LFTC - Letter From The Capitol

LFTC - Index 7/31/09

5 posts: (1) After Beer Summit: Obama, Gates & Crowley & yes, Joe--The Home Front; (2) Shoe Bomber: His Lawfare Bomb Explodes in Our Faces --9/11, 3/11 & N/11; (3) Can Arabs Pass "The Israel Test?"--Us v. Them; (4) For Al Gore: Ultimate Climate Change--"It's the Earth Stupid!"; (5) Coming to America: Saddam's Palestinian Pals--9/11, 3/11 & N/11.

LFTC - After Beer Summit: Obama, Gates , Crowley & Yes, Joe

Prsident Obama's "Beer Summit" yesterday was not, 44 said, an attempt to get either or both principals in the Gates incident to apologize.  Rather, it was to allow what diplomats call "a frank exchange of views"--diplo-speak for agreeing to disagree.  Sergeant Crowley stood his ground in public.  He intends to converse with Gates going forward.  He anticipates "meaningful discussions" in the future.  Beer is off the table, but Kool-Aid or ice tea is on (Crowley is too young to know about Jim Jones & Jonestown 1978).  Asked if the President had made any contribution to the discussion, Crowley answered (short video): "He provided the beer."  As for Joe, he "was very nice to the children" (Crowley's).

Here is an open letter from author Ruth Wisse to "Skip" Gates.  and here is the 9-1-1 caller, Lucia Whalen, Wednesday press conference video (approx. 8 mins.) (I hope the link survives to Friday.)  She presents a classic case of an innocent witness dragged into Hell, bewildered at the firestorm, and wishing for privacy & peace ASAP.  Mike Barnicle said on "Morning Joe" yesterday that  he would bet that a substantial number of people watched the 9-1-1- caller's press conference, and that they would not call 9-1-1 after seeing what happened to Lucia Whalen.

Also on Thursday's "Morning Joe," Joe Scarborough said that if his college-age son had been approached in Alabama by a cop & screamed at him, he'd go to jail too.  Marc Morial, President & CEO of the National Urban League, let things slip when answering Scarborough he conceded that had Gates been white nothing would have made the news.

In a piquant twist Whalen's attorney, Wendy Murphy, said Wednesday that the three highly-trained guys who got it wrong are having a White House Beer, while the one person who got it all right, her client, was not invited--albeit, she does not like beer anyway.

Ann Coulter argues (correctly) that we need a national "conversation" about phony claims of racism.  She notes the factors that saved Sergeant Crowley:

Suddenly, with the glare of the national spotlight being turned on a small local story, it became clear that there was no "racial profiling" involved – other than by the black Harvard professor, who lorded his credentials and connections over a white working-class cop.

We wouldn't have known about this case at all if the professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., hadn't blast e-mailed the universe that he was harassed by racist cops. Gates thought it would be a feather in his cap, not realizing there are huge areas of the country where people don't think it's heroic to browbeat cops checking on you after you break into your own house, such as 99 percent of the country outside of Cambridge.

Contrary to liberals' ardent desire, Sgt. James Crowley was not on tape saying, "I know it's his house, but let's stick it to this uppity negro." (Curiously, the tape of Gates' call demanding to talk to the chief of police to "report" Crowley has been withheld. Some watchdog group has got to demand that tape.)

But what if Crowley hadn't been a model policeman who taught diversity classes and once famously gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a black athlete?

What if the 9-1-1 caller had identified the suspected burglars as black, which it turns out she did not?

What if Crowley hadn't been fully supported by other cops at the scene, one Hispanic and one black?

What if, at some point in his life, Crowley had been accused – falsely or not – of racism?

His life would be ruined.

And by the way, try screaming at a judge that he's a racist and see what happens. Why should police officers deserve less protection than judges? They're in more danger.

The disorderly conduct charge was not dropped because it wasn't a good arrest. It was dropped, according to Gates' own lawyer, because of Gates' connections.

Bottom Line.  The Beer Summit brings to a close two weeks of roiling of the racial waters.  Sergeant Crowley might have ignored Gates's no-class braggadocio ("Do you know who I am?"), threats (to call Big Shots and bring them in--the President qualifies as a Big Shot) and racial victim posturing ("You're just arresting me because I am a black man in America).  Gates might be partly--not fully, given his outrageous verbal sallies--excused for his mean-spirited huffing and puffing, given that he had just gotten off a flight from China, was ticked off that he could not get in his home, etc., had he dropped the matter after disorderly conduct charges were dropped.  (Gates's lawyer admitted that the charges were dropped because Gates himself is a Big Shot.)

But Gates cannot--ever--be forgiven for trying to use the press to create another Duke University Racial Moment and thus undercut the mostly post-racial tenor of the Obama Administration.  This incident was, above all, not about race, or racism, let alone profiling.  It was about the insufferable arrogance of an African-American Harvard professor who thinks he can get away saying anything, and was prepared to enhance his own national profile by stirring up racial animosity.  Gates slandered and libeled the cop, the 9-1-1 caller who phoned in what she saw without mentioning race, and, by implication, anyone who came to their defense.

