What the Left at the “Nation” Demands from Democrats in the Lame Duck Session

Those at the “Nation”  a journal to Obama’s Left, offer this agenda to Democrats and the president:

“Nancy Pelosi says she wants to continue leading House Democrats because she is “driven by the urgency” of creating jobs and protecting healthcare reform, financial regulation, Social Security and Medicare. She’s got her priorities right. Now the soon-to-be-former speaker must get the politics right. The place to begin is the lame-duck session of Congress. The period after an election is not set aside for rearranging furniture; Congress sits for two years, not twenty-two months, and it’s supposed to do its job for the entire term. That doesn’t mean Democrats should be blind to the election results; to the contrary, they should respond to them—while getting things done for the American people.

The fundamental issue of the 2010 election campaign was jobs. The campaign played out in the shadow of an almost 
10 percent official unemployment rate and an unofficial rate (counting those who are underemployed or who have given up looking for work) closer to 17 percent. Every exit poll said voters were concerned about caring for the unemployed, promoting job creation and taking steps to develop a twenty-first-century economy that benefits working families.

That’s why Pelosi is smart to link the defense of healthcare reform, financial regulation and long-term commitments to maintaining Social Security with the need to create jobs. She can highlight the linkage during the lame-duck session by focusing on fundamentals: extending unemployment benefits, shoring up Medicare and Medicaid, and assuring that a stopgap spending bill contains funding not just to keep the federal government operating into the next year but to help state and local governments and school districts across the country do the same. These are all popular initiatives; Pelosi and Harry Reid—who still controls the Senate for the next two years—have no reason to accept the conventional wisdom that the election produced a mandate for conservative ideas, neglecting the plight of jobless Americans, cutting social services or forcing teacher layoffs in the middle of the school year.

Of course, the Republicans and their amen corner will screech about spending. Good. Democrats should take the moment to argue for letting the Bush tax cuts expire and using the new revenue to maintain federal, state and local services in tough economic times. President Obama has made the task harder by sending signals about compromises on the tax issue, but if compromise is necessary, the only credible one is giving relief to working families—not billionaires. The American people will get the point if Democrats make it aggressively and without apology.

Pelosi should also move the Fair Elections Now Act onto the floor for a vote, advancing a debate on an issue that Republicans don’t want discussed. We just finished the most expensive midterm election in US history; shouldn’t House and Senate committees hold hearings to look at how much was spent by corporations and billionaires, at the impact of that money on the elections and at the influence it will have on government? Republicans will scream, and incoming House Oversight chair Darrell Issa will surely shut down those hearings in January while opening hundreds of investigations on Democratic reforms. Bring it on. In her new role as minority leader, Pelosi could use her bully pulpit to ask essential questions. What is the GOP trying to hide? What do Republicans want to roll back? That’s a fighting stance, not a surrender position. And it’s one Democrats should maintain through the lame-duck session and into the 112th Congress.”

Comment:  What a battle if Obama listens to the “Nation” rather than the nation.

California Bankruptcy More Bankrupt Than Reported!

Victor Davis Hanson wrote the following expose of the bluest of blue states, California,  financial disaster at Pajamas Media:

“News came out on Thursday that the California budget deficit is actually closer to $25 billion, twice what we are told. This follows from last year’s $42 billion shortfall, which was closed by all sorts of one-time tax increases and gimmicks. Here is our general dilemma in a nutshell.

Taxes

Fact one: California has among the highest taxes in the nation, over 10% on top incomes, and about 9.5% that hits earners when they get above $47,000.

Sales taxes, depending on the county, average close to 10%. The result is that thousands (the exact number is unclear, perhaps between 2,000 and 3,500) of more affluent Californians are leaving the state each week for low- or no-tax states. Raise income taxes or sales taxes or gas taxes higher, and there will be a stampede. Note that property tax rates are not singularly that high in comparison to other states. Yet that fact is of little help since our assessments are often astronomical (given that we like to live on the coast and then, once there, ensure others cannot).

The apparent solution for now is to slap one- or two-year higher taxes on vehicle registration (sky-high), or issue fees to use state facilities, or to hike tuition at public colleges and universities (still cheap in comparison to private counterparts).

State Employees

Fact two: we have among the highest compensated state employees and teachers in the United States, with singularly powerful public employee unions. (I was governed by one for 21 years: professors at the closed-shop CSU were forced to pay union dues — even if we were not in the union, and objected to the union’s efforts to end merit pay and accountability and to ensure near universal tenure).

Yet in many categories we need more state employees to attend to basic services. But we cannot since the state operates a sort of caste system in which we pay so much to the entrenched that we cannot afford to hire more numerous entry-level workers. (Part-time PhDs at the CSU system make Wal-Mart greeters seem privileged in comparison). This is regrettable, because we tend to reward the superannuated and simply write off the younger and idealistic. An entire cohort of young California credentialed teachers and college graduates in general are in limbo, stuck in low-paying part-time jobs for the foreseeable future that won’t pay the interest on their student loans.

