AMERICAN JEWS AND ISRAEL

This Sunday I read three articles dealing with the attitude of American Jews toward Israel.

Ron Radosh at Pajamas Media writes about how liberal Jews in the Obama administration are reacting to Netanyahu's policies. Joining those who want Obama to primarily keep up the pressure on Israel is the mainstream of American liberal journalists, most of them Jewish, who evidently see a need to reinforce Obama (not that he needs it) in his decision to get tough on America’s most loyal ally in the Middle East.

Mark Davis wonders why he, as a Christian, is more loyal to Israel than most American Jews are. There is something fundamentally wrong when I care more about Israel than the American Jewish community.

Jacob Weisberg writes on why Israel and liberal American Jews are drifiting apart. If you want numbers, various polls document the disenchantment. The partisan gap in support for Israel has jumped dramatically of late, with 80 percent of Republicans expressing favorable view of Israel, according to Gallup, as compared with only 53 percent of Democrats. One recent study found that only 54 percent of Jews under 35 who aren't Orthodox are "comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state" (as compared to more than 80 percent of those over 65). Among younger Jews, only 20 percent rated as "highly attached" to Israel in another poll.

If you want examples of the shift in sentiment, read just about any Jewish columnist for a major newspaper. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times argued that Biden under-reacted to Israel's housing announcement. Richard Cohen of The Washington Post is writing a book arguing that the founding of Israel was a well-intentioned mistake.

TURKEY

A discussion of Turkey drawing closer to Iran. This is not good.

END OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

Interesting.

FINDING JESUS AT UNIVERSITIES

Jesus shows up where one does not expect Him to be. I am hoping this article creates some discussion on campus.

OBAMA AT BAT

I have been trying to keep track of political humor/satire since the end of the Bush years. This pajamas media satire on Obama is one of the best produced I have seen.

POLITICAL ICONOGRAPHY

An interesting discussion of Republican and Democrat symbols. Obama's logo is also included.

HIZBALLAH THREATS TO ISRAEL

Ehud Barak states that if Hizballah attacks Israel, Israel will go after its sponsors (which includes Iran among others).

"Israeli cannot accept the artificial differentiations between the Hizballah terrorists, the state of Lebanon and their sponsors," said Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak in a lecture in Washington Friday, Feb. 26.

He responded to the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's prediction of Israel's early disappearance earlier Friday, alongside Syrian president Bashar Assad and Hizballah chief Hassan Nasrallah, by saying he did not expect it will be possible to slide toward 2011 without decisions. This will be a complicated and tough year, he said.

THE PRESIDENCY

I thought this comment by Karl Rove shed some light on the influence of the president. He was writing about the health care summit and trying to analyze what the Republicans would face as well as some of the pitfalls for the President.

It's not easy to criticize a president face to face. During my White House years, congressmen and senators would sit in my office, pound the table, and vow to tell the president he mishandled an issue. Then we'd walk the 15 steps to the Oval Office, and they would instantly turn soft. The presidency commands respect. Americans expect the president to be treated with dignity and deference, making criticizing him to his face politically risky.

And this is another good inside look at how the White House operates. While it focuses on the departure of Desiree Rogers, I liked this comment by Andrew Card from the Bush White House. One other thing Card warned those new White House workers way back in 2001: "Remember, please remember, ladies and gentlemen, that when you leave the White House, your letter of resignation will go into the National Archives forever." After a long pause, he added: "Be careful what you say."

AMERICAN ECONOMY

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton believes the growing national debt has become a security issue and is hurting American power and influence around the world. I haven't seen anybody this high up in government say this.

But if the debt level is a problem now, where will the Obama administration's future debt load lead the nation? Hopefully the US will be stronger than Mali.

ISRAELI DRONES

They have the capacity to carry a significant bomb load as far as Iran.

OBAMA'S RELIGIOUS LIFE

A discussion of Obama's spiritual and church activities since being elected.

NEW JOBLESS AMERICA

Atlantic Monthly. No one knows what shape the recovery will take. Not even Paul Krugman. This is not an optimistic article.

LEADERSHIP & INTUITION

Michael Barone comments on intuition and presidential leadership.

No president enters office knowing everything he needs to know. His experience is limited to some greater or lesser extent; his knowledge of the people from whom he will choose appointees is incomplete; his mastery of the substance of public policy, after years on the campaign trail, is likely to be out of date. And like all of us, he does not know what the future will bring.

So presidents must rely on something else, something intangible and unquantifiable, in determining what is within the realm of possibility and what is a bridge too far: intuition.

AMY BISHOP

Probably only academics are really interested in Amy Bishop's murders of fellow faculty over an apparent tenure issue. But I do like Kissinger's supposed quote (although I am not sure it just applies to academics)--I can think of some church squabbles where it is quite appropriate.

"Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

The Boston political culture: Instead, the political culture of Massachusetts taught her something very different: It’s not what you do, but who you are.

BAYH'S DECISION NOT TO RUN

I always thought he was a sensible Washington politician, but he has given up on the Senate and Obama. He recognizes Washington is not working. Reid and Pelosi share a lot of the responsibility for the failure of congress to come together to resolve serious issues. But maybe he and his wife do not have clean hands.

