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-Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
No climate debate? Yes, there is
IN HIS WEEKLY address on Saturday, President Obama saluted the House of Representatives for passing Waxman-Markey, the gargantuan energy-rationing bill that would amount to the largest tax increase in the nation’s history. It would do so by making virtually everything that depends on energy - which is virtually everything - more expensive.

The president doesn’t describe the legislation in those terms now, but he made no bones about it last year. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008, he calmly explained how cap-and-trade - the carbon-dioxide rationing scheme that is at the heart of Waxman-Markey - would work:

“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket . . . because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, natural gas, you name it . . . Whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money, and they will pass that [cost] on to consumers.’’

In the same interview, Obama suggested that his energy policy would require the ruin of the coal industry. “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can,’’ he told the Chronicle. “It’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.’’

The justification for inflicting this financial misery, of course, is the onrushing catastrophe of human-induced global warming - a catastrophe that can be prevented only if we abandon the carbon-based fuels on which most of the prosperity and productivity of modern life depend. But what if that looming catastrophe isn’t real? What if climate change has little or nothing to do with human activity? What if enacting cap-and-trade means incurring excruciating costs in exchange for infinitesimal benefits?

Hush, says Obama. Don’t ask such questions. “There is no longer a debate about whether carbon pollution is placing our planet in jeopardy,’’ he declared Saturday. “It’s happening.’’

No debate? The debate over global warming is more robust than it has been in years, and not only in America. “In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming,’’ Kimberly Strassel noted in The Wall Street Journal the other day. “In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted . . . Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the ‘new religion.’ ’’

Closer to home, the noted physicist Hal Lewis (emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara) e-mails me a copy of a statement he and several fellow scientists, including physicists Will Happer and Robert Austin of Princeton, Laurence Gould of the University of Hartford, and climatologist Richard Lindzen of MIT, have sent to Congress. “The sky is not falling,’’ they write. Far from warming, “the Earth has been cooling for 10 years’’ - a trend that “was not predicted by the alarmists’ computer models.’’

Fortune magazine recently profiled veteran climatologist John Christy, a lead author of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. With his green credentials, Fortune observed, Christy is the warm-mongers’ “worst nightmare - an accomplished climate scientist with no ties to Big Oil who has produced reams and reams of data that undermine arguments that the earth’s atmosphere is warming at an unusual rate and question whether the remedies being talked about in Congress will actually do any good.’’

No one who cares about the environment or the nation’s economic well-being should take it on faith that climate change is a crisis, or that drastic changes to the economy are essential to “save the planet.’’ Hundreds of scientists reject the alarmist narrative. For non-experts, a steadily-widening shelf of excellent books surveys the data in laymen’s terms and exposes the weaknesses in the doomsday scenario - among others, “Climate Confusion’’ by Roy W. Spencer, “Climate of Fear’’ by Thomas Gale Moore, “Taken by Storm’’ by Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick, and “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years’’ by S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery.

If the case for a war on carbon dioxide were unassailable, no one would have to warn against debating it. The 212 House members who voted against Waxman-Markey last week plainly don’t believe the matter is settled. They’re right.
Posted by: GolfBravoUSMC || 07/01/2009 12:21 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  They must be killed sez Krazy Kruggy...

Betraying the Planet

By PAUL KRUGMAN

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.

In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Given this contempt for hard science, I’m almost reluctant to mention the deniers’ dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.
Posted by: tu3031 || 07/01/2009 13:12 Comments || Top||

#2  We Humans exhale Carbon Dioxide, if they're so concerned about an entirely natural making of plant food, just slit their own throats to "Eliminate a huge Carbon Dioxide polluter"

Start with Oblahblahblah as his mouth is always open..
Posted by: Redneck Jim || 07/01/2009 15:53 Comments || Top||


Caribbean-Latin America
The Wages of Chavismo
The Honduran coup is a reaction to Chávez's rule by the mob.

As military "coups" go, the one this weekend in Honduras was strangely, well, democratic. The military didn't oust President Manuel Zelaya on its own but instead followed an order of the Supreme Court. It also quickly turned power over to the president of the Honduran Congress, a man from the same party as Mr. Zelaya. The legislature and legal authorities all remain intact.

