Fierce Joy

U.S. Entrepreneurs Addressing the Water Crisis

2008-12-16T16:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a long, extremely interesting article on the business opportunities being seized by entrepreneurs in addressing water quality, purification and simple availability issues, in Inc. magazine:

First, some numbers. The United Nations estimates that by 2025, two-thirds of the world's population will face periodic and often severe water shortages. And the problem is not limited to the developing world. Here in the U.S., water managers in 36 states are predicting significant shortfalls within the next decade. Even in regions that do have sufficient supplies, aging infrastructure, inadequate treatment facilities, and contamination pose more problems. No surprise, then, that battles over water rights are becoming commonplace, pitting states and sometimes nations against one another in increasingly bitter conflict.

Analysts estimate that the world will need to invest as much as $1 trillion a year on conservation technologies, infrastructure, and sanitation to meet demand through 2030. As in the past, most of the large capital-intensive projects will be done by the usual multinational corporations and engineering firms. But the extent of the problem and the demand for new technology to address it present -- pardon the metaphor -- a kind of perfect storm for entrepreneurs. "Small companies with intellectual property, significant know-how, and a product that's scalable can stake out a niche below the radar of the large companies," says Laura Shenkar, a water expert and consultant in San Francisco. "This is an opportunity that will generate Googles."

What follows is an impressive overview on all sorts of American companies who are way ahead of the curve on these issues, and how their markets are growing by leaps and bounds here in the United States and, even more importantly, in the rest of the world.

This is such an excellent illustration of Thomas P.M. Barnett's dictum that it will ultimately be free trade and free markets that will prove decisive in solving the really big problems, both in the developed world he calls the Core and the economically disconnected countries in what he calls the Gap. Here's a perfect illustration, again from the Inc. article:

Moving Water Industries, an 82-year-old, family-owned manufacturer of water pumps based in Deerfield Beach, Florida, has been selling portable pumps for irrigation and flood protection in Nigeria for more than 30 years. But its mission in Africa has taken on a new focus: addressing the problem of safe drinking water in rural villages. The company's solution is the SolarPedalFlo, a solar- and pedal-powered pump that can provide filtered and chlorinated water for thousands of people a day -- three to four times the amount that can be produced from a borehole equipped with a hand pump. Each unit costs about $15,000.

Working with local governments, nongovernmental organizations, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, MWI has been able to install hundreds of the pumps in 12 African countries. The company is just introducing the technology in Central and South America and has one unit installed in the Philippines. With the hopes of speeding adaptation in Africa, it is in discussions with Green WiFi, a U.S.-based volunteer group that is working to install solar-powered Wi-Fi networks in the developing world. Together, the companies would be able to offer a compelling infrastructure two-for-one: clean water and Internet access powered by the same set of solar panels. William Bucknam, MWI's vice president and point man in Africa, hopes that pressure to meet the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals -- decreasing the number of people without access to safe drinking water by half by 2015 -- will encourage more of the public-private partnerships that will be needed for the technology to spread. "It's a huge problem," he says, "and we believe we have the answer."

Read the whole thing, of course. Optimist that I am, I just love this stuff!

An Excellent Article on Afghanistan...

2008-12-16T16:31:00.000-08:00

... in The Nation, of all places!

It taught me stuff I didn't know, for example. I knew a fair amount about the mainline Taliban, and about Hekmatyar who was the favored boy of the Pakistani ISI during the 1980s war against the Soviet occupation, but I didn't know about this gent:

Erstwhile CIA hand Jalaluddin Haqqani heads yet a third insurgent network, this one based in the eastern border regions. During the anti-Soviet war, the United States gave Haqqani, now considered by many to be Washington's most redoubtable foe, millions of dollars, antiaircraft missiles and even tanks. Washington was so enamored of him that former Congressman Charlie Wilson once called him "goodness personified."

Haqqani was an early advocate of the "Afghan Arabs," who in the 1980s flocked to Pakistan to join the jihad against the Soviet Union. He ran training camps for them and later developed close ties to Al Qaeda, which developed out of the Afghan Arab networks toward the end of the anti-Soviet war. After 9/11 the United States tried desperately to bring him over to its side, but Haqqani said he couldn't countenance a foreign presence on Afghan soil and once again took up arms, aided by his longtime benefactors in ISI. He is said to have introduced suicide bombing to Afghanistan, a tactic unheard of here before 2001. Western intelligence officials pin the blame for most of the spectacular attacks in recent memory--a massive car bomb that ripped apart the Indian embassy in July, for example--on the Haqqani network, not the Taliban.

The Haqqanis command the lion's share of foreign fighters operating in the country and tend to be even more extreme than their Taliban counterparts. Unlike most of the Taliban and Hizb-i-Islami, elements of the Haqqani network cooperate closely with Al Qaeda. Moreover, foreigners associated with the "Pakistani Taliban"--a completely separate organization that is at war with the Pakistani government--and various Pakistani guerrilla groups that were once active in Kashmir also filter across the border into Afghanistan, adding to a mix that has produced what one Western intelligence official calls a "rainbow coalition" that fights US troops. The foreign connection comes naturally, as the leadership of the three main wings of the insurgency is believed to be based across the border in Pakistan, and all insurgent groups are flush with funds from wealthy Arab donors and benefit from ISI training.

It all comes back to this -- if we're going to win in Afghanistan, we're going to need to neutralize Pakistan. And that's not going to happen if we continue the same old strategy of playing nice with a Pakistani military and ISI that is as often working against our goals as they are with us.

So, if Obama is really serious about stablizing Pakistan, the shipping of arms and of foreign aid to Pakistan, which ends up strengthening the military and the corrupt politicians, respectively, is not a winning strategy, to put it mildly.

My thinking is that we need a different approach, one we've not tried to this point: a full-on free-trade accord with Pakistan, wherein we reduce all our ridiculously high tariffs on their main export, which is textiles. This will have the benefit of strengthening the most free market elements of Pakistani society, instead of the feudal politicians like Zardari (Bhutto's widower), who is well-known as "Mr. Ten Percent" for the amount he skims off the top.

This would involve some pain on the part of textile laborers here in the United States, but it would be well worth it if the long-term result is a more stable Pakistan, with reduced influence for its fanatics.

Lastly, this might work well in confluence with a free trade accord with India and Afghanistan, so no one in that region feels left out.

We're not going to have a lot of money for big aid packages anyway in the current environment, so trying a different tack is well worth it!

Let's Laugh at Terrorists

2008-12-16T16:27:00.000-08:00

I've always felt that terrorists like Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, or Christian Identity freaks like Tim McVeigh would be laughable if they weren't such effective mass murderers.

Still, for all their undeniable dangerousness, it's a good thing to laugh at them as the pathetic losers they are.

Into this market niche steps Jeff Dunham, ventriloquist extraordinaire, and his puppet Achmed, the Dead Terrorist:

Wow!

2008-11-04T19:41:00.000-08:00

Obama has just been credited as having won Virginia, and is now over the top of 270 electoral college votes. Amazing stuff, historical stuff. I just heard Obama will end up winning 53% of the popular vote, so he'll be the first Democratic President since before Jimmy Carter to have done so.

Obama Takes Ohio, and Quite Possibly the Presidency

2008-11-04T18:24:00.000-08:00

If some Florida-2000-style weirdness does not ensue, this election could well be over with this news -- Obama has just been called as the winner of Ohio.

This has been an incredible, quintessentially American election, and whatever happens next, an enormous historical page has been turned. An American of African heritage, who unlike most of those Americans who share his African heritage is notdescended from slaves, has been elected to the Presidency.

I still have many problems with what I regard as his too far-to-the-left political ideas, but focus on this -- our new President-elect is the son of a Kenyan immigrant who came to this country for educational reasons, fell in love with an American woman from Kansas, and became the father to a child who, only 47 years later, would be elected President of this country.

What an incredible country! Whatever happens next, I am a very proud American today.

Bush States (Mostly) Holding for McCain

2008-11-04T18:12:00.000-08:00

Georgia, South Carolina, North Dakota, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, West Virginia all have gone for McCain thus far. The only exception is New Mexico and, if all the other Bush states hold for McCain, its loss is not fatal.

We're still waiting on Florida, Virginia, Indiana, Ohio and Missouri. If McCain loses any one of those big states, though, it's all over for him. The longer and further west this race heads, the better it looks for McCain, in my book.

In the meantime, Obama has continued the 2004-repeat theme by winning Kerry's states of New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Oh, and Michigan too.

New Mexico Flips to Obama

2008-11-04T18:01:00.000-08:00

This is not necessarily a surprise, but it is a flip from Bush winning it in 2000 and 2004: New Mexico has gone to Obama. Bad news for McCain, but again not necessarily unexpected.

Pennsylvania Goes for Obama

2008-11-04T17:30:00.000-08:00

Bad news for the McCain campaign, the heat is really on them now. If they still hold Virginia, Ohio, Florida and Missouri, this thing will go on through the night into the Midwest and Southwestern states, but if not, it's going to be an early night in the Presidential race.

First States Called

2008-11-04T16:45:00.001-08:00

No surprises just yet: McCain wins West Virginia and Kentucky, and Obama wins Vermont.

This is good news in particular for the McCain campaign, because it means he's holding Bush states so far. If that continues through Ohio, Virginia and Missouri in particular, there will be much joy in the McCain headquarters.

UPDATE: (8:00 PM Eastern) McCain won South Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee, and Obama is projected to win New Jersey, Connecticut, and his home state of Illinois.

As always, we'll see what happens next.

Early Indications

2008-11-04T15:03:00.000-08:00

So far, nothing decisive, but good news for both candidates. Newly-registered voters are overwhelmingly going for Obama, but late deciders seem to be breaking for McCain in a big way.

Some interesting news comes from Minnesota, where the Obama campaign is apparently finding it much closer than it expected. Given that nobody was thinking Minnesota was going for McCain, this can be only be regarded as good news for his side.

More to come, for sure!

Election Day!

2008-11-04T11:38:00.000-08:00

Tigerhawk has an excellent post on his hopes and fears for today. So I thought I would add my own here.

First, the self-evident truth is that, no matter whether McCain or Obama wins, they will be my President for the next four years. I will be more pleased today in the event of a McCain victory, but I will be no less proud of my country or supportive of its President in the event of a President Obama being sworn in.

My greatest fear is that, in the event of a McCain victory, Democrats in general and Americans of African ancestry in particular will feel that racism was the decisive cause of Senator Obama's defeat. I feel that will not be the case, that in fact the reason Senator Obama came so close is because of his incredible American journey as the first generation son of a Kenyan immigrant and his considerable personal political talents, despite a dearth of experience and a host of questionable political allies.

My second-greatest fear is that the world will recoil even further from us in the event of an Obama defeat. We cannot control that reaction, but I hope it does not occur in the event of my candidate winning the Presidency.

My great hope is that, no matter who wins, this election represents a tremendous chance for renewal of these United States. President Bush will be gone as of January 20 next year (while his foreign critics the Castro brothers, Hugo Chavez, and the Iranian ayatollahs continue in their ever-longer despotism), and I suspect all political sides in this country will be relieved to see him go.

I am a tremendous optimist, and I believe still that this country's best days are ahead of her. I can't wait for the next chapter in our country's history to begin, starting with this momentous day.

Down, But Not Out

2008-10-30T17:12:00.000-07:00

That's a good description of me, because I've been sick as a dog these past few days, and it's a good description of the McCain campaign too.

I honestly don't know where this is all going to end up, because the polls are all over the place, but I honestly think that McCain can still pull it out. Here's why:

1. Until the actual young voters turn out heavily for Obama, I'll doubt that they'll do so. Every four years, the youth vote is expected to turn out, only to disappoint those who, like Kerry in 2004, were counting on them.

2. Pennsylvania is drifting toward McCain, and I think it might surprise Obama in the same way it went for Hillary during the primaries.

3. Old people always turn out to vote, and they tend to be more conservative, so I figure this one will favor McCain overall.

The one thing I don't think is working against Obama is race -- if anything, I think it's working for him. I think many people who love this country and believe in its promise are positively eager to vote for an American President who happens to have African heritage, as Obama does. For me, his far-left ideas, his lack of experience, and his profoundly anti-free trade stance work against him, but that's just me.

Whichever way it turns out, it sure is going to be an interesting night next Tuesday!

"Innocent People Have to Die in a Revolution"

2008-10-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

That's what "Billy Ayers" allegedly said to an FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl, who had infiltrated the Weather Underground:

Pajamas Media: Scattered news accounts on the Internet note that you were instrumental in foiling Weather Underground attacks in February of 1970, in Detroit. The Weathermen built two bombs targeting the Detroit Police Officers’ Association (DPOA) building and the 13th Precinct. Were the goals of these attacks symbolic property damage as were some other Weathermen attacks, or were these targets selected to kill police officers?

Larry Grathwohl: The instructions I received from Billy Ayers was that the bombs to be used in Detroit must have shrapnel (fence staples, specifically) and fire potential (propane bottles). The intention was to kill police officers.

Pajamas Media: One of the Detroit bombs was to be placed on the side of the DPOA building, and the blast was likely to cause damage to the adjacent Red Barn Restaurant, which had mostly African-American customers. Who ordered the attack, and what did he say when you told him that innocent civilians would be killed?

Larry Grathwohl: When I objected to Billy Ayers that more innocent people would be killed in the restaurant, he replied, “Innocent people have to die in a revolution.” Billy also acknowledged during a criticism session in Buffalo that Bernadine placed the bomb at the Park Police Station which resulted in the death of Police Officer McDonnell.

This is important because it is evidence of several things: one, that Ayers intended to kill, and that it was luck and police work that prevented it, not his conscience as he would have it; two, that Bernardine Dohrn was personally responsible for the murder by bomb of a police officer.

And here is Gratwohl discussing the Weather Underground's plans to liquidate the roughly 25 million Americans they figured would not be susceptible to re-education after their glorious Communist revolution was realized:

From the above, it's pretty clear that Ayers and Dohrn are classic Stalinists, in their willingness to contemplate mass murder in order to accomplish their ideological goals. In this light, Obama's endorsement of Ayers' work as a so-called education reformer takes on all sorts of non-funny connotations.

Read the whole thing!

Concrete Blonde

2008-10-25T22:03:00.000-07:00

This is an incredible Los Angeles-based band I was fortunate enough to see in 1989 at the now-defunct Green Parrot club in Neptune, NJ. The lead singer, Johnette Napolitano, is all of 5 foot zero and man does she have a set of pipes. Given that the stage at the Parrot was all of an inch tall and I was standing right up against the stage, I towered over her and was utterly blown away.

Concrete Blonde "God is a Bullet"

There's a green plaid jacket on the back of the chair
It's like a moment frozen forever there

Mom and dad had a lot of big plans for their little man
So proud!
Mama's gone crazy 'cause her baby's shot down
By some teenage car chase war out of bounds
It was the wrong place wrong time wrong end of a gun.
Sad!

Shoot straight from the hip, yeah.
Gone forever in a trigger slip
Well, it could have been
It could have been your brother.
Shoot straight shoot to kill, yeah.
Blame each other, well, blame yourselves, you know
God is a bullet have mercy on us everyone

They're gonna call me sir they'll all stop picking on me
Well I'm a high school grad I'm over 5 foot 3
I'll get a badge and a gun and I'll join the P.D.
They'll see
He didn't have to use the gun they put in his hand
But when the guy came at him, well he panicked and ran
And it's a thirty long years 'fore they're givin' him another chance
And it's sad, sad, it's sad

Shoot straight from the hip, yeah.
Gone forever in a trigger slip
Well, it could have been
It could have been your mother.
Shoot straight shoot to kill, yeah.
Blame each other, well, blame yourselves, you know
God is a bullet have mercy on us everyone

Shoot straight from the hip, yeah.
Gone forever in a trigger slip
Well, it could have been
It could have been your mother.

John Lennon, Doctor King, Harvey Milk
all for goddamn nothing

God is a bullet have mercy on us everyone
God is a bullet have mercy on us everyone

More Bill Ayers Lunacy

2008-10-24T11:57:00.000-07:00

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn issued their revolutionary manifesto, Prairie Fire, on May 9, 1974. According to recently-scanned pages posted to the web, it contained the following tidbits:

We are a guerilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years.

[...]

We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power [my emphasis] and build the new society.

For those who continue to argue that Ayers was all about peace, he just got carried away, there's this: among the many "heroes" to whom Prairie Fire is dedicated is Sirhan Sirhan, the murderer of Robert Kennedy, who killed Kennedy because as a Palestinian militant he objected to Kennedy's support for the state of Israel.

As the poster of the pages notes, Ayers lists himself as the author of Prairie Fire on his own blog.

Bill Ayers was 30 when this manifesto was issued, Dohrn was 32, so please don't tell me you can chalk it up to youthful foolishness.

Why this matters, of course, is that Senator Obama from 1995 through 2005 chose a political alliance with these loons, with Ayers in the 1995-2000 (at least) educational reform of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and with Dohrn peripherally in letting the Ayers/Dohrn couple hold an introductory fundraiser for him in 1996.

And to those who continue to argue that Ayers and Dohrn changed, and that Senator Obama could not possibly know what these thugs were really about, there is this interview they gave to Connie Chung and ABC News in 1998, as repeated on Fox News recently:

That's not exactly hiding the fact that they're still radical, is it? How could anyone spend five minutes with these idiots and not realize that fact? How could someone purporting to have the intelligence and good judgement of Senator Obama not realize it, more to the point!

I wonder what Obama's various Kennedy supporters -- Senator Ted Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Kathleen Kennedy Townshend, and Maria Shriver -- are thinking now about Senator Obama's association with Ayers.

Obama Loses Chris Matthews?

2008-10-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

Kudos to Suitably Flip, who says, "Who is this anchor and in whose basement is he keeping Chris Matthews?"

But in all seriousness, when Obama loses (if only momentarily) Chris "I felt this thrill going up my leg" Matthews, maybe things are really starting to turn around for Senator McCain.

Memo to poor Governor Paterson from New York: what you were trying to think of was the Lugar-Obama legislation, a pretty slam-dunk piece that Senator Lugar largely updated from the old Nunn-Lugar legislation of the 1990s. In other words, even in this sole bipartisan accomplishment in Senator Obama's 3 years, 9 months in the U.S. Senate to date, his input was basically minimal.

ADDED: Since it is often stated that Senator Obama spent very little time indeed in the U.S. Senate before running for President, I decided to check on the precise dates involved. He spent just shy of 2 years, 4 months in the Senate before running for President, and if elected on November 4, 2008 to the Presidency it will only be 3 years, 10 months precisely since he was sworn in as a U.S. Senator.

Obama was sworn into the U.S. Senate on January 4, 2005

On May 2, 2007, Senator Obama declared he was entering into the Presidential race.

Adding it all up, that's 28 months as a full-time U.S. Senator, followed by 18 months as a full-time Presidential candidate. But of course he's qualified! Why would anyone have any doubt?

By contrast, the evil George W. Bush waited a full four years as Texas Governor from 1994-1998 before declaring his intent to run for President. It worked out so well the first time -- let's go for Obama and even less experience than the current President had!

John Kerry is a Disgrace

2008-10-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

If you recall, Senator John McCain was quite honorable in defending Senator John Kerry from the Swiftboat attacks on him during the latter's Presidential campaign against President George W. Bush in 2004.

A group of veterans backing President Bush launched a direct attack this week on Democratic nominee John Kerry's war-hero biography by releasing a new TV ad accusing him of lying about his injuries in Vietnam and dishonoring fellow veterans by speaking out against the war.

But the 60-second television commercial, being aired in three battleground states in the presidential race, sparked a furious response Thursday from Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, who called the ad "dishonest and dishonorable" and urged the White House to condemn it.

The White House declined but distanced the president from the group's critique of Kerry.

How does Kerry repay McCain during this year's Presidential election? This is how:

The 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, addressing a business summit in Cambridge yesterday, was talking about the media’s “silly questions” to presidential candidates when he cracked his “joke,” his spokeswoman said.

“Barack got asked the famous boxers or briefs question,” Kerry said, PolitickerMA reported. He said Obama successfully parried the question.

“Then they asked McCain and McCain said, ‘Depends,’ ” Kerry said, referring to the brand of adult diapers. Kerry spokeswoman Brigid O’Rourke defended the Bay State senator, saying he was recycling an old joke: “The point he was making was that the press asks silly questions and jumps on ridiculous things - as evidenced by this very story.” Kerry was forced to apologize in 2006 when he “botched” a joke that poor students end up “stuck in Iraq.”

Well, Senator Kerry, here's something I am most assuredly not joking about: you're slime, Senator, and my mild regret that I voted for you in 2004 has now solidified into complete certainty that I was mistaken in ever thinking you fit for high office.