Five Ways to Lose the Senate Majority. Either way, the two-term senator’s departure now places 10 Democratic-held Senate seats at risk—if all are swept under by a November GOP wave, Republicans are back in control of the Senate.

A breakdown of the races.

CLIMATE CHANGE SATIRE

This Hitler movie clip is probably going to be used by every interest group at some time or other. Whoever put this one together needs a spellcheck and they even get poor Starbucks in the script!

Something with a country & western theme.

TEA PARTY COMMERCIAL

It has been interesting to see the increased use of history motifs in so-called "tea party" commercials.

CLIMATEGATE AGAIN

BBC interview. It's hard to take these experts seriously.

Sea levels are not rising--report retracted.

Left-wing Europeans attack IPCC. The German left wing press, one of the world’s strongest supporters of the ‘climate change movement’ is turning against the scientists and UN bureaucrats responsible for leading the movement. A round-up of German press coverage over the unexpected resignation of UN climate chief Yvo de Boer offers a perspective on the failures of the climate change movement that is both more scathing and more frank than anything the mainstream US press has yet brought itself to utter.

CLIMATEGATE AGAIN

BBC interview. It's hard to take these experts seriously.

Loved this quote from Instapundit:

VICTORY HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS: Robert Gibbs Tells White House Press Corps That Obama Saved Iraq (Video).

But Obama’s about as much the father of this victory as Andrew Young was of Rielle Hunter’s baby . . . .

REDUCING THE DEFICIT

A proposal. Looks as good as anything I have seen. I can't say either party has shown any determination to end it.

BEARDED WIFE

Oh, those niqabs: An Arab ambassador discovered his wife was cross-eyed and has a beard! He now wants a divorce.

OBAMA, THE PARTISAN

Peter Wehner discusses Obama's pleas for non-partisanship when he is acting the partisan and conducting himself so much differently from what he promised in the campaign.

What is disappointing about President Obama is that he has governed in a manner so at odds with his core campaign commitments. Mr. Obama has become the most polarizing first-year president in the history of Gallup.

He has allowed Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in particular to promote a deeply partisan agenda, shutting out Republicans at almost every conceivable point. Depending on your politics, you may think that is a wise thing or a disastrous thing. But it is not a unifying thing. And declaring war on Fox News and intentionally targeting and elevating Rush Limbaugh, in an effort to make him the "face" of the GOP, are hardly the actions of a man who has reconciliation on his mind. Neither is selecting Rahm Emanuel -- one of the most relentlessly partisan figures in Washington -- as your chief of staff.

And CBS news comments that what Obama wants is surrender.

NEW WEAPON

How many weapons like this are being developed?

DOOMSDAY, FEBRUARY 11th

According to Iranian leaders something big is going to happen on Thursday. I am beginning to see more speculation on this. Michael Ledeen says Israel should be prepared, but it also could include a number of other possibilities.

BROWN AD IN MASSACHUSETTS

I think this is a great ad, but I may be biased. History as political spin beats kissing babies and candidates standing in suits in front of the Capitol.

JOE BIDEN

This is one time I am with Biden and not those making fun of his lack of knowledge. . .why does knowing something about the Oscars or the movie "Avatar" really matter when it comes to governance?

CLIMATEGATE, FEBRUARY 2010

From the Guardian.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up".

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

It also emerges that documents which Wang claimed would exonerate him and Jones did not exist.

NEW DISCRIMINATION?

This item shocked me. . .a group supported by liberals and Obama want to restrict gun-ownership for blacks because they are so violent. I am not a big one on gun-ownership, but you can't reduce gun-ownership for just one group in America.

For blacks, like all victims of homicide, guns — usually handguns — are far and away the number one murder tool. Successful efforts to reduce America’s black homicide toll must put a focus on reducing access to firearms.

GEITHNER & AIG BAILOUT

Like the article, I am not a fan of conspiracy theories, but something is not right about this behind-the-scenes bailout of AIG.

The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 to buy out, for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been allowed to fail.

It goes on to describe how Geithner and the New York Fed basically operated outside of any oversight or controls in its efforts to help AIG.

HOLOCAUST MOVIES

Ten good ones. Of those I have seen, I think the Pianist affected me the most.

HATE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

An interesting interview with an author I need to check out.

Those lucky few who are fortunate enough to be able to live their political lives free of the fear of violence are largely concentrated in the capitals of contemporary Western Europe and along the east and west coasts of the United States, who not coincidentally happen to make up the primary audience I was writing for, so I wanted to explain that the inhabitants of the Arabic-speaking Middle East are not as fortunate as we are. To say that Lebanon is held at gunpoint by an armed gang, or that Lebanese journalists are assassinated for their work, Syrian intellectuals and Egyptian rights activists are typically thrown in prison and tortured, and regional minorities like the Shia, Druze, Alawi, Christians, Kurds and Jews have often been the target of purges and political violence all in the name of Arab nationalism, a corporatist ideology that seeks to erase communal as well as individual difference, is not to say that Arabs only understand force, but that violence is a central factor in Arab political life and it is impossible to understand the region without taking this into account.