The Refined Classes

Fact three: a particular class, largely coastal, professional, and liberal, believes utopia is nearly here, if we just impose more regulation, higher taxes on businesses, and more environmental legislation. They have not a clue how others pump oil or gas, grow food, and produce lumber, only that they like driving, like eating, and like nice houses, but are not particularly interested in the grubby Neanderthals who allow that to happen.

So in times of near depression voters insist on stringent global warming/carbon emission laws, and keep adding regulations that hamper rather than encourage wealth creation. (Note: the more regulations we impose, the more they are ignored and the more lawless we become. Here in rural California, it is now common to see instant restaurants on the roadside: no septic systems, food preparation trailers plopped down with canopies, picnic tables, and plastic chairs, without the scrutiny that struggling restaurants put up with. Ditto instant hardware stores out on rural intersections where everything from new rakes to gas rototillers are peddled: no sales taxes, no questions, just a quick sale and on to the next location.

Fact four: we count on two things to save us. One, California is a beautiful natural paradise. Yesterday I drove from the high Sierra amid a blanket of alpine snow to the 70s in Palo Alto in a little over four hours, across one of the most productive and beautiful agrarian landscapes in the world. In sum, we think there will always be some of you who will fall in love with the aesthetics that we had nothing to do with, and thus might, like the proverbial fly landing on sticky paper, arrive and become enticed enough to let us tax you for a while in our P.T. Barnum-like con.

Two, someone in our past did not think like us, and so we inherited an infrastructure, universities, airports, and roads that we continue to milk but not refurbish or invest in. We, the less talented and industrious, but the far more critical and sarcastic, drive along I-5, and swim in beautiful Sierra manmade lakes, with the apparent belief that we are glad some anonymous fools did this for us. But we in our sophistication would never mar the landscape in the way they did. Think about blowing up Hetch Hetchy back to its natural beauty perhaps — then providing new drinking water for 85% of San Francisco, never.

The Unmentionable Topic

Fact five: we have no idea how many illegal aliens are in the state, and are left only with the paradox of being told 2-4 million reside here, but that the state also has about half of the nation’s 11-15 million illegal alien population. Add that up.

Nor are we told the greater social service costs of many second-generation Mexican-American citizens who, both at times tragically and heroically, must grow up so often in households in which their parents are here illegally, without English, and without a high school diploma. So Californians adopt an Orwellian persona: privately they assume that our near-rock bottom standing in nationwide public school math and English scores, record inmate population, out of control gangs, and assorted Medi-Cal and social service spending have something, or even a lot to do with the ripples from illegal immigration. But we also accept that even to suggest that is career suicide, given the changing political demography of the state. We prefer anecdote to statistic; one success story trumps five buried reports on failing schools, out of control public defender costs, or bankrupt emergency rooms. We have no idea how many Californians have fake IDs, or work for cash and untaxed wages, or work while on unemployment, or use public assistance money at casinos and palm readers (we call them “psychics”) (our governor just banned the use of public assistance funds for both in anger), but I do know from bitter experience that to even wonder out loud about that will earn all sorts of hatred and invective.

So we sound utopian in our public rhetoric, but privately millions of all races and ethnic backgrounds, including millions of liberals and Hispanics, are terribly worried, and so make the necessary adjustments: they avoid public schools like many in San Jose and Fresno; they do not live in towns like Orange Cove, Mendota, Parlier, Selma (mine, which I still enjoy), Fowler, or large areas of San Jose or Los Angeles, and they are careful where they go in the evening. When we see high school students at Morgan Hill High School walk out in anger at the crime of a few students wearing the American flag on Cinco de Mayo Day, Californians know enough to politely pass over that in conversation and yet not get near that school district in fact.

Gut-check Time

So we do not have much wiggle room left, especially when we vote for more of the sources of the problem and you in the other 49 states do not like loaning us $40 million a day just for our quite generous unemployment insurance in a very high-unemployment state. There are only so many gimmicks left. Either our Governor-elect and veteran liberal Jerry Brown will have to do a Nixon to China, or the Republican House will have to let us go broke and cut off the cash. Either way, it should be an interesting ride — perhaps a panic of 1893, Great Depression, 1970s stagflation, and 1992 state meltdown all in one surreal experience.”

Comment:  It doesn’t take too much imagination to realize these Democrats who run California, led by Rino Arnold Schwarzenegger, who preferred popularity over statesmanship, are going to rob endlessly from the U. S. Treasury to enhance their political power by massaging  their spoiled-rotten Roman constituencies  with more and more pleasures in exchange for them to   reelect Democrats  year in and year out,  ad nauseum.

How long will Americans living outside this sinking state be willing to pay for California  greed and sloth?

Charles Krauthammer on Obama’s Maneuverings at Home and Abroad….”Bad Week for the President”.

