Thursday, June 11, 2009
Are We Learning Yet?
It’s old news that Barack Obama has held onto or reinstituted vast swaths of George W. Bush’s national security policy. From staying the course in Iraq to re-starting military tribunals, so many controversial Bush-era decisions have proved to be simply the best way forward in a legally and militarily treacherous gauntlet. Many observers had predicted that Obama would come to heed reality and adopt Bush policy. As the unfolds day by day the question to be asked is if that realization will be acknowledged.
As Pete pointed out, Obama recently told a BBC reporter that the U.S. shouldn’t impose its values on other nations, but that “Democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion — those are not simply principles of the West to be hoisted on these countries, but rather what I believe to be universal principles that they can embrace and affirm as part of their national identity.”
Freedom and democracy as universal, not exclusively American, principles — where have I heard that before? From the 43rd president of the United States:
Some say that ending tyranny means “imposing our values” on people who do not share them, or that people live in parts of the world where freedom cannot take hold. That is refuted by the fact that every time people are given a choice, they choose freedom.
We saw that when the people of Latin America turned dictatorships into democracies, and the people of South Africa replaced apartheid with a free society, and the people of Indonesia ended their long authoritarian rule. We saw it when Ukrainians in orange scarves demanded that their ballots be counted. We saw it when millions of Afghans and Iraqis defied the terrorists to elect free governments.
At a polling station in Baghdad, I was struck by the words of an Iraqi–he had one leg–and he told a reporter, “I would have crawled here if I had to.”
Was democracy–I ask the critics–was democracy imposed on that man? Was freedom a value he did not share? The truth is that the only ones who have to impose their values are the extremists and the radicals and the tyrants. . . . Freedom is the dream and the right of every person in every nation in every age.
Not only do Obama’s words recall Bush’s philosophy; they echo an aspect of it that the Left had lambasted as fatally idealistic. But where Bush can unapologetically adduce Iraq as the most potent example of democracy’s universal appeal, Obama has chosen to bury the Iraq success for political reasons.
If Obama is going to walk the walk (we’re staying in Iraq) and talk the talk (democracy is universal), he needs to walk and talk at the same time, and own up to the political and ideological accomplishments on display in Iraq. When he follows up bold declarations of a universal democratic spirit with the weak sauce of Guantanamo apologies, he sounds as if he doesn’t believe his own words.
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S .F. Students Earn Their Stripes
California
When the San Francisco school board voted last month to restore the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program, it seemed that sanity had prevailed -- three years after the board voted to kill the popular program. Finally, the board had put students' welfare ahead of its ruthless political correctness.
Wrong. Unless the school board votes to recognize that JROTC fulfills students' high school physical education requirements at Tuesday's board meeting, the board's vote to keep JROTC could be viewed as a conniving stunt and a cruel hoax.
If students cannot get PE credit -- as they could before the board yanked it in 2007 -- many students will not be able to fit it into their schedules... [snip]
I urge readers to watch the video archive of the May 12 school board meeting on www.sfusd.edu. On the anti-side, you'll see some students, but mostly a bunch of aged hippies, who think we're still in Vietnam, railing against military atrocities. On the RO side, you'll see some parents and educators, but mostly kids, who aren't talking about themselves but something larger than themselves.
Students who are on the academic sweet track and those whose kids who are not yet there marvel at a program that taught them how to present themselves, ways to help others (first aid) -- and how to become leaders. They are confident young adults.
Unless the board quickly makes up for its folly, there will be fewer such students graduating San Francisco schools...
[Recommended > ]
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Israel rejects Clinton claim of no agreement on settlements
Just after US President Barack Obama's landmark address in Cairo, and just before US Mideast envoy George Mitchell returns to the region on Tuesday, the dispute between Washington and Jerusalem over settlement construction ratcheted up a notch. Israeli officials rejected on Saturday a statement by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dismissing Israeli assertions that the Bush administration had agreed to allow some construction in the settlements to allow for natural growth.
[I seem to recall it Obama insisting that all side 'abide by prior commitments'? Self exempted, evidently.
Reminder: 'natural growth' means not one additional foot of land but home additions as children are born.]
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NBC's Mitchell Hails Hillary Clinton As a 'Foreign Policy Superstar!'
In a piece that could've been crafted by Hillary Clinton's PR shop, NBC's Andrea Mitchell, on Monday's "Today" show, gushed on and on about the Secretary of State's new "role of a lifetime," as a "a foreign policy superstar," and cheered Clinton has the "highest approval ratings of any time in her career."
