Conservative Donnybrook

Maginnis thinks North Korea is the source for the alleged nuclear materials that Israel was allegedly going after when it attacked the Syrian site about 90 miles from the Iraqi border. If you look at a physical map of the region, you’ll see that the Israelis had to fly quite a way to get to the area of the site.

I think Philip Giraldi has a good take on what happened and why. In a follow up in the current (print-only version) American Conservative, he makes the very good point that the exercise might have had more to do with gathering information on a system of “synthetic aperture radar array” defensive emplacements. The Russians have provided Syria with this technology, and another client seems to have been Iran. Such knowledge would be quite beneficial — indeed, critical — to anyone wanting to, hypothetically, conduct bombing raids of military and nuclear facilities in Iran. Not that anyone in the world has been threatening that, of course. Or coming up with contingency plans for it. I’m just saying.

Sometimes it takes a while to rake the rock garden. I once saw my Korean professor consider his bonsai tree for 28 minutes before making a single snip. This one is a no-brainer.

I have been meaning to write something on this topic for a couple days now. PJB has beaten me to it. So, I shall simply link to his post.

I suppose the one benefit from a sinking dollar is that it becomes cheaper and cheaper for overseas companies to pay American workers to do the work that Europeans and Japanese won’t do. We will progressively become for Europe and Japan what Mexico and China has become for us. The difference being that Latin America and China are still Latin America and China to the Europeans and Japanese too, so the dollar will have to sink quite a way before we are on a par with Mexican workers.

But, if you work in Detroit (and can somehow manage to remain employed for the next decade or so), just hang tight. The work will come back to you.

The whole idea behind free trade is that an equilibrium point will eventually be reached where any nation which is engaged in free trade with another will ultimately have similar wages. For instance, as we move our manufacturing down to Mexico, the Mexican worker will slowly begin to be able to demand more wages, while American workers will lose wages until wages are equivalent. Only at that point will it no longer be advantageous for companies to employ Mexican workers in order to produce goods for the U.S. market.

Indeed, as PJB said, “the chickens of free trade have come home to roost.” And, it’s not just the value of the dollar that has suffered.

Beat Army!

Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a depressing article in the latest issue of National Review this week entitled, “The Politics of Spending.” Unfortunately, unless you are subscriber to the magazine, there is no online access to the article. (Here is the link for those of you who are subscribers.) So, I will have to summarize his article.

In the wake of low poll numbers and in response to widespread discontent within the conservative base, the White House has decided that it will try to woo the conservatives back into the fold by standing firm on budget spending. However, Ponnuru writes, this strategy has been backfiring. He notes that the best story for the Republicans during September was the MoveOn.org ad attacking General Petraeus and the worst story was the fight over increased spending on S-Chip. Continue Reading »