| Too much leadership at the cliff Jan 4th 2013, 03:03 The agreement on the "fiscal cliff" left the nation's major economic problems — its federal deficit and debt, high unemployment and low growth — on the negotiating-room floor. What went wrong? Part of the problem may lie with the negotiating style, the procedures and methods of both the Obama administration and Congress. They all try to run it from the top. The natural impulse was first to have the president and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) meet. Several sessions as the Jan. 1 fiscal-cliff deadline approached were short, an hour or less. The president complained to his staff that Boehner presented only talking points and wasn't there to negotiate. Boehner complained to his staff that the president did most of the talking, adopting a condescending, lecturing tone. Read full article >>   |  | Editorial Board: A government by extension: No way to run a country Jan 4th 2013, 01:28 CONGRESS DID NOT, in the end, go over the "fiscal cliff," which is a far cry, of course, from saying that it acted on the massive backlog of policy issues, large and small. Lawmakers avoided the "sequester" — $110 billion in across-the-board spending cuts, half to defense, half to other programs — but only by postponing them for two months. They renewed a number of tax breaks for business but many of them for only a year. They spared doctors a 27 percent cut in Medicare reimbursement rates; but this "doc fix," as with the many previous ones, lasts 12 months. Read full article >>   | | Editorial Board: China's Communist inheritance: A ticket to wealth Jan 4th 2013, 01:27 THIS HAS BEEN a riveting time for those interested in the marriage of wealth and power in China. A rising elite has fused capitalism and political might with such spectacular success that the egalitarian dreams of Communist China's founders seem lost in the mists of time. The implications are immense for the world's second-largest economy. Read full article >>   | | Editorial Board: Virginia's phony concern Jan 4th 2013, 01:27 TWENTY CLINICS in Virginia performed slightly more than 25,000 first-trimester abortions in 2011. In carrying out that legal, safe and relatively simple procedure, there were very few reports of mishaps or complications. For the most part, patients were in and out of the clinics within two or three hours. Read full article >>   | | Iran should be key topic at hearings Jan 4th 2013, 01:26 It is to be hoped that the forthcoming Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings regarding the president's nominations for secretary of state and secretary of defense produce a wide-ranging debate regarding this country's role in today's very unsettled world. The hearings almost certainly will provoke searching questions regarding the strategic wisdom of potential U.S. military action against Iran. Recent Israeli media reports have cited a former member of President Obama's National Security Council staff predicting a U.S. attack by about midyear. Read full article >>   | | Return of the real Obama Jan 4th 2013, 01:25 The rout was complete, the retreat disorderly. President Obama got his tax hikes — naked of spending cuts — passed by the ostensibly Republican House of Representatives. After which, you might expect him to pivot to his self-proclaimed "principle" of fiscal "balance" by taking the lead on reducing spending. "Why," asked The Post on the eve of the final fiscal-cliff agreement, "is the nation's leader not embracing and then explaining the balanced reforms the nation needs?" Read full article >>   | | Easing pain, not problems Jan 4th 2013, 01:24 Defeat is usually an orphan. This one had many proud fathers. In the "fiscal cliff" agreement, President Obama secured his vanishingly narrow electoral mandate to raise tax rates on a sliver of the wealthiest. House Speaker John Boehner staved off a revolt within his caucus, secured passage of a version of his own "Plan B" and lived to fight another day. The Senate earned its reputation as the slightly less dysfunctional portion of the federal government. Vice President Biden stepped up to negotiating duties that the president apparently finds distasteful. Read full article >>   | | Energy leases should help fund coastal conservation Jan 3rd 2013, 22:40 The Dec. 28 editorial "Unearthing America's resources" carried a somewhat cynical comment about the efforts of coastal states to receive a good portion of the revenue of offshore oil and gas development "even though the territory and those who regulate it are both federal." It is true that coastal states have no constitutional claim to the bonuses and royalties that come from drilling in waters more than three miles offshore, but there is a larger policy issue to wrestle with. Read full article >>   | | Our print-digital divide Jan 3rd 2013, 22:39 It was interesting that Kathleen Parker's Dec. 30 op-ed column, "Vanishing ink," opened with the final words of Steve Jobs. Few people deserve more credit for the transition of media from the old analog format to the digital format of today. This serves as a reminder of the evolution of stories. Read full article >>   | | A modern-day Homestead Act Jan 3rd 2013, 22:37 In his Dec. 27 op-ed column, "A nation settled by immigrants," George F. Will gave an excellent account of how the 1862 Homestead Act gave hundreds of thousands of immigrants and poor Americans the chance to improve their own prospects and those of the country. Mr. Will could have used this history to make an analogy and recommendation for our own time. Read full article >>   | | Establishing the cost of our gun culture Jan 3rd 2013, 22:34 Regarding the Dec. 31 news article "Obama seeks action on guns within a year": If you want to bear arms, you should also bear at least part of the consequences. Right or wrong, since the Supreme Court issued its opinion in D.C. v. Heller in 2008, a practical problem with implementing gun control is that the direct approach will run into legal roadblocks. But the magic of the legal system is that it provides many creative alternatives to the direct approach. Read full article >>   | | Jennifer Rubin: Boehner elected speaker again, tries to elevate the House Jan 3rd 2013, 20:26 Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) was reelected speaker of the House with only 12 defections, far less than needed even to require a floor fight. Those cheering for (let alone predicting) a Boehner defeat once again reveal themselves to be operating in some other political universe. Very slowly now: Boehner . . . is . . . popular . . . among . . . House Republicans including conservatives. Moreover, no one else seriously wants to take the job from him. Read full article >>   | | What's missing from the cliff debate: Growth Jan 3rd 2013, 20:01 The deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff" is a small victory for sanity, but what it says about the future is bleak. Washington will lurch from crisis to crisis, kicking problems forward and placing Band-Aids on those that it does address. There are likely to be no large-scale policy initiatives — on tax reform, entitlements, energy policy or even immigration. This is worrying, because beyond the self-inflicted crises of the cliff and the debt ceiling, the United States faces a much deeper challenge. Read full article >>   | | Greg Sargent: Weakened Speaker Boehner means tough governing road ahead Jan 3rd 2013, 19:23 John Boehner just won reelection as Speaker of the House of Representatives, meaning he successfully defied the threat of a conservative uprising that never quite materialized. But the narrowness of Boehner's victory -- he won with 220 votes, only after a return to those who had abstained -- bodes very badly for the prospects of any future cooperation between House Republicans and the White House, and by extension, for the prospects of cooperation in solving the country's biggest problems. Read full article >> | | Jennifer Rubin: Getting Ryan right Jan 3rd 2013, 18:59 Many political reporters see every event as a horse race. Who is ahead? Who's behind? Whose team are you on? Unfortunately, they miss a lot or misread a lot. The failure to take seriously deep philosophical issues and matters of character renders political reporting devoid of content and ultimately unhelpful in understanding the political process and the players in it. Read full article >> | |
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