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Taxpayers Have $80.3B Invested in Detroit
The taxpayers’ investment in the U.S. auto industry rose to $80.3 billion, after the U.S. Treasury provided a new $30.1 billion bankruptcy loan to General Motors(snip)two days after GM filed for bankruptcy, a new Treasury report said.
The funding amounts, through 15 transactions since December, total more than 10% of the $700 billion in bailout money Congress approved for the Troubled Asset Relief Program(snip)when it was created to help stabilize banks...
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New GM Chair: 'I Don't Know Anything About Cars'
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You can't make this stuff up. The titled quote comes from a Bloomberg story about new GM Chairman Roger Whitacre. You also can't make up most of the media's calm acceptance of yet another person heavily involved with running General Motors, aka Government Motors, who knows next to nothing about cars except as a consumer who drives them.
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The End of the Affair
There are few political humorists who have P.J. O'Rourke's instinct for what's important about a story or a pen as sharp and witty to describe it.
Car lover and brilliant satirist, O'Rourke nails it in this Wall Street Journal column:
The car ceased to be object of desire and equipment for adventure and turned into office, rec room, communications hub, breakfast nook and recycling bin-a motorized cup holder. Americans, the richest people on Earth, were stuck in the confines of their crossover SUVs, squeezed into less space than tech-support call-center employees in a Mumbai cubicle farm. Never mind the six-bedroom, eight-bath, pseudo-Tudor with cathedral-ceilinged great room and 1,000-bottle controlled-climate wine cellar. That was a day's walk away.
We became sick and tired of our cars and even angry at them. Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way,
But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat..
Read also P.J.'s hilarious take on horses vs. cars. And make sure you read the whole thing...
[I.e., cars are liberating and among the highest contributors to our standard of living, allowing us to go anywhere at anytime with all the people or stuff we want - all completely paid for in perfect proportion by those who chose to do so. What's not to like? Given even a casual glance at our highways each day, despite the daily liberal diatribe against them and every conceivable effort by our elites to make their use less attractive, there we are: the overwhelming majority who chooses to drive because it suits our lifestyle best.
Who is anyone to gainsay our choice - to say noting of public 'servants' chutzpah to do so?]
Highly Recommended > ]
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Scarborough Explodes On The "Failure Of The Mainstream Media"
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Scarborough's eruption was brought to you by the past (and continuing) failure of the main-stream media to cover President Obama fairly. In Mika Brzezinski’s morning news rundown, there was (what was supposed to be) a short segment on President Obama’s comments yesterday; regarding the latest in a series of auto-maker bailouts:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: How can he say that with a straight face? Seriously. This is one of the things that's troubling about this President is he can say things with a straight face that the media does not call him on.
After making a particularly entertaining analogy about choosing a lumberjack to perform spinal surgery (see the video above and to the right), Scarborough brought himself back on message:
SCARBOROUGH: The amazing thing is, this is the failure of the mainstream media. If the mainstream media had covered Barack Obama instead of applauding him during the campaign, you would know off the top of your head that nobody got more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives than Barack Obama. Nobody ran resistance...
Scarborough’s incredulity at the lack of media coverage is, to put it lightly, not entirely misplaced.
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Think twice about 'green' transport, say scientists
Agence France-Presse
PARIS (AFP) – You worry a lot about the environment and do everything you can to reduce your carbon footprint -- the emissions of greenhouse gases that drive dangerous climate change.
So you always prefer to take the train or the bus rather than a plane, and avoid using a car whenever you can, faithful to the belief that this inflicts less harm to the planet.
Well, there could be a nasty surprise in store for you, for taking public transport may not be as green as you automatically think, says a new US study.
Its authors point out an array of factors that are often unknown to the public.
These are hidden or displaced emissions that ramp up the simple "tailpipe" tally, which is based on how much carbon is spewed out by the fossil fuels used to make a trip.
Environmental engineers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath at the University of California at Davis say that when these costs are included, a more complex and challenging picture emerges.
In some circumstances, for instance, it could be more eco-friendly to drive into a city -- even in an SUV, the bete noire of green groups -- rather than take a suburban train. It depends on seat occupancy and the underlying carbon cost of the mode of transport... [snip]
It used 2005 models of the Toyota Camry saloon, Chevrolet Trailblazer SUV and Ford F-150 to calibrate automobile performance; the light transit systems in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston as the models for the metro and commuter lines...
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Lovely Organic Oil
I was speaking with an acquaintance recently and was struck by the number of people she knew that called themselves "environmentalists", and as such were wedded to the prevailing global warming rhetoric. It is hard to come to terms with the pervasive laziness of such people who are probably otherwise very nice upstanding citizens. I have been contemplating this problem and I believe I have had a breakthrough that I would like to share with you today.