We mention these not so small details because they are being overlooked as the world, including the U.S. President, denounces tiny Honduras in a way that it never has, say, Iran. President Obama is joining the U.N., Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez and other model democrats in demanding that Mr. Zelaya be allowed to return from exile and restored to power. Maybe it's time to sort the real from the phony Latin American democrats.

The situation is messy, and we think the Hondurans would have been smarter -- and better off -- not sending Mr. Zelaya into exile at dawn. Mr. Zelaya was pressing ahead with a nonbinding referendum to demand a constitutional rewrite to let him seek a second four-year term. The attorney general and Honduran courts declared the vote illegal and warned he'd be prosecuted if he followed through. Mr. Zelaya persisted, even leading a violent mob last week to seize and distribute ballots imported from Venezuela. However, the proper constitutional route was to impeach Mr. Zelaya and then arrest him for violating the law.

Yet the events in Honduras also need to be understood in the context of Latin America's decade of chavismo. Venezuela's Hugo Chávez was democratically elected in 1998, but he has since used every lever of power, legal and extralegal, to subvert democracy. He first ordered a rewrite of the constitution that allowed his simple majority in the national assembly grant him the power to rule by decree for one year and to control the judiciary.

In 2004 he packed the Supreme Court with 32 justices from 20. Any judge who rules against his interests can be fired. He made the electoral tribunal that oversees elections his own political tool, denying opposition requests to inspect voter rolls and oversee vote counts. The once politically independent oil company now hires only Chávez allies, and independent television stations have had their licenses revoked.

Mr. Chávez has also exported this brand of one-man-one-vote-once democracy throughout the region. He's succeeded to varying degrees in Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Nicaragua, where his allies have stretched the law and tried to dominate the media and the courts. Mexico escaped in 2006 when Felipe Calderón linked his leftwing opponent to chavismo and barely won the presidency.

In Honduras Mr. Chávez funneled Veneuzelan oil money to help Mr. Zelaya win in 2005, and Mr. Zelaya has veered increasingly left in his four-year term. The Honduran constitution limits presidents to a single term, which is scheduled to end in January. Mr. Zelaya was using the extralegal referendum as an act of political intimidation to force the Congress to allow a rewrite of the constitution so he could retain power. The opposition had pledged to boycott the vote, which meant that Mr. Zelaya would have won by a landslide.

Such populist intimidation has worked elsewhere in the region, and Hondurans are understandably afraid that, backed by Chávez agents and money, it could lead to similar antidemocratic subversion there. In Tegucigalpa yesterday, thousands demonstrated against Mr. Zelaya, and new deputy foreign minister Marta Lorena Casco told the crowd that "Chávez consumed Venezuela, then Bolivia, after that Ecuador and Nicaragua, but in Honduras that didn't happen."

It's no accident that Mr. Chávez is now leading the charge to have Mr. Zelaya reinstated, and on Monday the Honduran traveled to a leftwing summit in Managua in one of Mr. Chávez's planes. The U.N. and Organization of American States are also threatening the tiny nation with ostracism and other punishment if it doesn't readmit him. Meanwhile, the new Honduran government is saying it will arrest Mr. Zelaya if he returns. This may be the best legal outcome, but it also runs the risk of destabilizing the country. We recall when the Clinton Administration restored Bertrand Aristide to Haiti, only to have the country descend into anarchy.

As for the Obama Administration, it seems eager to "meddle" in Honduras in a way Mr. Obama claimed was counterproductive in Iran. Yet the stolen election in Iran was a far clearer subversion of democracy than the coup in Honduras. As a candidate, Mr. Obama often scored George W. Bush's foreign policy by saying democracy requires more than an election -- a free press, for example, civil society and the rule of law rather than rule by the mob. It's a point worth recalling before Mr. Obama hands a political victory to the forces of chavismo in Latin America.
Posted by: tu3031 || 07/01/2009 13:55 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Truth. Something OBAMA simply cannot see.
Posted by: Redneck Jim || 07/01/2009 16:03 Comments || Top||

