North Korea is back in the news.  As Patrick Goodenough reports here , the Obama administration has decided to re-engage North Korea, but reassures us that we are not rewarding their bad behavior.  Read this and decide for yourself if it's coherent.

"As it prepares to hold “exploratory” talks with North Korea, the Obama administration Wednesday repeated the standard assurance that it would not “reward bad behavior” – but also voiced concern that a failure to talk could prompt the Stalinist regime to do something provocative. "Our concern is that if we don’t engage, that could result in miscalculations by the North Koreans, as we’ve seen in the past,” a senior administration official said in a background briefing.  “Sometimes when engagement has been broken off, it causes them to lash out in dangerous and unsettling ways,” added the official, who is traveling with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Afghanistan. “But again, we are not prepared to reward bad behavior and we are not prepared to move forward to the next stage unless they show a true commitment.”

Does the state department have any idea what they are saying when they speak?

From the WSJ, comes this reminder that Uncle Sam is the rich uncle everyone wishes they had.  On it's 40th anniversary of government ownership, they set a record for riders and still lost $560 million.  "Since Richard Nixon nationalized passenger rail service in 1971, Amtrak hasn't made money in a single year."  No problem if you have Uncle Sam to cover you though.

 

The data keeps rolling in to prove how much better the private sector works than public sector when it comes to picking winners and losers.  As Michael Barone writes, 'Again an older technology has been improved and adapted to fill a need, while government dithers.  The old technology in this case is buses."  He goes on to describe how private businessmen have developed  new bus lines that "has attracted legions of price-conscious travelers".

"Chinatown bus service started in 1998 to provide a cheap way for Asian immigrants to get from New York to Boston. You lined up at the curb, paid your $20 fare to the driver and settled into a comfortable bus for four hours or so. Now there's service to multiple destinations (including gambling casinos) from New York and on the West Coast, too. And competitors have arisen. Megabus routes exist between Maine and Memphis and Minneapolis, notably including many college towns. The buses have bathrooms, AC power outlets and free wi-fi. They're not as fast as the much more expensive Acela train, but they tend to run on schedule."

Funny thing, my college aged son told me a few weeks back he was going to take the bus from Indianapolis to Chicago.  My immediate thoughts went to grimy, unsafe buses that pick up/drop off in dilapidated areas of big cities.  Or worse, another beheadeding like the one in 2008.  However as Barone writes, "Chinatown and Megabus operators ditched this model for one that works for travelers for whom money is scarce and time plentiful. Who needs a station? Intercity buses can occupy curb space briefly just as city buses do. Who needs multiple stops? You can make money on people who want to go from one specific location to another. "

Meanwhile government run rail service lost over $500 million last year moving passengers through multiple stops into/out of grimy trains in dilapidated parts of town. 

Americans are clamoring for a fact-based debate about the budget, but the numbers they're hearing from Washington are terribly confusing, says John B Taylor, Professor of Economics at Stanford.  In an editorial in the WSJ here, he asks a simple question, 'If government got by with 20% of GDP in 2007, why not in 2021 when the GDP will be substantially higher?"  He goes on to present the chart below that is very revealing about the direction that President Obama is taking the country.



This is the first analysis that The Forgotten Man has seen that puts government spending in terms we can all understand.  It just doesn't seem reasonable that we should be increasing our spending (ie, our tax dollars) to historically high levels.

Is the President already bored with LIbya?  As Byron York reports here. President Obama hasn't mentioned Libya publicly in 12 days,.  Meanwhile Qaddafi battles back and forth with the 'rebels', American's are on the sidelines and the Brits are sending in troops.  So just why are we in LIbya?  Pat Buchanan asks that here.  He has been highly critical of this 'war', though he also criticized the Iraq war for the same reasons.  I differed with him there, but think he is right about Libya.  We didn't take him out in 1986, let him go after Lockerbie, then struck a deal with him after he gave up his WMD's in 2003.  He's a schmuck, but seems like we have bigger fish to fry.  President Obama has stuck the prior administration policies in Afghanistan and Iraq and it has served our country well.  This one may not turn out so well unless he re-commits our military soon and stops relying on the Europeans to lead it.  They haven't won a war since they burned down the White House and even that didn't work out so well for them.

It seems that everytime a horrific shooting incident occurs, the anti-gun crowd ratchets up their agenda to eliminate guns.  It's happened again in Illinois as the Democrat Governor Pat Quinn has actually endorsed the idea of conceal-carry (48 other states already have it) and is being vilified for it.  As Steve Chapman writes, "By that, I refer to gun control advocates alarmed that the Illinois legislature may vote to let licensed individuals carry concealed handguns. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence calls the measure "dangerous." Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center says that it would lead to Tucson-style mass shootings as well as the killing of police."  However the statistics don't bear that out.  Chapman reports, "In fact, (Violence Policy Center) VPC's own data, when inspected closely, doesn't dent the case for gun rights. Over the past four years, there have been more than 60,000 homicides in the United States. The slayings carried out by permit holders amount to fewer than one of every 200 murders. For every licensee who killed someone, there are more than 20,000 who didn't.....What is extremely rare is a homicide committed by a permit holder in a public place in a fit of anger. Reviewing an earlier two-year database compiled by VPC, Kleck found only five cases "where possession of a carry permit may have contributed to the occurrence of the killing." Such episodes are not quite flying pigs, but almost."  The fact is that the murder rate in the United States has dropped by 50% in the last 20 years which as Chapman says, "The record of the past two decades demonstrates that you can strengthen the right of law-abiding adults to protect themselves against crime without making the world more dangerous."

Have you heard much about gas prices at the pump lately?  It seems like just yesterday that gouging was the hysteria of the liberals and the media.  Not sure what has changed, but according to this chart, gas prices have nearly doubled since the last presidential election. 

On the heels of the Chicago Public Schools angst over kids refusal to eat the rotten food they serve, we have Principal Elsa Carmona at the Little Village Academy in Chicago telling it's students they can't bring their own lunches to school.  As Bill O'Reilly writes here, school lunch madness has gone over the top.  He quotes Principal Carmona, "(she) went on to say that some parents are morons who allow their children to eat garbage and that is not going to happen on her watch. The Tribune quotes her: "It's about ... the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It's milk versus a Coke."

So that's it then, parents are morons and the school knows better.  Looks like it's a public school, so I guess it's free advice....

"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." --Thomas Jefferson

It used to be 120 days before President Bush lowered our taxes in 2001, but now we get to keep those 18 days of wages for ourselves.  As the Tax Foundation reports here, tax freedom day for Americans arrived on April 12th this year.  That's the day we stop giving all of our wages to the government and keep the rest for ourselves.  The Forgotten Man would like to see this day arrive sometime in February, but if President Obama has his way, it may take until June to start keeping the money we earn.