Hiding the Evidence

2008-10-20T11:23:00.000-07:00

It is silly, and so self-defeating, that a liberal blogger has deleted her post about first meeting Barack Obama in Bill Ayers' living room.

I myself checked out that post last week, and can confirm it was there, but I was not as smart as Patterico who took a screenshot, just in case:

On Thursday, the L.A. Times claimed that there is “no recorded basis” for John McCain’s statement that Obama launched his political career in Bill Ayers’s living room. That same day, I wrote a post that proved them wrong. I linked a January 27, 2005 blog post by Maria Warren, a political liberal who attended the function. In that post, she said:
When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the livingroom of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They were launching him–introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.
I originally read about this post at a Politico piece about the Ayers-Obama relationship in February 2008. That post identified the name of the blog, and Maria Warren as the author. But Politico did not link Warren’s post; I found it and linked it based on the evidence provided by Politico. Yesterday I sent the link to the L.A. Times as part of a request for a correction of the error in their editorial.

As far as I know, I was the first blogger to directly link Warren’s blog entry — and I did so last Thursday.

Now it’s Monday, and this blog entry — which had been around since January 27, 2005 — is suddenly gone. (H/t Jim Treacher.)

I thought there wasn’t anything to the Obama-Ayers relationship. I guess somebody thinks different — and is taking pains to delete the evidence.

But don't forget, there's nothing to hide here, Ayers is just a guy Obama knows from his neighborhood.

Obama and (Labor) Voter Intimidation

2008-10-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

Tigerhawk has an excellent post up about Obama's support for the Card Check bill backed by labor, which Obama supports and McCain does not. Here's why it's troubling:

Barack Obama supports Big Labor's ambition to intimidate American workers into joining unions that they would not join if they were permitted to vote in secret. This is the central idea of "card check," a program that would eliminate the need to have an election -- and the debate that precedes it -- before unionizing an American workplace. Big Labor is trying to accomplish through legislation what it cannot in the marketplace of ideas (in 2007, only 7.5 percent of private sector employees belonged to labor unions). "Card check" is such a naked power grab that even USA Today could not help but editorialize against it

Now, just imagine if corporate management was trying a similar thing in reverse, in other words, so long as 50% of employees signed a card in public indicating that was their intention, then management could de-certify a union. Pro-union Democrats such as myself would be howling, and properly so.

It is no different here -- unions in their desperation are willing to toss aside the critically necessary step of voting in secret AFTER a union has gathered enough signed cards (30% of the workers in a given company) to authorize having the vote in the first place. They are seeking to replace freedom of individual votes with a situation rife with possibilities for fraud and intimidation.

Add his support for this bill to his prior support for removing the Teamsters' federal oversight and a picture of Obama supporting the worst elements of unions more clearly emerges.

ADDED: To his great credit, Obama supporter and former 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern parts company with Obama on this one:

That pretty much says it all.

Times Like These

2008-10-18T21:35:00.001-07:00

The more I listen to Foo Fighters, the more I think Dave Grohl is just not sufficiently appreciated for his musical talents.

Foo Fighters "Times Like These"

I am a one way motorway
I'm the one that drives away
then follows you back home
I am a street light shining
I'm a wild light blinding bright
burning off alone

it's times like these you learn to live again
it's times like these you give and give again
it's times like these you learn to love again
it's times like these time and time again

I am a new day rising
I'm a brand new sky
to hang the stars upon tonight
I am a little divided
do I stay or run away
and leave it all behind?

it's times like these you learn to live again
it's times like these you give and give again
it's times like these you learn to love again
it's times like these time and time again

Obama's friend Alexi, the Mob Banker

2008-10-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

Of course, the national media has taken great interest in this story, too. Just as soon as they're done thoroughly vetting Joe the Plumber, they'll get right on it!

So, young Alexi Giannoulias, all of 29 years old, got elected Illinois State Treasurer in 2006 with a critical endorsement by Senator Barack Obama, who has reportedly called Giannoulias his protege.

His qualifications? Playing basketball with Obama, and for a time in Greece in a semi-pro league, and of course, making sure his family-owned Broadway Bank keeps local Mob figures well-supplied with easy money:

Before he promised to raise funds for Obama, Giannoulias bankrolled Michael "Jaws" Giorango, a Chicagoan twice convicted of bookmaking and promoting prostitution.

Giannoulias is so tainted by reputed mob links that several top Illinois Dems, including the state's speaker of the House and party chairman, refused to endorse him even after he won the Democratic nomination with Obama's help.

Giannoulias was the bank's vice president and chief loan officer for most of the more than $15 million in loans.

And let no one think that this means Obama's rep as a reformer is an absolute crock, oh no!

"Barack Obama has a long record of fighting for ethics reform from his days as a state senator," a campaign rep said.

Because putting a mob banker like Giannoulias in charge of all the finances of the State of Illinois is the reformist thing to do, you see?

With a record of staunch Daley Machine reform like this, it can only come as a shock that Illinois seems to be missing $45.8 billion in pension funds. Thank goodness Senator Obama has helped put Alexi and his well-connected Mob friends on the case! I'm sure it will all be cleaned up in a jiffy.

To get serious for a moment, this is not about party or ideology. This is about corruption. Obama and his Daley Machine pals in Chicago are corrupt to the core, as were Republicans Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay, among others. We just got rid of that last bunch of corrupt hacks, let's not give another gang a crack at it, mmkay?

McCain at least learned his lesson from being one of the Keating Five and thereafter took on his party's corrupt hacks, as did Palin in Alaska, both at considerable risk to their careers.

Obama and the Reverend Wright

2008-10-16T21:17:00.001-07:00

From a 2007 profile of Barack Obama in Rolling Stone:

The Trinity United Church of Christ, the church that Barack Obama attends in Chicago, is at once vast and unprepossessing, a big structure a couple of blocks from the projects, in the long open sore of a ghetto on the city's far South Side. The church is a leftover vision from the Sixties of what a black nationalist future might look like. There's the testifying fervor of the black church, the Afrocentric Bible readings, even the odd dashiki. And there is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a sprawling, profane bear of a preacher, a kind of black ministerial institution, with his own radio shows and guest preaching gigs across the country. Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday and solemnly, sonorously declares that he will recite ten essential facts about the United States. "Fact number one: We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he intones. "Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!" There is thumping applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. "We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!" The crowd whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: "And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS SHIT!"

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama's life, or his politics. The senator "affirmed" his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a "sounding board" to "make sure I'm not losing myself in the hype and hoopla." Both the title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright's sermons. "If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from," says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, "just look at Jeremiah Wright."

Obama wasn't born into Wright's world. His parents were atheists, an African bureaucrat and a white grad student, Jerry Falwell's nightmare vision of secular liberals come to life. Obama could have picked any church — the spare, spiritual places in Hyde Park, the awesome pomp and procession of the cathedrals downtown. He could have picked a mosque, for that matter, or even a synagogue. Obama chose Trinity United. He picked Jeremiah Wright. Obama writes in his autobiography that on the day he chose this church, he felt the spirit of black memory and history moving through Wright, and "felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams."

Obama has now spent two years in the Senate and written two books about himself, both remarkably frank: There is a desire to own his story, to be both his own Boswell and his own investigative reporter. When you read his autobiography, the surprising thing — for such a measured politician — is the depth of radical feeling that seeps through, the amount of Jeremiah Wright that's packed in there. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising. Obama's life story is a splicing of two different roles, and two different ways of thinking about America's. One is that of the consummate insider, someone who has been raised believing that he will help to lead America, who believes in this country's capacity for acts of outstanding virtue. The other is that of a black man who feels very deeply that this country's exercise of its great inherited wealth and power has been grossly unjust. This tension runs through his life; Obama is at once an insider and an outsider, a bomb thrower and the class president. "I'm somebody who believes in this country and its institutions," he tells me. "But I often think they're broken."

It seems to me that the Reverend Wright is still stuck in the early 1960s, to say the least, and refuses to see the many positive strides the United States has made in race relations. It's not all good, not by a long shot, but Wright makes the typical radical mistake of dismissing the good because it's not perfect.

News flash: this nation is never going to be perfect. The Founders wanted us to strive for a "more perfect union," by which they meant that for all the essential flaws of our humanity we should never stop trying to make a better nation. And so it has been: two steps forward, one step back.

The above article alone should put to rest the facile lie Obama has told, and most have accepted, that the ravings we heard from Reverend Wright this past spring were new or unacceptable to Obama. They were the very bread and butter of the Trinity Church, and for better or worse what drew him to that church in the first place.

Here's the full, in-context speech of the Reverend Wright, put on YouTube by the Trinity United Church itself (warning, it's nearly 7 minutes long, but worth watching):

And, Senator Obama's first (37 minutes long!) response, when he refused to disavow Wright and compared Wright's racism to his white grandmother's, without making the obvious point that she, at least, did not preach said racism to a crowd of 5,000 strong each and every Sunday:

Draw your own conclusions.

Hat Tip: Victor Hanson, whose writing pointed me to the Rolling Stone article.

Are You Kidding Me?!

2008-10-16T18:15:00.000-07:00

You know, as a Democrat in good standing I used to dismiss right-wingers whining about the "liberal media" as ridiculous, but then this happened: the New York Times, which assiduously stayed away from the Bill Ayers/Obama story for oh, gee, a year and a half until April 2008, is after three days on top of reporting all about that well-known domestic terrorist Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known by his sinister alias "Joe the Plumber."

Andrew Sullivan (aka "The Conservative Soul") knows the score, and has veered only briefly from his relentless pursuit of Trig Palin's true birth parents to vet this latest threat to the Democrats, uh, I mean the Republic.

Poor OPEC

2008-10-16T15:14:00.000-07:00

Oil is now at $70 a barrel and our good friends in OPEC are alarmed. Awww, poor OPEC! I'm sure there's nary a dry eye in the house.

But seriously, this makes me glad that the tax credits for wind and solar energy were passed as part of the bailout-palooza last week, because interest in alternative energy sources tends to dissipate whenever traditional energy sources get cheaper. You know, like happened during the last big recession of 1981-1983.

This time, let's hope we've learned our lesson and don't throw away the solar, wind and nuclear baby just because the oily bathwater is temporarily cheaper. Wow, is that a deranged metaphor or is it just me?

Orson Scott Card nails what bugs me about Obama

2008-10-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

As per usual, I'm late to the party as it was written on September 7, 2008, but I just ran across this excellent takedown of Obama by science fiction author Orson Scott Card:

Where and when has Obama taken anybody on in his own party? Where is his vote that flew in the face of his party's discipline, like many of McCain's? Obama liked to claim that McCain voted with President Bush ninety percent of the time. But that means McCain voted against a President from his own party ten percent of the time.

Meanwhile, Obama has voted with the extreme left of his party, right in line with the party leadership, one hundred percent of the time.

That ten percent of McCain's votes that went against his party is actually a remarkable record of independence. One that Obama has never even attempted.

I have nothing to add. Just read the whole thing.

ACORN Needs to be Prosecuted

2008-10-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

I'm no legal expert, but it's nice that the DC Examiner also thinks that ACORN needs to be prosecuted using the RICO statute:

It’s getting steadily more difficult to detect differences between an organized nationwide criminal conspiracy to commit voter fraud and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Thus far in the 2008 campaign, state election officials representing both major political parties in 15 states, including such key battlegrounds as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, have accused ACORN of various schemes involving widespread voter fraud. The pattern is so pervasive - and the danger to our electoral system so dire – that it demands federal intervention.

The Justice Department’s indictment in 2005 of the Milberg Weiss class-action securities law firm under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) did not involve charges of mob involvement. Ultimately, the firm plea bargained and several of its senior partners now reside in federal prisons. Likewise, ACORN’s repeated abuses don’t include mafia links, but the pattern matches the organized criminal conduct RICO was passed to combat.

ACORN likes to say all this uproar is about supressing the vote of poor and/or minority voters, but that's simply ridiculous. What these investigations across the country are about the fact that ACORN has no discernible quality controls in place for their voter registration process. It is well worth noting that the investigations are being conducted as often by Democrats as by Republicans.

Voter fraud is a felony offense, and it must be investigated thoroughly if we the people are to have any confidence in this rapidly approaching election's legitimacy.

Hat Tip: Instapundit

UPDATE: Even the Associated Press is noticing that 200,000 out of 600,000 new Ohio voter registrations have address and/or social security discrepancies. It doesn't mean all of those 200,000 registrations are fraudulent, but even a small number such as 5,000 could potentially swing the Presidential election.

UPDATE 2: Oh, and Hot Air reports that the FBI is now launching a nationwide investigation of ACORN. About time!

It's the Economy, Stupid...

2008-10-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

...and unfortunately that means right now folks are blaming McCain, because he shares party affiliation with President Bush, for the poor state of the economy.

Obama has all these enormous plans for new spending, and there is simply no way that his supposed tax increases only on the rich will be sufficient to pay for it all. Which means he'll be faced with the same choice Bill Clinton faced when he was sworn in on January 20, 1993: either he will have to abandon his more ambitious spending programs or he will have to abandon his middle class tax cut.

Clinton took the latter option, and it's one of the reasons he is remembered so fondly on the economy. He raised taxes in minor fashion on the wealthy, but only on the income tax. He did not raise capital gains taxes, he did not raise corporate tax rates, and he did not propose a windfall profits tax on oil companies, which are all central to Obama's program.

Further, under tremendous political pressure he abandoned the big government approach to universal health care, thus removing an enormous potential budget buster. This is in contrast to President George W. Bush, who championed the Medicare prescription drug benefit that is already, only in its third year, tripling its predicted cost.

If we had true conservative accounting, such that took account of the fact as shown above that government spending exceeds its projections dramatically, then I would feel more sanguine about this proposed new spending. But Obama's and McCain's proposals both likely lowball the estimate cost of new spending -- but at least McCain's spending proposals are modest by comparison to Obama's.

Then we come to free trade, which Obama has voted against consistently, as he has most of President Clinton's other moderate successes. Free trade is the engine of America's growth, and free trade accords only serve that critically necessary growth. Here's why: our tariffs on foreign goods are generally low, especially when compared to European, Asian, or Latin American countries. Free trade accords we've signed and ratified over the past few decades have the effect of bringing down foreign tariffs on our exports, while giving our trading partners the desired certainty (which investors prize) that the low tariffs on their exports to the U.S. are not subject to the yearly whims of a mercurial U.S. Congress.

According to World Trade magazine, Canada is our number one trade partner, Mexico is number three, and South Korea is number seven and rising quickly. Obama's reckless primary promise to tear up the NAFTA accord with Canada and Mexico if it could not be renegotiated, and his equally short-sighted opposition to the South Korea Free Trade Accord, would needlessly alienate these good friends and trading partners of the United States, to our mutual detriment.

The economy is deeply in trouble right now, to be sure, but a combination of large tax increases combined with a repudiation of our nation's historic commitment to free trade will only worsen the situation, not better it.

Don't take my word for it, though. An article in Foreign Affairs magazine had this conclusion in April 2005 about what it called "The Overstretch Myth" that America was inevitably headed for a fall, and it is just as relevant now as it was then:

Many analysts have pointed to the euro as a threat to the dollar's status as the world's central reserve currency. But the continuing strength of the U.S. economy relative to the European Union's and the structure of European capital markets make such a prospect highly unlikely. On the basis of likely demographic and productivity growth differentials, Adam Posen of the Institute for International Economics estimates that the U.S. economy will be at least 20 percent larger than that of the EU in 2020. The United States will maintain its 22 percent share of world output, but Europe's share will, in the absence of serious structural reforms, shrink by 3 to 5 percent. Moreover, European government bond markets, although larger than the U.S. Treasury market, are divided among five large countries and a host of smaller ones, greatly reducing liquidity, and European corporate bond and equity markets are smaller than their U.S. counterparts. With Asian capital markets still in their infancy, it will be a very long time before the pre-eminence of the dollar and U.S. capital markets is challenged.

At the peak of its global power the United Kingdom was a net creditor, but as it entered the twentieth century, it started losing its economic dominance to Germany and the United States. In contrast, the United States is a large net debtor. But in its case, no plausible challenger to its economic leadership exists, and its share of the global economy will not decline. Focusing exclusively on the NIIP obscures the United States' institutional, technological, and demographic advantages. Such advantages are further bolstered by the underlying complementarities between the U.S. economy and the economies of the developing world--especially those in Asia. The United States continues to reap major gains from what Charles de Gaulle called its "exorbitant privilege," its unique role in providing global liquidity by running chronic external imbalances. The resulting inflow of productivity-enhancing capital has strengthened its underlying economic position. Only one development could upset this optimistic prognosis: an end to the technological dynamism, openness to trade, and flexibility that have powered the U.S. economy. The biggest threat to U.S. hegemony, accordingly, stems not from the sentiments of foreign investors, but from protectionism and isolationism at home.

Protectionism and isolationism at home is precisely what Senator Obama offers as President, and why this Democrat simply cannot support him. As Senator McCain is a full-throated internationalist and committed free trader, he is the best choice for President on these critical economic issues.

More on the Chicago Machine

2008-10-14T10:09:00.000-07:00

According to David Freddoso in the Wall Street Journal, it seems that Senator Obama had a chance to back a bipartisan reform effort in Cook County in Illinois, and chose instead to vote for a Chicago political machine hack who was well known as corrupt:

In the 2006 election, reformers from both parties attempted to end the corruption in Chicago's Cook County government. They probably would have succeeded, too, had Mr. Obama taken their side. Liberals and conservatives came together and nearly ousted Cook County Board President John Stroger, the machine boss whom court papers credibly accuse of illegally using the county payroll to maintain his own standing army of political cronies, contributors and campaigners.

The since-deceased Stroger's self-serving mismanagement of county government is still the subject of federal investigations and arbitration claims. Stroger was known for trying repeatedly to raise taxes to fund his political machine, even as basic government services were neglected in favor of high-paying county jobs for his political soldiers.

When liberals and conservatives worked together to clean up Cook County's government, they were displaying precisely the postpartisan interest in the common good that Mr. Obama extols today. And Mr. Obama, by working against them, helped keep Chicago politics dirty. He refused to endorse the progressive reformer, Forrest Claypool, who came within seven points of defeating Stroger in the primary.

After the primary, when Stroger's son Todd replaced him on the ballot under controversial circumstances, a good-government Republican named Tony Peraica attracted the same kind of bipartisan support from reformers in the November election. But Mr. Obama endorsed the young heir to the machine, calling him -- to the absolute horror of Chicago liberals -- a "good, progressive Democrat."

Mayor Richard M. Daley -- who would receive Mr. Obama's endorsement in 2007 shortly after several of his top aides and appointees had received prison sentences for their corrupt operation of Chicago's city government -- was invested in the Stroger machine's survival. So was every alderman and county commissioner who uses the county payroll to support political hangers-on. So was Mr. Obama's friend and donor, Tony Rezko, who is now in federal prison awaiting sentencing after being convicted in June of 16 felony corruption charges. Rezko had served as John Stroger's finance chairman and raised $150,000 for him (Stroger put Rezko's wife on the county payroll).

Once again, we see the central role of Obama's money man Tony Rezko, who is one of the bagmen for the Chicago Machine.

Don't just take the Wall Street Journal's word for it though. Far closer to home, the Chicago Tribune had this to say about Obama's endorsement of Todd Stroger back in 2006:

...Obama has come too far as an inspiring new breed of politician on the national scene to muck around in local politics, endorsing machine hack candidates and substituting party for principle. Or so you'd imagine.

There were warning signs: Obama's first dubious endorsement of a lightweight came during the primary season when he cut TV ads plumping for Alexi Giannoulias, then 29, the vice president of his family's bank who decided he'd like to be state treasurer. The endorsement was widely seen as key to Giannoulias' primary victory.

Obama was upfront about why he got involved: Members of the Giannoulias family were early and strong backers of his U.S. Senate campaign and "I think it's important to reciprocate," he told a reporter.

But Obama did not reciprocate for Forrest Claypool.

Claypool was the overwhelming favorite of reform-minded Democrats in his race against incumbent John Stroger (Todd's father) and had headed Obama's transition team after Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004.

Old-guard candidate John Stroger, meanwhile, had endorsed Comptroller Dan Hynes instead of Obama in the Democratic Senate primary.

When Obama decided not to endorse either candidate, his spokesman intoned, "The senator believes that the voters should make up their own minds in this race."

As you know, then, John Stroger suffered a stroke, won the primary and retired for health reasons. The Democratic Central Committee thumbed its nose at critics and selected Todd Stroger to take his place on the ballot, rejecting more senior, qualified candidates such as U.S. Rep. Danny Davis of Chicago and veteran county Commissioner Bobbie Steele.