#2  the OAS also stood with Castro and Chavez
so did the UN Gen Assembly

the former is afraid of Chavez and

the latter is a dictator support group

Obama is still influenced by the Ayers metanarrative

damn it

Posted by: lord garth || 07/01/2009 19:15 Comments || Top||


Economy
"Welcome to the Hotel California in the age of Obama."
While promoting his new cap-and-trade energy tax bill, which passed the U.S. House last week, President Obama revealed in a White House address on Monday his model for the nation's economy - California. "In the late 1970s, the state of California enacted tougher energy-efficiency policies," Obama said, noting that the state and its residents use less energy today per capita than the national average. "Think about that," he said, "California producing jobs, their economy keeping pace with the rest of the country and yet they've been able to maintain their energy usage in a much lower level than the rest of the country."

Obama might want to rethink his choice of a model state because it is easy to understand how California has curbed its energy use. Between 2000 and 2007, before the current recession, the state shed nearly 21 percent of its manufacturing jobs, driving down its industrial electrical consumption by 21 percent. California's industrial users pay electric rates twice as high as their Midwestern counterparts - which helps explain why so much heavy industry has fled the state. In addition to alienating its industry, California has also curbed energy use through exorbitant residential electric rates (50 percent higher than the national average) and massive net out-migration. Between 2005 and 2007, 2.14 million Californians moved to other states, while only 1.44 million people from elsewhere moved to the Golden State, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Don't be surprised when the 2010 Census finds even more people leaving to escape California's 11.5 percent unemployment. And, as jobs and residents fled California, its tax revenues have declined, while its politicians went on a spending binge, creating a severe budget crisis.

If the President wants America to look like California, pushing the Obama-Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade anti-global warming energy bill through Congress is surely the way to do it. Among much else in its 1,200+ pages (none of which were read by the vast majority of House members who voted on it), the measure caps carbon dioxide emissions at levels certain to cause artificial scarcity and higher energy prices. That will convince still more American manufacturers that they can only remain competitive by moving to other countries with no caps (think India and China), lower expenses and cheaper workforces. Manufacturers who can't move or who must rely on electric power will simply go out of business or drastically reduce their workforces. The Heritage Foundation forecasts job losses under Obama-Waxman-Markey of 1.15 million annually beginning in 2012. Welcome to the Hotel California in the age of Obama.
Posted by: GolfBravoUSMC || 07/01/2009 11:48 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  "They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast."
Posted by: no mo uro || 07/01/2009 17:32 Comments || Top||

#2  FOX NEWS AM > GLEN BECK Prog also brought up NEW YORK CITY's econmic woes.
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 07/01/2009 19:47 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Politix
ACORN Rent-A-Mob Thugs to Harass Lenders in 14 Cities
ACORN, which played a starring role in creating the subprime mortgage crisis, plans to add insult to injury by harassing lenders across the nation with protests tomorrow in an effort to coerce them into supporting President Obama's Making Home Affordable foreclosure-avoidance program.
This is nothing new. They've done this in Chicago for years.
Austin King, director of ACORN Financial Justice, sent out a press release today advising of the demonstrations that are planned as part of its "Homewrecker 4" campaign. The four financial companies targeted are Goldman Sachs, HomEq Servicing, American Home Mortgage, and OneWest. Read the whole document here.

ACORN plans to hit Dallas, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, New York City, Wilmington (Del.), Columbus (Ohio), Houston, Little Rock, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Seattle.

But let's not forget that ACORN helped to cause the mortgage bubble by strongarming banks into making loans they shouldn't have. And cheering them on was ACORN's lawyer, Barack Obama, who contributed to the increasingly hostile environment for banks when he represented plaintiffs in the 1995 class action lawsuit Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank. The suit demanded that Citibank grant mortgages to an equal percentage of minority and non-minority mortgage applicants. The bank settled the case three years later and reportedly agreed to beef up its lending to unqualified applicants.

ACORN refuses to acknowledge the role that it and the CRA played in the current crisis on Wall Street, and President Obama continues to support stronger enforcement of the disastrous law.