Click on a RealClearPolitics video of  the Fox News weekly panel starring analyst Charles Krauthammer reviewing the Obama invasion of the Far East and its accomplishments.  Learn more about Obamaplan  making the dollar worth less.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/11/12/krauthammer_on_fed_devaluing_us_dollar.html

Pre-existing Health Condition Crisis Just Another Obama Marxist-LIE

The deluge never occurred.   All those millions of Americans claimed by Barack Obama to have been denied insurance due to pre-existing conditions were in the bowls of  the Obama mind, invented  to jam  passage of the ObamaCare government takeover of the American Health industry into law this past Spring…,.was just another Obama Lie.  

This Obama lie was just another used to slander the country’s free enterprise system.

Please read this  morning’s  article at the  Wall Street Journal’s opinion page  on the topic:

“Democrats think they know how to run the insurance industry better than the insurance industry, and they’re getting the chance to prove it under ObamaCare.  Consider the early returns on its plan to insure Americans denied coverage for pre-existing conditions.

To judge by President Obama’s rhetoric, the insurance industry’s victims have been wandering the country like Okies in  “The Grapes of Wrath.”   thus ObamaCare gave the Health and Human Services Department the power to design and sell its own insurance policies.  The $5 billion program started in July and runs throught 2014, when ObamaCare’s broader regulations kick in.

Mr. Obama declared at the time that “uninsured Americans who’ve been locked out of the insurance market because of a pre-existing condition will now be able to enroll in a new national insurance pool where they’ll finally be able to purchase quality, affordable health care-some for the very first time in their lives.”

So far that statement accurately describes a single person in North Dakota.  Literally, one person has signed up out of 647,000 state residents.  Four people have enrolled in West Virginia.  Things are better in Minnesota where Mr. Obama has rescued 15 out of 5.2 million, and also in Indiana – 63 people there.  HHS did best among the 24.7 million Texans.  Thanks to ObamaCare, 393 of them are now insured.”

A Request from Dennis Prager: Call Sears and Register a Complaint

Dennis Prager has asked his listeners to consider calling Sears (the Sears of Sears, Roebuck, and Co.)  He hasn’t request a boycott, but a request that they do not open Sears stores on  Thanksgiving Day…………….Which, recently, they have announced they will do.

Dennis reminded his audiences that Sears has been in business for over 125 years and has always honored Thanksgiving Day by recognizing it for a day of reflection and thanks.  We have been very blessed in America.   Dennis also reminded folks that it is an American holiday, not a religious one, so  the Marxist Lefties shouldn’t be so  disturbed  as to riot in protest……this last phrase about the Lefties is mine, not Dennis’, but I am guessing he knows what I mean.

The ACLU might object citing that Thanksgiving Day has a religious fever about it…….and by setting the day as anything unusual suggests a violation of everything being equal.

Please check out Dennis Prager’s web site for further information.

Chris Christie, the Anti-Obama, Rocking on the Campaign Trail

Jill Lawrence writes the following at Politics Daily, in an article called “Chris Christie’s Star Turn Raises National Prospects:

“The unlikely emergence of Chris Christie proves once again that you can never tell who is going to take off in the public imagination. The New Jersey governor not only rocked on the 2010 campaign trail, he quickly became a regular on short lists of Republican presidential prospects.

A year ago, the new Republican governor to watch was the one who prevailed in the only other gubernatorial race of 2009, Bob McDonnell of Virginia. The even-tempered, perfectly coiffed McDonnell ran a textbook campaign, won by 17 percentage points and was chosen to give the televised GOP response to President Obama’s State of the Union address.

To the north, in a different kind of campaign, Christie was demanding that Gov. Jon Corzine “man up and say I’m fat” in response to Corzine ads that made unsubtle allusions to Christie’s size. Toward the end, conservative columnist Paul Mulshine suggested Christie’s campaign might be the worst-run in state history and accused him of “trying to reinvent the flat tire.”

A four-point victory transformed Christie’s standing but not his style. Between battles with Democrats and their allies, he raised nearly $9 million this year for Republican candidates, according to political adviser Mike DuHaime (considerably more than McDonnell’s $2.5 million). Throughout, the former federal prosecutor has maintained a trademark manner so blunt and combative that the Quinnipiac University Poll routinely asks New Jersey residents whether they consider him a leader or a bully. “Leader” has hovered at 50 percent in recent months.

Both Christie and McDonnell laid impressive groundwork this year for their political futures, hitting the trail in 15 and 17 states, respectively. Their paths crossed in only six states: gubernatorial races in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, California, Illinois and Maryland. Beyond that, their itineraries diverged, with Christie for the most part staying out of southern, border and conservative states.

The New Jersey governor campaigned in governor’s races in Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Connecticut, Minnesota and Oregon; Senate races in Connecticut, Delaware and Florida; and four House races in Pennsylvania. He made repeated trips for Rust Belt candidates, including three for Tom Corbett, now the governor-elect of Pennsylvania.