The stench of same-old-same-old from John Stroger's years of cronyism and bloat hung over the process, and Obama had every excuse to distance himself from it.

Instead came this letter--a body blow to Claypool Democrats and the idealists whose fantasy about Obama is that he will transcend the grubby machinations and tawdry favor-swapping of party politics--followed by word from Obama's office that he will appear on stage at a pro-Stroger rally Monday night.

So, let's count the largely unchallenged statements Obama repeatedly makes about himself that this story simply destroys, shall we?

1. Obama represents a new politics. Reality: No, actually, he represents the oldest politics around, the big-city political machine. When given the opportunity to choose his reformist ally, Forrest Claypool, over a dirty Machine politician who previously endorsed Obama's rival, he undermined the reformer by failing to endorse either candidate. When John Stroger retired, Obama further chose to endorse Stroger's son Todd over more experienced and reform-oriented alternatives.

2. Obama represents a new bipartisan spirit, rising above petty divisions. Reality: At the last, given a chance to support a reformist Republican over Todd Stroger, Obama again chose Todd Stroger. Three strikes, you're out.

This is just his record in Chicago, but it exemplifies how Obama's rhetoric is completely disconnected from the actual reality of how he does things. And it is the poor of Chicago who suffer most from this corrupt brand of politics. "Stroger was known for trying repeatedly to raise taxes to fund his political machine, even as basic government services were neglected in favor of high-paying county jobs for his political soldiers."

Do you think the rich of Chicago were hurt by Stroger's neglect of basic services, or the poor?

Obama and the Teamsters

2008-10-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

I missed this back in May when it occurred, but according to CBS News and the New Republic Senator Obama struck a deal to end the federal Independent Review Board created in 1989 to curb Teamsters' corruption:

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that last summer, Illinois Senator Barack Obama told officials in the Teamsters union that he favored ending the Independent Review Board (IRB) that was created in 1989 by the federal government to rid the union of organized crime. Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Obama, confirmed the story, saying that the candidate believed that the IRB had "run its course" because "organized crime influence in the union has drastically declined." The Teamsters subsequently endorsed Obama for president, in late February.

Obama and the Teamsters bristled at suggestions that any deal was made. The Obama campaign also circulated a tape of a speech that Senator Hillary Clinton made last March to the Teamsters saying "at some point the past has to be opened," but Clinton's statement, like those made by Senator John Kerry in 2004, stopped well short of committing her to end oversight of the Teamsters. Based on the statements the newspaper quoted, it is fair to assume that The Wall Street Journal got the details right.

There are two reasons to be concerned about Obama's actions here. The first is procedural. Obama's promise to close down the IRB suggests a Bush-like contempt for the customary relationship between government and the judicial process. The president himself can't shut down the IRB. He can only recommend to his attorney general that he recommend to the U.S. Attorney in New York that it be shut down. But in these kind of touchy matters, presidents usually defer to the judgment of their attorney generals. By coming close to promising a shutdown, Obama was putting politics above judicial procedure - which is just the kind of "Washington" behavior that he likes to criticize his opponents for doing.

The second reason for concern is more substantive. Labor leaders have made plausible arguments for shutting down the IRB, but a Chicago politician should be extremely wary of acceding to them. If there is continuing mob influence in the Teamsters, it is probably centered in the Chicago area. And in the last decade, the Teamsters in Chicago have shown little enthusiasm for rooting out corruption in their ranks. As a veteran Chicago politician surrounded by a veteran Chicago campaign staff, Obama had to have known this - and that makes his warm words to the Teamsters all the more disturbing.

Once again, Obama goes where other Democratic politicians dare not go in explicitly committing himself to ending corruption oversight in exchange for union support. This is Chicago politics, but it's not remotely reformist politics.

'Cause I'm Waiting to Behold Your Many Charms...

2008-10-11T23:49:00.001-07:00

Some trippy, happy Beatles-inspired music from Karl Wallinger, a.k.a. World Party.

World Party "Put the Message in the Box"

And if you listen now
You might hear
A new sound coming in
As an old one disappears.
See the world in just one grain of sand.
You better take a closer look
Don't let it slip right through your hand.
Won't you please hear the call.
The World says

Put the message in the box.
Put the box into the car.
Drive the car around the world
Until you get heard.

Now is the moment,
Please understand.
The road is wide open
To the heart of every man.
A few simple words
So a mule could understand.
He don't want tomorrow
If it's just crumbling into sand.
Won't you please hear the call.
She says

Put the message in the box.
Put the box into the car.
Drive the car around the world
Until you get heard.

The World says
Give a little bit
Give a little bit of your love to me
'Cause I'm waiting right here with my open arms.
Give a little bit.
Give a little bit of your soul to me
'Cause I'm waiting to behold your many charms.
Is that love in the air?
She says

Put the message in the box.
Put the box into the car.
Drive the car around the world
Until you get heard.

Yet More Alleged ACORN Fraud

2008-10-10T11:29:00.000-07:00

This time, it's in Missouri:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Officials in Missouri, a hard-fought jewel in the presidential race, are sifting through possibly hundreds of questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by an advocacy group that has been accused of election fraud in other states.

Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.

"I don't even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy," Davis said. "We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don't exist, people who have driver's license numbers that won't verify or Social Security numbers that won't verify. Some have no address at all."

Here's more from CNN:

To my fellow Democrats, I say this: imagine if the evil George W. Bush himself was involved with a "voter registration" organization not merely accused, but found repeatedly guilty, of voter registration fraud! Then imagine that the Bush campaign gave $800,000 to said organization! Then try to imagine putting your head back together after it explodes.

As CNN reports above, Obama's campaign gave $800,000 to ACORN for its primary registration drive, and the supposedly non-partisan ACORN has returned the favor by endorsing Obama. I'd love to see the list of non-Democrats endorsed by ACORN -- I'm sure it's very extensive.

The bottom line is this is yet another example of Obama's Chicago style of politics -- remember to vote early, vote often and don't let being deceased stop you!

Hat Tip: Hot Air

ACORN Offices Raided for Alleged Fraudulent Voter Registration (again)

2008-10-08T09:28:00.000-07:00

From United Press International:

Nevada authorities said Tuesday they raided the Las Vegas offices of the controversial voter-registration activist group, ACORN.

The Secretary of State's Office confirmed to the Las Vegas Review-Journal that a search warrant was served at the ACORN office as part of a probe into suspected voter registration fraud.

[...]

The Review Journal reported that the Secretary of State's Office said ACORN employees were suspected of using false names or addresses in their registration efforts, including the names of some former members of the Dallas Cowboys.

And that's the reason why Obama's campaign is so keen to deny any link between him and ACORN.

Update: I've heard on TV that ACORN's office in Missouri was raided again on the basis of alleged fraudulent voter registrations, but there's no link to be found yet. When there is such a link, I'll add it.

Obama and ACORN, again

2008-10-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

Who you gonna believe, Obama or your lying eyes?

Obama's campaign has the following at its Fight the Smears website:

Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.

But, Sweetness and Light cites the following from Toni Foulkes, identified as being a Chicago ACORN leader and a member of ACORN's national board:

As Sen. Obama puts it, how did a skinny kid with a funny name become the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, with 53% of the statewide Democratic vote in a seven-person field?

Obama started building the base years before. For instance, ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.

Interestingly, the link at the cited Social Policy journal for Toni Foulkes' article is non-existent, even though all other articles on that page and others have working links. So bear in mind I am taking Sweetness and Light at their word without independent verification. But it raises the question of why that article alone has no link in the journal, when all the others do have working links.

In any event, there is ever so slight wiggle room here for Obama to claim he never worked for ACORN. From the above, it looks like he didn't draw a paycheck from them. But come on! -- by this ACORN board member's own admission, Obama showed up from 1992 through 2003 at "our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office." By any reasonable definition, contrary to Fight the Smears, Obama was indeed an ACORN trainer, even if he was an unpaid one.

Obama vs. McCain: (not just) tonight's debate

2008-10-07T19:58:00.000-07:00

In sum, I thought both men acquitted themselves well, and unfortunately right now with Obama leading in the polls McCain needed more dings on Obama than he got. So Obama is starting to look like he's trying to sit on his lead and run the clock out, we'll see if he succeeds.

Apart from the debate, I wanted to discuss some historical parallels from my own lifetime that I see in Senators McCain and Obama.

For all my vehement criticism of him and his questionable associations, I think Senator Obama is an honorable man, as is Senator McCain. My issue with him is that he's far more comfortable with the far left than people realize, much further left in his own way than President Bush, for example, is a creature of the far right.

Which leads me to my next thought, that Bush is the Nixon figure hanging over this election much in the way that Nixon, though not on the ballot, hung over the 1976 Presidential race between Ford and Carter. Carter was able to make the 1976 election a referendum on Nixon and thus was able to narrowly defeat the incumbent President Ford. Obama is trying to do the same thing by tying McCain to the discredited President Bush, and so far it looks like he's succeeding.

With either man we are going to get a repudiation of Bush -- the only question is how decisive a repudiation, and what form it will take. McCain decisively repudiates Bush on torture, for example, which is one of the many reasons I admire him. And he proposes, and I believe him because of his long record as a deficit hawk, that he will be tough as nails on needless new spending, which is critically necessary after the drunken spending spree both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been on these last 8 years, all of them overseen by President Bush with nary a veto.

Obama, on the other hand, promises to change everything -- except to rein in the profligate government spending. His only quibble with government spending is that we have not spent enough. On health care, more government spending. On the environment, more government spending. On a whole host of issues, the problem for Obama is framed as being the rich and/or the war in Iraq. The Obama solution: withdraw from Iraq post-haste, and tax the rich, and the combination of the two will pay for all his wonderful new government programs, which he says will benefit 95% of America.

So who's Ford in this parallel, and who is Carter? As if you didn't guess already, I think McCain stands in as Ford, and Obama as Carter. And that's where the problem lies... both Ford and Carter were repudiations of the much-despised Nixon, but Ford was a moderate repudiation while Carter was an ultra-liberal one. Personally, I much prefer the Ford model -- an honorable, moderate Republican battling the excesses of a profoundly liberal Democratic majority in both the Senate and the House.

Was Carter more effective, for having inherited such a Democratic Congress after having defeated Ford? No, he was not. As I predict will be the case with Obama, Carter was rolled by the Democrats in Congress, and was increasingly regarded in his own party as weak and ineffectual. This judgement was mirrored abroad by our old enemies in the Soviet Union, and our then-new enemies the Ayatollahs taking over Iran while Carter watched, helplessly.

Folks thought that things couldn't get worse in 1976, and that Carter would turn things around, would "save" America. I see a similar sentiment now, that things can't get any worse, and that only Obama can save America now.

I fear Obama will make things much worse, that he will follow the Carter model of being rolled by aggressive Democrats in Congress, and emboldened adversaries such as Putin in Russia, Chavez in Venezuela, and the decaying, corrupt Ayatollah's regime in Iran. Also, as was the case with Vietnam, where the Democrats cut off all military aid to South Vietnam and let it collapse, I fear the Democrats under Obama will gladly cut off all aid to the nascent democratic government in Iraq, regardless of the disastrous consequences for ordinary Iraqis or for American prestige.

Even if McCain is not the Reagan figure so many Republicans still hunger for (maybe Palin is? we'll see!), I think the American people would be better served in the next four years by a moderate, effective President McCain facing down a Democratic Congress than by an ultra-liberal and ineffectual President Obama being dominated by that very same Congress.

The Bottom Line on Obama is that he has none, himself

2008-10-06T11:53:00.000-07:00

I am a bit enraged right now, actually trembling with it, after reading some things that are very relevant as to the character of Barack Obama, and why I personally cannot vote for him. Bear with me, it will be a while before we get there, though.

I've been reading for a while now about Bill Ayers and Obama's association with him, and I keep coming back to it. It crystallized my doubts about Obama, and what I read this morning dispelled all doubts that I was, perhaps, being too hard on the man.

I was born in the mid-60s, so like Obama I was a pretty young fellow when the Weather Underground crimes of Ayers, Dohrn, Rudd, Boudin et al were committed. So I had a vague sense at best of what they did, but I knew it was safely filed under the category of Bad Things.

Which means I knew vaguely about the bombings at the Pentagon and the Capitol Building, and that they had not killed anyone, but I regarded that as being luck more than design, no matter what Ayers claimed.

After those "harmless" bombings, came the premature explosion of bombs intended for a dance for Non-Commissioned Officers at Fort Dix Army Base in New Jersey. Apparently, striking this blow would cripple the U.S. war effort in Vietnam, or something. From Wikipedia:

The Greenwich Village townhouse explosion was the premature detonation of a bomb as it was being assembled by members of the American "urban guerilla" organization, Weatherman (later rechristened the Weather Underground), in the basement of a townhouse at 18 West 11th Street in New York City's Greenwich Village. The three persons nearest the bomb were killed, two others in the house were slightly injured, and the four story townhouse was reduced to rubble and caught fire.[1] Shortly before noon on Friday, March 6, 1970, people in the townhouse were assembling anti-personnel weapons armed with roofing nails and packed with dynamite. Years later, former members of the organization who had not been at the scene advanced differing (but not incompatible) claims as to the plans for use of the bombs. Thus, according to Mark Rudd, the plan was to set them off that evening at a dance for noncommissioned officers at the Fort Dix, New Jersey Army base.[2] According to a detractor, "former members" have reported that some of the bombs were destined for the Fort Dix dance and others for Butler Library at Columbia University.[3]

Killed by the blast were Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins. Surviving in a stunned and bleeding state were Weatherman members Kathy Boudin and Cathlyn Wilkerson, who were upstairs at the moment of the blast. The two survivors were led out from the burning structure by a police officer and the off-duty New York City Housing Authority patrolman who had entered in search of survivors.[4] The rescuers were treated at St. Vincent's Hospital for smoke inhalation.[1]

Boudin and Wilkerson disappeared before they could be questioned. They had been free on bail on assault charges stemming from the Days of Rage riots in Chicago.[5] A neighbor who rendered aid after the blast described them as "dazed and trembling" as they were led "staggering" from the wreckage, one clad only in blue jeans and the other naked. The neighbor brought them to her house, where they showered, borrowed some clothing and told a housekeeper they were going to a local drugstore, then got into a taxi and disappeared.[6][7]

The building was owned by Wilkerson's father, a radio-station executive.[5] As the search for bodies continued days after the explosion, Wilkerson's parents made a televised appeal to their missing daughter to avoid needlessly risking the lives of searchers. They asked her to "let us know how many more people, if any, are still left in the ruins of our home", saying "more lives would be needlessly lost and only you have the key".[5]

Never fear, though, Kathy Boudin at least turned up again:

On October 20, 1981 heavily armed terrorists staged a daylight assault on a Brinks armored car at the Nanuet Mall in Nanuet, New York. In the attack that followed, Brinks guard Peter Paige was killed and Joseph Trombino seriously wounded, nearly losing his arm to the gunman’s bullets. Another Brinks guard, James Kelly, suffered wounds and a concussion as the gunmen pumped automatic weapon fire into the armored vehicle.
After leaving the mall the gunmen fled east, ditching their getaway car and entering the rear of a waiting U-Haul truck being driven by co-conspirators. This was an attempt to escape detection, as the participants knew that the police would be on the lookout for the male blacks that robbed the armored car. The gunmen were to be driven to safety by white accomplices, thinking they would easily escape back to New York City in the confusion immediately following the robbery.

Unfortunately for them a high school student witnessed the switch from the original getaway car to the U-Haul. Looking out her bedroom window, she notified the local police and an alert was broadcast to officers on patrol.

Ten minutes later Nyack Police officers were conducting a roadblock at Exit 11 of the New York State Thruway. Spotting a U-Haul, they ordered it to the side of the road. The driver and passenger in the front of the U-Haul did not match the description of the gunmen at the mall. Further, police radio transmissions had broadcast reports of another U-Haul being spotted heading south into New Jersey on Rt. 304.

Kathy Boudin, an occupant of the U-Haul, complained to the police that their guns made her nervous. Apparently, thinking they had the wrong U-Haul, the police stowed their weapons and shotgun. At that moment the rear of the U-Haul flew open and half a dozen heavily armed killers jumped out, each with military-style fully automatic weapons. Police Officer Waverly Brown was hit immediately and died at the scene. Detective Arthur Keenan was struck before he was able to take cover and return fire. Sgt. Edward O’Grady was shot numerous times and died ninety minutes later at Nyack Hospital. Officer Brian Lennon exchanged shots but was seriously outnumbered and under heavy fire.

This is where we get to the part that set my blood boiling. Kathy Boudin obviously used her "don't worry, officers, I'm just a white middle class girl" demeanor to set them up to be gunned down by her Black Liberation Army compatriots in the back of the U-Haul. She might as well have gunned down the policemen herself. And, she did all this a full eleven years after helping build bombs nearly killed her, and cost her the lives of three of her fellow radicals, showing that she had learned nothing at all about the utter futility of her violent extremism.

After Boudin went to jail, Bill Ayers and his wife raised Kathy Boudin's son Chesa Boudin as their own. Any doubts that Ayers has repented one bit of the same idiocy as Chesa's mother are dispelled by the following words from Chesa himself, now a newly-minted Rhodes Scholar: "We have a different name for the war we're fighting now — now we call it the war on terrorism, then they called it the war on communism. My parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world. I'm dedicated to the same thing."

Yeah, Chesa, your parents helped murder policemen because that actually improved lives in the rest of the world. How did anyone let this morally blind idiot into Yale, much less into the Rhodes Scholar program?

So Chesa's adoptive father Bill "I don't regret a thing. I think we didn't do enough" Ayers leads us, at long last, back to Barack Obama. It doesn't really matter whether you think Obama agrees with violent radicals like Ayers, or just went along with working with him at the Annenberg Foundation in Chicago for well over five years.

I actually think it's worse if Obama thinks poorly of Ayers, because it means Obama doesn't have a spine worth speaking of. It means that, just to get ahead in Chicago politics, Obama was willing to work with a leftist thug anyone should have been proud to spurn.

And that's when it hit me -- Obama has no bottom line. He has nothing that will make him rise up and say, "No! No! Hell no! I won't do it!" He's the quintessential go-along, get-along example of utter political spinelessness. And this might well be how he manages to glide by long enough to get elected, but it's why I feel he will be an utter disaster as a President, which is a far more serious matter.

Think of it -- which of the major Democratic constituencies has he been willing to piss off? The anti-war left? Nope. The protectionists in Big Labor? Not them, he's in the bag for them. The environmentalists who won't countenance nuclear power or drilling in the U.S.? Nah, he's their puppy too.

The list is endless, and he is basically the perfect liberal checklist -- every box is checked. The idiocy and manifest incompetence of Bush may be enough for Obama to ride the wave of "anyone but a Republican!" all the way to the White House, but what happens after that?

What if Obama is faced with a crisis where he can't please everyone?! As in, not having enough cash for the federal government to pass all of Obama's programs and give a middle class tax cut? Or keeping the anti-war folks happy by departing Iraq, even if things take a turn for the worse there? Such crises and many more are inevitable, and where is Obama's bottom line? I can't say. Can you?

Great leaders are the ones who actually stand for something, and let the chips fall where they may. Obama may be a great campaigner, but I think his utter lack of a bottom line means we'll be in for a second round of Jimmy Carter with him -- neither his enemies nor his allies will respect him, to the world's detriment.

So that's my bottom line on Obama: if he doesn't have enough of a spine to say "hell no!" to working with Bill Ayers, where will he draw the line?

I am absolutely certain that, both for better and for worse, McCain does have a bottom line, stuff he will simply not countenance. Both his enemies and his Republican allies have learned this. The certainty that there are certain things on which you simply do not cross a President McCain will serve his country much better than Obama's utter lack of similar red lines.

The Whole of the Moon!

2008-10-04T23:56:00.000-07:00

The Waterboys became one of my favorites in the late 1980s, and this is the first song of theirs which I ever heard.

The Waterboys "The Whole of the Moon"

I pictured a rainbow
You held it in your hand
I had flashes
You saw the plan
I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon

You were there in the turnstiles
With the wind at your heels
You stretched for the stars
And you know how it feels
To reach too high
Too far
Too soon
You saw the whole of the moon

I was grounded
While you filled the skies
I was dumbfounded by truth
You cut through lies
I saw the rain dirty valley
You saw "Brigadoon"
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon

I spoke about wings
You just flew
I wondered, I guessed and I tried
You just knew
I sighed
And you swooned
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon
The whole of the moon

The torch in your pocket
And the wind on your heels
You climbed on a ladder
And you know how it feels
To get too high
Too far
Too soon
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon

Unicorns and cannonballs
Palaces and Piers
Trumpets, towers, and tenements
Wide oceans full of tears
Flags, rags, ferryboats
Scimitars and scarves
Every precious dream and vision
Underneath the stars
Yes, you climbed on a ladder
With the wind in your sails
You came like a comet
Blazing your trail
Too high
Too far
Too soon
You saw the whole of the moon

ACORN and its alleged voter registration fraud

2008-10-03T23:06:00.000-07:00

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic writes an excellently fair-minded post about GOP complaints about the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN):

ACORN works in urban areas and among the poor, so their advocacy benefits the Democratic Party.