The final paragraph of the press release is unintentionally hilarious:
Because millions of Americans are losing their homes, neighborhoods and the economy are in ruins, and while the "Home Wrecker 4" are taking tax dollars and giving away huge bonuses, they refuse to do even the bare minimum for American homeowners by signing up for the Obama foreclosure plan.
Millions of Americans are losing their homes and neighborhoods and the economy are in ruins because of groups like ACORN that interfere with markets and force banks to do stupid things.
Posted by: Fred || 07/01/2009 00:00 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  "First they came for the lenders..."
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 07/01/2009 2:55 Comments || Top||

#2  harassing lenders across the nation with protests tomorrow in an effort to coerce them

....with of course the added, unspoken second order effect of creating a boycott of these institutions by an entire segment of the population.
Posted by: Besoeker || 07/01/2009 7:03 Comments || Top||

#3  Start with those banks who deserve criticism, Bank Of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Fifth Third, Compass Etc.
If you've any doubts, go to www.ripoffreports.com and see for yourself.
Outright thieves.
Posted by: Redneck Jim || 07/01/2009 16:00 Comments || Top||

#4  Affordable prices means lower prices.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles || 07/01/2009 17:59 Comments || Top||

#5  FOX NEWS this AM > GLEN BECK Prog > "THE COMING INSURRECTION". NEW BOOK [French Co-Authored]calls for ARMED/VIOLENT REVOLUTION + ANARCHIES + RESISTANCE in the USA. BECK strongly proclaims that the "EXTREME LEFT" IN US IS ACTIVELY SUPPORS = CALLING FOR SAME.
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 07/01/2009 18:46 Comments || Top||

#6  OOOOPSIES, my bad, GLEN BECK > also is disappointed at WAL-MART'S SEEMING COLLUSION WID ACORN + SEIU [combined public Company/Corpor Logos], which Beck argues are the same entities + whose Officios-Lobbyists are the only ones whom can get [policy?]confabs wid POTUS OBAMA at any time in the White HOuse???
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 07/01/2009 18:51 Comments || Top||


Home Front: WoT
Is Obama "objectively pro-fascist"?
Roger L. Simon, Pajamas Media

I don't know much about Honduras, but I do know something about Iran. And Obama's bizarre behavior, taking days to come to the conclusion any decent person knew immediately, indeed other world leaders like Merkel and Sarkozy had demonstrated as much - that there were very clear good and evil sides in the Iranian election, even though the good wasn't perfect. (Is it ever?) So when I heard that our President had joined Chavez and Castro in condemnation of the supposed coup in Honduras, this time with immediacy, I felt a tightening in the gut. Chavez particularly was on the side of Ahmadinejad in the recent Iranian brutality.

This was a side I didn't want to be on, didn't want our country on. I heard many suspicious things about Zelaya, the booted Honduran president, including allegations of drug ties. Also, he was running for succor to the UN, the very organization just weeks ago I had personally seen embrace Ahmadinejad in Geneva. So when I read this message from a Honduran on The Corner, I wasn't surprised.

Obama has strange friends. He equivocates and equalizes in disturbing ways. Is he "objectively pro-fascist" as George Orwell memorably wrote in his famous essay "Pacifism and the War"?

The answer is pretty obvious.
Posted by: Mike || 07/01/2009 08:16 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:



Obama abandons democracy abroad
Joshua Muravchik, Wall Street Journal

The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama's presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy. No administration has ever made these its primary, much less its exclusive, goals overseas. But ever since Jimmy Carter spoke about human rights in his 1977 inaugural address and created a new infrastructure to give bureaucratic meaning to his words, the advancement of human rights has been one of the consistent objectives of America's diplomats and an occasional one of its soldiers.

This tradition has been ruptured by the Obama administration....
...and here's why:
while it may be possible to identify derogations from democracy and human rights in America, those that are ubiquitous in the Muslim world are greater by many orders of magnitude. If democracy and human rights are held as high values, then all societies are not morally equal. This is a thought that cuts sharply against Obama's multicultural sensibilities.

