatorship and the people in Cuba continue to suffer today.”

Guillen, who is Venezuelan, said he was “100 percent” against the way Castro treated people and his country and was aware his comments would have offended a number of people beyond Miami’s Cuban community. “He not just hurt Cuban people he hurt a lot of people counting Venezuelans,” he said.

Guillen went on to say he was also “100 percent” against the way Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic and the Rwandan Hutus treated people,….but he nonetheless “respected” them as well.  Ozzie then repeated his claim MLB hates Latino players, as evidenced by the fact they aren’t provided free interpreters, wife-beaters, baggy jeans and fuzzy dice for their ’57 Chevys.

And if Guillen were able to speak to you (without the benefit of an interpreter) on his own behalf right now he’d tell you:

For all you do, this one’s for YOU Ozzie!

Meanwhile, here’s a question Ozzie or anyone else soon-to-be in the market for a job should be asking themselves:

How can you avoid a toxic workplace? 

 

Easy….like some 87,874,000 other Americans of working age, just stop looking for jobs.  That way, not only does The Obamao send you free sh*t every month….

….you don’t adversely impact his reelection bid by dramatically increasing unemployment figures; talk about a WIN-WIN!

Next, we turn to today’s Money Quote, and a snippet from a 1988 interview with Fang Lizhi, the lated Chinese dissident and physicist from the WSJ:

“In a roundabout way, I find a correlation curve: The less people know about China, the more optimistic they are. For example, foreigners are the most optimistic, babbling on about how much housing has improved and so on; overseas Chinese are a little less optimistic because they have access to more information; Chinese studying abroad are more pessimistic—it wasn’t easy for them to leave the country, and they have their personal experience to go by; the Chinese in China, people like us, are even less optimistic. But there’s one category of people who are the most pessimistic of all. Who are they? Those close to the top leaders, their attendants and secretaries. They say you can’t believe anything at all.“

A trait shared by every Marxist regime….

….which has ever existed.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s these two beauties from Jim Gleaves:

Then there’s this from the “Stick a Fork in Him” segment:

Garcia: ‘I’m not good enough’ to win a major

 

Heading into the weekend, Spain’s Sergio Garciawas asked if the Masters would be the least likely major he’d ever win. “It’s the one I have done the worst, so probably,” he answered. At least on Friday he was giving himself a slim chance.

One day later, on the heels of a third-round 75 that dropped him from contention, Garcia candidly told Spanish reporters at Augusta National that he feels he does not have what it takes to win a major championship. “I’m not good enough … I don’t have the thing I need to have,” Garcia said. “In 13 years (as a pro), the conclusion is I need to play for second or third place.”

He needs to play for second or third at Augusta, he was asked? “No, no, no,” Garcia answered. “In any major. I’ve had my chances. I’ve had my opportunities. And I waste all of them.”

Gee….we guess, just like the rest of us….

….Sergio’s just going to have to suffer through life’s little disappointments!

Finally, in the “Now THAT’S Something You Don’t See Every Day” segment:

British child hunting for Easter eggs finds hand grenade

 

Rumors British authorities then used the youngster’s find to slay the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog….

….remain unconfirmed.

Magoo