MEDIA COVERAGE OF OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

The media is admitting it did not cover Obama's negative qualities in the 2008 campaign.

DEMOCRAT HUBRIS

This essay expresses my thinking of Democrats in power. Lord Acton's comments on power are often over used, but power is a hard think to handle when one achieves it.


The love of power got to the Democrats: the love of big-shotting it before the cameras, as if senators were resident royalty rather than servants. Come to think of it, Scott Brown put the matter with great precision in his now-famous answer to David Gergen's question about responsibility for the maintenance of "Ted Kennedy's seat." Not Kennedy's seat, "the people's seat," Brown replied in setting Gergen straight.

TSARS

Love this quote for its historical allusion: "Obama has appointed more Czars in one year than the Romanov dynasty did in three centuries."

CLIMATEGATE, JANUARY 2010

A summary highlighting the major developments in the climategate controversy.

HITLER DEALS WITH DEMOCRAT LOSS IN MASSACHUSETTS

I can't remember how many take-offs I have seen on these clips from an old Hitler movie.

DEMOCRAT TACTICS AFTER LOSS IN MASSACHUSETTS

This summarizes how the Democrats are going to handle strategy going into the November 2010 elections. I guess I don't see a difference between Republican Wall Street "fatcats" and Democrat Wall Street "fatcats." And at some time blaming Bush is just not going to sell.

FIRST AMENDMENT HIGHLY OVERRATED

At least according to Rahm Emmanuel.

US MEDICAL CARE

The statistics used by the Obama administration that indicate the US is 37th in the world in overall performance of medical care are based on subjective WHO reports. It did not include patients who receive indigent care, for example. And the US is #1 in terms of medical responsiveness.

TEXAS v. CALIFORNIA

Interesting. Texas is doing a better job of educating students than California in spite of spending less money!

GOVERNMENT PAYROLL GROWING

More people are now working for the government than for wealth-producing enterprises.

VOLCKER ON THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

Paul Volcker was interviewed by Charlie Rose in Business Week. Volcker, a Democrat noted for a crusty personality, said some very uncomplimentary things about the Obama administration.

The American political process is about as broken as the financial system. Therefore, one has to be a bit skeptical. Just to give you one little example, one unrelated to the financial crisis. Here we are on Dec. 29, almost a year after the Inauguration, and there is no Under Secretary of the Treasury. That should be an important position. How can we run a government in the middle of a financial crisis without doing the ordinary, garden-variety administrative work of filling the relevant agencies? The Treasury is an outstanding example of a broken system, but it's not the only one.

Slow is too fast a word to describe what's going on. The Administration is one quarter over, and it hasn't manned the ramparts of government yet.

I wish the Administration would pay more attention to what's needed to improve the ordinary functioning of government. We can't even fight a war with our own people any more. We've got to hire Blackwater. I think people have lost confidence in government, they've lost trust in government, and it shows. This isn't a question just of this Administration. It's been kind of a steady, downhill path.

Charlie Rose: . . .but this Administration came in and said it would change. That was the mantra of the campaign. So what happened? Volcker: It shows you it's not that easy to change [emphasis added].

A REVIEW OF 2009

Dave Berry --great political satire. He has so many good ones, it is hard to pick just one or two--so I picked three.

February:
Despite this heroic effort, the economy continues to stumble. General Motors, which has sold only one car in the past year -- a Buick LaCrosse mistakenly purchased by an 87-year-old man who thought he was buying a power scooter -- announces a new four-part business plan, consisting of (1) dealership closings; (2) factory shutdowns;(3) worker layoffs; and (4) traveling backward through time to 1955.

March:
. . . an angry nation learns that the giant insurance company AIG, which received $170 billion in taxpayer bailouts and posted a $61 billion loss, is paying executive bonuses totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. This news shocks and outrages President Obama and members of Congress, who happen to be the very people who passed the legislation that authorized both the bailouts and the bonuses, but of course they did that during a crisis and thus had no time to find out what the hell they were voting for.

August:
California, in a move apparently intended to evade creditors, has its name legally changed to ``South Oregon.''

HEALTH CARE PLAN ANALYZED

Richard Epstein from Columbia (a video). Obviously he is opposed to the plan, but I believe he raises implications that I have not seen discussed.

GOTTA LOVE IT!

From the Huffington Post.

THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY

There has been no dearth of items over the past six months about the crisis newspapers are facing in the blogs I follow. Some newspapers have filed for bankruptcy, a few have closed down, and others have laid off much of their staff. Even the hallowed New York Times is having problems. I am not going to rehash all of the problems and analysis I have read over the past months.

In some cases I think newspapers just don't give much news for a variety of reasons. Some of this is ideological and some of it is just bad or inefficient reporting. I have found blogs to give more in-depth analysis and are often days ahead in reporting what is happening. And you can always check opinions out quickly by looking at blogs that report and comment from a variety of perspectives.

However, as a long time subscriber to the Dallas Morning News, I have been puzzled for months about its decision-making. First, let me say that I think it is really a good newspaper (far better then those I have seen in other cities, including my beloved Chicago Tribune). I felt its news reporting was above average, its opinion paged is balanced and filled with thought-provoking comments from left and right, the business section is strong, and the sports pages are great (especially if you are a Cowboys fan).