The election of America's first African-American President, with more white votes than Bill Clinton got, should have put paid to the racial grievance industry.  it did not.  But the rest of America can--and should--move on.  By declining to offer an uncalled-for apology to Gates, and because the President was forced to walk back his original insults when facts proved him way off base, a "Teachable Moment" (Obama-speak for a learning experience) indeed arrived.  Its lesson: We have come a long way from Duke University public lynching of three innocent white male students.  Race hustlers like Gates we may always have with us, but they cannot make their shrill accusations stick when the facts prove them wrong.  Thanks to a press that actually asked questions of both sides this time, the facts ultimately prevailed.

One last thought: As between Crowley & Gates, Crowley is a provider, Gates is a parasite--he lives and bloviates racially because Crowley protects his right to be a jerk.  Gates seems to be learning, having praised police work after the Beer Summit.

LFTC - "Shoe Bomber": His Lawfare Bomb Explodes in Our Faces

Debra Burlingame informs us that Attorney-General Eric Holder has declined to renew Special Administrative Measures (enhanced security restraints) on al-Qaeda Shoe Bomber Richard Reid.  The man who tried to mass-murder over 200 people flying over the Atlantic in December 2001 will be transferred from a SuperMax facility to a less secure prison.  Reid has claimed in a lawsuit that being confined in a SuperMax violated his First Amendment free speech & religious rights.

Reid declared: "I am at war with America."  Apparently, Team Obama will give him more opportunities to continue his war.  Since Reid's 2001 arrest we all have been doffing our shoes every time we fly.  Now, consider these 2006 global air travel statistics:

Today, the global airline industry consists of over 2000 airlines operating more than 23,000 aircraft, providing service to over 3700 airports. In 2006, the world’s airlines flew almost 28 million scheduled flight departures and carried over 2 billion passengers. The growth of world air travel has averaged approximately 5% per year over the past 30 years, with substantial yearly variations due both to changing economic conditions and differences in economic growth in different regions of the world. Historically, the annual growth in air travel has been about twice the annual growth in GDP. Even with relatively conservative expectations of economic growth over the next 10-15 years, a continued 4-5% annual growth in global air travel will lead to a doubling of total air travel during this period.

In the US airline industry, approximately 100 certificated passenger airlines operate over 11 million flight departures per year, and carry over one-third of the world’s total air traffic – US airlines enplaned 745 million passengers in 2006. US airlines reported over $160 billion in total revenues, with approximately 545,000 employees and over 8,000 aircraft operating 31,000 flights per day. The economic impacts of the airline industry range from its direct effects on airline employment, company profitability and net worth to the less direct but very important effects on the aircraft manufacturing industry, airports, and tourism industries, not to mention the economic impact on virtually every other industry that the ability to travel by air generates. Commercial aviation contributes 8 percent of the US Gross Domestic Product, according to recent estimates.

Let's do the math, using 2006 as a proxy for 2002-2009 figures, given that air travel has steadily increased at 5 percent annually for 30 years, and 2006 is in the mid-point of our time period, thus averaging out the lower figures for 2002-2005 & the higher numbers for 20087-2009.  For 7 years, 8 months since December 2001 the world's passengers have shucked their shoes every time they fly commercial.  At 2B passengers annually, that is over 15 BILLION  times to date that we have gone through the shoe routine, simply because this one monster turd tried to use a shoe bomb to blow up a single plane.

And now this ghastly turd wants us--is SUING us--to give him more lenient treatment.  And Team Obama is going to accommodate his request.  Think about this the next time you fly.

Bottom Line.  Once again our enemy--in this case, a jihadist would-be mass murderer--has successfully used our legal system as a weapon of war against us.  It seems we will not learn how expensive this folly can prove, until if & when (pray it will not happen) a WMD strike decimates an American city, or an EMP strike cripples the entire country.  It would be cheaper to learn the "lawfare" lesson now.

LFTC - Can Arabs Pass "The Israel Test?"

NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez ("Kay-Lo") interviews super-brain George Gilder about his new book, The Israel Test (2009).  In a nutshell GG says that Israel's 20-year super-boom has transformed it into an economic powerhouse that can pull the Palestinians--and the rest of the Middle East--out of its economic stagnation, if only the Arabs will let Israel do so.  During the first 20 years after Israel retook the West Bank in 1967, Palestinians prospered--until the UN and the West intervened:

During this 20-year period under Israeli rule, some 250,000 Israelis settled in the Territories. These were the supposedly predatory settlers. They supplied the infrastructure of power, water, education, and medical care that attracted nearly ten Arab settlers for every one Israeli. During this period, the economy in the territories grew some 25 percent per year, nearly the fastest in the world, and far faster than that of Israel itself, which was still bogged down in socialism. Arab life expectancy rose from 40 to around 70. Their incomes tripled while their population soared. Seven universities and 2,500 factories were established. It was the golden age for Palestinian Arabs.

