June 22, 2008
ENDING THE REVOLUTION AND STARTING THE REFORMATION...:
Getting the French to work (Alasdair Sandford, 6/22/08, BBC News)
Christine Lagarde, the country's first female minister for finance and the economy, says it is time for French people to "roll up their sleeves" and stop thinking about holidays.The former international lawyer, impressed by the work ethic during her time in the US, is intent on instilling the same spirit in her countrymen and women. [...]
"Instead of thinking about their work, people were thinking about their weekend… organising, planning and engineering time off," she says.
...is quite a portfolio.
ANNOUNCE HER EARLY...:
Three women who might join the GOP ticket (DAVID PAUL KUHN, 6/22/08, Politico)
The most-mentioned potential running mates — former Republican candidate and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty — are all men. Yet no clear front-runner has emerged, and there are at least three women McCain might select to fill out the ticket. [...]Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin may be nationally unknown, but in her state she is nothing short of a political phenomenon.
Palin, 44, would add youth to the GOP ticket. As governor she has shown a willingness to veto some of the state’s large capital projects, no small plus for fiscal conservatives. But it’s her personal biography, which excites social conservatives, and reformist background that might most appeal to McCain.
She’s stridently anti-abortion, and recently brought to term her fifth child — who she knew would have Down syndrome. A hunter, fisher and family woman with a rapid professional rise, Palin is a natural for Republican framing.
In 1982, Palin led her underdog high school basketball team to the state championship, earning the nickname “Sarah Barracuda.” Two years later she won the beauty pageant in her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska — and was also named “Miss Congeniality.” By her early thirties, she was the mayor of Wasilla.
In 2003, as ethics commissioner on the state's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, she risked her rising political star by resigning her position in protest of ethical misconduct within the state’s Republican leadership as well as then-Gov. Frank Murkowski’s acceptance of that impropriety. Though this briefly made her an outcast within the party, within a year several state Republican heavyweights were reprimanded for the conduct she’d decried.
Her reputation with the party thus redeemed, Palin defeated Murkowski in the 2006 Republican primary on the way to being elected governor.
As governor, she’s continued challenging the state’s powers that be, even winning tax increases on oil companies’ profits. Her approval rating has soared as high as 90 percent, making her one of America’s most popular governors.
“Palin is becoming a star in the conservative movement, a fiscal conservative in a state that is looking like a boondoggle for pork barrel spending,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster who specializes in women’s politics.
“She’s young, vibrant, fresh and now, and a new mother of five. She should be in the top tier,” Conway continued. “If the Republican Party wants to wrestle itself free from the perception that it is royalist and not open to putting new talent on the bench, this would be the real opportunity.”
...and you turn up the torque on Senator Obama.
DYING ALONE:
Italy struggles with immigration and aging (Elisabetta Povoledo, June 22, 2008, NY Times)
It is an everyday symbol, touching almost, of Italy's troubled demographics: an older Italian out for some air, at times arm in arm with an immigrant aide. The aides often are not here legally but have been tolerated because they do work few Italians do: care for the nation's rapidly aging population.But much as Italy is growing older, it is also more worried about crime.
And in the eyes of many Italians, for whom immigration is a relatively new phenomenon, immigrants also have a central role in this. Under a law proposed by the far right wing of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's new government, it would become a felony offense to come to Italy illegally, punishable by prison.
Combine retirement homes with prisons and you're all set.
THE GOOD COP:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: The interrogator who made him talk (Tom Leonard, 22/06/2008, Daily Telegraph)
Speaking quietly and patiently, and sometimes bringing his prisoner snacks such as dates, Mr Martinez was brought in after harsher interrogation techniques had been used on Mohammed, an American-educated engineer."They'd have long talks about religion", comparing notes between Islam and Mr Martinez's Catholicism, a CIA officer told the New York Times. "He wrote poems to Deuce's wife." Mr Martinez would listen to Mohammed's despair that he would probably never see his children again and his complaints about his living conditions, in particular his lack of a view.
Their relationship progressed to the stage that - according to Mr Martinez - Mohammed would offer key information unvolunteered.
This included his claim to have killed Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal correspondent kidnapped in Pakistan, which Mr Martinez told colleagues came out of the blue.
Mr Martinez was a specialist in analysing computer data on drug shipments but, aged 36, was moved to the CIA's counter-terrorism operation in Islamabad in 2002.
Intelligence chiefs struggling with their inexperience in dealing with an organisation such as al-Qa'eda, had concluded that searching for drug lords was not that different to looking for terrorist leaders.
After his capture, Mohammed cooperated sporadically with his captors, who believed that he was often giving incorrect information.