In September our renewal rate went to over a thousand dollars for a one year subscription! As a middle class family this is entirely beyond the budget so we dropped our subscription. Who can afford a newspaper subscription, at least at the Dallas Morning News? I am sure there will be at least 10,000 people who will want to pay this rate.

The interesting thing is that I have recently received subscription letters from Fortune and now Kiplingers (and maybe Forbes) with a yearly subscription rate of less than $10. Maybe they are trying to hook me for a year and then ask for a $500 renewal rate for the next year! I assume they want to raise circulation levels and then show advertisers the value of an ad.

Recently the Dallas Morning News called to win us back with a special offer. We didn't even ask what the offer was--no thanks--don't need an umbrella or a $999 special. I wish you guys the best, but it is going to take some doing for the print media to bring us back.

CAPITALISM vs. SOCIALISM

The impact of the coming debt crisis--with Greece and other countries facing national bankruptcy, 2010 will be an interesting year. I keep finding great Churchill quotes: The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

HEALTH CARE BILL QUOTES: US SENATE

I especially like those that say their vote can't be bought. And Senator Baucus reading from Wikipedia to support the bill!

MARK R. LEVIN

I was given Levin's book Liberty and Tyranny and was able to give it a quick read on the airplane. Some of his quotes:

p. 53: A discussion of the 1942 Supreme Court ruling Wickard v. Filburn that a farmer growing wheat on his own land and for his own use was still subject to federal production limits, even though none of his what ever left the state.

p. 65: Saul Alinsky and the radicals desire to eradicate the middle class.

p. 76: . . .ethanol has been around since the 1800s. If it were a vialbe alternative or additive to gasoline, which supposedly would reduce oil use, gasoline prices, and automobile emissions, the free market would have responded positively. [I am not sure Rockefeller would have allowed it, although I agree with his argument that ethanol is not a solution to the energy issue.]

p. 86: Quoting Rexford Tugwell (advisor to FDR): We didn't admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.

p. 89: The reason stimulus plans of this sort do not work is a fundamental reality of governance: The government does not add value to the economy. It removes value from the economy by imposing taxes on one citizen and providing cash to another. Or it borrows money that would otherwise be used by investors and redistributes it elsewhere. Or it prints money and threatens the value of the dollar. Nothing is stimulated.

p. 120: A discussion on enviro-statism and attacks Earth First for putting the earth ahead of human beings. Humans are expendable, the earth is not.

p. 127: In 1971, Dr. S.I. Rasol, a NASA scientist, insisted that "in the next 50 years, the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil-fuel burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees." An ice age was predicted.

p. 140: A 2 1/2 page (small print) of all the things caused by global warming--everything from acne to yellow fever. But spiders invading Scotland and a squid population explosion particularly caught my eye!

NOW THE OBAMA DOCTRINE

I guess every president get's his foreign policy doctrine.

He stated clearly that war can be just, indeed, that sometimes it is the only path of justice.

"We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes," he said. "There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naive -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King, but as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms."

T.D. LYSENKO & GLOBAL WARMING

I had forgotten about the work of T.D. Lysenko in Stalin's Soviet Union. He is a great example of the politicization of science.

Perhaps the most egregious ghost is Trofim Lysenko, the man who ruled the life sciences of Soviet Russia from the late 1920s until the early 1960s. He had a theory which fit Marxism perfectly: acquired characteristics can be inherited. This is not true, of course, but Lysenko had the Politburo and Stalin behind him. It was science that fit the political needs of the Bolsheviks, and so it was science backed by the awful power of the party and the state.

Lysenko's experiments were heralded, although the experiments were never replicated. The Soviet Union was full of botanists, biologists, geneticists, and other life scientists, and it was obvious to anyone with a free mind that Lysenko was propounding nonsense. But it was not until 1962 that the Soviet government allowed a real critique of his cartoon science

THE DAILY SHOW

Obama and the Democrats are in trouble if the Daily Show is doing this! The comments on Hot Air.

AND MORE ON CLIMATEGATE

It is worse than thought. Data has been withheld by many other scientists. There should always be an ongoing debate in science about the data no matter what the issue.

In 2004, retired businessman Stephen McIntyre asked the National Science Foundation for information on various climate research that it funds. Affirming "the importance of public access to scientific research supported by U.S. federal funds," the Foundation nonetheless declined, saying "in general, we allow researchers the freedom to convey their scientific results in a manner consistent with their professional judgment."

Which leaves researchers free to withhold information selectively from critics, as when CRU director Phil Jones told Australian scientist Warwick Hughes in a 2005 email: "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."

Volokh has a detailed analysis of the data issues.

And here is an even more complete summary of issues involved.

A CONSERVATIVE OBAMA?

This guy can really give a speech!

OBAMA'S AFGHANISTAN POLICY

Powerline, analyzing an article in the Washington Post, shows the inconsistencies in Obama's foreign policy team's decision-making in the last few months. It appears the administration gave McChrystal orders to draw up a plan and then denied, when the plan was drawn up, that it had given him those directives.

Also it is interesting to see that Obama has flipped on the Iraq surge. Under Bush he criticized it, but now he uses it as a model.

