OBAMA-CARNEY HUG

I was watching ABC news when they covered Jay Carney's (Obama's press secretary) resignation announcement and Obama and Carney hugged.  In spite of all of  the words, it looked like a very grim Obama as he hugged Carney.  I wondered if the body expressions told more than the words.  I was not the only one sensing this--here is IJReview's coverage of it!

IRAN: US GOING TO COLLAPSE

From the Jerusalem Post.

The deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Brig.-Gen. Hossein Salami said that the US’s status in the world has deteriorated and that its collapse is near.

“Today nowhere in the Muslim world” does anyone pull out “a red carpet for American officials and that’s why [US President Barack] Obama secretly” showed up at Bagram military base in Afghanistan without first letting President Hamid Karzai know, said Salami according to a report by Iran’s Fars news agency.

PUTIN'S WAR STRATEGY IN UKRAINE

From RealClearWorld on "Putin's new type of war in the Ukraine and whether it is failing."  A good discussion on Putin's strategy in the Ukraine and the tactics he has used.

According to a report by the  Atlantic Council, Russia has been preparing for this new kind of war for several years, building "very covert but well-structured networks with agents, with pro-Russian organizations, involving in such illegal activity many Ukrainians." Russian special ops officers "are very dangerous, well armed, [and well] prepared to do what they are doing now." Many are veterans of Chechnya or even Afghanistan. A number of them moved to Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; so they can claim to be regular Ukrainians just defending themselves.

GLOBAL WARMING STATS

From the WSJ.

During a fundraiser in Atlanta earlier this month, President Obama is reported to have said: "It gets you a little nervous about what is happening to global temperatures. When it is 75 degrees in Chicago in the beginning of March, you start thinking. On the other hand, I really have enjoyed nice weather."

What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years. Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere, compiled at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The latest (February 2012) monthly global temperature anomaly for the lower atmosphere was minus 0.12 degrees Celsius, slightly less than the average since the satellite record of temperatures began in 1979. 

CAMPAIGN FINANCE PUNISHMENTS

Democrats and Republicans should be punished equally for campaign finance law violations.  The case of how D'Souza (R) and Corzine (D) were treated.

VA SCANDAL UPDATE

The media has noted that "al Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo treated better than our vets."  You can't fire incompetents in the VA and they actually end up being promoted or given bonuses.

The Left has bragged about the VA as a model for medical care, but this socialist model has failed.

The "secret" of the VA's "success," Krugman argued, "is the fact that it's a universal, integrated system." That saves on administrative costs and allows for efficient record-keeping. Krugman acknowledged that the VA had a history of mismanagement and mediocre care, until "reforms beginning in the mid-1990's transformed the system." But wait. Hasn't it been a universal, integrated system all along?  This sounds like it could be a prophetic statement about Obamacare.  At least in a private care system you can sue the doctor or hospital for malfeasance. And Krugman opposed Republican proposals allowing vets to use VA benefits in private care systems.

From WND.  Obama failed to fix problems left over from the Bush administration even though he promised to.

Map showing an "epidemic" of VA incompetence.

VA SCANDAL

It has not been discussed widely but the recent treatment scandals in the Veteran's Administration should raise concerns about what will happen when the government runs all health care.  John Fund deals with some of the ramifications of this issue.  There are scandals in other countries which have national health care related to delays in treatment and potential patients being "removed" from surgery lists to make the government look like it is taking care of the health needs of its citizens.

Obama was warned about the VA health care crisis in 2008.

"Socialized Medicine on Trial".  Government has failed utterly. 

PROBLEMS WITH OBAMACARE

The 9 Obamacare predictions that came true.  From The Foundry.  This is going to get a lot worse.

1. The individual mandate is an enforcement nightmare.

2. The law will create new disincentives to work.

3. The law, particularly the employer mandate, will impose new costs on businesses that undercut jobs and wages.

4. The law undermines competition and further consolidates health insurance markets.

5. The law guarantees major premium increases.

6. The law discourages insurance enrollment among the young.

7. The law’s Medicare savings would not financially strengthen Medicare.

8. The law’s Medicare changes will result in reduced benefits and threaten seniors’ access to care.

9. The law compels taxpayers to fund abortion and weakens protections of the right of conscience.

PUTIN & WASHINGTON: A BATTLE OF VALUES

Jeffrey Gedman discusses Putin's goals and the West's failure to respond in an excellent column.  What caught my attention was his judgement that Washington doesn't know what to do. . .or maybe what even role America should play in these events. There seems to be a growing consensus that the US has "been outwitted."

But while Putin clearly knows what he wants, do we? History has taught us that in world affairs either a nation has an agenda or it becomes the victim of the agendas of others. The US has been preoccupied. Iraq, Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, the Arab Spring, and the Asia pivot have all consumed our attention and resources. For nearly a decade and a half we’ve been missing in action from Central and Eastern Europe. Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of our absence. We’ve been outwitted.

Gedmin also gives some policy options to perhaps get Washington moving again, beginning with his call for a new "containment strategy."

Melik Kaylan also has a good column on Putin's "strategic conservatism."  He has goals bigger than Russia.

Yet as Pat Buchanan and others have noted, Putin’s Russia is back in the ideological hunt—offering an alternative set of ideas capable of competing internationally with those of the US. Americans are still in denial about it, for many reasons, perhaps the chief among them being that, Buchananites apart, US opinionmakers on both left and right have largely written off the kinds of people that Putin appeals to both in Russia and abroad. If the paleoconservative voice has been relatively marginalized in the US media, it has a huge equivalent constituency in most countries that take traditions seriously. As Buchanan goes on to say in his article, “the decisive struggle in the second half of the twentieth century was vertical, East vs. West,” but “the twenty-first century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.”

I first got wind of this new pan-Putinist ideology in Tbilisi, Georgia, while covering the national elections in the fall of 2012. Having reported from there during the Russian invasion of 2008 and after, I knew the population to be virulently anti-Moscow and largely pro-West. So I was astounded when the country elected an oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who had made his money in Moscow, who refused to criticize Putin, and who ran against a government headed by the volubly pro-American Mikheil Saakashvili. In the space of a few years, President Saakashvili had stamped out Georgia’s legendary corruption, driven out the mafias, notched up eight percent annual growth rates despite global banking failures and a Russian invasion, and had delivered efficiency, transparency, and foreign investment. Yet the other side won. I saw a most skillful, well-financed, pre-prepared opposition campaign with Moscow-based funds, one that deftly cooked up a prison abuse scandal with scary videos to smear the government. It convinced me that the KGB was rebooted, modernized, formidable, and once more able to redirect the destiny of its near abroad satellites as it had for years, even in democratic contests. Above all, I got a foretaste of the ideas Putin has expounded more openly and systematically since 2008.