Then, in the early 1990s, the U.N. and the West sold out the country to Yasser Arafat and his terrorist forces. The Palestine Liberation Organization became the world’s leading per capita recipients of foreign aid as international organizations squandered billions on them and thus transformed the Palestinians from entrepreneurs and workers into terrorists, welfare queens, and political poseurs of victimization and violence.

Bottom Line.  Gilder's grand book is politically incorrect but on the mark.  Team Obama, alas, is too P.C. to see this.  The big losers will be--as always--the Palestinians, who remain true to the late Israeli FM Abba Eban's dictum: "The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

LFTC - For Al Gore: Ultimate Climate Change

Al Gore had a good day earlier this week, when temperatures soared to a record 103 in Seattle, 106 in Portland, Oregon and 108 in Vancouver.  But Al needs to think about another climate change threat.

Jonah Goldberg sums up the latest re the danger that an asteroid strikes Earth in the next century and causes a catastrophe that dwarfs global warming.  JG notes that in 1908 a meteorite exploded a few miles above the tundra in Siberia; the force was equivalent to a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb.  It flattened 80 million trees over an area twice the size of LA.  Had it hit 5 hours later, it would have obliterated St. Petersburg.  Some estimates see such a strike as a 1 in 10 proposition over the next century.  An asteroid the size of the one that smashed into Jupiter recently, would obliterate life on Planet Earth.

LFTC - Coming to America: Saddam's Palestinian Pals

Ace journalist Claudia Rosett spotlights an incredible security lapse  by Team Obama.  Outfits inside State & Homeland Security--naturally--are bringing 1,300 Palestinians to America, who had lived in Baghdad as favored guests of that great friend of America, Saddam Hussein.  Yep, THAT Saddam.  The Palestinians have been living in a UN camp.  Security clearances are being conducted in a manner to make sure no interviewee feels uncomfortable; the government refuses to say how many, if any, have been turned away.  As CR notes, North Korean refugees need not apply.  The public, as usual, is being kept in the dark.  No wonder.

LFTC - Index 7/30/09

3 posts: (1) Conyers Commits "Politician Gaffe" & Tells Truth About Not Reading Bills--The Home Front; (2) Health Care: 44 Backpedals--The Home Front; (3) Canada: Stimulus Lesson, Not Health Care--Wobble Watch.

LFTC - Conyers Commits "Politician Gaffe"& Tells Truth About Reading Bills

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers's (D-MI) statement Tuesday (0:38) about not being able to read a 1,000-page bill in two days informs us officially of what everyone inside the Beltway already knew: legislators lack the time to read much of what is put in front of them for a vote, even had they the inclination to do so.  Go one step further: legislators could not even read most bills even were they so inclined.  They are drafted in technical language, striking designated sections and replacing them with new language, whose impact is so arcane only seasoned Hill staff can decipher.  To figure out the 1,071 page monstrosity passed off as a stimulus bill (it wasn't one) last February would have taken staffers days, with the bill chopped into numerous small chunks and analyzed by specialists in each area.

Bottom Line.  While bad faith plays a part in ramming through bills no one has read, the sad reality is that modern government is too vast and complex an enterprise for it to be within anyone's span of comprehension.  The only cure for this is vastly less government, which will never happen.  Get used to your legislators not reading legislation they vote on, and get used to their not even being able to understand what such legislation means, without specialized staff support explaining what bills mean.

WILL LAWMAKERS READ BILLS THEY VOTE ON?  FAT CHANCE!

LFTC: Health Care: 44 Backpedals

President Obama said yesterday that a vote on his health care bill has been pushed back to October.  With three polls putting the President's approval rating at 53 percent, an NBC-WSJ poll shows support slipping for ObamaCare: respondents ranked health care third on the priority list, the top four being--see question 7b in the actual poll results-- job creation & economic growth 38%, deficit & government spending 17%, health care 14% and national security 11%.

Karl Rove sees 44 using scare tactics to sell ObamaCare.  A tentative compromise between the the administration and conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats was reached yesterday: (1) reduce projects costs below $1TR over the next decade; (2) exempts small business--under $500k; (3) the government will not use Medicare schedules for determining reimbursement rates for the public plan.  Of 7 Blue Dogs on the Senate Energy & Commerce Committee, chaired by Beverly Hills lefty Henry Waxman, 4 favor and 3 oppose.  Liberals are very upset.  The WSJ editors see a health care Fannie Mae in the proposed HC compromise.  WSJ pundit Dan Henninger sees Blue Dogs caught in the great 40-year tug-of war in American politics, between liberals pushing public sector dominance and conservatives pushing private sector dominance.

English writer Theodore Dalrypmple warns that finding a "right" to receive government-provided health care gives the grantor--government--the right to take it away in times of claimed emergency.  UK columnist Janet Daley sees health care realities trumping Obama's verbal talents (and finds a lesson there for Tory leader David Cameron). Robert Samuelson, in the same vein (no pun intended), sees a disconnect between 44's desire to simultaneously cover the uninsured, while cutting costs.  RS writes:

The most misused word in the health care debate is "reform." Everyone wants "reform," but what constitutes "reform" is another matter. If you listen to President Obama, his "reform" will satisfy almost everyone. It will insure the uninsured, control runaway health spending, subdue future budget deficits, preserve choice for patients and improve quality of care. These claims are self-serving exaggerations and political fantasies. They have destroyed what should be a serious national discussion of health care.