EVIL IN DUBAI

The city looks good on the outside with all of its magnificent buildings, but it is a moral and humanitarian sewer. This British report doesn't say much for the value system of the country. It is not an Arab Disneyland or a "Santa Claus' state. Evil abounds.

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

WHAT THE MEDIA IS NOT COVERING

Interesting. No mention of homelessness even though unemployment is up; references to "Christmas" shopping are declining; and no mention of the $80 billion taxpayers have already lost to keep General Motors going.

PAYING POLITICIANS TO LIE TO US

John Stoessel has his usual insightful analysis.

When you knowingly pay someone to lie to you, we call the deceiver an illusionist or a magician. When you unwittingly pay someone to do the same thing, I call him a politician.

The key to magic is misdirection, fooling the audience into looking in the wrong direction.

I happily suspend disbelief when a magician says he'll saw a woman in half. That's entertainment. But when Harry Reid says he'll give 30 million additional people health coverage while cutting the deficit, improving healthcare and reducing its cost, it's not entertaining. It's incredible.

GLOBAL WARMINING CRITIC

Dr. Ian Pilmer said Governments were treating the public like “fools” and using climate change to increase taxes. He said carbon dioxide has had no impact on temperature and that recent warming was part of the natural cycle of climate stretching over ­billions of years.

A SCIENTIST LOOKS AT CLIMATEGATE

A lengthy, but important post on the falsification of data. Derek Love sees a problem.

HUMAN BRAINS

Human brains are shrinking! This is more serious than global warming--what happens if our brains shrink to the size of a pea? Maybe it is our expanding waists that is causing it. This has been a crisis since at least 1996, but Al Gore has done or said nothing about it. Obama shouldn't be flying to Copenhagen, but instead he should call a world conference of leaders to address this issue. But wait, maybe global warming is causing our brains to shrink.

OBAMA CRITICISM

Politico is not a part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy," but its "7 Stories Barack Obama Doesn't Want Told" is quite critical of his presidency.

A FEMINIST LOOKS AT PALIN

Pollitt doesn't like Palin, but she does see sexism in how the media has treated her.

ASSESSMENTS OF THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY

Peggy Noonan has a critical assessment of the Obama presidency. He may be losing support from some liberals, including some in the media. Noonan discusses Elizabeth Drew and Leslie Gelb's recent critiques of Obama's presidency.

Drew's assessment of Obama's advisors: She scored "the Chicago crowd," which she characterized as "a distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team." The White House, Ms. Drew says, needs adult supervision—"an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment."

Noonan comments: Who are the wise men and women now? Who are the Robert Lovetts, Chip Bohlens and Robert Strausses who can came in to help a president in trouble right his ship? America seems short of wise men, or short on those who are universally agreed to be wise.

The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic not for those reasons, however, but because they express a growing political perception, and that is that there is something amateurish about this presidency, something too ad hoc and highly personalized about it, something . . . incompetent, at least in its first year.

Noonan also notes that a president's actions and image created in the first year of a presidency, often stay with the president. It remains to be seen, but Obama doesn't appear to be coming across as a Lincoln or Kennedy--the Carter image seems to be more appropriate at this point.

The Economist asks: "Does this president have a strategy. . .?" It assesses both his critics and those arguing that he is only in the first inning of a grand strategy. The writer states: It is a fair point, but as the months drag on, the “weak” case has been gaining the upper hand. Mr Obama has yet to show he has the staying power to take on a dangerous, stubborn and occasionally bad world. Even allowing for Israel’s shift this week, the president has hardly lived up to his promise to work for Middle East peace “with all the patience and dedication that the task requires”. With one big exception, he has not yet shown that he can back his oratory with a stick—and that was a tariff on Chinese tyres, a weak sop to America’s unions.

KING JAMES VERSION

This "King James only pastor" really develops his hermeneutic in this sermon.

CLIMATEGATE

Megan McArdle denies a conspiracy on the part of pro-global warming scientists. So now some scientific censorship is good. . .

Another view. There is some kind of conspiracy or cover-up.

Watch this video!

The Politics of Science: Hillary Clinton famously remarked that during the Bush years it was “open season on open inquiry,” rehashing the familiar charge that a faith-based obscurantism dogmatically dismissed not only the claims of legitimate science, but also the very claims of reason itself. President Obama has stayed true to the liberal posture that whatever policy he happens to advocate is the only one substantiated by empirical science. However, it has become increasingly clear that the president’s claim to rigorously adhere to a science of politics—a science that provides unprejudiced information upon which he can craft sound policy—has been overtaken by a politics of science—the crass and Procrustean transformation of whatever data is available into further confirmation of his own ideological commitments.

And I like the following quote from Instapundit. It's beginning to look more and more like Czechoslovakia in 1973.

ROGER SIMON on ClimateGate and Talk of “Transparency.”

UPDATE: A reader emails: “I now have a sense of what it was like living under Communism in Eastern Europe. The state-owned (in our case, establishment) press won’t report on reality so people had to turn to Samizdat to learn what’s actually happening in their world. It’s rather amazing. Also, having an Army of Davids go through these emails will pay dividends for years.” Well, Declan McCullagh at CBS has done a good job. But big-media folks seem to be slotting most of what coverage they do for the web, not for print or broadcast.

