SALISBURY POST
INSIGHT
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Incentive deals raise a lot of questions I’m confused! Incentive offers — bah, humbug. Can anyone explain this program? Only recently has this type of spending taxpayers’ money been brought to public attention. Thirty years ago, the economy was doing OK, and the practice of offering incentives to place companies in Rowan County was never on the table. We honestly do not understand such policies and what the longrange goal is supposed to accomplish. It seems to me that any company worth its salt does not need incentives more appealing than a good labor force and a fair and just county government that has the county population in mind and wishes to treat all people and companies on equal terms. Have you ever heard of a small business receiving such incentives? Any company that is relieved of expenses that smaller companies are not allowed to forgo can offer better benefits and higher wages. Will they? That’s their decision. It’s hard to understand how smaller companies employ the larger percentage of people, do the larger amount of business, pay the larger amount of taxes and yet get no incentives from our government — local, state and federal. Why cannot the government put all people and companies on the same playing field, as is our right. Let the unfair tactics be laid aside through the 100 counties in North Carolina and see if things work out, which they will, with better results for future generations. And don’t worry about all the benefits taxpayers are footing for government workers’ early retirement programs and other goodies; government policies will ensure they will stay in place until we as a state and country go belly up. — Ron Sweet Faith
Obama has already had far too many chances Regarding Arthur Steinberg’s (Dec. 6) “My Turn” article in which he asked, nay begged, that we “Give Obama a chance”: Mr Steinberg, I submit that we have given him more than the chance for which you so eloquently pleaded. We gave him a chance to sit in the world’s most powerful office. We gave him a chance to be Commander In Chief of the world’s most powerful army, at least until he is successful in castrating it. For two years he had a Senate with a “super majority” that had no restraints save the American voters, and will have the majority for two more years; a house of representatives with a majority that ran roughshod over any opposition, loyal or otherwise. He has been given a “free pass” by ALL the television news networks, save one. The newspapers report only the Democrats’ line. We allowed him to pass the “healthcare bill” that will probably bankrupt the nation we both love. We allowed him, in a period of less than two years, to amass a national debt greater than all presidents before him combined. Allowed him, unchallenged, to refuse to salute our flag, elected him without proof of citizenship, gave him virtually free rein to distribute billions of dollars to not only American banks and corporations but foreign ones as well; apparently with no way to audit them. (One of the corporations, GM, even had the audacity to advertise on television, that they had paid it back. We know now this was a complete lie.) We have allowed him to travel the world apologizing for the success that has been the United States, while bowing to foreign Muslim leaders and abandoning our international friends. God save our grandchildren, for we have abandoned any effort to leave things “better than we found them.” What more “chance” should we give this man? — Jack R. Kee Kannapolis
Letters policy The Salisbury Post welcomes letters to the editor. Each letter should be limited to 300 words and include the writer’s name, address and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for clarity and length. Limit one letter each 14 days. Write Letters to the Editor, Salisbury Post, P.O. Box 4639, Salisbury, NC 28145-4639. Or fax your letter to 639-0003. E-mail: letters@salisburypost.com
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2010 • 3C
Liberals are lost in fantasyland elcome to another episode of liberals in fantasyland! The “professional left” (as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs calls them) is going crazy over President Obama’s deal with the Republicans to extend tax cuts and unemployment benefits. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman yelps that the president is caving in to “blackmailers.” Nation editor Katrina STEVE & Heuvel COKIE ROBERTS vanden warns in the Washington Post that he “risks a failed presidency.” Norman Solomon of Progressive Democrats of America fulminates that “Obama may have just ensured that he’ll face a significant challenge to his renomination in 2012 from inside the Democratic Party.” All this hyperventilation shows how delusional these liberals really are. We agree with them, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are a bad idea the country cannot afford. But Senate Democrats tried twice last weekend to cancel those cuts. They failed badly both times, and in January the new Senate will tilt even more sharply to the right. The votes are simply not there for raising taxes on anyone, even the rich. Deal with it. Face facts, not fantasies. That’s exactly what Obama is trying to do. He knows that compromise requires both sides to give something. And without a compromise, tax rates will go up on Jan. 1, unemployment benefits will lapse, and a fragile economic recovery will take another devastating hit. Obama risks a “failed