America not only embodies these values, it is also more responsible than any other country for their spread. Many peoples today enjoy the blessings of liberty thanks to the influence of the United States, thanks to its aid, its example, and its leading role in bringing down the Axis powers, the Soviet Union and European colonialism. Moreover, the advancement of human rights and democracy requires the exercise of American influence and in turn may serve to strengthen that influence—neither of these, it seems, processes to be welcomed by apostles of national self-abnegation....
Go read the rest of it.
Posted by: Mike || 07/01/2009 06:50 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:

#1  He doesn't seem all that keen on democracy or the rule of law here, so why should we be surprised that he's not a big fan of it abroad?
Posted by: Cornsilk Blondie || 07/01/2009 7:07 Comments || Top||

#2  The article is spot on, but Barry's recent bowing to Saudi King Abullah was quite enough for me. Deeds not words, etc.
Posted by: Besoeker || 07/01/2009 7:26 Comments || Top||

#3  Compare wid PRAVDA > IIRC OBAMA PLANNING FRAUD AND TREASON - MULTIPLE GRAND JURIES [PART I]???
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 07/01/2009 18:40 Comments || Top||


From Kabul to Baghdad -- and back
By Tony Blankley

This week, American troops start leaving Iraqi cities in compliance with both former President George W. Bush's negotiated start date for withdrawal and President Barack Obama's campaign pledge. Given Bush's profound commitment to succeed in Iraq, if he were still in office and if he judged such a scheduled removal of troops to be dangerous, he doubtlessly would have postponed the action -- just as he changed his strategy and ordered the surge against the advice of most of his government and most of Washington in 2007. Yet it was that surge and the changed strategy designed and led by Gen. David Petraeus that left Iraq at noon Jan. 20 largely peaceful and on a steady march to a stable, friendly, representative government. But in the past several weeks, a deep, if quietly expressed, concern has arisen on the part of some Iraqis and some U.S. military personnel that the removal of U.S. troops so soon is precipitous and seriously risks a return to the murderous sectarian conflict of 2004-07.

The withdrawal plan that our government is carrying out intends to reduce the current 130,000 American troops in Iraq, including about 24,000 in Baghdad, to 50,000 by the end of 2011 -- all of whom will be outside the cities and used only for training and U.S. force protection. Pursuant to that plan, about 24,000 troops in Baghdad have been moved outside the city already to secured locations, such as Joint Security stations Istiqlal, War Eagle and Ur and Camp Taji.

In the fortnight leading up to this week's troop withdrawals, bombings of a Shiite mosque in Kirkuk and in the Shiite slums of Sadr City have taken about 200 Iraqi lives. Presumably, those attacks were carried out by Sunnis, whose decision to cooperate with U.S. troops two years ago in the Sunni Awakening and with the Petraeus surge combined to form Bush's successful strategy to bring peace and victory to Iraq. Now Sunnis are scared that the majority Shiite Iraqi government has just been waiting for the U.S troops to leave the cities so the Shiites can cut off the jobs to former Sunni fighters that the U.S. government promised. There are (not completely reliable) reports that the jobs cutoff and other abuses have started already.

It was the later strategy of the Bush team (and those of us who supported that strategy) for U.S. troop, diplomatic and economic presences to remain as long as needed at a high enough level to restrain the Shiite government from its natural tendency to abuse the Sunnis and push Sunnis to participate in government. To the contrary, it was always the position of the anti-war advocates that only if U.S. troops left promptly could the Iraqis be forced to work together.

The Bush theory having been proved successful, we are about to test whether the alternative theory also can work. Will the Shiites and Sunnis (and Kurds) peaceably rise to the occasion or fall back into mass sectarian murder and civil war? We all must hope for the success of the current U.S. administration's idealistic theory that Shiites and Sunnis already have overcome their historic murderous hatred of each other and are ready to govern and live together in peace. Far too many of our troops, allied Iraqi troops and innocent Iraqi citizens have been killed or distressingly wounded to now lose the peace so terribly earned. But the test comes at an inopportune moment. The U.S. administration was hoping its outreach to Iran without preconditions would result in the Iranians' helping us to calm the Shiites in Iraq (and some of our enemy in Afghanistan). Whether that was ever plausible we never will know. Now, instead, with the Iranian regime shooting down its own people in cold blood, President Obama has been pulled into a nasty exchange of angry and rude words with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- from whom, therefore, we cannot reasonably expect help as we try to extract ourselves from Iraq and build up in Afghanistan.