But word seems to be getting out.

CHINA & THE AMERICAN ECONOMY

I believed in free trade, but this news story is troubling. A US company is having to use Chinese technology to build wind turbines. US jobs might be created, but if we are dependent on the technology of China, America's future will face serious challenges. Obama's stimulus funds should be going to create future technologies and wealth and not just into jobs that consume wealth.

PRESIDENTIAL APPROVAL RATINGS

The WSJ has an interesting graph on presidential job-approval ratings from Truman until near the end of George W. Bush's presidency. Job-approval tends to drop in the second term of a presidency, but it didn't for Clinton. Gallup has the actual tables.

FREE SPEECH AT COLUMBIA

Ahmadinejad can speak at Columbia, but not Nonie Darwish--her recent book details the horrors of living under Islamic law.

PEW NEWS SCORE

Take this simple 12 question quiz at the Pew Research Center--it tests your knowledge of current affairs. If you get 11 or 12 correct let me know.

THE RED GUARD AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

When I saw this I immediately thought of the Soviet Union, but the author's reference to the Chinese Cultural Revolution is more correct.

The first step toward "cultural competence," says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize -- and confess -- their own bigotry. Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.

The task group recommends, for example, that prospective teachers be required to prepare an "autoethnography" report. They must describe their own prejudices and stereotypes, question their "cultural" motives for wishing to become teachers, and take a "cultural intelligence" assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other "isms." They "earn points" for "demonstrating the ability to be self-critical."

PALINOPHOBES

Jonah Goldberg describes someone criticizing the writing in Going Rogue only to confess that the quote came out of Obama's biography!

OBAMA FOREIGN POLICY TROUBLES

Obama's latest trip to Asia has not resulted in a lot of success according to Der Spiegel.

When he entered office, US President Barack Obama promised to inject US foreign policy with a new tone of respect and diplomacy. His recent trip to Asia, however, showed that it's not working. A shift to Bush-style bluntness may be coming.



The mood in Obama's foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The "first Pacific president," as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.

TARP: A FAILURE?

Many questions are now being asked about whether TARP was worth it. . .and not just by Republicans.

As the Obama administration considers how to approach the next phase of the $700 billion financial bailout, questions are being raised on Capitol Hill about whether it is helping the economy.

GLOBAL WARMING TAKING TIME OUT

From Der Spiegel, hardly some anti-intellectual, anti-science organ, right-wing publication.

. . .not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

And here are some of the hacked emails indicating some kind of conspiracy to keep the global warming theory alive when the data is not supporting it.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

An Update (11/24/09).

More seriously, in one e-mail, a prominent global warming alarmist admits to using a statistical "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures. Anthony Watts provides an explanation of this case in technical detail; the "trick" consists of selectively mixing two different kinds of data-temperature "proxies" from tree rings and actual thermometer measurements-in a way designed to produce a graph of global temperatures that ends the way the global warming establishment wants it to: with an upward "hockey stick" slope.

SECULAR ISLAM

Some English Muslims are renouncing their terrorist past and calling for a more secular Islam.

PALIN vs. OBAMA

Amazing! Palin more popular than Obama.

TAX CHEATS AT TREASURY

Another Obama appointee has not paid her taxes! This is getting tiring--I can't recall the exact number, but I will guess around 10 treasury or oversight appointees have not paid their taxes. Can't he find some honest people to appoint?

MOSSAD

The Mossad put spyware on a Syrian official's computer! Don't leave your computer in your hotel room.

GOING ROGUE

I feel I should collect some of the comments regarding Sarah Palin's political future.



Rod Dreher: I see him as a disillusioned early supporter. Sarah Palin is selling a personality, not a platform. That's not dumb. She's doing the best she can with what she has to work with. She quotes her father's line upon her resignation this summer as Alaska's governor: "Sarah's not retreating, she's reloading." On evidence of this book, Sarah Palin is charging toward 2012 shooting blanks.



A discussion of why the left fears her: What this country needs is a strong conservative leader with the courage of her convictions. Sensing those qualities in Sarah Palin, the liberal left is becoming frantic because they can't seem to halt her popularity. The reason they're panicking is because they're afraid of her connection with regular folks who work for a living, pay their taxes, attend a religious worship service regularly and believe that our country has lost the moral fiber that once united us.

An Alaska opponent: Palin neither organizes nor mobilizes. There is no Palin movement -- or organization of any depth and substance. There is no Palin philosophy beyond bromides about smaller government, the evils of abortion and the dangers of popular culture (which, right this moment, is making her a rich woman). While she easily won election as governor of Alaska in 2006, her victory was built largely on her fresh, attractive face and her predecessor's unpopularity.

Palin-Beck in 2012!

The media is really negative on Palin. 37 negative stories; 2 positive stories.

THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY: WHAT'S GONE WRONG?

Michael Barone looks at what has gone wrong with Obama's election promises of a better world if he were elected.

WALL STREET CASH

Of the top 15 recipients of Wall Street money, only 4 are Republicans. Now it is the Democrats who are the party of big corporate donations!