Oil as I understand it is the product of carbon based organic matter being crushed and perhaps heated over many millions of years which is basically the earth's method of composting. That makes oil the single greatest and most useful organic product available to us today. When we drill for and refine oil we are merely recycling it into more useable forms and releasing it for further cyclical uses in the environment. When we drive, heat, or engage in other joyous human activities like boating at the cottage or getting together for a drive with our other car club members we are recycling carbon from one form to another.
Once that carbon is used and released, plants will soak up all that wonderful carbon dioxide and use it to grow and increase yields while reducing water use. This process by plant life is a beautiful and effective source of carbon capture and all natural to boot. All of that additional plant matter will decompose and be stored for future generations in the form of lovely oil and coal. Our ancestors will hopefully drill, refine and burn it once again partaking in this wonderful all natural recycling process. It's a beautiful thing.
So next time someone tells you they are an environmentalist tell them you are too. While they eat carrots in front of the TV in their air conditioned palaces praying to the gods of the sun and wind to rescue them, you can drive out to your favorite hotel in the mountains and enjoy a succulent steak. You will even experience great satisfaction that you are helping the environment and future of the planet by recycling carbon by using a rich organic product, which will help the generations of the future. You are doing this by living your life and by enjoying the bountiful wonders of carbon: yes, lovely oil.
[But DT; "it's organic".]
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WaPo Highlights Kids Used to Push Green Agenda, Fails to Question Propriety of Tactic`
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Have you ever read a newspaper article and walked away stunned that the writer seemed to be totally oblivious to the real story or left some significant questions unasked?
Conservative readers of the June 9 Washington Post could understandably answer yes to the aforementioned question after reading the front page story "Early Lesson in Eco-Activism Comes From Economics Book."
Writer Daniel de Vise begins:Casting about for a cause, the Young Activist Club at Piney Branch Elementary settled on something close at hand: the hundreds of polystyrene trays and plastic utensils discarded daily in the school cafeteria.
Back up the train. An elementary school has politically motivated extracurricular clubs?
But young children are highly impressionable and the the political activism they would engender most certainly would be guided by the political views of their parents and teachers. As de Vise admits, Takoma Park is one of the area's "most socially conscious" (read: liberal/progressive in politics) communities.
But if the community at-large is pretty liberal, why on Earth isn't the push for eliminating styrofoam from the school's cafeteria the province of the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA)?
De Vise doesn't seem curious on that point, nor does he seem interested in probing how much the students understand about cost-benefit analysis.
Instead, de Vise opts to dutifully transcribe quotes from the little kids who are no doubt egged on by their teachers... [snip]
I'm not expecting a newspaper reporter to ask these difficult questions of impresionable 8-year-olds, but they are legitimate questions for the adults who are using the kids as "socially conscious" political props...
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'The Early Show' Shows Only Portion of Tasered Grandma Video
A local cop tasers a 72 great-grandmother and it's all caught on camera. How dare that nasty cop!! Which is precisely the reaction you'd get if you watched the segment on this morning's CBS's "The Early Show." The program begins the video right where the police officer tasers the woman, basically ignoring everything that transpired only moments before. "The Early Show" then shows a brief snippet of an interview with the woman:WOMAN: I wasn't argumentative, I was not combative, OK? All of this is a lie.
All contributor Russ Mitchell noted in the cop's defense was that the cop said the woman "would not cooperate" and "swore at him." The reaction from the show's hosts is, well, not very surprising after Mitchell noted that the constable's office is standing by the officer who tasered the woman:
HOST MAGGIE RODRIGUEZ: Are you kidding me?
HOST JULIE CHEN: I saw a longer piece of the tape and she said "just give me the ticket and I'll sign it." And then that happened?
It's obvious that Chen didn't view that much longer a piece of tape, else she might have come to a different conclusion.
Here is a complete video of the incident via The Dallas Morning News, and it directly contradicts the 72-year old woman's claim from above that she "wasn't argumentative" and "was not combative."
She at first refused to sign the speeding ticket, whereupon the officer prepared to arrest her (standard procedure) for that refusal. He asked the woman to move to the rear of her vehicle, whereupon she then agreed to sign the ticket, but with a profanity-laced response. She then attempted to push past the officer which would have put her perilously close to the highway's oncoming traffic.
The officer warned the woman that if she persisted, he would have to resort to using his taser. The woman's reply was "Go ahead -- tase me. I dare you," whereupon she said "I'm getting back into my car." She then plowed right into the officer who was in her path. It was only then that the officer resorted to his taser.
The question is: How did "The Early Show" miss all of this?
