Readers of The American Conservative might be interested to hear that we will be at this year’s CPAC. Some of our staff will be at booth 1915 with subscription information and copies of this month’s magazine, as well as some past issues — plus exclusive TAC pens and notepads.

Some events of note sponsored by our friends at the Committee for the Republic include the following;

Thursday

- 9am in the CPAC Theater: Eisenhower’s Farewell to the Nation, a presentation of President Eisenhower’s farewell address, introduced by his granddaughter Susan Eisenhower, with Q+A to follow.

- 10am in the Truman Suite: More Defense For Less, featuring COL Douglas Macgregor, USA (Ret.).

- 2pm in the Virginia Suite: Too Big to Fail: A Quadrillion Dollar Exposure!, featuring Peter Wallison, The Honorable Boyden Gray, John Henry, and John Prout.

Friday

- 2:30pm in the Jackson Suite: Founder Roundtable: Where did we go Wrong?, featuring Mark Skousen, Bruce Fein, Bill Nitze, Tom Whitmore, John Henry, and James Henry all portraying a selection of our Founding Fathers.

Saturday

- 10am in the Truman Suite: America & Its Wars: John Quincy Adams vs. James K. Polk, featuring Bruce Fein and Roberty Merry as John Quincy Adams and James Polk.

Image: Shutterstock/razihusin

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The European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes has told a Dutch newspaper that the Euro would survive a Greek exit from the currency. The announcement comes during a strike endorsed by two of Greek’s largest public sector unions. The Greek government has been seeking foreign investment and additional funds from the IMF, EU and the ECB. These institutions have made spending cuts a prerequisite for additional funds, and it is looking increasingly unlikely that there is the political will in Greece to implement the necessary cuts.

It is refreshing to see Ms. Kroes say what many having been saying for some time. The Greek government has proven itself incapable of taking the necessary decisions that it needs to make in order to keep itself in the single currency. Ms. Kroes expressed the sentiments of many on the continent during the interview:

“The Greeks have to realize that we Dutch and we Germans can only sell emergency Greek aid to our taxpayers if there’s evidence of good will.”

It is well known that numbers were fudged and excuses made in order for Greece to join the euro in the first place, and it is only recently that the full ramification of that decision has been felt.

There is no reason to think that given another bailout the fiscal situation in Greece will improve. There is an opportunity now for some politicians to show that it is possible for the single currency to suffer one casualty. For too long European politicians have tried to keep Greece in the euro. Now it seems that all of the measures taken in Europe have been completely ineffective in getting the Greek government to pass the necessary austerity measures. Even with a Greek default, which will be disastrous for Greece, the sovereign debt crisis in Europe will be far from over.

I hope the realization that the European Commission finally seems comfortable with some countries defaulting will be a wake up call to other countries in the euro. If tough austerity measures are not taken soon the recession in Europe will deepen. All that is needed is more political will.

Image: Shutterstock/kanvag

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One of the stupidest lines of commentary following Obama’s opposition SOPA and PIPA was that, while it showed how in-touch he was with the generation raised on free content, it wasn’t going to play well among the media industry scions who fund the Democratic Party. The assumption behind this kind of thinking is that Hollywood would punish the President for his insufficient piety toward the internet lockdown lobby by taking their money to politicians whose totalitarian tendencies were more overt. But it begs the question, to whom exactly? Republicans? Please, they’d sooner eat at Bob Evans. Aside from stool pigeons like Bob Goodlatte and Lamars Smith and Alexander, it’s hard to find an ear sympathetic to Big Content in the party that’s constantly grousing about the mainstream media. The Bush administration saw no major intellectual property protection measures enacted save for one at the very end of his term that created a copyright czar (who were the Republican sponsors of that House bill? Surprise! Goodlatte and Smith.). And say, how’s that cabinet-level line to the RIAA working out?

Seriously though, if I were Zach Horowitz or Edgar Bronfman I’d be pretty pleased with Obama’s job performance. Mere hours after Wikipedia, Reddit, Google and thousands of other websites participated in an online protest against SOPA, and four days after Obama announced his own opposition to the bill, news hit the wires that the long arm of the law finally caught up with Megaupload after a two-year international investigation headed up by the FBI and Justice Department, and the takedown has already had collateral effects. More broadly, domain name seizures are now more frequent than ever and he signed on to a global intellectual property enforcement treaty for which he claims Senate ratification is unnecessary.

Essentially ACTA imposes the terms of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act on the participating nations, other than that there are a lot of grey areas in the treaty (a good explanation as to what it could actually do can be found here). Because ACTA’s terms are more or less congruent with current US law, Obama claims he doesn’t need to put it to a Senate vote. For this reason, Darrell Issa has described ACTA as “more dangerous than SOPA” in that it subverts congressional authority to regulate foreign trade and intellectual property.