And most acutely, Republicans point to charges, many validated, of ACORN's turning in hundreds, if not thousands, of fraudulent registrations in at least a dozen states and employing felons in states where it's illegal to do so for voter registration purposes.

Defenders of ACORN insist they're non-partisan, say that the group simply wants to make sure that as many eligible voters as possible vote and contend that critics are motivated by their partisanship, and possibly by their antipathy toward poor people and black people. Note: ACORN has liberal critics too, including some who think the group's aggressive tactics and history of quasi-socialism make other community organizers look bad.

I've been having growing concerns about this myself, since there have been all too many convictions of various ACORN canvassers for allegedly making fraudulent voter registrations by the thousands. The fact that there has been more than one such episode is troubling.

I'm all for maximum registration and participation of every American voter, especially the poor who are the most vulnerable and too often disenfranchised. It does no one any good, especially the Democratic party, when that noble goal becomes tainted by voter fraud.

I would love to see this cease being a political football between the two parties, and become something both parties devote time to fixing in a clean, verifiable way. But alas I am probably dreaming.

Cindy Sheehan Hearts the Muslim Brotherhood

2008-10-02T20:30:00.001-07:00

As if embracing Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez was not enough, "peace mom" Cindy Sheehan has now taken up the mantle of waging peace on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Here's part of her letter to the First Lady of Egypt, Suzanne Mubarak, on the Muslim Brotherhood's own English language website:

Through my work on this issue I have become an
advocate for human rights violations all over the
world. I am sad to say that my first visit to your
beautiful country of Egypt brings me here under this
guise to appeal for fair and just treatment for the
forty members of the Muslim Brotherhood, all civilian,
who are being tried through a military tribunal. As I
understand it this process is illegal both under
Egyptian law and International law and since the
defendants have all been found innocent on four
different occasions in civilian courts, I can only
conclude that the Egyptian government is trying them
in a military tribunal as a last resort to guarantee a
guilty verdict.

Now, I have no doubt that the Mubarak government is not exactly a champion of due process in all instances, not just those where the accused are members of the Muslim Brotherhood. But I have not (yet) seen Ms. Sheehan championing secular Egyptians who have run afoul of the Egyptian government.

Ms. Sheehan is of course allowed to espouse any views she likes, but her alliance with thugs like the Castro brothers, Hugo Chavez and now the Muslim Brotherhood makes her self-professed pro-democracy stance ring entirely hollow.

Update: Wikipedia's entry on the Muslim Brotherhood helpfully has the following:

In the group's belief, the Quran and Sunna constitute a perfect way of life and social and political organization that God has set out for man. Islamic governments must be based on this system and eventually unified in a Caliphate. The MB goal, as stated by Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna was to reclaim Islam’s manifest destiny, an empire, stretched from Spain to Indonesia.[22] It preaches that Islam enjoins man to strive for social justice, the eradication of poverty and corruption, and political freedom to the extent allowed by the laws of Islam. The Brotherhood strongly opposes Western colonialism, and helped overthrow the pro-western monarchies in Egypt and other Muslim nations during the early 20th century.

On the issue of women and gender the Muslim Brotherhood interprets Islam quite strictly. Its founder called for "a campaign against ostentation in dress and loose behavior," "segregation of male and female students," a separate curriculum for girls, and "the prohibition of dancing and other such pastimes..."[23]

"... political freedom to the extent allowed by the laws of Islam." What a wonderful cause Cindy Sheehan has found for herself now!

Obama and the Surge in Iraq

2008-10-01T11:36:00.000-07:00

Prior to the Surge, in a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on November 20, 2006, Obama said the following:

Then, Obama told us "the Surge has not worked" on July 20, 2007, and at many other campaign stops. The next month, there were 80 U.S. service deaths overall in Iraq, 69 of them by my count from combat or IEDs.

Fast-forward to this year, when the evidence has been mounting that not only has the Surge in troops and the accompanying change in strategy has reduced U.S. military casualties but also reduced Iraqi civilian casualties, and Obama tells Katie Couric in Amman, Jordan on July 22, 2008 that he still would have opposed the Surge:

Given how laughable this stance became by August 2008, Obama and the Democrats had to resort to their new rallying cry: there's not enough political reconciliation in Iraq! We should still leave!

Somehow, they missed the news that Iraq's largest Sunni political party rejoined the Iraqi government in July 2008, after a year's boycott.

Or, they missed the following news in September 2008:

Now that Iraq's parliament passed a provincial elections law Wednesday, overcoming months of political gridlock, many politicians and Iraqis are looking ahead to what the elections early next year will mean for Iraq

Oh, and here's the death toll for that very month, September 2008, as compared to the year before:

The number of civilians killed in Iraq last month more than halved to 359 compared to a year ago, Iraqi government figures showed, and the number of U.S. troops killed in action also fell dramatically.

U.S. combat deaths fell to eight in September, down from 12 last month and vastly reduced from 43 in September last year, statistics from independent Web site www.icasualites.org showed.

Violence in Iraq has fallen to around four-year lows in recent months, but militants have still been capable of large-scale attacks.

A string of bombings last month targeted civilians shopping before their evening meal during the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, and in Iraq's north, where the U.S. military says al Qaeda is active, violent attacks are carried out almost daily.

But September's toll of 359 civilian deaths was still lower than August's 382. Some 884 Iraqi civilians were killed in September last year.

So, U.S. combat fatalities have fallen to 8 in September 2008 vs. 69 in September 2007. Iraqi civilian casualties have fallen to 359 as compared to 884 in September 2007. Political reconciliation is proceeding apace, now that Sunni and Shi'it politicians are not constantly worried that extremists will slaughter them if they make a compromise with the other camps in Iraq. And still the Democratic candidate for President says his course of opposing the Surge was the right one!

I will yield to none in my contempt for Bush's criminally incompetent management of the war from March 2003 through January 2007. But by finally jettisoning Rumsfeld and putting General Petraeus in charge of a Surge in troops and a change in strategy, Bush has managed to show he can, however belatedly, come to grips with reality.

That is more than the Democrats, or Senator Obama in particular, can say.

Updated 10/3/2008: Yahoo News:

Baghdad - Iraq's presidential council on Friday ratified a law that paves the way for the first provincial elections in four years, officials said.

U.S. officials hope the election will give greater representation to minority Sunni Arabs and disaffected members of the Shiite majority.

This exemplifies the difference between McCain's approach and Obama's -- Obama has pledged repeatedly over the last two years to "end the war" and leave, no matter what, even if genocide results.

McCain also proposed ending the war in Iraq, but only by defeating our extremist enemies first! McCain's preference is increasingly validated by the fact that, with violence declining, the critically necessary political reconciliation between Iraqi factions is happening.

Of course, since things are going well in Iraq these days, expect it to fall all the more rapidly off the front pages. That's a shame, because what we're seeing is nothing less than the dual defeat of Sunni (Al Qaeda) and Shi'ite (Mahdi Army) extremists, with huge repercussions for the entire region. The Ayatollahs of Iran and the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia might be distressed, but this development is to the great benefit of ordinary Iraqis.

Tidal Turbines

2008-09-30T15:34:00.000-07:00

From Clean Technica comes news that Scotland is planning a tidal turbine farm sufficient to power 40,000 households:

ScottishPower Renewables will apply for planning permission next year to build the two farms in Northern Ireland’s seabed. The turbines will be manufactured in Scotland in an intentional boost to the country’s green-collar job market.

The 98-foot structures have been tested to operate in water as deep as 328 feet, and they spin slow enough to allow marine life to avoid the 66-foot blades. Most boats and ships would not be affected by the farms since the turbines won’t even reach 30-feet below the surface, but net-towing trawlers will be forbidden from the area.

“Tidal power is completely renewable, being driven by the gravity of the sun and moon, with no carbon dioxide emissions, plus the added benefit of being entirely predictable,” said Keith Anderson, the director of ScottishPower Renewables. The farms would help Scotland attain its goal to reduce its carbon footprint by 80% by 2050.

Maybe this is the answer to those wealthy folks like Walter Cronkite and the various Kennedys who are opposed to wind farms being placed in the waters off Cape Cod? Let's hope!

Franklin Raines, Fannie/Freddie, and the Democrats

2008-09-29T10:57:00.000-07:00

From Hot Air: Franklin Raines, former Clinton Budget Director, became CEO of Fannie Mae and was under some heavy grilling in 2004 by Republicans concerned that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not observing basic accounting rules, including those established by Sarbanes/Oxley in the aftermath of Enron's collapse.

Just watch and form your own conclusions, but my take is that this video could not be more devastating, even if we didn't have the heavy-handed text super-imposed on the video.

This is Through-the-Looking-Glass territory, with Republicans insisting on the need for reform and greater regulation, and the Democrats arguing everything is fine, and leave the markets alone. The problem is, the markets were not operating normally, they had been distorted by political pressure to offer lending to high-risk home loan recipients, something that Fannie and Freddie were then buying up, spreading the toxic debt of these future foreclosures throughout the entire financial system.

So Fannie and Freddie have now collapsed, precipitating the chain of events leading to the $700 billion bailout that the Congress is voting on today.

But don't worry about Mr. Raines! He came out just fine with a multi-million dollar pay package, according to his Wikipedia entry:

On December 21, 2004 Raines accepted what he called "early retirement" [4] from his position as CEO while U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigators continued to investigate alleged accounting irregularities. He is accused by The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), the regulating body of Fannie Mae, of abetting widespread accounting errors, which included the shifting of losses so senior executives, such as himself, could earn large bonuses [5].

In 2006, the OFHEO announced a suit against Raines in order to recover some or all of the $50 million in payments made to Raines based on the overstated earnings [6] initially estimated to be $9 billion but have been announced as 6.3 billion.[7].

Civil charges were filed against Raines and two other former executives by the OFHEO in which the OFHEO sought $110 million in penalties and $115 million in returned bonuses from the three accused.[8] On April 18, 2008, the government announced a settlement with Raines together with J. Timothy Howard, Fannie's former chief financial officer, and Leanne G. Spencer, Fannie's former controller. The three executives agreed to pay fines totaling about $3 million, which will be paid by Fannie's insurance policies. [ed. emphasis added] Raines also agreed to donate the proceeds from the sale of $1.8 million of his Fannie stock and to give up stock options. The stock options however have no value. Raines also gave up an estimated $5.3 million of "other benefits" said to be related to his pension and forgone bonuses.[9]

An editorial in The Wall Street Journal called it a "paltry settlement" which allowed Raines and the other two executives to "keep the bulk of their riches." [10] In 2003 alone, Raines's compensation was over $20 million.[11]

On July 16 of this year Ben Smith at Politico pointed out that Barack Obama has been calling Franklin Raines for advice on mortgage policy.

See also my earlier post on Senator Obama being the #2 recipient of all Fannie/Freddie political contributions over the last 20 years, just behind #1 recipient Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn), now chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

Update: For a highly opinionated take on things, Stanley Kurtz of the National Review writes in the NY Post that Obama's early community organizing affiliations with ACORN helped in the critical loosening of lending standards that has led to this mess:

... community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

The seeds of today's financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.

CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in "subprime" loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.

Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA - and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.

In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America's financial institutions.

Banks already overexposed by these shaky loans were pushed still further in the wrong direction when government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying up their bad loans and offering them for sale on world markets.

This, unfortunately, is precisely what is meant by the proverb "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

I Just Heard the News Today...

2008-09-27T21:22:00.000-07:00

... yes, I know, it's a Beatles reference, but I literally did just hear the news that keyboardist Richard Wright of Pink Floyd has died.

R.I.P., Richard.

Pink Floyd "Echoes"

Overhead the albatross
hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine.

And no one called us to the land
And no one knows the wheres or whys
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb towards the light

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can

And no one calls us to move on
And no one forces down our eyes
And no one speaks and no one tries
And no one flies around the sun

Cloudless everyday you fall upon my waking eyes
inciting and inviting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning

And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
And so I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky

Decentralized Nuclear Power

2008-09-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

This is very interesting. Instead of large, expensive, nuclear power plants that take years to build, Hyperion Power proposes to build thousands of small-scale nuclear power plants sufficient to power 10,000 American households:

It's about 70 megawatts thermal, and, depending on your steam cycle and how you're generating electricity, it's about 30 megawatts electrical, at the turbine. Thirty megawatts is tiny compared to traditional nuclear reactors and even coal plants, but we're going for distributed or grid-appropriate electric generators or for industrial uses—for mining, for heavy oil production.

And, they claim it's safe, self-sustaining, and utterly useless to any would-be nuclear bomb makers:

Our fuel is very unique. It's uranium hydride. UH3 is the chemical formula. Low-enriched, about 10 percent [uranium isotope]-235, the rest is U-238. By comparison, bomb-grade fuel is about 98 percent enriched.

You can't turn our fuel into a bomb. You'd have to re-enrich, re-process the fuel, so you might as well start with yellowcake. That's one of the neat safety features of our reactor. For nefarious purposes, our reactor has absolutely no value whatsoever.

[...]

The neat thing about UH3, about uranium hydride, is it's a moderator and an emergency cooling system in one. Its chemical composition—and we say it's been designed by God to be the prefect nuclear fuel—when uranium hydride gets too hot, when the reaction gets a little out of hand, it will start shedding those hydrogen atoms naturally, which turns off the nuclear fires and, if necessary, cools down the reactor. This happens very, very fast.

If Hyperion's claims prove true, this is a small, relatively cheap, easily managed form of nuclear fission. Not only could this be easily applied throughout the United States, but also throughout the world. Since defeating global warming is not only about the United States getting off carbon-based energy production, but also about India and China doing so, the adoption of such clean, distributed low-cost nuclear power by those nations could be a big part of the eventual solution.

Hat Tip: Clean Technica

Ron Paul Shows His Stripes

2008-09-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

Shockingly, it turns out the love in Ron Paul's Revolution is only for those who are white, Christian, and racist! I am sure the various 9/11 Truthers, white supremacists and Holocaust deniers who flocked to his campaign will be disappointed.

If you have no clue what I'm talking about, it's that Ron Paul endorsed one Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party for President. These are a few of Mr. Baldwin's beliefs:

If America wishes to remain a free and independent republic, if this nation truly desires future peace and prosperity, and if we genuinely aspire to remain a blessed and protected land, we must quickly throw off this foolish infatuation with multiculturalism, which is nothing more than an attempt to de-Christianize our country, and humbly return to the God of our fathers!

[...]

Call it what you want - “New World Order,” “International Order,” “International Community,” “World Law.” It all means the end of U.S. sovereignty and independence. Americans need to be aware that power hungry politicians from both parties along with money hungry executives from multinational corporations pose a much greater threat to our liberties than any foreign terrorist does.

[...]

For nearly a half-century, we have forsaken the moral principles of Heaven. We have legally murdered too many unborn babies. We have too readily accepted aberrant, sexual behavior. We kicked Heaven out of our schools, out of our homes, and out of our hearts. As a result, God is giving us a little taste of Hell.

This glorious news was resoundingly seconded by Alex Jones (last seen here protecting the world from Michelle Malkin) and the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Apparently, true-blooded American patriots are so thin on the ground that the Ron Paul Revolution has no choice but to turn to white supremacists like the aforementioned Council. Check out their Wikipedia entry for more.

Or, if you don't want to take Wikipedia's word for it, just read the Council's own Statement of Principles:

(1) We believe the United States is a Christian country.

[...]

(2) We believe the United States is a European country and that Americans are part of the European people.

[...]

(8) Cultural, national, and racial integrity. We support the cultural and national heritage of the United States and the race (ed. emphasis) and civilization of which it is a part, as well as the expression and celebration of the legitimate subcultures and ethnic and regional identities of our people.

Ron Paul shows his true stripes. I look forward to those well-meaning anti-racist libertarians duped by him thus far leaving and denouncing his cause post-haste.

Hat Tip: Little Green Footballs

Obama and Ayers

2008-09-23T19:10:00.000-07:00

Stanley Kurtz of National Review offers a report on the recently unveiled archives related to Barack Obama's relationship with '60s radical and unrepetenant bomber William Ayers:

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.

The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

This last paragraph brings home the bottom line for me as a Democrat. Does anyone truly doubt that if a rising Republican politician had spent five years working with an unrepentant abortion-clinic bomber who described himself as a "a small f fascist" or as a "small n nazi," that he would still be seriously considered as a national politician? So why the double standard on behalf of Barack Obama?

I am a small d democrat as well as a big D Democrat. And Ayers is not an adherent of democracy! He decided that, since the democratic will of the American people had disappointed him in the 1960s by not ending the Vietnam War quickly enough, he and his fellow radicals would force the American people to change their mind through a bombing campaign aimed at the Pentagon, the Capitol building in DC, and that well-known center of war planning, the NY city Police Dept. headquarters.

In a similar vein, I have long felt there was something smelly about Pat Buchanan's long support for Nazi death camp guards like John Demanjuk (spelling?). Sure enough, Buchanan has come along in recent years with the ridiculous thesis that the U.S. never should have warred against the Nazis, that poor Adolf Hiter was forced into a war against Britain and the West that he did not want by Winston Churchill, among others.

Just as Buchanan has revealed what many long suspected about his pro-Nazi tendencies, I think Obama's association with anti-American radicals like Ayers and out-and-out racists like Rev. Wright tells us that Obama's true politics lie with the radical left. One decade-plus association with Wright or Ayers alone would be troubling enough! Two such associations tells us either:
a) Obama is a dupe who cannot figure out on his own what these men are like; or
b) Obama is a cynic who thinks he can build his political career in Chicago with the likes of these guys, and still go on to claim he's a post-partisan, post-racial moderate.

So far, Obama has actually been able to get away with option b, to my amazement. We'll see if he's be able to make it last until November 4.

Hat Tip: TigerHawk

Naomi Wolf Brings Us the Truth!

2008-09-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

Naomi Wolf, lone voice in the wilderness, tells us about the coming Palin-Rove administration, umm, I mean dictatorship:

Under the coming Palin-Rove police state, you will witness the plans now underway to bring Iraqi troops to patrol the streets of our nation. This is not McCain's fantasy: it is Rove's and Cheney's.

Under the Palin-Rove police state, there will be no further true elections. Mark Crispin Miller has done sensational and under-reported investigating to establish that -- as I warned -- indeed the GOP staffers on the US Senate Judiciary Committee have been.

Yes, that last didn't make sense to me either. No doubt it was a secret message to the freedom fighters massing in their hidden bases to strike a blow against the evil Empire!

What's a good evil Empire, though, without the S&M? Of course, Palin/Rove have that angle covered, writes Wolf:

I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites ("the heart of America is on display") and realized Bush's speechwriters were writing her -- not McCain's -- speeches. I heard her tell George Bush's lies -- not McCain's -- to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners -- this is Rove-Cheney's enthusiastic S and M, not McCain's, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit --but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.

Who knew Sarah Palin was an "S and M" stateswoman? But wait! Where is John McCain in all this? Well, Wolf has braved unspeakable dangers to bring us the truth:

McCain doesn't matter. Reputable dermatologists are discussing the fact that in simply actuarial terms, John McCain has a virulent and life-threatening form of skin cancer. It is the elephant in the room, but we must discuss the health of the candidates: doctors put survival rates for someone his age at two to four years. I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney into the foreseeable future -- for a decade perhaps -- a puppet "president" for the same people who have plundered our treasure, are now holding the US economy hostage and who murdered four thousand brave young men and women in a way of choice and lies.

I think Wolf meant to write "a war of choice and lies" in that last sentence, but I would not presume to amend her sacred words of warning.

Read her whole devastating expose at the Huffington Post. Where else?

Hat Tip: Jammie Wearing Fool

Hitchens on Obama

2008-09-22T12:59:00.000-07:00

The man, Christopher Hitchens, has this to say about Obama:

Why is Obama so vapid and hesitant and gutless? Why, to put it another way, does he risk going into political history as a dusky Dukakis? Well, after the self-imposed Jeremiah Wright nightmare, he can't afford any more militancy, or militant-sounding stuff, even if it might be justified. His other problems are self-inflicted or party-inflicted as well. He couldn't have picked a gifted Democratic woman as his running mate, because he couldn't have chosen a female who wasn't the ever-present Sen. Clinton, and so he handed the free gift of doing so to his Republican opponent (whose own choice has set up a screech from the liberals like nothing I have heard since the nomination of Clarence Thomas). So the unquantifiable yet important "atmospherics" of politics, with all their little X factors, belong at present to the other team.