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DMN/CNN tie Tea Party Protesters To Holocaust Museum, Tiller Shootings
Dallas Morning News’s Wayne Slater become one of the first pundits after the shootings at the Holocaust Museum on Wednesday to hint that there was a connection to mainstream conservative activists.
On CNN Newsroom, about two hours after the story broke, Slater linked this incident and the murder of abortionist George Tiller with “anti-tax secessionists in Texas,” his label for Tea Party protesters.
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AP Picks Up Huff-Po Blogger's Lame Smear Alleging Palin Plagiarism
If you would like a great example of how the Old Media takes a story that has no legitimacy at all and uses it as the basis for a smear job, the Associated Press offered a wonderful sampling of the tactic for you on June 8.
From a headline that makes the issue seem more weighty than it is, to the lack of competent reporting from both sides of the matter, AP employed this favorite Old Media tactic by taking another swipe at Governor Sarah Palin with little by way of substantive evidence. It's another "seriousness of the charge" story despite the complete lack of evidence as well as a lack of any gravitas on the part of the original source of the charge.
At issue is the false charge leveled by a Huffington Post blogger that Governor Palin "plagiarized" a section of her speech as she introduced talk show host Michael Reagan in Anchorage, Alaska on Wednesday, June 3. HuffPo blogger Geoffrey Dunn charged that Palin lifted several sections of Newt Gingrich's work without attribution, and AP ran with the story even as they allow Palin's lawyer to point out that she cited Gingrich twice in her speech...
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Study: TV Networks Cheer for Barack Obama's RevolutionStudy: TV Networks Cheer for Barack Obama's Revolution
Study: TV Networks Cheer for Barack Obama's Revolution
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During his first 100 days as President, Barack Obama has pushed an audaciously liberal agenda which, if enacted, would have radical consequences for America for decades. With Democrats enjoying monopoly control of the House and Senate, the news media have a professional duty to scrutinize those policies, and give audiences both sides of the story — not just the perspective of a powerful Chief Executive.
Unfortunately, a Media Research Center analysis of ABC, CBS and NBC evening news coverage of President Obama’s first 100 days in office shows network reporters have failed as watchdogs. The networks have raised few doubts about Obama’s left-wing agenda and showered each of Obama’s major policy initiatives with positive press.MRC analysts looked at all 982 broadcast evening news stories about Obama and his administration from Inauguration Day (January 20) through April 29. Key findings:
- Obama’s first 100 days were defined by massive spending, aggressive intervention in the private sector and proposals for a huge expansion of the federal government. Yet none of the networks aired a single story on whether Obama’s policies were pushing the U.S. toward socialism, and no reporter used the term “socialist” to describe Obama.
- Not only that, network reporters never used the word “liberal” to describe either Barack Obama or his agenda during the first 100 days.
- The networks lavished good press on every major initiative of the early Obama administration, including the massive stimulus package, all of the various bailouts, health care, stem cells, the environment and foreign policy.
- In the days before the President unveiled his unprecedented $3.5 trillion budget — with a record-shattering $1.75 trillion deficit — four out of five statements on the evening newscasts parroted the White House spin that Obama was a deficit fighter.
- Reporters treated Obama’s hugely expensive $787 billion stimulus bill to mainly positive coverage (58 percent positive, 42 percent negative).
- The networks applauded Obama’s decision to use taxpayer money to fund embryo-destroying stem cell research (82% positive coverage).
- Network coverage of Obama’s mortgage bailout was also positive — 59% of statements supported the bailout or wanted even more intervention, compared to 41% who opposed the bailout as unfair to responsible homeowners.
- Reporters heavily skewed their coverage in favor of the President’s actions on global warming (78% positive).
- President Obama’s decision to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan was greeted by nearly unanimous (91%) positive coverage — a far cry from the highly negative coverage of President Bush’s successful troop surge in Iraq two years ago.
- Like Obama and the Democrats, the networks went on a feeding frenzy against big corporate bonuses. The networks aired six times more statements forwarding the “infuriated” reaction to business (104) than criticized politicians’ grandstanding (16).
- The networks spent days decrying AIG’s $165 million bonuses, but hardly mentioned the $210 million in bonuses handed out by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the bailed-out mortgage giants with strong Democratic ties). ABC and NBC completely ignored the Fannie and Freddie bonuses, while the CBS Evening News gave it 27 seconds.
The longstanding liberalism of network reporters made them aggressive adversaries of the Bush White House over the past eight years. The evidence from Barack Obama’s first 100 days is that that same liberal mindset has crippled reporters’ ability to be effective watchdogs on behalf of the public.
The once-fierce media watchdogs have become Barack Obama’s drooling, tail-wagging lapdogs.
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