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APRIL 29,  2012

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:46 P.M. ET:

HOUSING PROSPECTS – Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who co-created the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index, says that housing prices may not rebound for a generation or more.  A weak labor market, high energy prices, and a general sense of unease in the buying public are combining to depress real-estate.  It wasn't many years ago that many people, especially in "hot" areas, believed their home was their greatest investment.  Now it may simply serve as a nice place to live, which ain't bad.

NEW YORK SLIDING – Three major economists, including Arthur Laffer, place New York State right at the bottom in economic outlook.  As a New Yorker, I'm not surprised.  New York has worked hard over the years to create an inhospitable business climate and to drive out its most productive and imaginative citizens through high taxes and ridiculous housing prices.  That places us right down there with California, Illinois, and New Jersey.  The states with the best economic climate, according to these three economists, are Utah, South Dakota, Virginia, Wyoming and Idaho.

NEWT TO GO – Advance word has it that Newt Gingrich will formally withdraw from the Republican primary race on Wednesday.  It is widely expected, but not certain, that he will endorse Governor Romney.  Rick Santorum has yet to endorse the Romney effort, but polling shows that Republicans are starting to unite around Romney, although their enthusiasm may be limited.  Newt is a great idea man and should not be shut out by the Romney people. 

April 29, 2012       Permalink

THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN – AT 11:25 A.M. ET:  As we've said before, some of the best journalism on American politics comes from Britain.  The Brits have a sharp eye when it comes to our political games, and they instinctively seem to know what's going on.  This, from Toby Harnden, in London's Daily Mail, on Obama's permanent campaign:

Barack Obama has already held more fundraising events to build cash for his re-election bid than all five Presidents since Richard Nixon combined, according to figures to be published in a new book.

Actually, there have been six presidents since Nixon, excluding Obama:  Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43.  I assume Harnden is leaving out Ford because he wasn't technically running for re-election in 1976.  He had acceded to the presidency upon Nixon's resignation. 

Obama is also the only president in the past 35 years to visit every electoral battleground state in his first year of office.

The figures, contained a in a new book called The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign by Brendan J. Doherty, due to be published by University Press of Kansas in July, give statistical backing to the notion that Obama is more preoccupied with being re-elected than any other commander-in-chief of modern times.

And we are paying for those re-election trips.

While the Obama’s campaign activities in office have been largely in line with historical trends, he is especially vulnerable to criticism because in 2008 he promised to change how politics works and to curb links with special interests.

Vowing in 2008 to ‘launch the most sweeping ethics reform in US history’ Obama said that if elected he would ‘make government more open, more accountable and more responsive to the problems of the American people’.

Yeah, change we can believe in.  We've seen how that's worked out.

In his State of the Union speech in January, Obama bemoaned the ‘corrosive influence of money in politics’. The following month, he reversed course and announced he was allowing cabinet members and top advisors to speak at big money events for so-called super PACs – unaccountable outside groups raising money for his re-election.

COMMENT:  No wonder young people have lost their enthusiasm for Obama.  He's just another politico doing what politicos have always done.  There is no real hope and change in this administration.  The extraordinary thing about it is its ordinariness.

April 29, 2012       Permalink

A REMINDER FROM HISTORY – AT 10:35 A.M. ET:  The United States, in what President Ford called an act of "dishonor," cut off aid to South Vietnam in 1975, insuring a Communist victory and abandoning those who had fought side by side with us.  Congress, controlled by an increasingly radical Democratic Party,  insisted on the cutoff. 

President Ford did try to make some amends by inviting those who had helped us to immigrate to America, creating the productive, educated Vietnamese-American community we have today.  But the fact is that South Vietnam slipped into the Communist orbit and ceased to exist as a separate nation.  A "united" Vietnam emerged, a complete dictatorship.

There are Vietnamese-Americans still fighting for the freedom of their native country.  And Vietnam is none too pleased with them.  Consider this, from AP:

A Vietnamese-American pro-democracy activist has been arrested and accused of terrorism for allegedly trying to sabotage liberation celebrations commemorating the end of the Vietnam War, state media said Sunday.

Nguyen Quoc Quan, 58, of California, was detained April 17 after arriving at the airport in southern Ho Chi Minh City, Tuoi Tre newspaper reported. He is accused of planning to hold protests for Viet Tan, a banned U.S. exile group, during this week's May Day festivities and the April 30 anniversary of the fall of the former U.S.-backed South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, to the northern communists in 1975.

Authorities also found many documents in Quan's possession on "terrorist training," the paper said. Quan, a mathematician, was previously sentenced to six months in jail by a Ho Chi Minh City court in 2008 for terrorism.

After being deported from Vietnam, Quan continued to travel from the U.S. to Thailand and Malaysia to train members of the Viet Tan group on nonviolent struggles in Vietnam, Tuoi Tre said.

Hanoi often uses vague national security laws to charge pro-democracy activists with terrorism, but the U.S. government has said it has seen no evidence that California-based Viet Tan, also known as the Vietnam Reform Party, is a terrorist organization.