The health-care conundrum involves a contradiction that the administration steadfastly obscures: In the short run -- meaning four to eight years -- government cannot both insure the uninsured and rein in health spending. Here's why. The notion that the uninsured get little or no care is a myth: They now receive about 50 to 70 percent as much health care as the insured. If they become insured, they would use more health care, possibly as much as today's insured. That would increase both government and private health spending, depending on how the insurance is provided.

A WSJ op-ed uses 44's press conference comment about doctors ordering unnecessary tonsilectomies to justify ObamaCare to make the point that 44's view of medicine is simplistic:

Those greedy doctors. “You come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats,” President Obama explained at Wednesday’s press conference. “The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.’”

If that’s what he really thinks is wrong with U.S. health care—and with the medical profession—then ObamaCare is going to be even worse than we thought. The point Mr. Obama oversimplified is that the way the U.S. pays for medical services can encourage some physicians to prescribe unnecessary tests or treatments, especially in Medicare. But his implication is that doctors aren’t acting in the best interests of their patients in order, basically, to rob them.

Incentives matter, yet maybe the truth is that medicine is a highly complex science in which the evidence changes rapidly and constantly. That’s one reason tonsillectomies are so much rarer now than they were in the 1970s and 1980s—but still better for some patients over others. As the American Academy of Otolaryngology put it in a press release responding to Mr. Obama’s commentary, clinical guidelines suggest that “In many cases, tonsillectomy may be a more effective treatment, and less costly, than prolonged or repeated treatments for an infected throat.”

Mr. Obama seems to think that such judgments are easy. “If there’s a blue pill and a red pill and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well,” he asked, “why not pay half price for the thing that’s going to make you well?” But usually the red and blue treatments are available—as well as the green, yellow, etc.—because of the variability of disease, human biology and patient preference. And the really hard cases, especially when government is paying for health care, are those for which there’s only a red pill and it happens to be very expensive.

The costs are illustrated by RomneyCare in Massachusetts, as noted Tuesday night by former Senator Bill Frist (R-TN), himself a practicing top-flight surgeon: While RomneyCare took the state percentage for those covered by health insurance from 93 to 97 percent, the average wait to see a specialist is not 50 days, versus 20 days elsewhere in the US.

Peggy Noonan argues with her customary verve that common sense sank ObamaCare in its undiluted form:

I think the plan is being slowed and may well be stopped not by ideology, or even by philosophy in a strict sense, but by simple American common sense. I suspect voters, the past few weeks, have been giving themselves an internal Q-and-A that goes something like this:

Will whatever health care bill is produced by Congress increase the deficit? “Of course.” Will it mean tax increases? “Of course.” Will it mean new fees or fines? “Probably.” Can I afford it right now? “No, I’m already getting clobbered.” Will it make the marketplace freer and better? “Probably not.” Is our health care system in crisis? “Yeah, it has been for years.” Is it the most pressing crisis right now? “No, the economy is.” Will a health-care bill improve the economy? “I doubt it.”

The White House misread the national mood. The problem isn’t that they didn’t “bend the curve,” or didn’t sell it right. The problem is that the national mood has changed since the president was elected. Back then the mood was “change is for the good.” But that altered as the full implications of the financial crash seeped in. The crash gave everyone a diminished sense of their own margin for error. It gave them a diminished sense of their country’s margin for error. Americans are not in a chance-taking mood. They’re not in a spending mood, not after the unprecedented spending of the past year, from the end of the Bush era through the first six months of Obama. Here the Congressional Budget Office report that a health care bill would not save money but would instead cost more than a trillion dollars in the next decade was decisive. People say bureaucrats never do anything. The bureaucrats of CBO might have killed health care.

The Washington Post reports infighting between liberal and conservative Democrats over HC legislation.  Robert Goldberg raises 15 HC questions for 44.  Charles Krauthammer says rhetoric met reality and thus sank ObamaCare; fictions about revenue neutrality couldn't stand--especially with malpractice suits not curbed, these being a major factor in soaring HC costs.  John Fund reports that only by concealing how hard young, seniors & small business will be hit does ObamaCare stand any chance of ultimate adoption.  Kimberely Strassel lists mistakes Team Obama made which undermined his health care push.  They include a stimulus bill that added to the deficit, a cap & trade bill than antagonized conservative Democrats, and rushing HC bills out, before moderate members of his party could be given real input.  Newt Gingrich cites Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-CA) disgraceful history of ignoring massive HC fraud.  Blue Dog Democrats are being wooed with another government board for implausible cost control.  Politics maven Jay Cost details how increasingly liberal leadership in the House led to the present mess.  Talk show host Dennis Prager, always a reservoir of common sense, has 10 questions on ObamaCare.  A New York Times front-pager details one hospital's two-sided role in lobbying over health care legislation.