Hitchens is equally hard on the Republicans, too. But he points out something I have long thought about Obama -- that he really didn't expect to be the nominee this time around, and now he's stuck:

To put it a touch more precisely, what I suspect in his case is that he had no idea of winning this time around. He was running in Iowa and New Hampshire to seed the ground for 2012, not 2008, and then the enthusiasm of his supporters (and the weird coincidence of a strong John Edwards showing in Iowa) put him at the front of the pack. Yet, having suddenly got the leadership position, he hadn't the faintest idea what to do with it or what to do about it.

Look at the record, and at Obama's replies to essential and pressing questions. The surge in Iraq? I'll answer that only if you insist. The credit crunch? Please may I be photographed with Bill Clinton's economic team? Georgia? After you, please, Sen. McCain. A vice-presidential nominee? What about a guy who, despite his various qualities, is picked because he has almost no enemies among Democratic interest groups?

Read the whole thing.

Gabriel!

2008-09-20T21:44:00.001-07:00

Peter Gabriel, who I have been fortunate enough to have seen in concert in 1987, 1993, and 2003, sings an extraordinary song of Native American loss and resilience:

Peter Gabriel "San Jacinto"

Thick cloud - steam rising - hissing stone on sweat lodge fire
Around me - buffalo robe - sage in bundle - run on skin
Outside - cold air - stand, wait for rising sun
Red paint - eagle feathers - coyote calling - it has begun
Something moving in - I taste it in my mouth and in my heart
It feels like dying - slow - letting go of life

Medicine man lead me up though town - Indian ground -
so far down
Cut up land - each house - a pool - kids wearing water
wings - drink in cool
Follow dry river bed - watch Scout and Guides make
pow-wow signs
Past Geronimo's disco - Sit 'n' Bull steakhouse - white
men dream
A rattle in the old man's sack - look at mountain top -
keep climbing up
Way above us the desert snow - white wind blow

I hold the line - the line of strength that pulls me through
the fear
San Jacinto - I hold the line
San Jacinto - the poison bite and darkness take my sight -
I hold the line
And the tears roll down my swollen cheek - think I'm losing
it - getting weaker
I hold the line - I hold the line
San Jacinto - yellow eagle flies down from the sun -
from the sun

We will walk - on the land
We will breathe - of the air
We will drink - from the stream
We will live - hold the line

Ralph Peters on Palin

2008-09-20T16:44:00.000-07:00

Ralph Peters is always the sort to shoot from the hip in his essays and let God sort it all out, and he doesn't disappoint in his essay on the appeal of Sarah Palin:

Sarah Palin's one of us. She actually represents the American people.

When The New York Times, CNN, the NBC basket of basket cases and all the barking blog dogs insult Palin, they're insulting us. When they smear her, they're smearing every American who actually works for a living, who doesn't expect a handout, who doesn't have a full-time accountant to parse the family taxes, who believes in the Pledge of Allegiance and who thinks a church is more than just a tedious stop on daughter Emily's 100K wedding day.

Later on, he writes,

For the first time since Ronald Reagan, our last great president, we, the people, see a chance that one of us might have a voice in governing our country.

Speaking of Reagan (Eureka College, Illinois), every chief executive we've had since the Gipper snapped his final salute as president has had the imprimatur of an Ivy League university. And we've gone from bad to worse:

* George Herbert Walker Bush: Yale.

* William Jefferson Clinton: Georgetown, Oxford, Yale Law.

* George W. Bush: Yale and Harvard Business School.

The first lacked the sense to finish the job in Desert Storm; the second lacked the guts to go after al Qaeda when it was just a startup - and the third, well, let's just say he disappointed our low expectations.

Now we have the Ivy League elite's "he's not only like us but he's a minority and we're so wonderful to support him" candidate, Sen. Barack Obama (Columbia and Harvard Law).

Our country can't afford another one of these clowns. Harvard isn't the answer - Harvard's the problem.

So here's the message Palin is sending on behalf of the rest of us (the down-market masses Dems love at election time and ignore once the voting's done): The rule of the snobs is over. It's time to give one of us a chance to lead.

Sen. John McCain's one of us, too. He raised hell at Annapolis (quadruple ugh: military!), and he'll raise the right kind of hell in Washington.

McCain's so dumb he really loves his country.

Sarah Palin's dumb that way, too. How terribly unfashionable.

Agree or disagree with the man, Peters always is bracing, unconventional, and calling 'em like he sees 'em. I happen to think he's on to something here.

Hat Tip: Hot Air

Great Britain Finds it Needs More Nuclear Power

2008-09-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

Like Germany before it, the United Kingdom is finding that it needs more nuclear power plants:

* UK will press "all buttons" to get nuclear built
* nuclear is a "no-brainer" because it contributes to energy security and job creation
* "insecure international sources underline the case for a diverse mix"
* "determined to get nuclear up and running as soon as possible"
* nuclear industry could create 100,000 new direct jobs
* Britain needs to move fast to establish position in international market
* all of the above is part of the need to "spotlight" the opportunities available

There are several factors pushing the UK government’s rapidly growing interest in building new nuclear power plants.

* Natural gas production in the North Sea is falling more rapidly than expected.
* Russia is a major European gas supplier, but its reliability is increasingly in question.
* Iran is another big gas supplier to Europe with questionable reliability.
* Alternative energy programs are not delivering power as rapidly as expected.
* Carbon emissions concerns have changed the status of coal as an energy fuel.
* Existing UK nuclear plants have a limited life remaining. (Note: It is possible to extend the life of these facilities.)

I'm all for solar energy, as is quite obvious to any reader here, but I think we're going to need expanded nuclear power too. I'd rather we build nuclear- and solar- and wind-powered energy generation than another coal- or natural gas-powered plant, which will only continue to exacerbate the problem of global warming.

If we want to continue feeding hard currency to Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia, by all means, let's continue the informal ban on nuclear power. If we're serious about green energy generation, though, we might want to add nuclear power to the mix of clean energy options available to us.

An Overlooked Victory in the Tolerance War

2008-09-18T19:09:00.001-07:00

I missed this when it happened, but it seems that Qatar, which shares with Saudi Arabia its intolerant Wahhabi ruling ideology, has built its first-ever government-approved Catholic Church:

The 2,700-seat church was built on land donated by Qatar's emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, and five other buildings are under construction nearby for other Christian denominations in this oil-rich state where over 70% of the population are expatriate workers.

"I convey very special greetings from the Holy Father to the Emir," said Cardinal Ivan Dias, the envoy of Pope Benedict XVI and the Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

"Without his precious gift of a land to the Catholic community, we would not be here today," Dias said.

Qatar follows the rigorous Wahabi teachings of Sunni Islam, and like neighboring Saudi Arabia had not previously authorized Christians to practice their faith openly.

A priest operated in Qatar since the 1960s without official approval, and the opening of the church Saturday appeared to be another sign of Qatar's efforts to open up to the West as it seeks a bid for the summer Olympic Games in 2016.

"It is a dream coming true," said Bishop Bernardo Gremoli, a former vicar of Arabia who initiated the church project more than 20 years ago.

Some 150,000 Christians of all denominations live in the emirate, over 90% of them Catholic expatriate workers from the Philippines, India and other Asian nations.

Since the CIA's 2008 estimate of Qatar's population is 824,789, only 247,437 native Qatari are actual citizens! Only since March have those Catholics in the far-larger expatriate majority been allowed to worship in Qatar without fear of official reprisal.

America has properly been welcoming as Muslim mosques and Hindu temples, among many other houses of worship, have been built to serve new immigrants to our shores. The same pattern has largely been replicated in the other countries of the West. It is a good sign, a very good sign, that this tolerance is at long last beginning to be reciprocated in the heart of the Arabian peninsula.

UPDATE: Worth noting, too, is that Qatar's desire to be judged worthy to hold the 2016 Summer Olympics was a driving force behind this decision. Globalization works its special magic again.

America Needs Engineers!

2008-09-18T16:17:00.001-07:00

Mars may need more women, but America needs more engineers.

This impressive young man, William Yuan, is exactly what we need -- except we need his sort of talent, ingenuity and engineering know-how by the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions.

Oh, yes, he's only twelve years old:

...a 12 year old boy in Beaverton, Oregon recently developed a new type of 3D solar cell that makes other solar cells look inefficient by comparison.

William Yuan’s 3D cell can absorb both visible and UV light. According to his calculations, solar panels equipped with his 3D cells could provide 500 times more light absorption than current commercial solar cells and nine times more light than existing 3D solar cells.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, a whole generation of future scientists and engineers were inspired by a potent combination of fear of losing out to the Soviets, and of science fiction inspiring them to believe that they, too, could make a better future.

If we're really serious about transforming energy and transportation in this country, we're going to need tons of engineers to do the hard, technical work involved. Hitting the math and science books may be less fun in the short run than playing games and chatting online, but the percentage of young Americans doing the former rather than the latter may well determine whether the United States remains a leading source of technological innovation, or becomes an also-ran.

Hybrid Cars on the Bleeding Edge

2008-09-17T10:35:00.002-07:00

I've run across two great posts that feed into one another.

First, Thomas P.M. Barnett notes how higher gas prices have put Toyota in the catbird seat for now with their Toyota Prius hybrid. The next step is the plug-in hybrid market, and even beyond that, hydrogen fuel cell cars:

I know, I know. Amory Lovins is a nut.

But I see a lot of good coming from these high prices. The Middle East needed a big resource transfer to handle that 100 million young heading toward non-existent jobs. WE were going to pay that money one way or the other. Hybrids beat bullets and bombs.

Complementing the above is the news that, with our current energy set-up, mass acceptance of plug-in hybrids would mean a huge increase in water usage by existing power plants:

If 25% of the nation’s fleet converted to plug-in vehicles it would require an additional 1 billion gallons of water for electricity generation. For comparison, that’s almost half the total urban water used by the state of California in one year.

But no one, including the study authors, is saying that plug-in hybrids should be blacklisted. It just adds an important consideration for water-stressed areas that have plans for a grid-based automotive fleet. It also highlights the importance of using sustainable (wind, solar) sources of electricity for electric vehicles.

And as far as the alternatives go: PM pointed out that growing a bushel of corn requires 2200 gallons of water, which only makes 2.7 gallons of ethanol. I would take a fleet of plug-ins over a fleet of Flex-Fuel vehicles any day.

My take: once again we see that corn-based ethanol is a big dead end. Second, plug-in hybrids are great but we need a change in our energy generation so as not to engender a whole new set of water scarcity issues.

Long term, somehow the growing globalizing Core is going to have to come up with the low-carbon emissions energy to produce either mass quantities of electricity for the plug-ins, or the sort that can enable relatively low-cost, low-energy production of mass quantities of hydrogen for fuel-cell transportation. Probably both, with the latter being the long-term solution.

I share Tom Barnett's optimism and only hope that we take care to integrate the Middle East into the Core as we engage in this massive transformation.

Slick Willie's got nothing on Obama!

2008-09-17T10:35:00.001-07:00

Once again, Obama talks the talk of being a reformer, but only McCain actually walks the walk.

Hot Air reports that John McCain co-sponsored legislation in 2005 designed to reform the GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that are at the heart of the current financial crisis:

For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs–and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO’s report this week does nothing to ease these concerns. In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO’s report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay.

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.

Obama, newly sworn in as the junior Senator from Illinois at the time, did not join as a co-sponsor with McCain nor has he sponsored or co-sponsored any such legislation since.

What's more, after Democrat Chris Dodd from Connecticut killed McCain's bill in the Banking Committee, Obama went on to become the #2 recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac campaign contributions! He did this in less than four years in the Senate, leapfrogging even John Kerry who has been in the Senate since 1984. That's quite an accomplishment indeed, but it's not one of reform.

The breakdown of contributions is found here at Open Secrets, the non-partisan campaign finance website. The aforementioned Senator Dodd (a Senator since 1980) is #1 in receiving a total of $165,400 in combined PAC and individual contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac contributors from 1989 through 2008. Obama, despite not even being on the Senate Banking Committee, has vaulted to the #2 position receiving $126,349 in contributions since 2005, eclipsing Senator John Kerry (in the Senate since 1984) who has received a total of $111,000 since 1989.

And McCain, who has been in the Senate since 1986 -- what is his record? Well, since 1989 McCain has received a whopping $21,550 in contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It's worth noting that all those contributions are individual contributions, not PAC donations. McCain, like Obama, has not been on the Senate Banking Committee, and yet he managed to co-sponsor reform legislation where Obama has not. Unsuccessfully, to be sure, but still he at least gave it an effort!

The difference in contributions from these doomed giants becomes all the more stark if you break it down into a yearly average. Rounding up to 4 years, Obama's average yearly received total from Fannie/Freddie amounts to $31,587.25 for each and every year he's been in the Senate. By contrast, McCain's 20-year average from 1989-2008 works out to $1,077.50 per year. If Obama had been in the Senate as long as McCain or Kerry or Dodd has, his total take from Fannie/Freddie would be in the realm of $631,745, or nearly four times the take of current champ Dodd.

There are many, many things Obama is. A brillian law student, yes. A passable community activist who gave up when things got difficult, that too. An ambitious climber of a State Senator, yep. A Senator who ran for President before even a third of his first term was up? Sure! A reformer, though? Please don't insult my intelligence.

This infuriates me so because I am a Democrat, and in my still beating Democratic heart I want to believe that Democrats are on the side of the little guy, while Republicans are the corrupt hacks on the take.

But no, there are corrupt hacks in both parties, and there are true reformers to be found in both parties too. You have to look beyond party labels, and judge them on the content of their character, as illustrated time and again through their record.

The qualms of my Democratic heart are relieved, then, because once again I find that McCain is the reformer, while Obama proves himself to be nothing more than the latest version of the corrupt Chicago machine politician.

Neither man is perfect, and it's ridiculous to expect perfection. But the difference between McCain and Obama on this and other reform issues is so clear as to be laughable. Slick Willie has nothing on Obama, nothing.

UPDATE: As if to put an exclamation point on all of the above, Dennis Byrne of the Chicago Tribune writes on Obama Sidestepping Reform in Illinois.

Albanian Muslims Saved Jews from the Holocaust

2008-09-16T13:01:00.000-07:00

I heard about this on NPR the other day, and have been so busy with work and life I only got around to blogging about it now.

It seems that Albanians in general, Muslims and Orthodox and Catholic, have a code called Besa, which requires that one opens one's home to people in need. On the program I was listening to, one old Albanian Muslim said (and I'm paraphrasing) that he'd rather his son die than that he betray the Besa code.

During the Holocaust, then, Besa took the following form: Albanians of all religions, but mostly Muslim, took in Albanian and non-Albanian Jews and hid them from the Nazis who were demanding that they be handed over. They gave these Jews Albanian names, Albanian peasant clothing, and claimed when pressed by the Nazis that they were relatives. This despite the grave danger that the Nazis would realize the ruse, and simply exterminate the Albanians along with the Jews they were sheltering.

On the program, they had an interview with an elderly German Jewish woman who had been saved by Besa-observant Albanians. In her accent, so familiar to me because it sounded much like my grandparents on both my mother's and father's side, she simply and heartbreakingly put it this way (again, not an exact quote, I am paraphrasing from memory): "Here were the civilized Germans, with all their poets, and writers, and their composers, committing this crime. And then there were the Albanians, 80% of them illiterate, peasants really, saving us from the Nazis."

This hits me where I live. I am very German in my heritage, the hair is still blue, the eyes used to be blonde -- scratch that, reverse it. Given that my father's German-born parents were Lutheran, and my German-born mother was Catholic, my family never was on the receiving end of Hitler's hatred of Jews. So I have always been simultaneously proud of my heritage and chastened by it -- I take the Holocaust very personally, because it is my tribe (so to speak) that committed it, even if none of my ancestors were Nazis themselves.

So for Albanian peasants to save Jews -- even foreign Jews like the woman above who fled from Hamburg, Germany -- is an extraordinary act of moral courage, one that humbles me and literally reduces me to tears. God bless them.

This came at just the right time after 9/11's anniversary, because it was a useful reminder that the enemy is not of any one particular faith -- there are evil men, fanatics, of all religions, and of none at all. We should not forget that most Muslims are not remotely sympathetic to Al Qaeda, and that what I call the Tolerance War should only be fought against the vicious extremists, with our true allies being all tolerant folks regardless of faith.

I only wish those very Islamic extremists who deny the Holocaust would talk to the Besa-observant Muslims in Albania and open their eyes, but that's unlikely in the extreme, alas. Still, the rest of us know the truth, and that is enough.

For more, go to the Center for Islamic Pluralism

UPDATE: I found Norman Gershman's video documentary on Besa here.

Lightning Crashes

2008-09-13T20:21:00.000-07:00

An appropriately mournful yet beautiful song in this week of remembering the irreplaceable lives lost on 9/11 and since.

LIVE "Lightning Crashes"

Lightning crashes a new mother cries
Her placenta falls to the floor
The angel opens her eyes
The confusion sets in
Before the doctor can even close the door

Lightning crashes an old mother dies
Her intentions fall to the floor
The angel closes her eyes
The confusion that was hers
Belongs now to the baby down the hall

Oh now feel it, comin' back again
Like a rollin', thunder chasing the wind
Forces pullin' from
The center of the earth again
I can feel it.

Lightning crashes a new mother cries
This moment she's been waiting for
The angel opens her eyes
Pale blue colored iris
Presents the circle
And puts the glory out to hide, hide

Oh now feel it, comin' back again
Like a rollin', thunder chasing the wind
Forces pullin' from
The center of the earth again
I can feel it.

McCain Surging

2008-09-13T20:06:00.000-07:00

The Zogby polling group reports something of a surge underway toward McCain in critical battleground states!

In this latest adjustment of the Zogby map, Obama has lost 26 Electoral College votes from two states—Pennsylvania and New Mexico – both of which were moved from the Obama column into the toss-up column.

Meanwhile, McCain has gained enough ground to have—at least for now—captured a definitive lead in seven new states: Ohio, Missouri, Nevada, South Carolina, Montana, South and North Dakota. McCain’s gains total 54 Electoral College votes. Based on a Zogby analysis of other credible polling and demographic trends, the Zogby map is also moving four other states – Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota, and North Dakota from toss-ups into the McCain column.

The only bad news in this bunch is from North Carolina, in fact, where Obama has a surprising 1.5% percent lead.

This is Zogby we're talking about, so take it with the caution it deserves, but still, it's good news that I hope we see reported by other polling outfits.

Hat Tip: Hot Air, Gateway Pundit

9/11 Seven Years Later

2008-09-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

I was living and working in Silicon Valley in Northern California on 9/11/2001, so I saw it all unfolding back home in the NY metro area from a strange, disconcerting distance.

The first news I got was from a roughly 6:00 AM Pacific time IM with a New Jersey friend, who informed me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center while he was commuting on the New Jersey Turnpike to work.

Of course, I thought it was a Cessna. How wrong I was.

Too many forget the horror and panic of those days in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when the expectation was that another such attack was going to come any day now. I remember vividly my mother telling me my sister was seriously considering going to Germany (where we have many cousins and aunts and uncles) with my niece and nephew simply in an effort to get smallpox vaccines for them, because those were unavailable here in the United States.

My home county in New Jersey, Monmouth County, famously took the biggest hit in terms of lives lost. I was not there then, so I can only take the word of my family and friends that the smell from the fallen towers lasted for days after the attacks.

We have come a long way since then, but not so long that we should forget the enormity of the evil visited upon us by the gleeful fanatics of Al Qaeda. We are on the verge of decisively defeating them in Iraq, but much work remains to be done in Afghanistan and in their new safe havens of Pakistan's wild northwest territories.

Never forgive. Never forget.

Go Green! (and defeat Al Qaeda)

2008-09-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

That's what Thomas Friedman says we can and must do, as part of an interview with Fareed Zakaria on the Amazon site.

First Friedman talks about the resentment rising countries feel about our holier-than-thou lectures, and how we should grab the window of opportunity this affords us, such as it is:

Every time I come to China, young Chinese say to me, "Mr. Friedman, your country grew dirty for 150 years. Now it's our turn." And I say to them, "Yes, you're absolutely right, it's your turn. Grow as dirty as you want. Take your time. Because I think we probably just need about five years to invent all the new clean power technologies you're going to need as you choke to death, and we're going to come and sell them to you. And we're going to clean your clock in the next great global industry. So please, take your time. If you want to give us a five-year lead in the next great global industry, I will take five. If you want to give us ten, that would be even better."