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President Obama’s deal with Republicans on tax cuts and jobless benefits has infuriated some on the left. presidency” if he accepts that disaster, not if he tries to avoid it. “For too long, Washington has been a place where any compromise was seen as a failure,” the president told supporters in a video message, “where victory was defined not by what you achieved for the country but by who you defeated in partisan warfare.” He’s absolutely right. This deal is not caving in to “blackmail”; it is recognizing reality. Yes, the Republicans have been cynical, devious and intransigent. They also won the last election and gained a share of power. Liberals want Obama to keep posturing. He wants to start governing, and the only one way to do that is to work with the opposition. In fact, governing well could turn out to be his best political strategy. Independents liked Obama’s emphasis on bipartisanship during the campaign, and they still do. In a recent poll by the
Pew Research Center, 59 percent of independents urged Obama to work with Republican leaders while only 29 percent said he should stand up to them. More important than Obama’s image is the health of the economy. The recent rise in unemployment to 9.8 percent crushed White House hopes for a robust recovery. As Fed chairman Ben Bernanke admitted on the CBS program “60 Minutes,” “We’re not very far from the level where the economy is not self-sustaining.” Liberals like Krugman complain that the last stimulus package, at $800 billion, was too small. But when this package is added up — including reduced payroll taxes and larger investment incentives for business — it will pour an additional $900 billion into the economy, more than the original stimulus bill. Some of it might be wasteful — the rich are more likely to save and not spend their tax windfall
WikiLeaks spurs ‘Big Brother’ to pounce ikiLeaks is exposing the way our government conducts “business.” It is not a pretty process. Sometimes Uncle Sam limps along like a powerless giant, as when secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton vainly plead with China to stop facilitating the military rise of Iran. (But don’t let that stop you from buying that made-in-China flat-screen TV for Christmas. Great price.) Sometimes Uncle Sam slimes DIANA around like the WEST mob, as when shutting down opposition to the Copenhagen climate accord is his racquet and bullying is his game. The rock-bottom worst of the revelations, however, shows Uncle Sam patronizing the American people, lying to us about fundamental issues that any democracy catastrophically attacked and supporting armies abroad ever since doesn’t merely deserve to know, but needs to know. Our democracy demands it, if it is to remain a democracy. Most pundits, certainly on the Right, disagree. As Commentary editor Gabriel Schoenfeld wrote in the WSJ this week: WikiLeaks “is not informing our democracy but waging war on its ability to conduct diplomacy and defend itself.” Funny, but I feel more informed — and particularly about what a rotten job the government knows it’s doing in conducting diplomacy and waging war on democracy’s behalf. I know more about the government’s feckless accommodation of incomparable corruption in Afghanistan; its callousness toward Pakistani government support for the Taliban and other groups fighting our soldiers in Afghanistan; its inability to prevail upon “banker” China to stop facilitating the military rise of Iran (mentioned above but worth a reminder) and its failures to prevail upon aid-recipient Pakistan to allow us to secure its vulnerable nuclear assets. One running theme that emerges from the leaked cables is that the U.S. government consistently obscures the identity of the nation’s foes, for example, depicting the hostile peoples of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States
— and the blow to the deficit will be huge. But the economy desperately needs another boost. By opposing this deal, liberals are hurting Obama’s prospects for a second term, not helping them. Finally, there is the suicidal threat to run a liberal against Obama in the primaries. History is clear: A sitting president who faces a serious primary challenge is often mortally wounded. Just look at Gerald Ford in 1976 (Ronald Reagan), Jimmy Carter in 1980 (Ted Kennedy) and George Bush in 1992 (Pat Buchanan). Liberals might be frustrated now, but would they prefer Mitt Romney in the White House? Or Sarah Palin? This is not a liberal country, and hasn’t been since the collapse of the New Deal coalition in the mid-1960s. In 2008, only 22 percent of all voters called themselves liberals (44 percent identified as moderates and 34 percent as conservatives). Successful presidents have to govern from the center, and that’s what Obama is trying to do. As the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell noted, “We’ve had more conversations in the last two weeks than we’ve had in the last two years, and I think that’s a good sign.” It is. The president has made the first move. McConnell and the Republicans have made a good start toward reasonableness, but on many fights to come, they have to stand up to their own hardliners and take the hand the president is extending. That’s what the country wants. And what it needs. • • • Steve Roberts’ new book, “From Every End of This Earth” (HarperCollins), was published this fall. E-mail address: stevecokie@gmail.com.
