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APRIL 30,  2012

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 9:41 P.M. ET:

JIMMY HAS A DISTINCTION – According to a new book by WaPo writers Mike Duffy and Nancy Gibbs, Jimmy Carter has won a major distinction:  Among former presidents, and the incumbent, he is the least popular former president.  Clinton, Bush 41 and Obama, according to the book, can't stand Carter because Mr. Peanut is constantly interfering with foreign policy, and conducting foreign policy without any administration's request.  The evaluation is not surprising.  However, Carter remains popular with discerning foreigners, like the Nobel Peace Prize committee.  (Choke.)

EDUCATORS AT WORK – The parents of a British teen who died suddenly two months ago have received a warning from her school that she won't be permitted to attend her school's prom unless she improves her attendance record.  No, this is not a joke.  The school blames the letter on a software error.  Apparently, warning letters are not checked before they go out.  Modern British education at work.  Compare please to similar problems at the UK's nationalized health service.

NEW TERROR CONCERN – ABC News is reporting that American and European authorities are worried that Al Qaeda may soon try to plant bombs inside its operatives, then put them these suicide bombers on airliners.  Physicians contacted by reporters said that there was plenty of room inside the stomach cavity for explosives.  It does not take a large bomb to blow out the side of an airliner.  For the last year, terror experts have warned that Al Qaeda was designing bombs with no metal parts that could be detected by metal detectors. 

AYOTTE BOOSTED – Buzz is increasing that New Hampshire's popular Senator Kelly Ayotte is on Romney's short list for the V.P. slot.  Ayotte was an early endorser and has been an active surrogate.  Romney is reported to be very comfortable with her.  The problem is that she is from the same region as Romney, and her experience level is borderline – New Hampshire attorney general and two years in the U.S. Senate.  On the other hand, she is a proven vote getter and might help with the women's vote.

April 30, 2012       Permalink

THE ROAD TO APPEASEMENT? – AT 9:04 A.M. ET:   There are a number of stories around that the United States is willing to cut a deal with Iran that compromises long-held, bipartisan American positions.  From The Los Angeles Times:

WASHINGTON — In what would be a significant concession, Obama administration officials say they could support allowing Iran to maintain a crucial element of its disputed nuclear program if Tehran took other major steps to curb its ability to develop a nuclear bomb.

U.S. officials said they might agree to let Iran continue enriching uranium up to 5% purity, which is the upper end of the range for most civilian uses, if its government agrees to the unrestricted inspections, strict oversight and numerous safeguards that the United Nations has long demanded.

Such a deal would face formidable obstacles. Iran has shown little willingness to meet international demands. And a shift in the U.S. position that Iran must halt all enrichment activities is likely to prompt strong objections from Israeli leaders; the probable Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney; and many members of Congress.

But a consensus has gradually emerged among U.S. and other officials that Iran is unlikely to agree to a complete halt in enrichment. Maintaining an unconditional demand that it do so could make it impossible to reach a negotiated deal to stop the country's nuclear program, thereby avoiding a military attack.

It's the same old story – the obsession with an "agreement," a signed piece of paper, the same kind of signature we've gotten from North Korea many times...with no real result on the ground.

That position is contrary to the mood of many in Congress. Lawmakers in both houses have begun circulating resolutions, with support from dozens of members, that demand an end to all Iranian enrichment. One senior Senate aide involved in the issue said any deal allowing continued enrichment "would be dead on arrival" in Congress.

Over the last several years, Congress has led the push for increasingly tough sanctions against Iran, and could approve even tougher measures that would drive Tehran away from any potential deal with the U.S. and other powers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also remains staunchly opposed. He argues that letting any centrifuges spin in Iran will allow scientists there to sharpen their mastery of nuclear science and edge toward bomb-making capability.

COMMENT:  It's better to have no agreement than one that looks like Swiss cheese.  Then we have a clear situation, and we can take a number of new actions. 

I don't like what's emerging.  Some observers are noting that President Obama is going relatively easy on the brutal regime in Syria, Iran's closest Arab ally, because he doesn't want to upset the Iranians, hoping to sign a deal with them.  The deal, not our security, then becomes the objective.

One of the strongest opponents of the Iranian nuclear program has been France, under Nicolas Sarkozy.  But Sarkozy is likely to be voted out of office on Sunday, and a new, socialist government is likely to be more flexible.  This is not good.

Iran is a major threat, and the signals we are sending are not helpful in countering that threat.

April 30, 2012       Permalink

TASTELESS – AT 8:47 A.M. ET:  As we commemorate the first anniversary of the dispatching of Osama bin Laden by Navy Seals, we watch in dismay as President Obama tries to exploit the action for his own political gain.  It is going down badly with those who understand that the Seals were the ones at risk, not the president.  From The Hill:

The killing of Osama bin Laden is undoubtedly a crowning achievement in President Obama's tenure at the White House.

Yet one year after the president ordered the successful mission that resulted in the death of the nation's number one enemy, it's unclear how much of a boost Obama will receive in the fall.

Obama got a poll bump, but it didn't last very long.  The economy hovered over everything, as it still does.

Polls now suggest Obama has a slim lead over presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in an election that is likely to be razor-tight, and seems equally likely to focus on the economy and not national security.

Nonetheless, Obama's campaign team has touted bin Laden's death in the days leading up to the anniversary to remind the public of the president's decision, and to contrast Obama's leadership on national security with Romney.