At one rally for Corbett, Christie happily described how New Jersey Democrats compared him to “Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, all those great leaders of the past,” after he had dealt with a budget deficit by declaring a fiscal emergency, impounding money and issuing executive orders. “I fixed it by myself,” he said.

In California, a finger-pointing Christie faced down a hostile questioner at a Meg Whitman event, talking over him loudly to tell him that “it’s people who raise their voices and yell and scream like you that are dividing this country.” The clip ended up making Christie famous across the political spectrum.

My first and only encounter with Christie came at the National Governors Association meeting in Boston last summer. Standing under the Massachusetts statehouse dome, talking with unfamiliar reporters who expected bipartisan pleasantries, he launched into a scorching attack on public employee unions. He accused them of refusing to share the pain of the recession.

A month later, New Jersey was in the news for losing $400 million in the competitive “Race to the Top” education grants from the federal government. The culprit appeared to be a clerical error (budget data for the wrong year) that cost the state three points and knocked it into 11th place. But Christie’s frosty relations with labor soon emerged as another, perhaps larger factor in the loss.

Teacher-union support is worth far more than three points to federal evaluators and has been a hallmark of winning grant applications. It turned out Christie had at the last minute rejected an application that then-education commissioner Bret Schundler had worked out with the New Jersey Education Association. The budget glitch “would have been irrelevant” had the overall application been stronger, said NJEA spokesman Steve Baker.

Christie fired Schundler in August. In subpoenaed testimony under oath last month to a legislative committee, Schundler said the compromise plan gave Christie 90 percent of what he wanted and he could have pursued the rest in the legislature. But he said Christie insisted the compromises be dropped and the application be hastily rewritten because a talk radio host was saying he had “caved in to the union.”

A former Jersey City mayor and two-time candidate for governor, Schundler told me he was compelled to testify and his goal has not been to “take on” the governor. He even told me that he is not surprised at Christie’s success on the national campaign trail. “He’s struck chords which for [Republican] primary voters are attractive. He has shown willingness to make very aggressive cuts in spending growth,” Schundler said.

DuHaime said Christie was in high demand in part because of political geography. “We talk an awful lot as a party about cutting spending and cutting taxes and living within our means, and he’s proven you can do it in a blue state with a Democratic-controlled state legislature,” DuHaime said. “He’s doing a good job as governor in a place where people thought it might be difficult.”

Baker, citing $820 million in education cuts that Christie is trying to impose, offered a different reason for Christie’s success: “People across the country don’t have to live with the consequences of the decisions that he’s making.” So far, however, Christie is holding his own. A new poll from Quinnipiac finds that 52 percent approve of his handling of the state budget, versus 42 percent who disapprove.

The Race to the Top fiasco has not cramped the governor’s penchant for bold moves and fighting words. In recent weeks he has killed a new commuter rail tunnel to Manhattan, saying it’s too expensive (commuters and invest-in-infrastructure types were stricken, but 53 percent in New Jersey support Christie’s decision).

He also told teen-agers in Trenton that if their teachers “cared about learning,” they would not be “in Atlantic City having a party.” It was a reference to the education association’s annual convention, held Nov. 4-5, which this year featured 300 seminars and workshops, classroom technology demonstrations and 700 exhibitors. “The governor has once again spoken passionately without the facts,” NJEA vice president Wendell Steinhauer told the local Fox affiliate.

In Virginia, controversial headlines usually involve not McDonnell but Ken Cuccinelli, a conservative firebrand who succeeded McDonnell as state attorney general. McDonnell — conservative but no firebrand — is usually in the role of smoothing feathers after Cuccinelli has ruffled them.

The governor did have one major controversy of his own, after he failed to mention slavery in a proclamation of Confederate History Month in April. McDonnell later apologized for what he called his “major and unacceptable omission.” He said next year’s proclamation will be called “Civil War in Virginia” and written to remember all Virginians. The conciliatory gesture and language (he had made, he said, “an error of haste and not of heart”) were widely praised.

Out on the campaign trail, in addition to states he had in common with Christie, McDonnell helped out in governor’s races in Nevada, Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, Vermont and Massachusetts; Senate races in Missouri, Washington, Arizona and California; and nine House races in Virginia. Since he is limited to one term by law, he will have to find something else to do in 2014.

Sadly for their fans, neither of the 2009 governors will likely be running for president in 2012. McDonnell has said he is “fully committed” to serving his four years. Christie said last weekend on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he is “absolutely” not running. Some are skeptical about the repeated denials, but DuHaime offered three more this week in one sentence. “He’s not running, he’s not running, he’s not running,” he told me.

Christie and McDonnell will each have nearly three years in office when it comes time for the GOP nominee to pick a vice president — a year more than former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had under her belt when John McCain tapped her. The odds are probably better for McDonnell than Christie. “Can you see me as somebody’s vice president?” Christie asked on “Meet the Press.” “I would feel bad for that poor man or woman.”