At The Atlantic, Alexander Fumas explains some of the objections to ACTA:

… It is worth noting that the negotiations throughout most of the process were highly secret with negotiators forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, a fact that, according to one cable, made even some of the negotiating parties uncomfortable. There were few avenues for public or civil-society input. Meanwhile many U.S. based multinational corporations and their interest groups, including the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, Sony, and Time Warner were consulted via formal USTR advisory boards.

Have a look at the list of signatories and two things will become abundantly clear. First, this treaty is not about counterfeiting because the major countries with counterfeiting problems have not signed it, namely China, Indonesia and others in southeast Asia. Second, the majority of the signatories are countries with a robust market for American entertainment; Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the EU, which lends credence to the idea that the treaty was crafted for the sake of Hollywood and large media conglomerates.

Europeans are already quite upset about it.

As for Obama’s promise to veto SOPA and PIPA, which are merely tabled not defeated, contre the jubilant internet’s chest-thumping, well, Obama said he wouldn’t detain Americans indefinitely without due process either.

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Today the President signed an executive order freezing all Iranian government assets held or traded in the U.S. This order is the latest in a series of sanctions that have been placed on Iran by the European community and the U.S. The new sanctions include blocks on the Iranian central bank. The move comes quickly after the President said that Israel and the U.S. were “in lockstep” regarding their policies on Iran. These sanctions are an unwise move that will serve only to encourage anti-western rhetoric in Iran, and will damage an already suffering Iranian economy.

The animosity between Iran and the west is escalating. The assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist (almost certainly carried out by Israeli intelligence), economic sanctions from Europe and the U.S., British and American Navy ships in the Persian Gulf, and unconfirmed reports that Israel will strike Iran as soon as April are all kindling to the neoconservatives’ fire.

What seems to be constantly overlooked is the fact that economic sanctions and assassinations will only unite a country that has a legitimate opposition. As has been noted here at TAC before, if there is one issue that will dilute the political opposition in Iran, it is foreign intervention. The backlash against a pre-emptive western strike against Iran would be severe enough without the economic hardship which our sanctions are placing on the country.

The President in his State of the Union said that no option was off the table in regards to Iran, and we should believe that he means what he says. It is a shame that the President who campaigned so heavily on the follies of the Iraq war is now engaging in eerily familiar rhetoric.

Image: Shutterstock/yui

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Allow me to vent an old complaint. It’s something that I can’t get off my chest, although I have written about it many times. Every time I hear a politician utter the word “values,” I throw my shoe at the TV. I throw both shoes at the screen when I hear the term “family values.” It’s not that I personally am without moral beliefs. In fact the ones I hold would suggest that I’m a social reactionary. What I object to is empty rhetoric.

All politicians favor “values,” and when those on the social Left claim to stand for “family values,” as Obama has been doing, they have as much right to that term as anyone else. Indeed I can respect people I disagree with on just about everything, because they act on the basis of their beliefs.

Some of my Republican friends, who make fun of my attitude, ask me whether I really admire Obama as a person of principle. I respond by explaining that to whatever extent he acts on the basis of conviction, Obama deserves my respect. I wish I could say the same about Mitt Romney or other GOP presidential candidates who waffle every time they encounter liberal journalists or think that a hostile reporter may be eaves-dropping. Although I disagree with Ron Paul’s judgments about Iran, I have to recognize that Paul stands up for his constitutional principles. I find the same integrity in John Bolton, whom I have known for many years. Although I would not trust the war-happy Bolton anywhere near Foggy Bottom, let alone as Secretary of State, I’m sure he would never betray his conscience. For me that does count for something.

The users of the value-word are mostly hack Republicans, trying to avoid mine fields. Value-talk typically consists of phrases intended to reassure one’s base while revealing nothing that could get hurt the speaker. In the current presidential primaries several Republicans have departed from this script by telling us what they would do to oppose gay marriage and restrict abortions. I applaud this honesty, which for me is far less distasteful than hearing someone announce that he or she is the candidate of values. The only “value” that I find in such politicians is the priority of getting elected.

But standing for principle may not be enough. I also wish to hear from the advocates of traditional social positions how they intend to implement them. It seems that even those with whom I agree in principle have sometimes held questionable views about constitutional matters. It is state legislatures, not courts or federal bureaucrats, which should be dealing with abortion and gay marriage. Congresswoman Bachmann and former Senator Santorum both misstated this procedural matter during primary debates, although Santorum later corrected his mistake. All attempts at end-runs around state governments in order to have the feds decide social issues is not only constitutionally wrong but also dumb. Do social traditionalists honestly believe that the federal government is more likely to ride to their rescue than the state legislatures of our more conservative states? It is mostly the federal administration that has steered the country leftward throughout my life. I see no reason to believe this will change in the foreseeable future. Read more…

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