Friedman worries, however, that we in the U.S. are blowing the head start we've been given, and Zakaria offers up this following reason:

I think it's not about our economic system but our political system. The rhetoric we hear is that the market should produce new energy technologies. But the problem is, the use of current forms of energy has an existing infrastructure with very powerful interests that has ensured that the government tilt the playing field in their favor, with subsidies, tax breaks, infrastructure spending, etc. This is one area where the Europeans have actually been very far-sighted and have pushed their economies toward the future.

Friedman goes on to talk about how this affects our war against Al Qaeda, in a tactical sense:

They began with a marine general in Iraq, who basically cabled back one day and said, I need renewable power here. Things like solar energy. And the reaction of the Pentagon was, "Hey, general, you getting a little green out there? You're not going sissy on us are you? Too much sun?" And he basically said, "No, don't you guys get it? I have to provision outposts along the Syrian border. They are off the grid. They run on generators with diesel fuel. I have to truck diesel fuel from Kuwait to the Syrian border at $20 a gallon delivered cost. And that's if my trucks don't get blown up by insurgents along the way. If I had solar power, I wouldn't have to truck all this fuel. I could—this is my term, not his—‘outgreen' Al-Qaeda."

I argue in the chapter that "outgreening"--the ability to deploy, expand, innovate and grow renewable energy and clean power--is going to become one of the most important, if not the most important, sources of competitive advantage for a company, for a country, for a military. You're going to know the cost of your fuel, it's going to be so much more distributed, you will be so much more flexible, and--this is quite important, Fareed--you will also become so much more respected.

Oh, and Friedman makes this excellent point about the creative destruction that such a big change in energy technology will entail:

In the green revolution, everyone's a winner: BP's green, Exxon's green, GM's green. When everyone's a winner, that's not a revolution--actually, that's a party. We're having a green party. And it's very fun--you and I get invited to all the parties. But it has no connection whatsoever with a real revolution. You'll know it's a revolution when somebody gets hurt. And I don't mean physically hurt. But the IT revolution was a real revolution. In the IT revolution, companies either had to change or die. So you'll know the green revolution is happening when you see some bodies--corporate bodies--along the side of the road: companies that didn't change and therefore died. Right now we don't have that kind of market, that kind of change-or-die situation. Right now companies feel like they can just change their brand, not actually how they do business, and that will be enough to survive. That's why we're really having more of a green party than a green revolution.

On the first point, Friedman is absolutely right that we should make the most of every opportunity the rest of the world affords our country through their own unwillingness to face up to these challenges.

I part company with him when he endorses Obama's big-spending government subsidy approach over McCain's more free market approach. Still, McCain would be wise to emphasize more strongly that as President he won't let current low-cost subsidies for wind, solar and geothermal lapse, as all too many Republicans are currently willing to allow to happen.

It's interesting where Friedman concentrates on the purely tactical applications of green energy to the war against Al Qaeda. He's quite right that solar would be helpful powering our military outposts on the Syrian border, but at least in this interview he doesn't address the larger strategic considerations.

I'd love nothing more than to deprive the Ayatollahs, Putins, and Chavezes of their oil wealth when we transition to a new varied energy source that stems more from technical knowledge and innovation than from the luck of the geological draw. In any such contest, our open society model which puts a premium on talent regardless of country of origin will do very well indeed.

What I don't think anyone is addressing, however, is how such a green revolution might worsen the feeling of resentment against the West if the Muslim world is again left on the sidelines of this latest revolution. Given the widely-reported problems in education in the Arab world, combined with its dependency on oil as its leading export, this is a very-real possibility even in the event that the United States successfully leads such a technological transition.

This is not an argument against the environmental necessity of this transition, but I think it points up the fact that Thomas Barnett's grand strategy of "Shrinking the Gap" by more thoroughly integrating the Middle East into globalization's Core will be more relevant to the defeat of Al Qaeda than the green revolution alone will.

Hat Tip: Instapundit

An Excellent Overview on Palin

2008-09-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

The Corner points to an excellent overview of Sarah Palin's career in Alaska, placing in context how the various aspects of her life led her to this point, and what she has accomplished already.

Wasilla's population of 9,000 would be a small town in Britain, and even in most American states.

But Wasilla is the fifth-largest city in Alaska, which meant that Palin was an important player in state politics.

Her husband's status in the Yup'ik Eskimo tribe, of which he is a full, or "enrolled" member, connected her to another influential faction: the large and wealthy (because of their right to oil revenues) native tribes.

All of this gave her a base from which to launch her 2002 campaign for lieutenant (deputy) governor of Alaska.

She lost that, but collected a powerful enough following to be placated with a seat on, and subsequently the chairmanship of, the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which launched her into the politics of Alaska's energy industry.

Palin quickly realised that Alaska had the potential to become a much bigger player in global energy politics, a conviction that grew as the price of oil rose. Alaska had been in hock to oil companies since major production began in the mid-1970s.

As with most poor, distant places that suddenly receive great natural-resource wealth, the first generation of politicians were mesmerised by the magnificence of the crumbs falling from the table. Palin was the first of the next generation to realise that Alaska should have a place at that table.

Her first target was an absurd bureaucratic tangle that for 30 years had kept the state from exporting its gas to the other 48 states. She set an agenda that centred on three mutually supportive objectives: cleaning up state politics, building a new gas pipeline, and increasing the state's share of energy revenues.

This agenda, pursued throughout Palin's commission tenure, culminated in her run for governor in 2006. By this time, she had already begun rooting out corruption and making enemies, but also establishing her bona fides as a reformer.

With this base, she surprised many by steamrollering first the Republican incumbent governor, and second, the Democratic former governor, in the election.

Far from being a reprise of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Palin was a clear-eyed politician who, from the day she took office, knew exactly what she had to do and whose toes she would step on to do it.

The surprise is not that she has been in office for such a short time but that she has succeeded in each of her objectives. She has exposed corruption; given the state a bigger share in Alaska's energy wealth; and negotiated a deal involving big corporate players, the US and Canadian governments, Canadian provincial governments, and native tribes - the result of which was a £13 billion deal to launch the pipeline and increase the amount of domestic energy available to consumers. This deal makes the charge of having "no international experience" particularly absurd.

Read the whole thing, of course.

This puts a whole new perspective on things. It deepens her reform agenda, and McCain's, because it shows that Palin has really led nothing less than a revolution in the way things are done in Alaska. And an overwhelmingly successful and popular one, at that.

Palin helps McCain again in precisely inverting one of the common slams on the Bush Administration -- that they were the servants of Big Oil, through and through. Well, in Alaska, Palin made certain that Big Oil served the people of Alaska.

A similar thing has occurred, interestingly enough, in Iraq. Prior to our invasion, oil served to benefit only a small elite around Saddam. Now the oil wealth is widely dispersed, being given not only to Saddam's Sunni Arab base, but also to the Shi'ites and Kurds who actually live above Iraq's largest oil fields. But I digress.

McCain would do well to take his cues from this article and better articulate just how revolutionary Palin has been in Alaska, and that he and his running mate intend to do the very same in leading the United States, not merely with oil but in making sure all energy sources -- nuclear, solar, wind and geothermal -- are rapidly and efficiently put into service to the American people.

I think that would be yet another devastating blow to an Obama campaign which has no practical experience in these matters, and whose policy prescriptions, while admirable, are almost entirely in the realm of government subsidies and government-funded research.

The More Things Change...

2008-09-08T10:39:00.000-07:00

...the more they stay the same:

Nicaragua on Friday became the first country other than Russia to formally recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, giving Moscow a victory in its battle with Georgia over the two breakaway provinces.

And Chavez gets in on the act, of course:

Last week, Ortega's ally Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Russia made the right move by recognizing the independence of the two breakaway regions. But Chavez hasn't formally done the same.

Chavez said he fully supports Russia's position and that Venezuela "would do the same if someone dared to attack us."

The Venezuelan leader has criticized Georgia and has called President Mikhail Saakashvili a "puppet" of Washington.

For those of you not paying attention during the 1980s, Ortega was the Sandinista President of Soviet-allied Nicaragua, against whom the Reagan Administration waged a proxy war with the Contras. Unfortunately, he's back in office, with support from would-be Venezuelan President-for-Life Hugo Chavez.

I would hope this sort of thing would put paid to the notion that Chavez and Ortega are any kind of reformers, instead of the thugs that they really are.

McCain's Speech

2008-09-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

A fellow McCain Democrat puts it best:

Compare the Obamas' epic self promotion of the mundane to the quiet dignity of John McCain describing his torture - - "and they broke me". That's epic. That's courage.

Even though he will never be accused of being a great speech-giver, it's that quiet dignity and the resultant big bounce McCain is getting in the polls that seems to be causing growing panic in the Obama campaign.

When Obama is trying to say he thought about going into the military, and tax hikes are a bad idea, he's not showing confidence in his own ultra-liberal convictions, to say the least.

Hat Tip: Hot Air and Concerned Democrats for McCain

Let's Not go Overboard...

2008-09-08T08:18:00.000-07:00

...on Russia, says Thomas Barnett, and I agree with him. Because to do so means throwing away the strategic opportunity to finish off Al Qaeda and, longer term, to Shrink the Gap:

I see essentially four million-man armies out there: U.S., Russia, India, China. A fifth wheel would be NATO (with the body core really being Turkey).

You put those resources in rough combination (frenemies competing and collaborating economically and security-wise) and there's no question that there's enough Core-wide resources to pool against the tasks of shrinking the Gap. You put them largely at odds with each other, then the hedging requirements will gobble up most of the important budget, and in the U.S. that means a Leviathan that continues to grab the lion's share of acquisition, keeping emerging SysAdmin capabilities as strict lesser-includeds.

And, later in his post:

From history's perspective, it can't get much dumber than this: our globalization sweeping the planet in the form of an international liberal trade order, but right at its apogee, the four million-man army nations find a way to turn on each other more than the collective problems and opportunities staring them in the face.

From an international businessman's perspective, this is potential tragedy in the making. From a grand strategic perspective, this is an unthinking America playing down to the lower-order dynamics generated by less-mature great powers.

In short, we should know better and act better and avoid this pathway.

But Americans are, by their nature, strategically short-sighted. We respond emotionally to events--this week's column (above).

The column he references can be found here.

Well, I am going to differ with Dr. Barnett here only in that he sees a greater likelihood of this strategic blunder occurring with a President McCain than with a President Obama.

I think Obama's open protectionism is more harmful here than McCain's occasionally strident rhetoric. It will not only hurt the very Gap nations we're supposed to be helping, along with hurting the U.S. economy, but it will also increase the likelihood of trade blocs forming.

I may be wrong about this, and I will be the first to say so in that event, but with Henry Kissinger advising McCain, even from the sidelines, I doubt very much a President McCain will make the mistake of going back to the Cold War. Never forget it was Kissinger who advised that old Cold Warrior Nixon to make the strategic stroke of genius that was flipping China to the anti-Soviet side, while also aggressively pursuing detente with the Soviets themselves.

Which leads me to a final question: if "only Nixon can to China," is the modern equivalent "only McCain can go to Iran"?

Palin's Record Examined

2008-09-07T07:15:00.000-07:00

Here are some good data points on Palin's record and views as Governor of Alaska:

1. Anchorage Daily News, Dec. 29, 2006, Same Sex Benefits Ban Gets Palin Veto:

In the first veto of an administration that isn't yet a month old, Palin said she rejected the bill despite her disagreement with a state Supreme Court order earlier this month that directed the state to offer benefits to same-sex partners of state employees.

Advice from her new attorney general said the bill passed by the Legislature was unconstitutional, she said.

"Signing this bill would be in direct violation of my oath of office," Palin said in a prepared statement released by her administration Thursday night.

2. Associated Press, Sept. 2, 2008, Palin has not pushed creation science as governor:

As a candidate for governor, Sarah Palin called for teaching creationism alongside evolution in public schools. But after Alaska voters elected her, Palin, now Republican John McCain's presidential running mate, kept her campaign pledge to not push the idea in the schools.

Also, from the same article:

Palin's children attend public schools and Palin has made no push to have creationism taught in them.

Neither have Palin's socially conservative personal views on issues like abortion and gay marriage been translated into policies during her 20 months as Alaska's chief executive. It reflects a hands-off attitude toward mixing government and religion by most Alaskans.

"She has basically ignored social issues, period," said Gregg Erickson, an economist and columnist for the Alaska Budget Report.

3. Anchorage Daily News, May 24, 2008, Palin's veto ax lops $268 million from budget:

Gov. Sarah Palin on Friday axed about 10 percent of the spending that state legislators approved for hometown projects.

This is the second year in a row Palin vetoed projects dear to legislators. She said lawmakers stuffed the $2.7 billion state capital budget too full.

"There were things like dealing with killer shrubs and Zamboni blades that are not the state's highest priority at the time," Palin said on Friday.

4. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, May 29, 2008, Palin cuts money for energy research:

A new energy research center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks is looking for alternative funding after Gov. Sarah Palin last week vetoed a $1.5 million state and federal appropriation for the center.

The Alaska Center for Energy and Power formed in January and is focused on developing new technologies to lower the cost of energy in rural Alaska and attract energy-intensive industry with cheap renewable resources.

Lawmakers included $500,000 in state funding in the operating budget they approved last month, but Palin cut the funding.

Later, in the same article:

Palin recently signed into law HB 152, a bill setting up a fund for renewable energy projects, and she agreed to distribute $50 million in state funds for renewable energy projects this year.

But that money can only go toward projects using proven technologies.

Here's my take -- clearly, she's a conservative all around, verging on libertarianism at times. Despite her religious beliefs, she effectively allowed same sex partner benefits to go forward by vetoing a legislative ban on it on constitutional grounds. I like that -- the constitutionality of the proposed law outweighed her own religious views on the matter!

The same holds true with her supposedly creationist views. She may believe in creationism, but she's making no moves to push it down the throats of public school students.

The other theme that jumps out is that she's a real fiscal hawk, one not scared to upset legislators by killing their pet projects. I would hope that both she and a President McCain would take that attitude to Washington if their ticket is elected.

The last item is the one that disturbs me the most, with her cutting the funds on alternative energy research. That one bothers me, as someone who believes we need to both drill off shore and aggressively move forward with solar, nuclear, and wind energy. The only ray of light I find in the News-Miner article is this: "In a written explanation of her vetoes, Palin noted that she would consider funding the research center in a future budget."

Read 'em all and see what you think.

Elfman Music!

2008-09-06T22:46:00.001-07:00

Oingo Boingo, led by Danny Elfman, in its prime around 1985:

Oingo Boingo "Dead Man's Party"

All dressed up with nowhere to go
Walking with a dead man over my shoulder
All dressed up with nowhere to go
Walking with a dead man over my shoulder

Waiting for an invitation to arrive
Going to a party where no one's still alive
Waiting for an invitation to arrive
Going to a party where no one's still alive

I was struck by lightning
Walking down the street
I was hit by something last night in my sleep
It's a dead man's party
Who could ask for more
Everybody's coming, leave your body at the door
Leave your body and soul at the door

Don't run away it's only me
Don't be afraid of what you can't see

I was struck by lightning
Walking down the street
I was hit by something last night in my sleep
It's a dead man's party
Who could ask for more
Everybody's coming, leave your body at the door
Leave your body and soul at the door

Don't run away it's only me
Don't be afraid of what you can't see
It's only me... It's only me...

Reform, or the Lack Thereof

2008-09-05T11:23:00.000-07:00

Well, everyone else is no doubt talking about the McCain speech last night, but I wanted to point out something that was discussed in it: the notion of reform, specifically combating political corruption everywhere, starting with one's own party.

McCain has been pissing off his fellow Republicans with his calls for Campaign Finance reform ever since the immediate aftermath of his defeat by George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries.

Actually, here's something I had simply forgotten with the passage of time, McCain had been working with Democrat Russ Feingold on campaign finance reform since 1995! They finally got it passed in 2002, to the disgust of many Republicans and great damage done to McCain's presidential prospects.

Since entering the Senate, Obama's main claim to fame on reform has been the 2007 Ethics Reform, which Feingold initiated with Obama and McCain co-sponsored but did not initiate. PolitiFact.com from Florida's St. Petersburg's Times examines Obama's claims in his latest ads about his central role in this reform and only finds them to be half-true.

Further, yesterday saw dual convictions in separate Democratic and Republican corruption trials. First, uber-corrupt Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff was sentenced to four years for his various violations of federal law.

Second, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a Democrat, pleaded guilty to two felony charges of lying to a jury, and pleaded no contest to assault on a police officer.

The difference, here, is that McCain was an avowed enemy of Jack Abramoff and his congressional allies, Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, among many others. As seen below, DeLay hates McCain with a mad passion:

By contrast, here's Obama two years ago on Kilpatrick:

The final piece of the puzzle, to me, is that both McCain and Obama pledged to use public financing in the Presidential campaign if they made it this far, and only McCain kept that pledge.

In the end,we have a true contrast here: McCain is a political reformer even when it makes him a pariah in his own party. Obama, by contrast, acts as a reformer only up until the point it threatens his own advancement, or that of his fellow Democrats. At that point, he bails.

That's my take. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

More Good News from Africa

2008-09-04T13:47:00.000-07:00

Thomas PM Barnett links to a great article in the Washington Post about the growing middle class in Africa.

This is the stuff that I really think McCain is good at, though he does not talk about it nearly enough. As an unabashed free trader, his approach offers more hope for the growing economies of Latin America and Africa than does Obama's completely protectionist approach.

The irony is that Obama, with his Kenyan heritage, is more hostile in his policy prescriptions to Africa's aspirations than old white Republican McCain.

The Wizard's Sense of Honor

2008-09-03T21:47:00.001-07:00

I may be doing him no favors, but the Wizard just became my favorite Democratic blogger:

September 2nd, 2008. The 2008 Election ended this morning as a vast cadre of liberals, progressives, Democrats and like minded journalists lifted the white flag and surrendered.

We surrendered something a whole lot more valuable than our vote. We surrendered our principles. We surrendered our core values.

As a Democrat like this honorable gentleman, I am as appalled as he is as to what my party is up to. His candidate might be Obama and mine is McCain, but I applaud him for his exceptional honor and integrity. If only Andrew Sullivan had half his sense of honor.

Read the whole thing and see what I mean.

An Initial Observation re: Palin's Speech

2008-09-03T19:29:00.000-07:00

The crowd loves her, absolutely loves her. That can't be faked.

If enough Americans who aren't delegates to the Republican Convention end up feeling the same way about Governor Palin, I suspect we are seeing a national political star being born here.

I'm still boggled

2008-09-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been kind of quiet because I really try not to rant, and I haven't trusted myself not to.

I don't dig smears. I don't like personal attacks. And I have seen very little except hysterical smears and personal attacks on Governor Sarah Palin, especially since Saturday.

My initial impression is that I like the woman, and we'll see she if she shows herself worthy of McCain's faith in her over the next 60-odd days until the election.

But this sort of sewer politics turned my stomach when Republicans afflicted with Clinton Derangement Syndrome engaged in it, and it turns my stomach no less when Democrats afflicted with Palin Derangement Syndrome engage in it.

By all means, have at her with tough, probing questions about Governor Palin's policies, Governor Palin's ideas, Governor Palin's qualifications to be Vice President. But please leave the rest of her family out of it, especially her minor children, even Bristol.

More soon, after her speech. For what it's worth, I believe the expectations could not be lower for her speech, so I think she'll benefit from that and nail it. We'll see.

An Open Letter to Andrew Sullivan

2008-09-02T09:26:00.000-07:00

I sent this to Mr. Sullivan via email, and wanted to share:

Dear Andrew,

I am writing you again for the second time in as many weeks.

First, I would love you to vet your candidate, Senator Obama, about whom you at least candidly admit you can longer be objective, as thoroughly and aggressively as you have been going after Governor Palin.

Second, you have the gall to still demand medical records showing that Trig is Governor Palin's child? Even when the record now shows Bristol, Trig's putative mother, was getting pregnant around the same time Trig was born in April? Are you seriously alleging that Bristol gave birth to one child, had it covered up with the "Gov. Palin gives birth to Downs baby" story, and then got busy making another one?

What next? Are you going to follow this up by demanding, as per the whisper campaign in South Carolina's 2000 Republican primary, that the McCains present their adoption papers for Bridget (their Bangladeshi daughter) to prove without a shadow of a doubt that she wasn't a black child of McCain's born out of wedlock?

As a Democrat who was with you for Kerry in 2004, I am saddened because you have truly descended into the sewer out of your zeal for your candidate Obama, who has just as many questions of experience, competence and character as you repeatedly allege Governor Palin to have.

If you had ripped Obama with as many vicious low-blow allegations over his complicated past associations, I could at least see you as being even-handed in your sewer tactics.