Nor does he plan to change. Said the man nicknamed Gov. Wrecking Ball, “I am who I am.” It’s an open question how that will play outside the northeast and Midwest, and over time.  Lucky for him, he’s 48 and not term-limited.  The 2013 gubwernatorial election will be a test of how well he wears.”

Comment:  “How well he wears”, running for governor of New Jersey in 2013?    Does anyone think he would resign from his first year as President of the United States to return to be Governor of New Jersey?  

Chris Christie is everything Barack Hussein Obama is not.   He is the antiObama, forthright, direct, verbal, aggressive, speaks with clarity and content, bright and quick, American born and bred, and is a terrific communicator with or without teleprompter.  He doesn’t have to hide and fudge looking for escape hatches with every paragraph of speech…….He is what he believes, not what he wants his audience to believe he is.

Chris Christie is as authentic and Barack Hussein Obama is synthetic and artificial…….and…..

Chris Christie is not a Marxist and never went to Jeremiah Wright’s “Goddamn America” church.

The only question is whether Republicans have any manhood to choose him for the 2012 presidency.

For anyone who hasn’t seen Governor Christie at work, or for those who have and want to be refreshed to know that there are still some human males in 2010 American politics, please click here: 
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/05/13/video-chris-christie-destroys-reporter-for-calling-him-confrontational/

Mr. Christie is the antiObama in today’s America.   However, if you aren’t yet persuaded, how about his approach to clean up the graft in his state’s public sector?    Try clicking below for another demonstration of leadership:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/christie-makes-it-personal-107057143.html

Obama’s EPA to Kill Jobs

Job-Killing Environmentalists

President Barack Obama seems more concerned with appeasing environmental extremists in his administration than he is with the lost jobs of Americans, says Jon Basil Utley, associate publisher of the American Conservative.

Below are three areas where the environmental extremists hope to wreak havoc on the American economy:

Carbon Dioxide.

• Human activity accounts for less than 4 percent of global CO₂ emissions and CO₂ itself accounts for only 10 percent or 20 percent of the greenhouse effect.
• Water vapor accounts for most of the other 80 percent.
• The Christian Science Monitor recently published an analysis of how the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) plans for reducing carbon dioxide could cause the loss of over a million jobs and raise every family’s energy costs by over $1,200.

Factory Boilers.

• The EPA wants new, more stringent limits on soot emissions from industrial and factory boilers.
• This would cost $9.5 billion according to the EPA, or over $20 billion according to the American Chemistry Council.
• A study released by the Council of Industrial Boiler Owners says the new rules would put 300,000 to 800,000 jobs at risk as industries opted to close plants rather than pay the expensive new costs.

Ground Level Ozone.

• The EPA has asked the U.S. government to enact new smog regulations for ground-level ozone that will cut levels to .006 to .007 parts per million — this comes less than two years after standards were set at .0075 particles of pollutants per one million.
• The New York Times reports that the agency quotes the price tag of such a change at between $19 billion and $100 billion per year by 2020.

It’s time for Congress to investigate what the EPA and its reckless agenda is costing American workers, businesses and taxpayers, says Utley.

Source: Jon Basil Utley, “Job-Killing Environmentalists,” Reason Magazine, November 10, 2010.

For text:

http://reason.com/archives/2010/11/10/job-killing-environmentalists

For more on Environment Issues:

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=31

(The above article is from the National Center for Policy Analysis.)

Charles Krauthammer: The Importance of India in America’s Future

 Charles Krauthammer reminds us that President Obama cannot be wrong on all matters.  Read about it in his article at National Review Online:  “Why Obama’s Right about India.”

“There has been much grousing about the expense of President Obama’s India trip. This is silly and vindictive. The one thing this country owes its leader is to spare no expense in protecting him. Especially when his first stop is Bombay, scene of one of the most savage and sustained terror attacks in modern times.

It is protested that Britain’s prime minister took a British Airways flight when he traveled to Washington in July. So what? To be blunt about it: A once-imperial middle power flies commercial; America flies colossal. Why do you think we built that 747 flying palace emblazoned with the presidential insignia — if not to land to awestruck crowds wherever it goes?

There was grumbling about the White House taking over every room at Bombay’s five-star Taj Mahal Palace hotel. What is the Secret Service to do? Allow suites to be let to, say, groups of Pakistani madrassa instructors?

I will admit that Indian authorities went somewhat overboard when they cut down the coconuts surrounding the Gandhi museum in Bombay. I am no expert on this, having never been subjected to a coconut attack, but it seems to me that a freefalling coconut would be no match for an armored car built to withstand anything short of a nuclear device. Now perhaps the enemy, always racing one step ahead of us, is working on the dreaded RPC: the rocket-propelled coconut. I’m not privy to all the intelligence here, and, try as I may, I could get nothing out of the Coconut Desk at the CIA. Nonetheless, to this outsider, the anti-coconut measures seemed a bit excessive.

But I digress. The only alternative to drawing down the Treasury to move the president around safely is not to let him go at all. And that’s not feasible. Presidential visits are the highest form of diplomacy, and the symbolism alone carries enormous weight. No one remembers what Nixon did in China; what changed the world is that Nixon went to China.