However, he talked most freely to Mr Martinez. Colleagues noted that they had a certain amount in common - they were a similar age, they both went to universities in the American South, they were both religious and they were both fathers.
The poetic "tributes" to Mr Martinez's wife, scribbled in ungrammatical English, were intended as a mark of respect to the interrogator, said a colleague.
The intelligence provided by Mohammed was reflected in the report of the official 9/11 commission, which listed 60 occasions on which he provided facts about al-Q'aeda.
OF COURSE THE GAME BITES...:
Soccer player arrested for chewing out ref (CHRISTINE OLLEY, 6/21/08, Philadelphia Daily News)
Instead of quietly following orders after he was ejected from the game between the Fulhundred team and the Pizza by Elizabeth team, Jones bit the ref's chin."The official attempted to back away from the player at which time the player grabbed the victim's shoulders and pulled him towards his face with his mouth wide open," New Castle County police said in a statement.
The 38-year-old official suffered deep lacerations just below his lower lip and underneath his chin from the severe bite, police said.
...but that's taking things a bit too seriously.
$500 MILLION DOESN'T BUY WHAT IT USED TO:
McCain Rises and Obama Dips in Fund-Raising for May (LESLIE WAYNE, 6/22/08, NY Times)
After raising record amounts of money all year, Mr. Obama continued spending heavily as the primary campaign extended into early June, and he ended May with $33.3 million in cash for the primary race. Mr. McCain, who raised less all year, was virtually assured of the Republican nomination by February and so spent less, ending the month with $31.6 million in the bank.
Once again we see how little money means in politics. After a year as a cash-raising phenomenon, Senator Obama ends up with the same amount of money as John McCain and, despite the latter spending nothing, at a spot in national polls where Democrats always lose five months later. Even Michael Dukakis had a three-times greater lead before being blown out.
THE GUBERNATORIAL ADVANTAGE:
Crime Debate Reduced to Incarceration Debate (George Will, 6/22/08, Real Clear Politics)
If crime revives as an issue, it will be through liberal complaints about something that has reduced the salience of the issue -- the incarceration rate. And any revival will be awkward for Barack Obama. Liberalism likes victimization narratives and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which "society" writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.Last July, Obama said "more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities." Actually, more than twice as many black men 18-24 are in college as there are in jail. Last September he said, "We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives." But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, writing in the institute's City Journal, notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population. Furthermore, Mac Donald cites data indicating that:
"In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer."
Oh, what he wouldn't give to fly into Illinois and personally oversee an execution, a la Bill Clinton.
IT'S NOT A HOUSE, IT'S A PUP TENT:
House Passes Spy Bill; Senate Expected to Follow (Paul Kane, 6/21/08, Washington Post)
The House, in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, yesterday approved a sweeping new surveillance law that extends the government's eavesdropping capability and effectively would shield telecommunications companies from lawsuits for cooperating with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.Ending a year-long battle with President Bush, the House passed, by a 293 to 129 vote, an overhaul of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). [...]
Only one Republican opposed the bill, but Democrats were sharply divided. And the legislation presented a fresh foreign policy dilemma for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). The party's presumptive presidential nominee announced his support of the FISA bill despite active opposition to it from the liberal activist base that has financially fueled his campaign.
America doesn't elect liberals, so he has to at least pretend.
UNDERSTANDABLE HYPOCRISY:
McCain Defends Trade Pact: As Candidate Visits Canada, His Team Bashes Obama on NAFTA (Perry Bacon Jr., 6/21/08, Washington Post)
McCain said his visit to Canada was "not a political campaign trip," and his remarks centered on keeping relations between the United States and Canada strong. The Republican from Arizona did not refer to Obama by name and refused to take questions on political matters at a news conference after his speech, though he was accompanied by top political adviser Charles R. Black Jr. McCain spent much of his trip in closed-door meetings with Canadian officials.Nonetheless, his comments on NAFTA invoked Obama's criticism of the agreement, and McCain's campaign attacked the senator from Illinois on the issue throughout the day, accusing him of changing his position after becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee.
"For months, Barack Obama said that he would 'make sure that we renegotiate' NAFTA, demanded unilateral changes and threatened to unilaterally withdraw if he did not get his way," McCain said in a statement released by his campaign. ". . . Now he claims: 'I'm not a big believer in doing things unilaterally.' "
Throughout his primary battle with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), Obama was a strong critic of NAFTA, describing it as a "big mistake." He said he wanted to renegotiate the deal with Mexico and Canada to impose requirements on worker pay and environmental safeguards.
