'Just say No' returns to American politics:

SIGN THE PETITION
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"For much of its 47-year existence, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has been a cartel in name only. It could not control oil prices because many of its members regularly breached the production quotas that were intended to regulate the market. So OPEC followed oil prices up and down, as supply and demand shifted. But now OPEC may be the real deal: a cartel that works. If so, that's bad news for the rest of the world."

— Robert Samuelson, Newsweek and Washington Post
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Why We Serve: Captain Helps Americans Relate to Troops

The captain said he wants to talk with audiences about life in the military and life overseas. “There are many people who don’t know anyone in the military,” he said. “It’s important for them to know what we do and why we do it.” The American people need to understand that servicemembers are all volunteers, “and that we’re normal people,” he said.

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Navigating the Numbers

[snip] defense spending -- even with war costs factored in -- is well below the historical average -- Today we’re spending less than 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense. That’s only 1 percentage point higher than we were spending at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. And it’s still below the 6.2 percent of GDP we were shelling out for defense during the waning years of the Cold War in the 1980s -- and significantly less than the 9.5 percent we spent in the late 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War...

[ Recommended >]

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Back to Basra: Challenging the Blunderbusses

Remember the Iraqi government's Basra offensive, launched a month ago and quickly declared a failure by an overwhelming majority of the talk show and editorial commentators? "Basra Blunder" was the headline of a column that received wide distribution; the column described Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as an inept, impulsive figure "in way over his head."

Today, Maliki and Iraqis in general have earned the right to sneer at such instant and shallow media negativism, for Knights Charge (code name for the anti-Shia gang offensive in Basra) is proving to be an extraordinarily significant political and military operation with rather heady long-term payoffs. [snip]

Knights Charge, however, was much more than a confidence-building measure; it may be the most decisive example of a country-building measure we have seen since Saddam fell in April 2003. A democratically elected prime minister who happens to be a Shia ordered his nation's troops to strike a Shia gangster. The Iraqi government took the initiative -- amd now stands to reap several impressive political benefits...

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The Airline Bomb Plot

[that was so nearly the 'Airline Bomb-ing']

...Here's another hypothetical: Would this conversation be different today if in August 2006 seven airliners had taken off from Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport, bound for the U.S. and Canada and each carrying about 250 passengers, and then blew up over the Atlantic Ocean? [snip]

The view that 9/11 "changed everything" did not hold up under the weight of our politics. Divisions re-emerged between Democrats and Republicans, in office and on the streets. These fights reignited over the Patriot Act, Guantanamo and the warrantless wiretap bill (or "FISA" revision). These arguers stopped to stare momentarily at their televisions when Islamic terrorists succeeded in mass murder in the 2004 Madrid train bombing and the 2005 London subway bombing, but quickly returned to partisan grandstanding...[snip]

The arrests of the men [before they could execute their crime {suicide bombers are not deterable, they must be interdicted}], who say they are innocent, was the result of broad and prolonged surveillance. For months, the suspects were bugged, photographed and wiretapped. Here in the U.S., our politics has spent much of the year unable to vote into law the wiretap bill, which is bogged down, incredibly, over giving retrospective legal immunity to telecom companies that helped the government monitor calls - originating overseas...[snip]

Philip Bobbitt, author of the just released and thought-provoking book, "Terror and Consent," has written that court warrants are "a useful standard for surveillance designed to prove guilt, not to learn the identity of people who may be planning atrocities."

Planning atrocities is precisely the point.

[Recommended >]

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Parenting the Palestinians

Golda Meir said, ''The Arabs will stop fighting us when they love their children more than they hate Jews.'' This quote provides the key to unraveling the question of why the Palestinians persist in attacking their neighbors the Israelis, rather than emulating them. A people goes much farther in emulating those more functional than themselves than they do in relentless blame and hatred. Witness the Japanese, conquered in World War II, studying and improving upon the structures of American industrial might.

[the key here is education. Ideas born in radical Egypt, printed in Saudi Arabia or Syria, are taught in Gaza and the west bank - from birth. Until we step up to confronting the continuing indoctrination to the ideology of hate and death, militant Islam will produce an inexhaustible supply of murderers. Rumsfeld was/is right: we need fight the war of ideology; it's what's fueling everything. ]

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[FLASHBACK:

Friday, January 25, 2008

The War of Ideas Should Be Engaged

http://netizennewsbrief.blogspot.com/2008/01/war-of-ideas-should-be-engaged.html ]
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Plutonium on the Euphrates

The press is now reporting, that the Administration will confirm that Israel bombed what the U.S. believes was a nascent plutonium-producing nuclear reactor being built with North Korea's assistance.