The visit to India was particularly necessary in the light of Obama’s bumbling over-enthusiasm in his 2009 trip to China, in which he lavished much time, energy, and praise upon his hosts and then oddly tried to elevate Beijing to a G-2 partnership, a kind of two-nation world condominium. Worse, however, was Obama’s suggesting a Chinese role in South Asia — an affront to India’s autonomy and regional dominance, and a signal of U.S. acquiescence to Chinese hegemony.

This hegemony is the growing source of tension in Asia today. Modern China is the Germany of a century ago — a rising, expanding, have-not power seeking its place in the sun. The story of the first half of the 20th century was Europe’s attempt to manage Germany’s rise. We know how that turned out. The story of the next half-century will be how Asia accommodates and/or contains China’s expansion.

Nor is this some far-off concern. China’s aggressive territorial claims on resource-rich waters claimed by Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Japan are already roiling the neighborhood. Traditionally, Japan has been the major regional counterbalance. But an aging, shrinking Japan cannot sustain that role. Symbolic of the dramatic shift in power balance between once-poor China and once-dominant Japan was the resolution of their recent maritime crisis. Japan had detained a Chinese captain in a territorial-waters dispute. China imposed an embargo on rare-earth minerals. Japan capitulated.

That makes the traditional U.S. role as offshore balancer all the more important. China’s neighbors, from South Korea all the way around to India, are in need of U.S. support of their own efforts at resisting Chinese dominion.

And of all these countries, India, which has fought a border war with China, is the most natural anchor for such a U.S. partnership. It’s not just our inherent affinities — democratic, English-speaking, free-market, dedicated to the rule of law. It is also the coincidence of our strategic imperatives: We both face the threat of radical Islam and the longer-term challenge of a rising China.

Which is why Obama’s dramatic call for India to be made a permanent member of the Security Council was so important. However useless and obsolete the U.N. may be, a Security Council seat carries totemic significance. It would elevate India, while helping bind it to us as our most strategic and organic Third World ally.

China is no enemy, but it remains troublingly adversarial. Which is why India must be the center of our Asian diplomacy. And why Obama’s trip — coconuts and all — was worth every penny.”

Comment:  Mr. Obama didn’t invent the need to be a close ally to India.  George W. had paved the wahy.

 

Peggy Noonan, the Republican Message and Obama Gifts

I read Peggy Noonan regularly.  I have never met her beyond the reading.  She is pictured as an “eastern” state gal, one who has never soiled her fingers by digging out a dandelion.  She has disdain for Sarah Palin, whom I tremendously admire but don’t support her for president.  Peggy seems stuffy, but, I read her anyway……after all, she isn’t writing in some garden publication.

“Obama’s Gift to the GOP” is the title of her today’s Wall Street Journal entry.   Peggy isn’t enamored with the president.  Her stock skyrockets as she writes him so well:

“Democrats are down, and sniping at each other. That’s the way it goes when parties lose. What’s interesting is the mood this week among Republicans on the ground. It’s not triumphal. They all seem to have in the back of their minds a question: Is this election the beginning of the big turnaround? Is this when the GOP comes to the fore as its best self and soberly, shrewdly pursues policies that will help dig our country out of the mess? Or will the great sweep of 2010 come to be seen, in retrospect, as just another lurch and shift in a nation whose political tectonic plates have been unstable since 2006?

They’re not sure, but there’s a high degree of hope for the former. And that’s news, because Republicans haven’t been hopeful in a long time.

They continue to be blessed by luck. Whatever word means the opposite of snakebit, that is what the Republican party is right now. One reason they are feeling hope is that they have received two big and unexpected gifts from President Obama. The first, of course, was his political implosion—his quick descent and speedy fall into unpopularity, which shaped the outcome of the 2010 elections. At the heart of that descent was the president’s inability to understand how the majority of Americans were thinking. From the day he was sworn in he seemed to have had no practical or intuitive sense of what was on the American mind. By early 2009 they had one deep and central worry, the economy. But his central preoccupation was reforming health care. He devoted his first 18 months to it and got what he wanted, but at the price of seeming wholly out of touch with the thoughts and concerns of the American people.

This week the president gave Republicans a second unexpected gift. He reacted to the election’s outcome in a way that suggested he’s still in his own world, still seeing a reality no one else is seeing. The problem wasn’t his policies, but that he didn’t explain them well. It wasn’t health-care reform, it was his failed attempt to popularize it. His problem was that he was not political enough. He was too substantive, too serious. Americans have been under stress, and people under stress don’t think clearly, and so they couldn’t see the size of his achievements.

He sounded like a man who couldn’t see what was obvious to everyone else, and once again made his political adversaries seem, in comparison, more realistic, more clear-sighted and responsive to public opinion. And he did this while everyone was watching. Again, what a gift.

Two areas seem to me key for Republican leaders in Washington. One is a long-term concern, the other an immediate one.