COMMENT:  We have chosen, over the years, to avert our eyes.  Subjected to relentless left-wing propaganda, including that mouthed by the likes of John Kerry, we convinced ourselves that the Vietnam War had been hopeless, and we accepted the outcome.

Outgoing Senator James Webb of Virginia, a Vietnam vet, has said that for more than a generation this country has lived a myth, the myth that we "lost" the Vietnam War.  We never lost a battle in Vietnam.  We abandoned the effort, even cutting off aid to our allies after all American ground troops had been withdrawn.

The Cambodian genocide occurred in the 1970s, and we averted our eyes then, too.  All the fraudulent "anti-war" activists had nothing to say.

The media has done nothing to correct the record.  It was part of the problem.

So let us think of Nguyen Quoc Quan, as he sits in prison in Vietnam, and hope that our own government today will vigorously work to free him.  That may be a false hope because too many just don't want to remember.

April 29, 2012        Permalink

ON ALERT – AT 10:14 A.M. ET:  It's pretty clear from some of the stories crossing our desk that there is concern in Washington about renewed terror from Al Qaeda...even though some smug Obamans believe that the war on terror is over.  This is an administration that celebrates the end of wars that never ended.  From Fox:

WASHINGTON – A year after the U.S. raid that killed Usama bin Laden, Al Qaeda is hobbled and hunted, too busy surviving for the moment to carry out another Sept. 11-style attack on U.S. soil.

But the terrorist network dreams still of payback, and U.S. counterterrorist officials warn that, in time, its offshoots may deliver.

A decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that has cost the U.S. about $1.28 trillion and 6,300 U.S. troops' lives has forced Al Qaeda's affiliates to regroup, from Yemen to Iraq. Bin Laden's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, is thought to be hiding, out of U.S. reach, in Pakistan's mountains, just as bin Laden was for so many years.

"It's wishful thinking to say Al Qaeda is on the brink of defeat," says Seth Jones, a Rand analyst and adviser to U.S. special operations forces. "They have increased global presence, the number of attacks by affiliates has risen, and in some places like Yemen, they've expanded control of territory."

It's a complicated, somewhat murky picture for Americans to grasp.

U.S. officials say bin Laden's old team is all but dismantled. But they say new branches are hitting Western targets and U.S. allies overseas, and still aspire to match their parent organization's milestone of Sept. 11, 2001.

The deadliest is the affiliate in Yemen.

COMMENT:  There is a chronic narrative at work on the American left that we tend to exaggerate enemy threats.  Part of that narrative dovetails with another part of leftist imagery that holds that we have a large defense budget only to feed the greed of the "industrial-military complex."

Now, I have no doubt that the "complex" does try to scare us, in part to market its wares.  I also have no doubt that the defense establishment sometimes gets a bit vivid.  Before World War II there was a standing joke about the Navy always detecting submarines off America's coasts...just before the Navy budget was up for approval in Congress.

That having been said, it is a terrible mistake to think that we constantly inflate foreign threats.  Indeed, this administration is minimizing them.  At the end of the Cold War, the left heckled us for our "Cold War mentality," arguing that the Soviet Union had always been weak, and had collapsed under its own weight, and that we had never needed large defense outlays.

Well, excuse me, but the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at the U.S., a massive land army on the periphery of Europe, and a regular supply system that equipped rogue nations hostile to the West.  It collapsed in part because of the economic pressure applied by Ronald Reagan's defense buildup.  And the Soviet Union fought World War II with, essentially, a third-world economy, and yet made mincemeat of the Nazi divisions.  More than 80% of the Nazi casualties were suffered at the hands of the Red Army, that peasant army representing a nation that couldn't feed many of its own children. 

Judge foreign enemies by their effectiveness and resourcefulness, not by the size of their economies.  The war on terror is far from over.

April 29,  2012     Permalink 

APRIL 28,  2012

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 10:51 P.M. ET:

TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY – The British army is planning to station soldiers and surface-to-air missiles on at least one residential building near this summer's London Olympics, a sign that the Brits take the threat of a terrorist attack, including one launched by air, very seriously.  Some residents of a building selected for the missile battery are clearly upset, fearing the arrangement may make them targets of terrorists.  The missiles are part of a massive security presence to deter a tragedy.  Britain faces threats both from external sources and radical internal elements.

PALIN BACKS MOURDOCK IN INDIANA – There is probably no more symbolic figure in the Senate's Republican establishment than Richard Lugar of Indiana, who has been elected to the Senate six times, and is 80.  Now he is being challenged from the right in the GOP primary by State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who is given a very decent chance of getting the nomination.  Palin's endorsement is Mourdock's most important thus far.  She is at odds with John McCain in this regard.  McCain has issued a vigorous endorsement of Lugar.

SAUDIS MIFFED AT EGYPT – Saudi Arabia has closed its embassy in Cairo and recalled its ambassador after anti-Saudi demonstrations erupted in the Egyptian capital.  The Egyptians are miffed because the Saudis are detaining an Egyptian human-rights lawyer on drug charges.  The diplomatic crisis between the two major Arab powers is deepening.  The two countries represent different paths.  Egypt is in major transition.  Saudi Arabia is, at least for now, an island of royalty-controlled stability.  Resentments are likely to continue.