I am struck by the potentially appalling irony that overhangs the president's decision this week to go forward with the removal of troops. G.W.F. Hegel, a great philosopher of history, believed that history is ironic and that every historical circumstance contains the seeds of its own destruction. Consider that it was Obama's central message during the presidential primary campaign that President Bush had made a strategic error by precipitously withdrawing troops from the war in Afghanistan -- the good and necessary war -- in order to provide troops for the unnecessary and ill-considered Iraq war. While the general election hinged on many issues, it was Obama's early and consistent opposition to the Iraq war and support for the Afghan war that gave him traction and eventual victory over Hillary Clinton.

Now President Obama is honoring his campaign pledge to systematically and promptly withdraw American troops from Iraq and send them to Afghanistan. But now it is the Iraq war and (until now) impending peace that looms large as a potential strategic advance for Western and peaceful interests in the Middle East. (Did the democratic Iraqi example encourage the Iranian democracy fighters?) And it is the Afghan war that seems without clear purpose or likelihood of success and that is draining currently needed troops from the Iraq theater of operations. I don't know whether history is ironic. It would seem to have a "fearful symmetry." It is certainly merciless.
Posted by: ryuge || 07/01/2009 06:39 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:


Iraq
Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki, Critical of Consensus Democracy, Calls for a Presidential System
Posted by: anonymous5089 || 07/01/2009 17:28 || Comments || Link || [0 views] Top|| File under:


Home Front: Culture Wars
Where are all the usual suspects?
Following the contested Iranian election, the green armbands of the opposition and pictures of bloodied and dying Iranian protesters were being held aloft by Iranians from Los Angeles to Paris. Noticeably absent from the international scene were Westerners, particularly students.

The reaction to events in Iran has shown once again the double standards and hypocrisy of those in Europe and the West who jump at the slightest opportunity to protest Israel but remain stoic in the face of events in Iran.
Of course, it's not about Israel—-it's about what Israel represents
While many have compared the outpouring of anger in Iran to what presaged the 1979 revolution, there is one key difference; this time around, no Western students care. Before the shah fell from power, he often visited the capitals of major European and North American cities. Every time he did, tens of thousands of progressive students and human-rights activists poured out onto the streets calling him a fascist and protesting his visit.

In one such protest on June 2, 1967 a German student, Benno Ohnesorg, was even killed.

But now there is no such outpouring of emotion. Neither is there any interest from the UN or from Jimmy Carter.

YET IN January, when Israel was embroiled in a war with Hamas, the anger directed at her in Europe was apoplectic. When Israel fought a war against Hizbullah in 2006, Western students even proudly wore the symbol of Hizbullah, a clenched fist holding an AK-47.
Tranzis just hate humans and love their enemies
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 07/01/2009 11:38 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  don't tell me that progressives have selective morality, I couldn't handle such a notion.

(sarc/off)
Posted by: Broadhead6 || 07/01/2009 21:36 Comments || Top||



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Two weeks of WOT
Wed 2009-07-01
  11 cross-dressing Haqqani turbans arrested in Khost
Tue 2009-06-30
  Iran confirms Ahmadinejad's victory
Mon 2009-06-29
  Mousavi's website shut down
Sun 2009-06-28
  Saad al-Hariri Leb's new premier
Sat 2009-06-27
  Council appoints commission to probe election
Fri 2009-06-26
  Mousavi warns of more protests
Thu 2009-06-25
  Somali legislators flee abroad, Parliament paralysed
Wed 2009-06-24
  Khamenei agrees to extend vote probe
Tue 2009-06-23
  Revolutionary Guards Say They'll Crush Protests
Mon 2009-06-22
  Guardian Council: Over 100% voted in 50 cities
Sun 2009-06-21
  Assembly of Experts caves to Fearless Leader
Sat 2009-06-20
  Iran police disperse protesters
Fri 2009-06-19
  Khamenei to Mousavi: toe the line or else
Thu 2009-06-18
  Iran cracks down
Wed 2009-06-17
  Mousavi calls day of mourning for Iran dead

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