Economist Martin Feldstein explains that tax rates will have to rise from 35 to over 45 percent simply to cover HC costs, with consequent loss of economic activity.  A WSJ editorial notes that Nancy Pelosi wants to hike the payroll tax to pay for ObamaCare.  Writing in Forbes, Manhattan Institute scholar Dr. David Gratzer compares American HC cost rises to those of OECD countries, and finds America running about average, rising in parallel with France & Iceland, but rising less than HC costs in Britain, Belgium & Australia.

HC mavens Regina Hertzlinger of Manhattan Institute and Robert Book of the Heritage Foundation notes that US HC per capita HC costs are 70 percent higher than in other developed countries, without being 70 percent better, and that control of unit controls is needed.  She presents detail on how Medicare's cost numbers are made to look better than those for the private plans: clandestine cost-shifting, fuzzy math and tossing much of the bill to future payees, yielding lower bills for today's taxpayers.  Yale Law Professor Stephen Carter defends the value of profit in health care.

A final Obama blunder was summoning Congressional Budget Director Douglas Elmendorf, a CBO chief appointed by the Democratic House leadership, broke what has become a tradition of not meeting directly with anyone from CBO.  (Alice Rivlin, CBO's first chief, has said she met frequently with the President during her term of service.)  CBO, an arm of Congress- created by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, was created for the specific purpose of giving Congress an independent source of information to counter the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).  By meeting with Elmendorf PResident Obama has boxed himself and the CBO Director in: If CBO alters its budget impact projections for ObamaCare it will appear as if Presidential pressure prevailed.  No CBO chief with the moxie to issue a report undermining ObamaCare will fold here, and sacrifice his reputation.

Bottom Line.  ObamaCare cannot compute by the numbers.  Even the Omnisicent One cannot get around this.  For any realistic chance of ultimate passage Team Obama will have to accept major changes, probably including jettisoning a public option.

LFTC - Canada: Stimulus Lesson, Not Health Care

David Frum shows why Canada is likely to emerge in far better economic shape than the US, from the global eocnomic meltdown.  Forget about their health care system.  If only Team Obama had followed this economic program, crafted by PM Stephen Harper.  Writes Frum:

Only about 10% of the Obama stimulus money has been spent. The Democratic Congress that wrote the plan timed most of the spending to occur in 2010 — 15 months after the onset of the recession, but just in time to ensure lots of ribbon cuttings leading up to the November 2010 congressional elections.

Canada, by contrast, adopted a much more modest and short-lived stimulus plan — $40 billion, almost all of it to be spent within a single year — and has held the line on spending in the medium and long term. Assuming both governments have projected accurately, Canada will emerge from the recession with a debt burden under 30% of national income, while America’s debt-GDP ratio will approach 100%.

Put in context, Canada's GDP is $1.37TR and its population is 33.5M.  Its stimulus was $1,200 per person.  For the US, this would be $365B, not the $787B Pelosi & Reid packaged, of which but 11 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), was stimulus--most of it in the out years, not 2009.  Even assuming all 11 percent fell in 2009, that would be but $87B--about 1/4 the per capita stimulus Canada enacted.

LFTC - Index 7/29/09

5 posts: (1) Climate Change Chicago Style; Coldest Style in 66 Years; China's Chill--"It's the Earth Stupid!"; (2) Sotomayor One Step Away; Graham Breaks Ranks--The Home Front; (3) National Security & Leaders' Imagination--9/11, 3/11 & N/11; (4) Palin's Parting--The Home Front; (5) Prisons & Jails: Who Rules?--The Home Front.

LFTC - Climate Change Chicago Style: Coldest July in 66 Years; China's Chill

July is setting records for Chicago summers: 2/3 of a century without a July this cold.  Al Gore, visit the Windy City and cut loose with gusts of hot air, quick!  The latest round of China-US climate talks ended yesterday in stalemate, as China reserves the right to industrialize despite our global pollution fears, and wants to talk about not climate change, but America's budget deficit.  Brrrr!

LFTC - Sotomayor One Step Away; Graham Breaks Ranks

Yesterday's 13-6 Senate Judiciary Committee vote, with only Lindsey Graham (R-SC) crossing party lines, sent Judge Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination to the floor.  Republicans are committed already to allow her a floor vote, and thus confirmation is assured.  On October 5, 2009 Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor will take her seat to hear arguments on opening day.

Senator Graham explained his vote (7:31) as deference to Presidential prerogative.  This is on one level honorable, reflecting an historic tradition of same.  But it is a prescription for ratcheting the Court to the left over time.  To review ground covered yesterday in LFTC: The Republicans play softball, often confirming Democratic nominees with little serious opposition; during the Clinton years Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed in 1993 by a 96-3 vote, and Stephen Breyer was confirmed in 1994 by an 87-9 vote.