The State Department has already given up on holding North Korea to its promise to disclose all of its nuclear activities. But now it appears that Foggy Bottom and President Bush are prepared to forgive North Korea for telling what the U.S. now agrees were lies about the North's nuclear proliferation to a Middle Eastern autocrat who is an enemy of America. At the same time, Bush Administration officials are saying that it is good policy to trust Kim Jong Il's declarations on his stockpiles of plutonium.

So: Israel had to risk war with Syria to destroy a nuclear facility built with the help of lying North Koreans. But no worries, the U.S. says it can still trust North Korea to tell the truth about its current programs. This makes us wonder if the unofficial U.S. nonproliferation policy is to have Israel bomb every plutonium facility that the North Koreans decide to sell...

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Esteem for US rises in Asia, thanks to Iraq war

THE US war in Iraq has strengthened its strategic position, especially in terms of key alliances, and the only way this could be reversed would be if it lost the will to continue the struggle and abandoned Iraq in defeat and disarray.

The US's three most important Asian alliances - with Australia, Japan and South Korea - have in his view been strengthened by the Iraq campaign. Each of these nations sent substantial numbers of troops to help the US in Iraq. They did this because they believed in what the US was doing in Iraq, and also because they wanted to use the Iraq campaign as an opportunity to strengthen their alliances with the US.

More generally, in a world supposedly awash in anti-US sentiment, pro-American leaders keep winning elections. Germany's Angela Merkel is certainly more pro-American than Gerhard Schroeder, whom she replaced. The same is true of France's Nicolas Sarkozy. More importantly in terms of Green's analysis, the same is also true of South Korea's new President. Lee Myung-bak, elected in a landslide in December, is vastly more pro-American than his predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun.

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'Nanny state' cramps Europe's style

Europe started 2008 with a raft of new laws against smoking, air pollution and even junk food adverts, but some grumbled that the New Year's resolutions from the "nanny state" cramped their style. (Snip) While many accepted the new rules as reasonable*, some bristled at what they called the state's overreach and the creeping end of the Euroean way of life.

[reasonable: other people should be forced to act as I would. This is the model some Americans want to emulate?]

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Reducing greenhouse gases harder than we thought

Reducing carbon dioxide will be far more challenging than society has been led to believe, local scientists wrote in an article published in this week's edition of Nature. Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado and Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research examined one of the reports released last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and concluded that it was overly optimistic.

[not optimistic in the IPCC's doom & gloom forecasts, but optimistic in mankind's ability to affect climate {which by definition includes 'change'}]

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When Political Correctness Becomes Conventional Wisdom

... Climate change scientists have no evidence for their theories that cannot be refuted by experts of equal or greater stature. Bill Gray, for example, is the world's most famous authority on hurricanes. Working in the atmospheric science department of Colorado State University, he predicts the number of hurricanes each tropical storm season will produce. A towering figure in his field, he has trained dozens of scientists over the years.

Gray has testified on global warming before Congress. He has given speeches, written articles and done all he can think of to get his message out. Yet, he has been ostracized by his colleagues, cut off from government funding and invested more than $100,000 of his own money to keep his research going — all because he contends that global warming is a fraud.

“I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people,” he says. “I've been in meteorology over 50 years. I've worked damn hard, and I've been around. My feeling is some of us older guys who've been around have not been asked about this. It's sort of a baby boomer, yuppie thing.”

Unfortunately, it appears that the yuppies have won and their political correctness has now become conventional wisdom. Welcome to the 19th Century.

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Senate Keeps Focus on Polar Bear

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said the Department of Interior has been "foot-dragging" on listing the polar bear as an endangered species and has asked the department's secretary to appear before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.[snip]

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member of the committee, however, said, "Unfortunately, the polar bear is simply a pawn in a much bigger game of chess.

"It has become clear that listing the bear as a threatened species is not about protecting the bear but about using the ESA to achieve global warming policy that special interest groups cannot otherwise achieve through the legislative process,"

"Implementation of ESA should be driven by science, not litigation," Inhofe said. "As we have heard in testimony before the committee, all too often the act's strict timelines make it nearly impossible for the scientists to do their job."

Dale Hall, director of FWS, recently testified before the Committee that he needed extra time to review additional science before making the final decision on the listing of the polar bear.

[have you thought through how much this political subterfuge is going to cost you at the pump?

Pelosi > http://speaker.house.gov/contact/ (202) 225-0100

YOUR Senator http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

President > president@whitehouse.gov


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