That is not remotely the case, alas. I will leave you with some final thoughts:

1) In the name of evenhandedness, will you at least call Obama a former state senator, since your preferred way of referring to Gov. Palin is as ex-mayor of a tiny Alaskan town. If we're going to demote people to the previous level on their resume, we might as well be consistent across the board. So McCain can become former Congressman McCain, and Biden can become... what did he do before becoming a Senate lifer anyway?

2) I look forward to your equally obsessive and probing contrasting of Obama's claims to be a reformer with the fact that he's been since his first political foray a member in good standing of the corrupt Daley dynastic machine in Chicago, replete with his connections to the money-man/fixer of said machine, Tony Rezko, now awaiting sentencing for his felony convictions.

3) What will happen when Obama inevitably disappoints you, as Bush has?

I truly feel you have gone beyond the pale here, and it saddens me because I have long felt that, while you definitely get passionate about what you believe, there have always been certain lines of propriety and respect you would not cross in your writing -- no matter how incensed you got. I believe that no more.

Very truly yours,

Thunderheart (note: not my real name)

A Fellow McCain Democrat

2008-09-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

A former top supporter and fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, John Coale, puts it very well indeed:

I think John McCain basically is what Obama says he is and what Obama is not

I've been arguing the same thing, though not quite so simply and eloquently.

Here's the rest on video!

Hat Tip: Hot Air

Saturday Night Music

2008-08-30T23:51:00.000-07:00

A somewhat obscure song from one of my fave bands of all time:

Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois produced this I believe, and their influence shows.

U2 Heartland

See the sun rise over her skin
Don't change it
See the sun rise over her skin
Dawn changes everything
Everything
And the delta sun
Burns bright and violet
Mississippi and the cotton wool heat
66 a highway speaks
Of deserts dry
Of cool green valleys
Gold and silver veins
Of the shining cities

In this heartland
In this heartland soil
In this heartland
Heaven knows this is a heartland
Heartland, heartland

See the sun rise over her skin
She feels like water in my hand
Freeway like a river cuts through this land
Into the side of love
Like a burning spear
And the poison rain
Brings a flood of fear
Through the ghost-ranch hills
Death valley waters
In the towers of steel
Belief goes on and on

In this heartland
In this heartland soil
In this heartland
Heaven knows this is a heartland
Heartland
Heaven knows this is a heartland
Heartland, heartland
Heartland
Heaven's day here in the heartland

Obama = Bush = Big Spender

2008-08-30T14:21:00.000-07:00

This one is for that vast constituency, my fellow McCain Democrats!

I was going through various votes for big-subsidy bills such as Energy bills, Farm bills, etc. -- yes, I have a life, why do you ask? -- and I discovered an interesting pattern.

On many of the most disgusting giveaways in recent years to Big Farm, Big Oil, and Big Pharmaceutical, Bush and Obama were perfectly in alignment, whereas McCain was among the few lonely votes against these budget-busting giveaways!

Consider the giveaway to big oil that was the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which Obama voted for and McCain voted against. This was championed by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and "McCain opposed the bill on grounds it included billions in unnecessary tax breaks for the oil industry."

Or let's consider the giveaway to seniors and Big Pharmaceutical companies that was the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, which Bush passed in 2003 and McCain bravely voted against on grounds that it was adding a new budget-busting entitlement. Obama was not yet in the Senate at that time, but he has since made it clear he supports this law, and regards it as insufficient. This despite the following from Wikipedia:

The MMA was signed by President George W. Bush on December 8, 2003, after passing in Congress by a close margin.

One month later, the ten-year cost estimate was boosted to $534 billion, up more than $100 billion over the figure presented by the Bush administration during Congressional debate. The inaccurate figure helped secure support from fiscally conservative Republicans who had promised to vote against the bill if it cost more than $400 billion. It was reported that an administration official, Thomas A. Scully, had concealed the higher estimate and threatened to fire Medicare Chief Actuary Richard Foster if he revealed it. By early 2005, the White House Budget had increased the 10-year estimate to $1.2 trillion.

Read that again -- this new entitlement's cost is nearly three times its initial estimated cost -- and that's just over its first ten-year period!

In fairness, there was a recent proposal to means-test Medicare drug recipients. In a radical move, the proposal was to lessen Medicare drug subsidies for those making over $165,000 a year. $165k a year, in retirement! It is very telling that Obama voted No on this common-sense reform, and McCain voted for it.

Lastly, there is this year's Farm Bill, the most bloated giveaway of all. Obama supported this $300 billion giveaway as a way of appealing to farmers just before the critical Iowa primary, McCain said, and I'm paraphrasing, it's wrong and I don't care if opposing it hurts my political chances. See more here at Donklephant. Oh wait, Obama didn't actually vote for the bill, he just supported it. Isn't that special? Even Bush, who threatened to veto the bill, signed the darn thing when he saw the numbers were against him.

So, if big government giveaways along the lines of Big Spender Bush are your thing, kids, then Obama is your guy! He's willing to come through for every special interest there is, because he's a new and different kind of politician. Meanwhile, poor old tired white guy McCain, the epitome of the evil establishment, is against these ridiculous pork-fests on the basis of the quaint notion that we might not want to bequeath a bankrupt nation to our grandchildren. How benighted of him.

This is yet another example of why McCain is a leader, and Obama is just another iteration of the same old, same old political hack, notwithstanding all his stirring rhetoric.

Palin for Vice President

2008-08-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

In case you missed it, John McCain has chosen Sarah Palin to be his running mate.

I think this is an excellent pick, and I admit I didn't expect it -- the McCain campaign did a much better job of keeping their pick secret than did the Obama campaign, because nobody was counting her in the list of the final few candidates.

Here is where I think this choice makes an enormous difference: like McCain, Palin does reform, instead of just talking about it like Obama does.

Just contrast what Palin has done in a mere two years as Alaska's governor to Obama's singular lack of accomplishment as a Senator where his party had the majority! First she defeated the arguably corrupt Democratic governor, Tony Knowles, and since taking office has moved to sideline the corrupt Republican Congressman, Don Young, and his equally corrupt Republican colleage in the Senate, Ted Stevens, who is currently under federal indictment. She refused to accept the appropriations for the infamous bridge to nowhere that those men slipped into the budget via earmarks.

Further, she has worked hard to give oil contracts in Alaska on the merits, resulting in new contracts being awarded to new players and not just the same old companies, such as BP, who corruptly dominated the process for years.

Palin will thrill the pro-life crowd and the pro-gun rights folks who are important parts of the Republican Party with her staunch stance on both. As a Democrat, those stances are less important to me personally, but anything that helps unify the Republican base even more behind McCain is fine by me.

Finally, for all that the Obama campaign has already derided Palin for her lack of experience, her experience contrasts favorably to Obama's! Her career in Alaska politics, at roughly 16 years old, is just a bit longer than Obama's 12-year career in Illinois politics, and as a former Mayor and a current Governor she has lots more executive experience than Obama does, by far, and unlike him she has actually accomplished something with her position beyond pretty speech-making.

Oh yeah, and like most Alaskans she's for drilling off-shore and in ANWR, but as an environmentalist she wants to do it as respectfully of the environment as possible. What's not to like?

A Good Day for America

2008-08-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama is nominated today as the Democratic Party's candidate for President:

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The American dream, ever a work in progress, is taking a big step forward today. I may be opposed to Barack Obama because of the quality of his ideas, but that makes me no less proud of my country for this long-overdue day having finally arrived.

On Liberal Hawks

2008-08-27T18:40:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting post on the hopes of liberal hawks that, once Obama gets elected, they'll have more power in his new administration than folks would think.

Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen. The Democrats have moved far too much to the left over the last eight years, beginning with their 2000 standard-bearer Al Gore making a complete 180 degree turn from his anti-Saddam efforts throughout the 1990s as Vice President (see this from 1992!), to his later apologizing to the Saudis for how bad we in the U.S. have been since 9/11. Gore went from a staunch foe of Arab despots to one who apologized to them on bended knee -- all because of the Bush Derangement Syndrome that infected him and far too many in my party.

This movement to the left is why Barack Obama is the nominee of the Democratic Party this year, and not Hillary Clinton. Everyone has had to bend to the new dominance exercised by the MoveOn.org types -- John Kerry and John Edwards, for example, both shucked their tough guy stances as soon as they lost the 2004 election, and moved to renounce their previous "we'll fight the war better than Bush will!" stance in favor of "leave Iraq now, and we never should have been there!"

This is not to say that Bush handled Iraq competently -- he hasn't, and if a Democratic President managed a war as poorly as he did from 2003-2007, the Republicans would have turned on him and at least attempted his impeachment. Just see how they demanded and got Defense Secretary Les Aspin's scalp in 1993 simply for the loss of 19 Army Rangers in Somalia!

But Bush, for all his incompetence, finally managed to come around to the Surge that John McCain had championed since around summer 2003, and much more importantly to the brilliant change in tactics General Petraeus implemented to accompany the rather small increase in troop numbers.

I'd love to see liberal hawks come back to being at the heart of Democratic foreign policy, but it's not going to happen in a Obama Administration. Rather, I think the only chance they have of a comeback is in the event of McCain proving victorious. In that event, maybe, just maybe, the Blue Dog conservative Democrats in Congress will be able to work across party lines with President McCain.

I look forward to that possibility, obviously, since I am an outcast from my own party until that time.

And Now for Something Completely Different...

2008-08-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

Alex Jones, meet Michelle Malkin. Michelle Malkin, meet Alex Jones and twenty or so of his bestest friends. For those few who don't know what Malkin looks like, she's the tiny Asian-American woman using her camera to film the protest. Alex Jones is the guy hurling insults at her at high volume:

For some reason, Alex Jones howling at the diminutive Ms. Malkin as though she was the embodiment of pure EEE-VUL reminded me of the following:

Hat tip: Gateway Pundit and the People's Press Collective

Some Music

2008-08-25T12:53:00.000-07:00

Even though their politics and mine have long since diverged, I love the Aussie band Midnight Oil, so there:

Midnight Oil "One Country"

(Jim Moginie/Peter Garrett)

Who'd like to change the world
Who wants to shoot the curl
Who gets to work for bread
Who wants to get ahead

Who hands out equal rights
Who starts and ends that fight
And not rant and rave
Or end up a slave

Who can make hard won gains
Fall like summer rains
Now every man must be
What his life can be

So don't call me the tune, I will walk away

Who wants to please everyone
Who says it all can be done
Still sit up on that fence
No one I've heard of yet

Don't call me baby
Don't talk in maybes
Don't talk like has-beens
Sing it like it should be

Who laughs at their nagging doubts
Lying on a neon shroud, running around
Just got to touch someone
I want to be

So don't call me the tune, I will walk away

One country one
Country one country

Who wants to sit around
Turn it up, turn it down
Only a man can be
What his life can be

One vision
One people
One landmass
We are defenseless
We have a lifeline

One ocean
One policy
Seabed life
One passion
One movement
One instant
One difference
One lifetime
One understanding

One country
One understanding
Transgression
Redemption
One island
One placemat
One tournament
One element
One moment
One fusion
Yes, and one time

More Good News About Solar

2008-08-25T12:44:00.001-07:00

The more news I see along these lines, the happier I'll be:

“You could supply the entire US with the sun power here in a little piece of the Southwest,” says Dan Kabel as he strolls beneath a row of trough-shaped mirrors. Mr. Kabel is chief executive of Acciona Solar Power, which owns the $266 million Nevada Solar One project. “As fossil fuel costs rise, this plant is unaffected. “If America doesn’t do this, if we don’t install many more of these clean solar-power systems, we’ll just end up seeing a lot more fossil-fuel plants instead.”

Worth mentioning is the following:

Concentrating solar technology produces electricity for about 17 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), Mehos estimates. But subsidies remain critical to solar thermal development in both the US and Spain, two global hotbeds of CSP development. With the federal investment tax credit, or ITC, costs drop to about 15 cents per kWh – low enough to compete with natural gas.

More solar, more wind, more nuclear, says I! Obama is two-for-three on the above (he waffles on nuclear), and McCain three-for-three thankfully.

Oh Please

2008-08-25T12:33:00.000-07:00

Nancy Pelosi continues being hysterical:

"We've got a planet to save. Nothing less is at stake other than civilization as we know it today," the California Democrat and speaker of the House told reporters Saturday afternoon in assessing the election and the nominating convention taking place here over the week.

Well, Nancy, I am sure you've given up your three-story brick mansion and your private jet because, you know, you wouldn't want to be accused of hypocrisy as well as hysteria!

Oh yes, Nancy apparently doesn't know that natural gas is a fossil fuel!

Hat Tip: Hot Air

Africa Ascendant

2008-08-21T07:26:00.000-07:00

A great piece from Roger Cohen on good news from Africa (among other places) in the New York Times:

During a short stay in Ghana, which will hold free elections in December, Vodafone had bought a majority stake in Ghana Telecom for $900 million (entering a fiercely competitive mobile-phone market) and I’d heard much about 6 percent annual growth, spreading broadband and new high-end cacao ventures.

Accra, the capital, is buzzing. Russian hedge funds are investing. New construction abounds. Technology enables people in the capital to text money transfers via mobile phone to poor relatives in the bush.

I don’t think that picture is exceptional these days for Africa, where growth averaged close to 6 percent last year and I sense a fundamental change in attitudes to governance, trade, the private sector and political accountability.

His killer summation is, "Africa Ascendant is not yet a slogan that sells. It will be."

Read the whole thing.

Ex-Wahabbi takes on his former ideological soulmates

2008-08-20T13:23:00.001-07:00

Ed Husain is a Brit of Pakistani heritage who, after a time as a Wahabbi extremist, turned his back on that dead-end path and now works to prevent others from doing so. He has an excellent piece today on how the Muslim Council of Britain is standing more with the extremists than the moderates on the issue of forced marriage for Muslim women in Britain:

When I met Amina she was still in love with this man but her father insisted she marry her cousin from Pakistan, who happened, rather conveniently, to be visiting England. Her father also had a heart condition and used his illness to emotionally blackmail her. Eventually Amina gave way. She sacrificed love to south Asian culture and married Mr Pakistan.

White, liberal eyes reading this article will be astounded to know these things happen in Britain. I am sorry, but they do. And it gets worse.

Amina was repeatedly raped by Mr Pakistan, but her mother told her that a Muslim man has such rights over his wife, and in Islam there is no such thing as marital rape.

I wanted to help Amina. I suggested she divorce her husband and marry her true love but she told me her husband would kill her if she even mentioned divorce. Eventually, she risked everything and escaped to a women's refuge. When she asked for a divorce her husband refused and was supported in this by the Islamic Shariah Council, a powerful all-male outfit controlling women's lives.

So, a new marriage contract is proposed, and the Muslim Council of Britain weighs in:

The new Muslim marriage contract sought to update and develop fiqh, or Muslim personal jurisprudence, by shifting the power balance in a marriage to empower women to trigger divorce, feel safe from rape or abuse, prevent husbands from taking second wives, and set up accommodation separated from a husband's parents.

All common sense, one would have thought. It went further. Witnesses at wedding ceremonies could be women and even non-Muslim, since the Qur'an is gender and faith neutral on this issue. And a Muslim woman does not need a wali, or male guardian (based on Hanafi school of Islamic law, to which the majority of Britain's Muslims adhere).

Had Amina and her husband signed this contract, she would have had every right to escape her miserable marriage, or even marry her first love. For those who need scriptural justification for every step of their life, the Muslim scholars behind this contract provided evidence and shariah-based arguments.

It was all too good to be true. Misogynist, Saudi-trained clerics don't simply stand by and watch their last grip over Muslim family life slip away so easily. First, as expected, came an Arab male cleric with extreme Wahhabi leanings, denouncing the contract as kufr, or non-belief. His rant can be watched on YouTube.

Last Friday, after initially endorsing the new contract, the MCB back-tracked and issued a statement to "clarify" is position. It spoke of "misinterpretation of shariah by those who the MCB had trusted to take the lead" and said: "The MCB rejects the misguided and incorrect assertions made by and ascribed to the Muslim Institute."

This all goes to show that the Tolerance War I've spoken of is internal to many religions, including Islam. Kudos to Ed Husain for fighting the good fight to help modernize and moderate his faith. Unfortunately, the MCB has chosen to stand in the way, showing once again it is not the moderate organization it claims to be. Shades of CAIR here in the United States, but that's a discussion for another time.

Hat Tip: Harry's Place

Grand Strategy and Russia

2008-08-20T13:07:00.000-07:00

Several strategists I respect, including my former professor George Friedman at Stratfor and Thomas Barnett, are arguing that we've misplayed the situation with Russia and essentially driven them to lash out. It's worth noting that Tom Friedman has the same perspective in an op-ed piece today.

Now these gents are not Pat Buchanan, who never met a fascist he didn't like and couldn't help admiring how Putin put the smackdown on the Georgians! Rather, they are arguing from a standpoint of grand strategy that it is better for us to engage Russia than to isolate it over what is in the end a minor dust-up on Russia's periphery.

I have real problems with this, because my emotions get caught up in the "big bully Russia beating up small, heroic Georgia" storyline. There's a lot of fundamental truth to that storyline. But grand strategy is not about emotion, it's about a cool, dispassionate 10,000-foot view of what is in a nation's long-term interests.

Forget Putin's thuggery for a moment. It is hard to do so, but let's try to look beyond it just for a moment. Is it desirable for the United States to get into a new Cold War with Russia over a small nation of 4.5 million people? Is it even possible that our relationship with Russia can be salvaged at this point, after our mis-steps and Russia's even more numerous ones?

These are difficult questions to answer, and clearly beyond my pay-grade or, for that matter, Obama's. It's my hope that for all his stirring rhetoric that "we are all Georgians," McCain has some clear-eyed grand strategists (Kissinger, perhaps?) advising him on the bigger grand strategy concerns.

I wish I had something more definitive than that, but I don't.

Obama and McCain on Trade

2008-08-19T21:10:00.000-07:00

I wanted to examine free trade accords not only their own, but in the context of the larger foreign policies put forth by candidates Obama and McCain.

Put simply, the differences could not be more stark. McCain is an avowed free trader, while I have yet to find a free trade accord that Obama has not opposed! In this respect, he represents a great departure from former President Clinton, who bucked heavy union pressure to get NAFTA passed through Congress.

There has been much activity recently with regard to free trade. CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Accord, was narrowly passed on a party-line vote in 2005 with 217 Congressmen (mostly Republicans) voting for, and 215 (mostly Democratic) Congressmen voting against.

The US-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement was signed on April 12, 2006 and is currently being implemented.

Sadly, since my Democrats took over the majority in the House and Senate with the mid-term elections of November 2006, all progress toward further free trade agreements has stalled. Speaker Pelosi has frozen votes on the Colombia Free Trade Accord, and is obviously in no hurry to approve the South Korea-US Free Trade Accord or the Panama Free Trade Accord.

This stance, which Senator Obama sadly champions, is a betrayal of our close friends and allies. In the case of Central America, Panama and Colombia in particular, to oppose the free trade accords with those nations after the decades of hard work they've done to reduce the violence of their various civil wars is just inexplicable. Especially since the Democrats always championed the "soft power" of economic engagement with those nations, in contrast to the hawkish policies of the Reagan 80s they so criticized.

It's all part of a dangerous trend where the U.S, the greatest beneficiary of and champion of free trade, is turning away from that pillar of our success just as the rest of the world is coming around.

Senator Obama can pander to the reactionaries of right and left from Pat Buchanan to Lou Dobbs to Michael Moore all he wants. It's one of the many reasons he's lost my vote, and for his unstinting support of free trade Senator McCain has yet again earned my vote.

Obama's advisor is defense counsel for Panamanian official indicted on charges of murdering an American soldier

2008-08-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I missed this! In the course of researching my next post on McCain's and Obama's contrasting positions on free trade, I came across this from ABC's Jake Tapper:

Greg Craig, a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama, is a partner at the big-shot DC law firm Williams & Connolly. There Craig represents Pedro Miguel González.

González is president of the Panamanian Legislature and is also under indictment in the U.S. for murdering U.S. Army Sgt. Zak Hernández in 1992.

Several paragraphs later, there's this from Obama:

"Until that situation is resolved, we cannot support any trade agreement with Panama," Obama wrote.

Craig also represents Carlos Sánchez-Berzaín, the Bolivian Defense Minister who has been accused in a federal lawsuit of "crimes against humanity" because of his alleged role in the suppression of labor union riots in 2003 that resulted in the deaths of 67 people.

This would be hilarious, if it were not so serious. In essence, Obama is saying that his advisor gets a pass, and Panama takes the fall, because of this case.