But Democrats have, since the 1987 Robert Bork hearing, played hardball.  They smeared Judge Bork, eminently qualified; had the hearing been conducted under traditional rules, Bork would have won confirmation.  They allowed Souter to pass, only because Souter supporter Sneator Warren Rudman, his New Hampshire GOP sponsor, convinced key liberal groups that Souter was not "Bork without a paper trail," as Teddy Kennedy feared.  They high-tech lynched Clarence Thomas in 1991, smearing his personal reputation.  They gave John Roberts a partial pass because they were not convinced he would consistently join the conservative bloc, and because Roberts handled his hearing with consummate skill.  And they grilled Samuel Alito over the fire before letting him win confirmation narrowly.  They played hardball and blocked several non-white male GOP nominees for the federal bench during Bush's first term, denying them credentials that would have teed up a possible Supreme Court nomination during Bush's second term.  (Graham cited several Democratic Judiciary Committee senators who broke ranks, but they are a minority, and Senator Graham's hope that the Court can be saved from politics seems forlorn--his citation of the 1986 Scalia vote references a vote before Bork, and thus in a different nomination era.)

Above all, then-Senator Barack Obama conceded that both Roberts & Alito were qualified, yet voted against them because they, in his view, "lacked empathy"--liberal-speak for leftward judicial activist leanings in key cases.  Senator Graham should have returned the favor, preserving Sotomayor's rampant racial & gender obsessions as a campaign issue for his next senatorial run.

Bottom Line.  Sometimes it pays to follow the motto, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."  If one side, to use another sports metaphor, uses gloves while the other side uses brass knuckles, it is easy to figure out who is likely to win most of the time.

LFTC - National Security & Leaders' Imagination

Recently, Newt Gingrich gave a major national security address (52:45 including Q&A) at the Heritage Foundation.  It is long, but brilliant: Gingrich has more substance & imagination to offer on national security threats than any potential Presidential candidate in either party.  He focuses on long-range planning, war games, scenarios that go beyond tic-tac-toe to 4-dimensional chess, a high-gear media capability for public diplomacy, preparing to deal with strategic surprise breakout & respond rapidly with a counter-breakout system.  Well worth a listen, even in segments.

Another thing leaders must do is be prepared to adjust their portrait of even familiar countries or issues.  George Gilder has just published "The Israel Test" (2009), showing how in the past decade Israel has morphed from economic ward to powerhouse, with implications for a path to peace with the Palestinians (if ever, that is, they wake up).

This New York Times front-pager cites scientific advances that could imperil humanity, by exceeding human span of control; it offers the kind of example Gingrich would appreciate.

LFTC - Palin's Parting

Sarah Palin took shots at her tormentors and hinted at future plans, surrendering her governorship of Alaska.  Part I video (10:27) & Part II video (8:26) offer 19 minutes of Palin public passion.  She slams those in the media who "make things up" about our soldiers, but fails to give examples that would convince skeptical Independents.  But she nails the nasties by telling them that the new Governor has a nice family, and that that family's kids should be left alone (as hers were not).

LFTC - Prisons & Jails: Who Rules?

Did you know that prisons & jails differ?  I confess that somehow that detail missed me for 62 years.  Prisons are for incarceration of more than one year, while jails hold those convicted of lesser offenses, or those awaiting arraignment or trial.  Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald details life in such facilities.  It is a long piece and strong medicine, but worth a full educational read.

Here is one excerpt that is chilling in the Hobbesian world it reveals:

The goal is to gain control of the officer. An inmate’s most potent method of corruption is to persuade an officer to break the rules for him. “Inmates know that once they get a corrections officer to do something for them, even if it’s just bringing them a cheeseburger from McDonald’s, they own the officer,” says Frank Straub, the police commissioner of White Plains, New York. It is illegal to bring an inmate so much as a stick of gum, as corrections officers learn from their first day in the academy. But there will always be a few officers who are turned by a skilled con man. The manipulators test officers quickly—looking for a sign of weakness or perhaps kindness to exploit, or using intimidation to try to bring an officer to heel. “Inmates say it all the time: ‘I’ll see you when I get out,’ ” says Jones.

The threat can be realistic because at Rikers, as at other urban jails, inmates and officers often share community ties. The Rikers workforce is predominantly minority; there is a proud tradition in black families of correctional work, dating from the time when police and fire departments were less friendly to blacks. Given the black incarceration rate, the chance that an officer and an inmate know each other is not negligible. Most officers don’t let any prior acquaintance they have with an inmate—which they’re supposed to report to supervisors—affect them; most perform their vital law enforcement function with honor. But for a few, familiarity with an inmate or intimacy with the culture of crime raises the risk of malfeasance, and not just because of fear of retribution when the inmate is released. The president of the New York corrections officers’ union recently addressed the problem of fraternization on the union’s website. “Are you just willing to surrender all that you’ve worked for and all that your family is proud of just because of some individual who lives down the street from you and you want to be a part of some acceptable click [sic]?” wrote Norman Seabrook. The 1 percent of officers “who say it’s ok to bring in that cell phone or that contraband for an inmate, because they are ‘friends’ ” put the lives of their colleagues at risk, Seabrook warned. “Today it’s a cell phone; tomorrow it’s a 9 millimeter.”

The results of any favoritism, even if it’s less shocking than bringing contraband to a cop killer, are disastrous for a jail. “When a corrections officer builds a relation with an inmate, the system starts to collapse,” says Straub, who has studied corruption in New York prisons. “The whole process is undermined.”