April 28, 2012       Permalink   

McCAIN RAPS OBAMA ON BIN LADEN – AT 10:16 A.M. ET:  John McCain, who should have been president, has said what a lot of us have been thinking:  It's disgraceful for President Obama to take so much credit for the bin Laden raid.

The first anniversary of the raid comes up this week, and the Obamans are doing all they can to make it a plus for their guy's re-election campaign, including letting NBC News, a division of the Democratic Party, into the situation room of the White House.  I must say that it is surly, and something I haven't seen often in American politics.  Usually, presidents give the credit to the people who risked their lives and carried out the attack.  The president may bask in the glow, but the spotlight is on the troops.  From The Hill:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) rebuked President Obama on Friday for using the anniversary of Obama bin Laden's death to score political points, calling it a "shameless end-zone dance."

"Shame on Barack Obama for diminishing the memory of September 11th and the killing of Osama bin Laden by turning it into a cheap political attack ad," McCain said in a statement circulated by the Republican National Committee.

With the one-year anniversary of bin Laden's killing approaching next week, Obama's campaign released a video Friday suggesting that Mitt Romney, the putative GOP nominee, would not have ordered the risky incursion into Pakistan to nab the 9/11 mastermind.

The video doubled down on remarks that Vice President Biden made Thursday questioning whether Romney had the fortitude to pull off such an operation.

"This is the same President who said, after bin Laden was dead, that we shouldn't 'spike the ball' after the touchdown," McCain said. "And now Barack Obama is not only trying to score political points by invoking Osama bin Laden, he is doing a shameless end-zone dance to help himself get reelected."

COMMENT:  The Dems are trying, as they did in 2008, to portray Obama as a centrist, which he is clearly not.  Problem is, it may work again.  Republicans must paint an accurate picture of this man, and provide a vision of what he will do as he runs wild during a second term.

April 28, 2012       Permalink

HOLDER IN HOT WATER? – AT 9:51 A.M. ET:   Not with President Obama, but possibly with the House.  The radical attorney general, who has run the Justice Department as a private club for the base of the Democratic Party, has made some enemies in high places.  From Fox:

House GOP leaders said Friday they are pursuing a plan to hold Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and the Justice Department in contempt for “stonewalling” them over information regarding the administration’s failed Fast and Furious gun-tracking program.

GOP Rep. Darrell Issa confirmed to Fox News that House Speaker John Boehner gave him and others on his House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform the authority to drafted a contempt of Congress resolution.

“We have a few other options (but) to a great extent we’ve been stonewalled by the Justice Department,” said Issa, R-Calif.

The news of the document and the extended meeting in Boehner’s office was reported first by The Los Angeles Times.

“We have issued a subpoena,” Utah GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a member of the oversight committee, said earlier on Fox News. “We have bent over backwards to be patient and take time. (Holder) is leading us down a path where we have no other choice.”

The resolution, if approved by the GOP-led House, could force Holder to release thousands of pages of documents related to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ program.

COMMENT:  Obama will back Holder.  They are best friends forever.  Holder established a reputation as Easy Eric in the Clinton administration, when he approved last-minute presidential pardons that he shouldn't have approved. 

In the Obama administration it was Holder and his appointees who blocked prosecution in an open-and-shut case against the Black Panthers, for interference with voting in Philadelphia in 2008.  That set the tone for this Justice Department. 

I doubt if Holder will cooperate unless forced to.

April 28, 2012       Permalink

WHERE OBAMA STANDS – AT 9:32 A.M. ET:  Scott Rasmussen reports this morning that the presidential race remains extremely close, with Obama slightly ahead but Romney holding his own:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows President Obama earning 47% of the vote, while likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney picks up support from 45%. Four percent (4%) would vote for a third party candidate, while another three percent (3%) are undecided...

...Over the past six weeks, Obama’s support has been within two points of 45% every single day. During that same time period, Romney has been within three points of 46% every day. Considering that the polling has a 3-percentage point margin of error, these numbers reflect remarkable stability and a very close race. See tracking history.

The race is also close in key battleground states. Obama leads by four in Ohio. Romney is up two in North Carolina and up by just a single point in both Virginia and Florida.

That is encouraging for Romney.  It's not good in Ohio, which every successful GOP candidate for president in recent history has won, but that can be turned around.  Romney's lead, although slim, in Virginia and Florida, could give Mitt victory in two major states that Obama carried in 2008.

But it's going to be very tough.

A president’s Job Approval rating is one of the best indicators for assessing his chances of reelection. Typically, the president’s Job Approval rating on Election Day will be close to the share of the vote he receives. Currently, 49% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president's job performance. Fifty percent (50%) at least somewhat disapprove.

COMMENT:  That's a dramatic improvement for Obama in recent weeks.  He usually drifted around 46-47% approval in the Rasmussen poll, with about 53% disapproving.  This is probably based somewhat on his campaigning, and his shoring up his support in his base.  It certainly couldn't be based on performance in office, because there's been so little.

This race will get very bitter. 

April 28,  2012     Permalink