OBAMA'S MIDDLE EAST POLICY

Bill Clinton to the rescue! It is in "shambles."

ISLAM IN FRANCE

Sarkozy wants to restore French values in France.

At the heart of the identity crisis plaguing today’s France is a significant immigrant population that refuses to become French, and a multicultural left that has allowed them to live isolated in ghettoes for decades, where many have fallen prey to Muslim preachers of hate.

OBAMA HANDSHAKE

In Japan, Obama bowed to the Japanese emperor while shaking his hand--his opponents in America did not like it, but now there is the question of whether the Japanese approved. The emperor is no longer a god.

RADICALISM IN AMERICAN MOSQUES

An interview with Dr Zuhdi Jasser, an American Muslim. He is very critical about what is happening in mosques. Radicals have taken over in many cases and the media and government seems to be ignoring it.

This has been a frustrating thing for me as a Muslim activist. Many Muslims disagree with political Islam, but they're not pressured to take on the mosque leadership. So you have discussions in the mosque going far beyond theology and the example of the Prophet; imams use the pulpit, or minbar as it's called in Arabic, to discuss politics. I've sent this over and over again in mosques I've attended.

Remember that mosque in Phoenix? There were 500 people there that day. I was the only one who publicly criticized the imam for that. And yet, every Muslim I talked to was offended by what the imam did. But they have this sheep mentality. They don't want to fight the tribe. They don't want to rock the boat. They don't understand that showing that we can criticize ourselves is not a weakness, it's a strength.

And Rod Dreher also wonders where the media is when dealing with radical Islam in America.

When it comes to investigating and exposing radical Islam in America, the media see their job as managing the story, not telling it. Six years ago, the then-head of the Islamic Society of North America came in for an editorial board meeting. He talked about peace, friendship and tolerance. But when I calmly asked him how he reconciled that rhetoric with the record of support for radical causes among ISNA board members, he shook his fist at me and called me a Nazi.

When anti-Semitic, anti-Christian hate literature is found at a mosque, or radical speakers give a program praising a Muslim fanatic, or Muslim children are taught the philosophy of the foremost philosopher of Islamist terror – all of which have happened in the Dallas area in recent years – few care to notice.

"Connecting the Dots" -- Stephen Hayes tries pull together the trail of Hasan.

AIDS IN AFRICA

An interesting article describing how abstinence and a one-partner sex emphasis has curtailed AIDS in Uganda. Other African countries using the western emphasis on condoms have not been as successful. The African value system relates to abstinence according to the writer. An evangelical Christian moral ethos seems to work better.

The vast majority of Africans hold a worldview of causation very different from our own. Most Africans believe that any major occurrence, good or bad, has two causes. The first might be called physical: for instance, that a retrovirus causes AIDS by destroying the cells of the immune system. The second is a spiritual, less tangible cause, but is perceived to be no less real.

A natural corollary of viewing the spirit-world as the source of human suffering is the belief that man is (or thinks he is) under the thumb of God. If a person genuinely believes this, he will work to please the spirit-world through his actions. Morality has a practical emanation in this sense, because the goodness of a man's actions is tied to perceived material benefits. Evangelical Christianity encourages Africans to view their problems in this spiritual-moral frame of reference. The rhetorical pattern that emerges from African churches today is a lamentation, but not self-pitying, asking, "How can we change to better please God?"

The public health lobby answers this question by saying, essentially, "Start using condoms." This is the narrow-minded response, much more so than the call for behavioral change. As long as this attitude persists, Western policy will remain discordant with the realm of cause and effect within which Africans are operating. Christianity, as well as Islam, is a huge force whose day-to-day impact on African lives cannot be ignored. Any successful HIV/AIDS strategy will have to enlist churches, their moral authority and their enormous memberships.

HEALTH CARE REFORM

This sounds like a common sense way to solve the US health crisis. Business Week gives 10 ways to cut health costs.

Major problems exist for the elderly in the current bill. Where is the AARP?

The report, requested by House Republicans, found that Medicare cuts contained in the health package approved by the House on Nov. 7 are likely to prove so costly to hospitals and nursing homes that they could stop taking Medicare altogether.

MORE HASANS?

A study on the number of Muslims in the military.

Officials said the Defense Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff plan to discuss an examination of the Muslim presence in the U.S. military and the threat of Al Qaida influence.



Officials said the Pentagon has been receiving reports of Muslim soldiers who expressed opposition to the U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. They said the opposition was encouraged by Islamic clerics as well as Muslim officers such as Hasan, who warned Muslims against harming co-religionists.

MUSLIMS ADVISING US GOVERNMENT

This doesn't sound good to me--Dreher questions where the government is getting advice on Islam. Qutb is a radical Islamicist in my opinion. If Muslims advising the government believe and teach utb's philosophy, isn't this somehow influencing the advice they give.

Given that Qutb thought any Muslim that didn't share his bloodthirsty totalitarian view of Islam was no better than an infidel, you'd think that a Muslim who wanted to help the US government flag potential extremist threats domestically would be alarmed by discovering that Qutb was being taught to kids at a large local mosque. You would be wrong.