The first has to do with the art of political persuasion. A month ago, in conversation with a veteran Democrat, I mentioned that the old cliché is now truer than ever, that everything happens in the center. The path to victory is through the center, that’s where things are won. The Democrat nodded vigorously. “Compromise,” she said, “it’s so important.”

But compromise was not my point. Persuasion was my point. Compromise is a tool you use to get the best legislation possible, but you have to persuade the big center that your way is the better way. We’re in an age where politicians assert, insist and leave. It’s all quick, blunt and dumb. But to win and hold the center you have to make your case, you have to show you’re philosophically serious, you have to show your logic, and connect it to a philosophy. You don’t sit around saying, “I like centrists so I compromise,” you say, “Here’s what we believe, here’s how we think and why.”

The establishment of the GOP hasn’t been good at this. Some of them aren’t philosophically serious. Some don’t know that persuasion is at the heart of things. Some know but aren’t good at it. Some think they’re never given quite the right venue to expand on their views, or questioned in the right way. They should create venues.

A lot of this will fall to the newly elected congressmen and senators, and the philosophically inclined incumbents who’ve been quiet and let the leadership dominate the stage the past few years.

Right now the center is with the Republicans. They voted like Democrats in 2008 and like Republicans in 2010. But there’s going to be lots of drama in Washington the next few months, and things could turn on a dime. To hold the center you have to respect your own case enough to argue for it, and respect the people enough to explain it.

The second area has to do with the media environment that will exist in January, when the new Congress is sworn in. The mainstream media already has a story line in its head, and it is that a lot of these new Congress critters are a little radical, a little nutty.

Media bias is what we all know it is, largely political but also having to do with the needs of editors and producers. The media is looking for drama. They are looking for a colorful story. They want to do reporting that isn’t bland, that has a certain edge. We saw this throughout the past year as they covered big tea party rallies.

A reporter would be walking along with a cameraman. At one picnic blanket she sees a sober fellow and his handsome family. He looks like an orthodontist or a midlevel manager. His family looks happy, normal, pleasant. Right next to them, on a foldout lawn chair, is a scowling woman in a big straw bonnet with a dozen tea bags hanging from the brim. She’s holding a sign, a picture of Obama in a Hitler mustache. Who does the reporter choose to interview? I think we know. A better question might be who would you pick if you were that reporter and had a producer back in the newsroom who wanted interesting copy, colorful characters and vivid pictures.

The mainstream media this January will be looking for the nuts.

I saw this in 1994, when the new Republican Congress came in. The media had a storyline in their head then, too: These wild and crazy righties who just got elected are . . . wild and crazy. They focused their cameras on people who could be portrayed as nutty, and found them. The spirited Helen Chenoweth, freshman from Idaho, talked a little too much about “black helicopters.” She was portrayed as paranoid and eccentric. Bob Livingston, from New Orleans, went to his first meeting of the Appropriations Committee wielding a machete. The new speaker, Newt Gingrich, was full of pronouncements and provocations; he was a one-man drama machine.

It was a high spirited group, and one operating without a conservative media infrastructure to defend them. They and others were caught and tagged like big wild birds, then released into the air, damaged.

The point is when they want to paint you as nuts and yahoos, don’t help them paint you as nuts and yahoos. It’s good to keep in mind the advice of the 19th century actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who once said, speaking in a different context, that she didn’t really care what people did as long as they didn’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.

That would be the advice for incoming Republicans: Stand tall, speak clear, and don’t frighten the horses.”

Comment:  I have even more disdain for Republicans over the past twenty years than does Ms. Noonan when she describes them in her writings.   But, I think I am for forgiving of their incompetence and absence of core.   

Every voting American should have sympathy for these pleasant creatures.  Nearly all of their lives they have had to endure Lefty tyrants running their classrooms, the television news, movie entertainment, and likely their Sunday mass.  They wanted to be conservative, they wanted to talk conservative, they wanted to think and write conservative, but they didn’t know how.

They didn’t dare.   They would be punished.

Is it surprising that some have become giddy and foolish when suddenly they feel a breeze of freedom to utter something that won’t be used as a baseball bat to smash the idea out of their heads?

I have some faith in this new bunch of Republicans entering the House of Representatives.  And it is because of the evangelical conservative work of Sarah Palin and her followers.  This women has reintroduced Americans to democracy……to the dismay of  the Obama Lefty tyrants.

The people may be dumb, all right, but we are not dumb on all fronts, Mr. Obama and  fledgling Marxists!

Roger Simon Adjusting to the Stench of a U.N. Conference

Exploring through the news and its topics, I came across a piece written by Roger Simon in the Washington Times:  April 27,2009, “Kafka meets “Orwell”.     It seems Mr. Simon had attend a United Nations function and the function included a special guest as main speaker for the event.

“I am writing on the long flight back to Los Angeles from Geneva, where I have just attended the so-called Durban Review Conference of the United Nations, aka Durban II.