The 12 days of self-gifting N
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, shown during a November news conference in Geneva, Switzerland, is now in a British jail fighting extradition to Sweden on sex-crime allegations. as “allies.” It’s not that such hostility is a secret, or even constitutes news. But the cables reveal that our diplomats actually recognize that these countries form the financial engine that drives global jihad, or, as they mincingly prefer to call it, “terrorism.” But they, with the rest of the government, kept the American people officially in the dark. Then came WikiLeaks, Internet publisher of leaked information, prompting the question: What is more important — the information theft that potentially harms government power, or the knowledge contained therein that might salvage our national destiny? Whether such information was originally “classified,” the body politic should be electrified by the fact, as revealed by the leaked cables, that nations from Pakistan to Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia are regularly discussed as black holes of infinite corruption into which American money gushes, either through foreign aid or oil revenue, and unstaunched and unstaunchable sources of terror or terror-financing. If this were to get out — and guess what, it did — the foreign policy of at least the past two administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, would be unmasked as a colossal failure. And maybe that’s what behind the acute distress over WikiLeaks. Last week, I put it down to political embarrassment; this week, a new, more disturbing factor has emerged. The state power structure, the establishment more or less, believes itself
to be threatened. Its fearful response has been quite startling. First, there were calls for WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange’s execution; these have simmered down to calls for trial. Amazon and PayPal cut off service to the WikiLeaks website. Then, in a twist or kink perhaps beyond even Orwell’s ken, Assange was arrested without bond this week on an Interpol warrant over very fishy-sounding charges about “unprotected” sex in Sweden — a country, we may now ironically note, of draconian laws governing sexual intercourse and no laws whatsoever governing violent Islamic nogone-zones. Things went completely “1984”-ish when the federal government weighed in, actually warning federal employees not to read the WikiLeaks materials — still “classified,” after all. Creepier still, the Library of Congress followed suit, voluntarily blocking the WikiLeaks site from library computers. Now, universities are warning students not to post public comments about WikiLeaks on Facebook or Twitter — lest Big Brother takes note and holds a federal employment grudge. Suddenly, it’s not about secret information anymore, or diplomatic relations. It’s about control. The atmosphere chills. • • • Diana West is the author of “The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization,” and blogs at dianawest.net.
arcissism may have been dropped from the psychiatrists’ “Manual of Mental Disorders” but it’s making a holiday comeback in the form of “self-gifting” and “me-tailing.” During the recession, shoppers cut back on everything, including gifts to themselves. But two institutions that keep an eye on consumer spending, the National Retail Federation and the Wall Street Journal, report that as the economy improves, people are DALE again willing to MCFEATTERS once spend on themselves or “self-gift,” to use the preferred expression. The federation says that, after falling since 2007, when the recession started, the percentage of shoppers planning to self-gift this season is 57 percent, up 4 percent from last year. And they’re planning to spend more on themselves — $107.50, up from $101.37 last year. Not surprisingly, self-gifts run heavily to electronics, jewelry and clothing. All of this is taken not as a sign of feckless self-indulgence but as a sign of economic and consumer health. The reasoning is somewhat circular but retailers say if consumers are willing to spend on themselves, they’re likely willing to spend on someone else and often justify selfgifting by buying gifts for others. The Journal chronicles a related form of self-gifting in a story headlined “The Rise of Holiday Me-tailers.” Me-tailing is the practice of searching out gifts that, in the Journal’s description, are hyper-customized vanity purchases. It is illustrated by a photo of a California man who commissioned 200 bobblehead dolls of himself. A Chicago outfit called Whoopass Enterprise will be glad to model one after you. Mars candy will custom emboss M&Ms with your photo, your kid’s photo, your pet’s photo or if you’re heavily into cannibal revenge fantasies, the photo of someone who really annoys you. The technology is such that anything you want your photo on, some company stands ready to do it. An outfit called gelaskins.com imprints your photos on clear vinyl skins that fit any one of 130 electronic gadgets. Fathead, the company that makes those giant cutout vinyl wall hangings of sports heroes, will also make one of you. It’s not totally the season of good will to all. Fathead’s president tells the Journal, “We’ve got requests to print people who were clearly drunk, passed out around the toilet. We may chuckle, but we won't produce it.” It’s probably a safe bet that these were not self-gifted. • • • Dale McFeatters writes columns and editorials for Scripps Howard News Service.