Obama's position was questioned after a report that adviser Austan Goolsbee had downplayed the candidate's rhetoric as "political maneuvering" in a meeting with a Canadian diplomat in Chicago.
Obama says he still wants to renegotiate parts of the deal, but he backed off of some of his harsh language in an interview with Fortune magazine published this week.
Becoming the Democratic nominee requires you to grovel before groups--like unions--whose position are opposite those of the American people and harmful to the country, which is why you have to run from them once you win the nomination. The big question is whether you'd then make the Bill Clinton mistake--governing like the part man rather than the national candidate--or whether you'd have sense enough to go Third Way from Inauguration Day. Senator Obama doesn't seem the canniest pol around, so it's easy to see him replaying '92-'94.
MORE:
Whereas, truckling in the GOP primaries forces you to take morally proper and optimal political positions, Is Pastor Hagee Good for the Jews? (DAVID VAN BIEMA, 6/20/08, TIME)
Cutting ties with John Hagee has proved to be a lot easier for Senator John McCain than it has been for some of the very Jewish groups most offended by the conservative Evangelical pastor's statements about God and the Holocaust. McCain moved to dissociate himself from Hagee after a 1999 sermon was publicized in which Hagee claimed that God intended the Holocaust, and had prophesied it in the Book of Jeremiah. "And that will be offensive to some people," Hagee boomed. "Well, dear heart, be offended. I didn't write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, 'My top priority to the Jewish people is to get them back to Israel.' "But where McCain cut ties with the Evangelical mega-pastor who had endorsed his candidacy, Abe Foxman, head of the anti-Semitism watchdog organization the Anti-defamation League, appeared more willing to forgive. The reason for Foxman's reluctance to abandon Hagee may have been summed up in a letter from the pastor carried on the ADL's website, in which Hagee points out, "I have devoted much of my adult life to combating anti-Semitism and supporting the state of Israel."
Hagee's support for the Jewish State — he also heads up the influential organization Christians United for Israel, and was a key speaker at last year's conference of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — has brought Israel millions, if not billions of dollars from Evangelical tourism, and it has delivered political support for a strong pro-Israel policy in Washington.
...though you may, mistakenly, dump them for the General.
FALLING UPWARDS:
Big Promises Bump Into Budget Realities: New President Won't Have an Easy Time Paying for New Initiatives, Fiscal Experts Say (Lori Montgomery, 6/22/08, Washington Post)
In a new paper titled "Facing the Music: The Fiscal Outlook at the End of the Bush Administration," University of California at Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach and two co-authors from the Brookings Institution conclude that, if spending grows at historic rates, simply keeping the Bush tax cuts and halting the spread of the AMT would drive the budget deficit to $481 billion by the end of the next president's first term, or 2.7 percent of the economy.
Nevermind the inability to forecast economics accurately or the massive cuts that will follow winding down the WoT, the deficit has averaged an "unsustainable" 2.2% of GDP over the past forty years, 25 of which have been the greatest economic boom in human history. Deficits are a moral issue, not an economic one.
IN A CONTEST BETWEEN IDEAS AND IDENTITY...:
McCain Driving Debate, But Some Fear Swerving: GOP Insiders Want More Consistent Theme (Michael D. Shear and Juliet Eilperin, 6/22/08, Washington Post)
In the two weeks since Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee, John McCain has demonstrated a knack for driving the daily political debate, forcing his opponent to respond to a challenge to meet in town hall debates, accusing him of being "delusional" about terrorism and saying he flip-flopped on public financing for his campaign.
...how would the idea candidate not drive the race? And how can the most liberal Senator in the most conservative country reveal his ideas without sustaining political damage?
BUT IT'S AN EXAMPLE OF PARODY (via Buttercup):
Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill (Meredith F. Small, 6/20/08, LiveScience.com)
Neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin at the University of California, San Francisco, has also recently discovered that sarcasm, which is both positively funny and negatively nasty, plays an important part in human social interaction. [...]According to Dr. Rankin, if you didn't get the sarcastic tone of the previous sentences you must have some damage to your parahippocampal gyrus which is located in the right brain. People with dementia, or head injuries in that area, often lose the ability to pick up on sarcasm, and so they don't respond in a socially appropriate ways.
Presumably, this is a pathology, which in turn suggests that sarcasm is part of human nature and probably an evolutionarily good thing.
Take out the "presumably"'s and there's nought left of Darwinism.
CARS & CITIES, A DEADLY COMBINATION:
Car hits NYC pedestrians for 3rd time in 2 days (Associated Press 06.21.08)
For the third time in two days, a vehicle plowed down pedestrians on a New York City sidewalk, this time leaving three bystanders injured and a driver under arrest.