On October 18, 2008, four months after the Woods contraband scandal came to light, 18-year-old Christopher Robinson was killed in his Rikers cell by three fellow adolescents. Investigation into the murder revealed a different locus of corruption.

Officers Michael McKie (“Mack”) and Khalid Nelson (“Nel”), with help from Officer Denise Albright (“Mama A”), had licensed 12 young thugs (the “Team”) to enforce discipline on their cell blocks by means of an extortion racket. New inmates had a choice: they could join “the Program,” which meant forking over a percentage of their commissary accounts and telephone privileges to the Team; or they could receive “spankin’s” (beatings) in their cells. Nelson and McKie taught the Team how to beat the holdouts so as to avoid bruises that supervisors might detect. Team members got to dictate who sat on which chairs in the dayroom, who went to the bathroom and when, and who could go into and out of his cell. Lowly lookouts policed the communal seating areas, “pop-off dummies” delivered the beatings, and the top dogs controlled the housing areas. In exchange for their extortion privileges, Team members were to keep order on the wing.

Throughout the history of corrections, officers seeking to maintain order have tried to exploit the brutal authority that inmates exercise over one another. Mississippi and Louisiana prison officials, among others, issued pistols to selected prisoners to keep other inmates in line in the 1940s and 1950s, writes John DiIulio in Governing Prisons, with predictably predatory results. A respected Texas prison commissioner, George Beto, tried to civilize this so-called con-boss system in the 1960s by more carefully choosing the inmates who would perform staff functions, but the same abuses developed, including quasi-official beatings of noncompliant inmates. Other institutions, like the small South Dakota jail where Kent County captain Randy Demory once worked, had more informal means of delegation. “A guard got a local college football player out of a cell and put him into another cell with instructions to Ωsettle these boys down,≈ ” Demory recalls. “The football player took care of business and was rewarded with extra food.”

McKie and Nelson’s Program had a particularly dire outcome. Rikers officials had transferred Christopher Robinson into McKie and Nelson’s housing unit in an effort to disrupt Robinson’s own predatory behavior toward fellow inmates in a different cell block. Accustomed to being the top dog himself, he refused to join the Program. Two days later, three inmates known as “Pop Brim,” “Ant Luv,” and “Fire” beat him to death.

Such delegation arrangements are no longer officially tolerated, yet they keep breaking out. Why? Perhaps because keeping a lid on inmate violence is so difficult. After all, the other benefits to corrections officers from such schemes appear modest. Police corruption usually entails considerable financial gain for the dirty cop, but in jail there are few deep pockets. At best, McKie and Nelson were freed from the necessity of patrolling the cell block every hour or so. They were undoubtedly lazy (and probably also part of the same criminal culture to which their charges belonged), but what we should learn from the Program scandal is just how great the challenges for corrections officers are. Left to its own devices, inmate society is not carnivalesque spontaneity, as the Foucauldians might have us believe, or grassroots democracy, as proponents of the misguided 1970s and ’80s “prisoner self-governance” movement suggested, but Lord of the Flies cruelty in which the strong try to control and exploit the weak.

The symbols of detainee power would be laughable if the means of attaining them weren’t so dangerous. Power-seeking inmates will try to control bathroom use and food consumption. Low-status inmates will wind up excluded from the dayroom. Commissary accounts, with which inmates purchase snacks and personal hygiene items from the jail store, are an obvious target for extortion. And chairs are a particularly useful tool of domination. A detainee sitting on a stack of four chairs is broadcasting: “I’m king.” A battle-gray adolescent dayroom at Rikers recently got rid of its freestanding chairs in favor of a green cement picnic table with attached benches. “The inmates were trying to control the seating: stacking chairs and not allowing certain people to sit,” says Edmund Duffy, the tall, energetic warden who now runs the jail where the Robinson murder occurred. Eliminating movable chairs solved another problem as well: they’re the first thing grabbed during a fight.

The predatory drive is particularly strong among younger inmates. Not only are young detainees in thrall to their hormones, but only the worst of the worst adolescent criminals go to jail, rather than to the far milder juvenile-justice system. Three-quarters of the adolescent detainees at Rikers are awaiting trial for the top felonies, such as homicides, shootings, and robberies, a far higher percentage than in the detainee population at large.

Here are money paragraphs at the finish:

The 44 inmates in the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP) are all awaiting trial on murder, rape, robbery, and other top felonies or have just been sentenced and await transfer to prison upstate. On Monday mornings, they sit in a large oblong circle in the light-filled atrium of their two-tiered cell block, arms crossed, orange-jumpsuit-clad legs splayed out in front of them, paying close attention to an unusual conversational ritual. Pat, a designated inmate leader, begins. “I heard you say, Fred, that I discounted you. You said you were angry. Can I ask you a clarifying question?” Fred’s response is less than clear, but Pat presses on: “Can I propose an agreement that we support each other and let us nurture each other?” Another man chimes in: “Can I validate that I heard you say that you propose an agreement that you support each other?” A third inmate picks up: “I support you validating the agreement that they support each other,” and everyone claps.