It's just another case of Obama protecting his personal cronies while giving the cold shoulder to this country's vulnerable allies, from Iraq to Colombia to Georgia to Panama.

The Imminent Decline of Chavez and Company

2008-08-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald noted recently that Chavez's radical populist friends in Latin America are not doing as well as they say they are:

In Venezuela, Chávez's popularity has plunged, as growing numbers of Venezuelans are suffering from a 30 percent inflation rate, massive corruption and nepotism (about two dozen Chávez relatives hold senior government jobs). They also resent a president who gives away petro-dollars from the country's recent oil bonanza in ego-boosting trips abroad.

In Bolivia and to a lesser extent in Ecuador, opposition forces are displaying growing resistance to these countries leaders' efforts to become presidents for life.

In Argentina, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's populist government lost its aura of invincibility when Congress -- led by her own vice president -- overturned a key government bill to further tax soybean exports. Political winds in Argentina are beginning to blow away from pro-Chávez populism and move toward the center.

And here is his bottom line, which really shows who is shrinking poverty in Latin America (hint, it's not Chavez):

In sheer numbers, Latin America's pragmatic-democratic bloc -- led by Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile -- already accounts for more than 80 percent of the region's economy, and more than 90 percent of its foreign investments.

This falls right in line with Thomas Barnett's observation that, when it comes to shrinking the Gap, foreign direct investment (FDI) is what it's all about. But to get the FDI flowing into your country, you need a) security and b) an investment-friendly environment.

Chavez and his imitators are doing all they can to provide the reverse of the second requirement, and as seen with Chavez's support for FARC in Colombia he is doing his best to ruin the security aspect too. In the end, Chavez is only perpetuating the misery in his country and that of his allies, while the rest of Latin America moves on.

Postscript: All the above is worth considering in light of our Presidential candidates' differing trade proposals for Latin America, to which I'll return shortly.

Wind Energy in Upstate New York

2008-08-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

I just read two very interesting articles at the NY Times and Yahoo on wind energy in upstate New York.

One thing that jumped out at me in the Yahoo article was how it was the younger generation that was opposed to the installation of the wind turbines, while their literal parents were the ones embracing this new technology in the hopes of building a better economic future for their poor rural communities. In Tom Friedman's lexicon of the "Lexus and the Olive Tree," then, the young embraced the traditional olive tree while their elders embraced the futuristic Lexus. Quite the role-reversal!

The NY Times article focused more on the corrupting influence of Big Wind, showing that even green companies can be as wicked as traditional energy companies. Heh.

An Essential Difference between McCain and Obama

2008-08-16T18:56:00.000-07:00

I'm a Democrat, as I believe I've mentioned somewhat incessantly. And one of the big inspirations for my family was John F. Kennedy. It's one of my Dad's big regrets that he voted for Nixon in 1960 and not Kennedy, but I think that's pretty much the last time my father voted for the Republican candidate for President.

I can't speak for my Dad, but I know what attracted me after the fact (given I was born after his assassination) to JFK was his clarion call to serving our great country. The famous quote was, of course, "ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country!"

JFK made this call to service in several contexts -- in the fight against Communism; in the fight against racism on behalf of civil rights; in his call to get a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s; and finally in asking young, idealistic Americans to serve all humanity in eradicating poverty via the newly-formed Peace Corps.

It is the fact that JFK called us to serve more than just ourselves, that made him so beloved not only in this country but across the world. Time and again when discussing my country with folks from other parts of the world, whether it's my mother's native Germany, or Russia, or with many colleagues I worked with from India, JFK was brought up favorably, even reverently, in stark contrast to the current crop of politicians in America.

Obama clearly has the JFK style down: the ringing rhetoric, the air of cool, the adoring crowds. The critical thing he lacks is the substance that made JFK more than just a callow, pampered son of a wealthy family.

If I were to boil down Obama's message to its essentials, it would be, "what can America do for you?" Withdrawal from Iraq, sure! Healthcare for all, you got it! Green energy without having to continue any nasty drilling for oil, piece of cake. And don't worry about sacrifice, my fellow Americans, because only the rich will have to do that, and as you're not one of those, you won't have to worry about it. So sayeth Obama.

McCain, by contrast, is all over the "ask what you can do for your country" side of JFK's formulation. He is certain of a bright future for America, but he knows it's going to take more than magical, fluffy bunny thinking to get us there. It's going to require that we all transcend ourselves, that we will have to pull together and work hard, and that some of us may even fall in struggle against our foes, but that this is all well worth it when we serve America's common good. Indeed, McCain explicitly states that "I do not claim to save my country, for I know my country saved me" when he was a POW.

There is a corollary to this, and that is that McCain is far more willing to tick people off than Obama is. Just McCain's own fraught relations with his own Republican Party shows this. Obama tries to portray a world in which everyone is pretty much in agreement, and no one needs to get upset or hurt along the way to the brighter future.

McCain will not mince words for the most part, and if his campaign finance reform efforts ticks off some conservatives, oh well. If his blunt formulation of marriage being between a man and a woman upsets some, well, that's the way it is. Or for that matter if Russia's tender feelings are upset by being labeled the aggressor in Georgia, well, that's just too bad. And I write this as a pro-choice, pro-marriage equality dude, but I respect McCain's character even where I disagree with him.

This may be an inappropriate comparison, but I'm going to make it anyway: think on the friends who've been with you through thick and thin, who you know no matter what you can count on. Are they ones that always tell you're doing okay even when it's clear you're on the wrong track? Or are they ones who make it clear that, while they'll always be there for you, they will call you on your B.S. when necessary?

Obama is that bland sort of friend who will never call you on your stuff for fear of annoying you, and McCain is the warrior on your side who may irritate you, but he will challenge and push you to be better than you are.

That's why McCain has what it takes to be a leader, and Obama manifestly does not.

Free Trade Helps Win the Tolerance War?

2008-08-15T13:10:00.000-07:00

You know how sometimes you have a really good idea and then you read about that idea in the newspaper? Me neither. Heh.

Actually, Edward Gresser and Mark Dunkelman at the Wall Street Journal borrow one of my better brain-waves about free trade helping fight terror.

The idea I had was this: since our massive military aid packages to Pakistan and Egypt, to name but two countries, have not exactly made us beloved, why not try free trade accords with those countries? We have already done so with Jordan, but I am not aware of any other such accords with Arab and/or Muslim countries.

Gresser and Dunkelman argue along the same lines:

Towels, for example, are Pakistan's top export. Each container full of towels exported to the U.S. brings in enough income to employ about 500 Pakistanis. But while Pakistani towels are subject to a 7.5% tariff, competing towels from the Dominican Republic or Costa Rica -- both of which benefit from the Central American Free Trade Agreement -- come in duty-free.

Likewise, luggage made in Indonesia is subject to a tariff that can rise to 22%, but competes with tariff-free suitcases manufactured in Mexico. Lebanon, which exports preserved fruits and vegetables, must compete with similar duty-free items exported from Peru.

Unlike Senator Obama, I am for free trade along with Senator McCain. We have already made great gains in securing economic and political stability in Central America and Peru with the CAFTA and Peru free trade accords, respectively, and we should do the same with the Muslim world.

So who do you think we should begin with, if you agree with the sentiments expressed here? I nominate: Afghanistan and Pakistan (together, as a package deal), Egypt, Iraq and Indonesia. Seems like a good beginning to me.

Thomas Friedman, somewhat off-target

2008-08-15T10:35:00.000-07:00

Thomas Friedman argues here that the U.S. should follow Denmark's good example in conserving energy and changing transportation patterns.

Specifically, he says:

* Denmark has used its taxes on gasoline to wean itself off foreign oil.

* It has also used building and efficiency standards to that end.

* Lastly, it has aggressively expanded wind energy, not only domestically, but exporting such technology at a rate four times faster than the rest of its exports.

The only problem I have with any of the above is that Friedman gives far too little emphasis to the fact that Denmark has only 5 million or so people, and that they are drilling offshore in the North Sea. He mentions that its a small country with North Sea oil, but it's a one-line throwaway.

So I looked up Copenhagen's population on Wikipedia, and Copenhagen turns out to contain 1,835,371 people, or 33.5% of Denmark's total! So of course when your main city has a third of the country's population, you can have advantages in transit efficiency that much bigger countries cannot avail themselves of.

Friedman is dead on about the need for greater energy efficiency in this country. But when he advocates for $10/gallon gas as Denmark has, or using bicycles more to commute in-city as he claims 50% of Copenhagen's residents do, he's ignoring the obvious fact that not every aspect of Denmark's model is going to work here in this vast, sprawling country of ours.

Good News / Bad News

2008-08-15T10:29:00.000-07:00

In the good news dept. for fighting global warming, apparently China is rapidly ramping up various green energy technologies.

This is very good news from the standpoint of slowing down the rate of growth of future CO2 emissions, since China and India are the fastest growing sources of CO2 emissions, and China has recently passed the U.S. as the number one source of said emissions.

The bad news aspect is that China is getting more serious about this, perhaps, than the U.S. is! I hope this ends up spurring us even harder to push for nuclear, solar and wind energy generation.

More Evidence About Japan's Refusal to Surrender

2008-08-12T13:23:00.000-07:00

Those who cling to the untrue doctrine that violence never settles anything would be advised to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms. -- Robert A. Heinlein

As is so often the case, Heinlein provides indispensable perspective about the news that Prime Minister Tojo of Japan resisted surrendering even after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Also worth noting:

The stridency of the writings is remarkable considering they were penned just days after the U.S. atomic bombs incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing some 200,000 people and posing the threat of the complete destruction of Japan. At the time, Japan had begun arming children, women and the elderly with bamboo spears, in addition to the aircraft and other forces it had marshaled, to defend the homeland against a ground invasion.

It was the violence, the naked force, of the United States that finally gave those favoring peace in the militarist Japanese cabinet the political power to overcome the war camp led by Tojo. Would that we could have settled these issues without the horrific application of such violence, but sadly that just isn't the real world.

A Different Perspective

2008-08-12T08:48:00.000-07:00

Just over a year ago, the columnist Spengler at the Asia Times imagined the following conversation between Putin and George W. at Kennebunkport:

Bush: Vladimir, I was hoping we'd come out of this discussion with an understanding of at least one point: Why are you so upset about our putting anti-missile systems into places like the Czech Republic? You know that we can't defend Europe against a Russian missile attack.

Putin: George, it's not just about the missiles. It's about your lily-pad bases in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and elsewhere in our near abroad. It's about fomenting those pointless color revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. You aren't going to get democracy in these places - it's silly presumption. All you will do is foster the centrifugal forces that threaten to tear apart the Russian Federation. Don't you get it, George? We are only three-quarters Russian, and in a generation we might be only half Russian. We haven't recovered from the beating you gave us in the 1980s. Half of adult male deaths in Russia are due to alcoholism. Our women have 13 abortions for every 10 live births. We're fighting for our life. We are not going to let what remains of Russia be torn to pieces.

Bush: Do you think we can find some kind of common ground over Kosovo?

Putin: That's where you are really playing with fire, George. You are proposing to dismember Serbia to add a province to Greater Albania, and you will set a precedent for every breakaway minority that wants to leave Russia. We can't possibly accept this - and I warn you that if you insist on this dangerous and reckless course of action, we will do precisely the same for disputed territories in the near abroad, starting with South Ossetia. (emphasis mine)

I think this is what my former professor George Friedman at Stratfor is trying to get at too. It's uncomfortable for me, because my every instinct screams that Putin is a bloodthirsty ex-KGB thug who has just led his nation to a well-deserved status as a rogue, and damn the strategic considerations.

But Spengler was certainly prescient, writing on July 3, 2007, about Russia reacting to a Kosovo declaration of independence by putting down independence-minded republics in its "near abroad." And Russia's notions of strategic necessity certainly have major points of departure from ours.

Spengler has his obsessions with Islam to be aware of, for example he thinks there's no such thing as a "moderate Muslim," but for all that his take is a usefully contrarian perspective to consider. Read the whole thing.

Sunni Neighbors of Iraq Start Coming Around

2008-08-11T10:38:00.000-07:00

Gateway Pundit is on the case, even if I cannot find this in any American newspapers online today:

"King Abdullah of Jordan has become the first Arab head of state to visit Iraq since the US-led invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003."

Remember, this is the same King Abdullah, a Sunni Arab, who in 2004 "warned of what he called the potential for a new Shi'ite crescent of governments and movements stretching from Lebanon to Iran."

So it's worth asking what has changed? For one, the Sunni tribes in Anbar province have decisively repudiated the Sunni extremists of Al Qaeda. For another, the Iraqi government has shown itself to be very willing to go against Iran by taking down the Shi'ite extremists of the thuggish Mahdi Army.

When even the traditional Sunni ruling elite of the Arab world starts beating a path to an elected Shi'ite Prime Minister steadily gaining power and popularity as the Surge turns things around in Iraq, you know things have changed! After all, it was this same King's father, King Hussein, who among others convinced Pres. George H.W. Bush to abandon the Iraqi Shi'ites to Saddam in 1991 at the conclusion of the first Gulf War.

The democratic empowerment of non-radical Shi'ites not only freaks out Sunnis like King Abdullah and the kleptocratic Saudi royal family, but also the ruling Shi'ite Mullahs of Iran, whose population is largely too young to remember the Shah and only know the repressive rule of the Ayatollah Khameini and company.

All to the good, in my view: the right people are being scared, and the long-oppressed are finally standing on their own, with the invaluable help of the men and women of America's military. It has been a long, bloody road, but a dual victory over both Shi'ite and Sunni extremists is finally coming into view.

The Russian aggression against a free Georgia

2008-08-11T10:04:00.000-07:00

Russia and Comrade Putin have removed any doubt about their true colors with their violent over-reaction to Georgia's attempt to regain its own territory in South Ossetia. With the latest news just coming that Russia's forces are not only active in seccessionist Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but also have seized Georgia's city of Gori (see this map), it becomes very clear that Russia's intent is to overthrow the pro-western government in Georgia.

Stratfor has been warning for some time now that the Russians were not going to sit still for the steady eastward push of NATO, and would be striking back to preserve their hegemony in what they regard as their "Near Abroad." Unfortunately, they've been proved correct, in spades.

Thomas Barnett weighs in with the following excellent strategic caution:

"Again, you can say, 'Who the hell are these guys!' But a lot of the world says the same about us regarding Southwest Asia (the Middle East)--a place a lot more important strategically to the entire world than the Caucasus. So go easy on that one.

"Also go easy on wanting to ramp up strategic conflict with Russia. It's certainly a familiar emotion for a lot of us over 40, but you have to ask yourself, 'Where are we going with this, given everything else we're trying to achieve right now?'

"Admittedly, Russia does enough bad stuff and Moscow can certainly get itself right back on top of our strategic planning pile, but we're a long ways from that and I don't anticipate that being the ultimate message that Putin seeks to send here.

"Instead, we're going to have to figure out something a whole lot more sophisticated than simply resurrecting the Cold War plot line."

I love Barnett's ability to do the high-level strategic view, because I find it so difficult myself to keep that cool analytical mode going at times like these.

Politically, I think Obama's both sides are at fault sentiments as originally expressed were ridiculous, and his follow-ups not more impressive. McCain always gets tagged as the loose cannon, but his outrage is perfectly justified here, and Russia might want to ask itself if its actions will help elect McCain? Clearly, as per this excellent Tigerhawk post, the Russians prefer Obama even to the extent of seemingly coordinating their statements with him.

The bottom line is this: we certainly are not going to be able to stop Russia from doing what it pleases here, short of a willingness to go to war with them.

Given that we're clearly not going to be doing that, I feel much more confident that a President McCain will show Russia there is a big price to be paid for this sort of behavior. More and more, Obama shows he's looking to step into President Carter's shoes, and that's a movie I saw once before in my lifetime and have no desire to see a second time.

America the Different

2008-08-08T12:32:00.001-07:00

I am going to start this off with a 5-year-old link to the always-excellent Michael Totten, because it has bearing on what I want to talk about. I'll wait, no worries.

As you just read, the United States treats immigrants differently than the rest of the world does, and that's part of its special magic. I've often thought that the best way of summing it up is this way: immigrants come here and change America, and in turn are changed by America.

Some anecdotal evidence of how this works out over generations, from my own experience and that of my friends, follows.

My parents are both German in ethnicity, my father having been born here and my mother immigrating here on a 1-year work visa for her West German company, eloping with my Dad, and never looking back, despite having parents, five sisters, and two brothers back in Deutschland.

I look around at a lot of my childhood friends and I see similar patterns of their parents being a case of like marrying like:

1. My friend Michael's parents were both of Italian immigrant families, both sets of grandparents having immigrated from Italy.

2. My friend Chris' parents, both Italian in heritage, marry and have Chris and his younger sister.

3. My brother-in-law's parents, both from Irish immigrant families, married and had an even bigger family of six kids.

I have many more such examples, but you get the idea. Fast-forward to my generation, which is tail-end boomer and beginning of Generation X, and the marrying patterns are far different than what I observed in our parents generation:

1. Michael marries a woman who is of mixed Chinese and Korean heritage, who grew up in Texas and has a charming Houston accent, no less!

2. Chris marries Christine, who is Irish-American through and through.

3. My Irish-American brother-in-law ends up happily married to my German-American sister, and have made me the proud Uncle to one niece (my god-daughter) and two nephews.

And me? No marriage yet, alas, but I've seriously dated someone of Italian heritage, another who immigrated from the Philippines in 1973 at age 13, and would have happily dated a good Ethiopian immigrant friend of mine if only she'd ever said yes!

Yes, I know these are anecdotes and therefore statistically value-free, but I'd be willing to bet they are more indicative of the ways things are in these United States than not. Meanwhile, over in Europe to name but one example, are we seeing many Irish marrying Germans, Italians marrying Korean/Chinese, or Italians marrying Irish? Again, I don't have evidence one way or the other, but my sense from hearing about my many German cousins' lives is: not so much.

I really think this is one of the many, many strengths of my country, that we really don't care as much as the rest of the world about matters of ethnicity and religion. And with each generation, we inter-marry more across religious or ethnic lines.

If you're to view it from an evolutionary standpoint, marrying across bloodlines like we're doing here can only strengthen this human race that we are ALL members of.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Gotta Give Credit Where It's Due

2008-08-08T11:58:00.000-07:00

Jake Tapper at ABC News has distinguished himself with his tough, fair and even-handed reporting on both the Obama and McCain campaigns. In being as tough on Obama as he has been on McCain, Tapper has been the exception that proves the rule about the MSM being in the tank for Obama.

So I have to follow Tapper's excellent lead and give credit to Obama for denouncing race-baiting and borderline anti-Semitism by an African-American Democrat in a primary in Tennessee. Obama said, "These incendiary and personal attacks have no place in our politics, and will do nothing to help the good people of Tennessee."

Obama has done the right thing here, at the risk of alienating some of his core supporters, so it's well worth noting.

It raises all the more keenly the question of what this extraordinarily intelligent, educated man was thinking in keeping company with the radical, arguably racist and anti-Semitic Reverend Wright of Trinity United Church for twenty years. Ignorance simply cannot plausibly be Obama's excuse, and the remaining explanation of cynical political calculation lasting two decades disgusts me.

Would that Obama had shown the sort of moral courage with Reverend Wright he has shown today!

Iraqi Army is Willing...

2008-08-08T11:49:00.000-07:00

...but not ready to fight, reports the NY Times.

This once again proves the utter silliness of Obama's we'll leave no matter what mantra. I know that Prime Minister Maliki seemed to endorse Obama's timetable, but regardless I think Maliki will stop playing politics after the upcoming Iraqi elections are done. If, however, he demands that U.S. troops to leave, we will certainly leave. Contrast that, if you will, to Russia's current war on independent Georgia for the impertinence of trying to act like it really is sovereign over its own territory.

But remember, we're the greatest threat to world peace, behind Israel of course! Western European public opinion, which loves Obama, teaches us this important truth.

Thomas Barnett Teaches Me Something New (again)

2008-08-07T21:25:00.000-07:00

As per Thomas P.M. Barnett, the U.S. is actually the #1 source of its own oil, with NAFTA partners Canada and Mexico comprising the #2 slot, then Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe (including the former Soviet Union) rounding out slots 3 through 6. Who knew? The Middle East, second to last in supplying oil to the United States!

This proves again Barnett's point that he's been making for a long while now -- that the war in Iraq has NOT been about stealing oil for the United States -- rather, we've been securing the oil that will be primarily going to other, Asian destinations by destroying the corrupt and murderous Saddam family chokehold on it, and replacing it with a far more transparent, less corrupt democratic government in Iraq. Better for the people of Iraq, definitely, and better for the world.

The thanks for our efforts have, of course, been overwhelming.