OBAMA'S TRADE POLICY

It appears to be drifting. . .and at a time our economy is in shreds. A view from Asia:

Across the region, concern is rising about the absence of US leadership on trade since Mr Obama took office. Few believe that he has the will or power to restart the Doha round of global trade talks – and he has not asked Congress for a renewal of the president’s fast-track negotiating authority.

UNEMPLOYMENT HEADED TO 20%

It might even reach 13%--this is not a good sign for Obama and the Dems. 12 reasons are given for this projection.

Gluskin Sheff economist David Rosenberg, formerly of Merrill Lynch, thinks the unemployment rate is going to at least 12 percent, maybe even 13 percent. Optimists, Rosenberg explains, underestimate the incredible damage done to the labor market during this downturn. And even before this downturn, the economy was not generating jobs in huge numbers. If he is right, all political bets are off. I think the Democrats could lose the House and effective control of the Senate. I think you would also be talking about the rise of third party and perhaps a challenger to Obama in 2012.

WASTE AT THE UN

From Volokh:

Indeed, when one raises even a handful of the many, many scandals surrounding the UN and money, the reaction among international law observers tends to be, in my experience, not shock and a resolution that the organization needs to be better held to account, but a general sense that those who dwell on the sordid details are somehow demeaning the institution.

FT. HOOD SHOOTING

Viktor David Hanson's view.

In other words, the narrative after 9/11 largely remains that Americans have given in to illegitimate "fear and mistrust" of Muslims in general. A saner approach would be to acknowledge that there is a small minority of Muslims who channel generic Islamist fantasies, so that we can assume that either formal terrorist plots or individual acts of murder will more or less occur here every three to six months.

Bruce Bawer's take.

Most of the people in the mainstream media, I suspect, could also see early on exactly what was going on — but to an outrageous degree, they, too, spent Thursday evening doing their best to turn away from the obvious truth. Throughout the evening military and other authorities kept saying, and the talking heads on CNN kept repeating, that there was no sign that this was “a terrorist act” — as if Nidal Malik Hasan had to be officially connected to al-Qaeda to be a jihadist, a pious Muslim who saw the infidel as his enemy.

From Hot Air: Hasan attended a radical mosque in Great Falls, Virginia.

The issue of political correctness in dealing with terror is analyzed by Ralph Peters.

How could the Army allow an obviously incompetent and dysfunctional psychiatrist to treat our troubled soldiers returning from war? An Islamist whacko is counseled for arguing with veterans who’ve been assigned to his care? And he’s not removed from duty? What planet does the Army live on?

Hasan psychotic according to Walter Reed officials. Doctors questioned his behavior. He wired money to Pakistan. Pam Geller's view.

REPUBLICAN HEALTH CARE BILL

The Republicans certainly have a much lower price tag on their bill. I will be watching to see how the critics deal with it.

The Congressional Budget Office Wednesday night released its cost analysis of the Republican health care plan and found that it would reduce health care premiums and cut the deficit by $68 billion over ten years.



The Republican plan does not call for a government insurance plan but rather attempts to reform the system by creating high-risk insurance pools, allowing people to purchase health insurance policies across state lines and instituting medical malpractice reforms.



"Not only does the GOP plan lower health care costs, but it also increases access to quality care, including for those with pre-existing conditions, at a price our country can afford," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said.

GOLD & US ECONOMY

This report in the Financial Times that India is buying a massive amount of gold indicates a lack of faith in the dollar.

GLOBAL WARMING QUESTIONED

I am seeing more "academic" articles questioning global warming as just a current phenomena. When I saw this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education questioning it, I began thinking that the questions have moved far beyond those so-called "right-wing," anti-intellectuals. I like the historical perspective of this scientist.

People have changed the planet's climate, warming the atmosphere by churning out greenhouse gases.

But that process didn't start during the Industrial Revolution. It began thousands of years ago, according to a controversial hypothesis, before anyone uttered the phrase "global warming."

The warming, triggered by a relative handful of farmers, some cutting and burning forests and others planting rice paddies, could be the best way to explain one of the strangest oddities in earth's climate record. The notion has admirers but also adamant detractors, who say it has major holes and—just as seriously—provides an excuse for skeptics of current global warming to say that climate change is a long-term trend that has little to do with car tailpipes and modern industry.

PROBLEMS WITH STIMULUS SPENDING

Reason.com has an interesting graph showing that the stimulus money is being spent disproportionately. The states with the highest unemployment are receiving fewer funds per person than states with lower employment. If one accepts the premise of the stimulus it should be spent in places where you need to jump-start the economy. And it looks like Congress and the administration are most focused on Washington D.C. where unemployment is less of an issue because of all the government jobs available. Poor Michigan and California.

And once again Business Week had an interesting article about the lack of investment in research and development. Both business and the federal government are very short-sighted, because it is r & d that creates future jobs. Stimulus money spent to keep some people hired in a day-care center has much less impact than money spent to develop innovations that lead to the jobs of the future. Washington and businesses are just focused on the present and not the future. But the future will come at some point.

OBAMA'S FOREIGN POLICY

A discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of Obama's foreign policy. Is he just engaged in community organizing at the international level?