The most notable part of the push is a web video that suggested Romney would not have made the decision to target bin Laden.

Disgraceful.

Though the bin Laden poll bounce was short-lived, the new push around the anniversary suggests Obama's campaign team sees bin Laden as a powerful symbol for the president that, if used effectively, could put Obama over Romney in November.

Yet there are risks with the approach, too.

Republicans have used the web video and criticism of Romney to accuse Obama of crass opportunism.

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the video attacking Romney was “a cheap political attack ad,” “the height of hypocrisy,” and a “pathetic political act of self-congratulation.”

Some also argue highlighting bin Laden's death could spur on new terrorist attacks, or at least leave Obama vulnerable to the argument that he is not making the country safer.

Al Qaeda and its affiliates have for years used the heated rhetoric and actions of U.S. political figures to inspire terrorists to action.

COMMENT:  What's also remarkable is that the first person to bring up the charge against Romney was Joe Biden, who actually opposed the bin Laden raid.  Talk about nerve.

I don't think the bin Laden operation will do much for the president, unless Romney puts his foot in his mouth, which he is prone to do.  In World War II, when American airmen shot down the Japanese admiral who'd planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, citizens did not applaud President Roosevelt.  They applauded the pilots.

During the Korean War, when our forces pulled off one of the most daring operations in modern military history, the invasion of Inchon, Americans did not cheer Harry Truman.  They cheered Douglas MacArthur and the Marines.

Obama can push it too far.  He's already doing it.

April 30, 2012     Permalink     

THE RIOT CARD – AT 7:53 A.M. ET:  There is concern about rioting if the Trayvon Martin case doesn't go the way some "activists" want it to go.  We are noting the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King case in California, wherein there was massive rioting in Los Angeles when some cops were acquitted of charges of excessive force in the arrest of King.

The great Heather MacDonald, one of the best analysts writing today, notes the anniversary in City Journal, and the lessons we can apply to the Trayvon Martin situation: 

Could it happen again? That is the taboo question on the 20th anniversary of Los Angeles’s murderous Rodney King riots, just as another racially charged prosecution—this time in Florida—captures headlines across the nation. Sadly, the answer is yes. As the Oakland riots in 2009 and 2010 following a transit officer’s fatal shooting of a parolee made clear, the threat of riots—what Fred Siegel has called “riot ideology”—still hangs over interracial incidents of violence when the victim is black. And just as the press cynically manipulated the facts in the Rodney King beating in order to increase racial tensions, it has done so again in the Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Florida.

The best hope for avoiding a repeat of the L.A. mayhem, should blacks not be satisfied with the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, is that police forces across the country have learned the lesson of the Rodney King riots: that outbreaks of civil anarchy must be immediately and unapologetically suppressed.

And...

Pumped up on alcohol and drugs, King led officers on a high-speed chase across L.A.’s freeways and residential streets far north of South Central. When the officers finally stopped him, they tried nonviolent means of arresting him—verbal commands, a group tackle, handcuffs, and, finally, a taser—but he fiercely fought all of them off. Only after King lunged at the officers did they resort to the baton. A civilian video captured much of the stop, but the media edited out the nonviolent prelude to the baton blows.

Sound familiar?  NBC News, anyone?

Some 54 citizens of Los Angeles were murdered in the rioting that followed the not-guilty verdict in the trial of the cops who "beat" Rodney King.  Some 2,328 were hospitalized.  More than $1-billion in damage was done.  By that time the left-wing media had established the "narrative" that cops were the greatest threat that blacks faced. 

And...

The press could use the 1992 riots as an occasion for self-examination. Instead, history is repeating itself. The build-up around the Trayvon Martin shooting seems almost designed to provoke riots should the case not come out the way the race agitators and the media think it should. As with the King beating, the press has doctored evidence and suppressed relevant context. It is once again promoting falsehoods—that the criminal justice system is racist and that blacks are under assault from racist whites.

And...

It seems almost unimaginable that a jury would acquit Zimmerman after the intense campaign insisting on the symbolic racial status of the case. But should such an outcome come to pass, every police department in the country should be prepared to put down any ensuing violence at its first outbreak, in the name of justice for all. This much we should all have learned from the ugliness of 1992.

COMMENT:  And if police departments move to suppress any violence?  You may be sure the only thing many "journalists" will be looking for is any case, even imagined, of excessive force.  And Eric Holder's Justice Department will rush in to investigate, not the rioters, but the police. 

One serious question is whether George Zimmerman can get a fair trial anywhere in the United States.  Juries, even if kept anonymous, can feel intimidation.  And hints can be dropped that jurors' names are "known" in the "community," despite assurances of anonymity.

Read the whole piece.  Real journalism at its best.

April 30, 2012       Permalink

MODERN JOURNALISM – AT 7:37 A.M. ET:  I kid you not.  This headline, and sub-headline, actually appear in the online edition of today's New York Times:

Makeup, and Feminist Guilt, at 13

A girl wants to wear make-up. Her mother wants her
to understand that wearing make-up is both a personal
and a political choice.

COMMENT:  Wha?  A political choice?  The Times is back in the 1960s, and lovin' it.  The recent attack on Ann Romney by a high Democratic activist illustrates that those whom the Times supports are also living in the world of tie-died jeans, anti-war fever, and fantasies about "oppression."

The left calls itself progressive.  It is actually regressive.  And let's let 13-year-old girls grow up without believing that every move they make is political. 

April 30,  2012     Permalink 

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