How was it? Well, when early 20th-century journalist Lincoln Steffens returned from the Soviet Union after the October Revolution, he famously proclaimed he had been “over to the future, and it works.” To paraphrase, I have been to the U.N. present, and it’s nuts!

Steffens was proved wildly wrong, but I strongly suspect I am more accurate. A conference on racism and human rights that features Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as, in essence, its keynote – indeed only significant – speaker is on the edge of a psychotic nightmare. It makes you think you’re living in some alternative universe out of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” among a society of multilingual bureaucrats nostalgic for Josef Stalin.

Of course, it wasn’t intended to be that way. The United Nations expected its review (and subsequent ratification!) of the notorious Durban I conference – the 2001 Israel-bash that singled out that country as the world’s sole apartheid state – to be the usual self-preserving exercise in diplomatic double-speak.

But it couldn’t control Mr. Ahmadinejad’s pathological anti-Semitism, and everything ran off the rails. Normally complaisant European countries like Norway walked out, and the conference virtually shut down the next day out of embarrassment.

U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay announced that the Main Committee (whoever its members were – it was never explained) had approved the final statement three days in advance of schedule, and a tomblike silence fell over the Palais des Nations.

My guess is that silence is the default position for the Palais, which resembles nothing so much as Franz Kafka’s “The Castle.” The European U.N. headquarters and original home of the League of Nations is a vast, labyrinthine place that no known person could find his way around without the most experienced guide – certainly not the reporters who had congregated from around the world for the conference, many of whom I would encounter wandering lost in the endless corridors looking for the “media center.”

If they were exceedingly fortunate and stumbled on that center, they found, well, exactly nothing, because there was no information to be obtained. An unblinking female official, again out of Kafka, sat there, staring blankly while nodding opaquely to their questions.

That may be the point. A few years back, after the debacle of the oil-for-food scandal, when the United Nations was caught siphoning billions to international thugs under the guise of helping Iraq’s children, then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan promised the world transparency. No such luck. Although U.S. taxpayers front 22 percent of the U.N. budget, we still know almost nothing about what things cost at the global governmental organization.

Durban II was no exception. Interviewing conference spokesperson (in U.N. speak “Chief, Civil Society Service, Outreach Division, Department of Public Information”) Ramu Damodaran for PJTV, I asked him what the bill was for the Ahmadinejad show. He said he couldn’t tell me because it was part of a “larger budget.” When I asked what that was, he didn’t have an answer either, but he did acknowledge that other people were “interested

But it couldn’t control Mr. Ahmadinejad’s pathological anti-Semitism, and everything ran off the rails. Normally complaisant European countries like Norway walked out, and the conference virtually shut down the next day out of embarrassment.

U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay announced that the Main Committee (whoever its members were – it was never explained) had approved the final statement three days in advance of schedule, and a tomblike silence fell over the Palais des Nations.

Whatever the United Nations paid for the privilege of having Mr. Ahmadinejad spew Holocaust denial, the Iranian leader clearly gave back to the city of Geneva, taking, I was told, 40 rooms in the hotel where I was staying – the Intercontinental. He also had a party there for 500 of his closest, largely Iranian, local friends.

No wonder the Swiss president eagerly and publicly shook Mr. Ahmadinejad’s hand upon his arrival. It caused some local criticism, but only minor. It is obvious that the United Nations and its conferences are big business in Geneva – a city of sleek Mercedes-Benzes with diplomatic plates cruising by the rows of private banks that line the Rhone River. No one wants to disrupt that.

But this posh greed is only part of the reason the Durban Review Conference depressed me. What I witnessed was not an anti-racism conference, but a pro-racism one – and not just because of Mr. Ahmadinejad. In fact, if the Iranian madman had not been there, the whole thing might have slipped by. At least now there might be some tiny chance that others will take a second look at what the United Nations is doing.

Hoover Institution scholar Shelby Steele eloquently expressed this irony – that Durban II actually encouraged racism – at a kind of counterconference organized at the Palais by Anne Bayefsky of the Touro Institute. It featured Elie Wiesel, Natan Sharansky, Jon Voight, Alan Dershowitz and the Rev. Patrick Desbois.

According to Mr. Steele – who is black – racism, though of course still a problem, diminished significantly in Western culture in recent years. In short, it is no longer cool to be racist – far from it.

In organizing the Durban Review Conference, the United Nations – besides wasting everyone’s money – emphasized and actually reinforced this marginal racism, providing developing nations and their representatives an excuse for their situation and a “distraction” from it (anti-Semitism above all). So they blame others and don’t bother to improve themselves. Orwell and Kafka would not have been surprised.

Let’s hope there’s no Durban III.

Roger L. Simon is a novelist and screenwriter and the chief executive officer of Pajamas Media and Pajamas TV. His most recent book is “Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror.”

Comment:  I am wondering if anyone reads either Kafka or Orwell anymore.   Has lefty academia removed those works from the required lists?