The men are performing their “one-on-ones,” public interactions between two inmates who bring up any tense moments they’ve recently had with each other, discuss what they learned the previous week about controlling and expressing their emotions, and announce what they intend to learn as the day progresses. The conversational conventions would undoubtedly be familiar to group-therapy habitués, but without such therapy experience, the self-referentiality of the discussion seems like a madly literalistic enactment of social-contract theory.

The participants turn to the future. “Now can I give you some feedback, Greg?” the leader starts. “My kernel of truth is that I’m excited because I’m expecting a visit on Saturday.” Greg responds: “Pat, can I give you some feedback? Would you like me to validate it? I heard you say that your kernel of truth is that you are happy because you are expecting a visit; my kernel of truth is that I’m happy, too.” Pat replies: “I heard you say that you heard me say that I’m asking for validation; however, you said . . .” Some members of the ring aren’t paying rapt attention to this exchange. A facilitator rebukes them: “Is that respectful that you are talking while these brothers speak?” The inattentive detainees soberly apologize.

That men with a criminal inability to control violent impulses can participate in this artificial ritual, known as “conscious languaging,” with seeming sincerity says a lot about human malleability. What will remain of these conversational mannerisms when they collide with the code of the streets is unknown. But program director Eddie Concepcion says that the inmates are already bringing their new language to court. “A detainee will say to the judge: ‘I hear you say that if I take this plea, I can go home. Can I ask you a clarifying question?’ The court personnel are blown away. Usually these guys are cussing out the judge.”

RSVP aims to train the inmates to think twice about their reactions before acting on them and to take responsibility for everything that they do. If a participant even hints at blaming drugs, alcohol, or anger for his past violence or a present conflict, program leaders will call him out. “Every day, we remind them that they are violent and are responsible for being violent,” Concepcion says. The Westchester RSVP is too new to have produced reliable post-release outcomes yet, but the rate of infractions among its members is a small fraction of those among the inmate population at large. Graduates who have been sent upstate to prison have requested the RSVP manuals so that they can start their own groups there. And the San Francisco prototype of RSVP does boast a significant impact on recidivism: the one-year rearrest rate for violent offenses dropped 82 percent for participants who spent 16 weeks in the program; participants who spent less time in the program had higher rearrest rates.

The challenges of running jails exceed anything that the academic world—and most of us—can begin to understand. In addition to the huge problems of logistics and safety that jails present on their own, commissioners also face a well-organized inmates’ rights lobby that fights commonsense antiviolence measures. Until recently, for example, New York City officials weren’t allowed to put pretrial detainees in uniform, which made detecting contraband more difficult. Only last year did Commissioner Horn win the right to monitor detainees’ phone calls. Adolescents arrive at Rikers with their criminal histories largely concealed from officials to protect their privacy, hindering the determination of their security risk.

But the order that the lobbyists, academic critics, and neo-Foucauldians see as oppressive is inmates’ only hope for safety and even, perhaps, rehabilitation. The recent insights of urban policing—that order matters, that small violations lead to greater crimes, and that information must be gathered and analyzed—are all equally pertinent to jails, where chaos and corruption always threaten.

Bottom Line.  Do not take your perception of life behind bars from either Hollywood or civil liberties types.

LFTC - Index 7/28/09

3 posts: (1) Gates Arrest: The 9-1-1 Transcript--The Home Front; (2) Supreme Court: Sotomayor, Ninth Scorpion?--The Home Front; (3) Footballica Fantastica! --Cyber-Serendip.

LFTC - Gates Arrest: The 9-1-1 Transcript

Here is the 9-1-1 transcript of the July 16 police call as to Professor Gates & chauffeur trying to wedge their way into Gates's home.  The caller did not say anyone was black and did not say a burglary was in progress.  Rather, she described suspicious but ambiguous events, leaving it to police discretion as to whether to send a cop.  Racism?  You make the call....

LFTC will await with interest Thursday's scheduled Beer with Barack at 1600.

LFTC - Supreme Court: Sotomayor, 9th Scorpion?

Oliver Wendell Holmes once described the Supreme Court he served on for 30 years (1902-1932) as "nine scorpions in a bottle."    In Supreme Conflict (2007) ABC Supreme Court reporter Jan Crawford Greenburg has written a remarkable account of the Court's tangled history during four administrations, from 1981 to 2007.  Greenburg combines reportorial detail, legal acumen (she is a lawyer) and a talent for storytelling to give readers a riveting account.  The book is accessible for lay readers, who most need to understand a vital, but arcane institution and how it works.

The author uses three settings to tell her tale: nominations, Court cases and internal Court politics that so often influence, at times substantially, how consensus legal opinions actually are arrived at.

Nominations.  Ronald Reagan's nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor began to break the mold of Supreme Court nominations and hearings.  O'Connor had a sharp legal mind, and a sparkling personality to go with that.  That, plus her breakthrough status as the High Court's first woman nominee, made her a shoo-in, despite her sketchy knowledge of constitutional law.  It was thought too soon after Watergate, during which Robert Bork carried out President Nixon's unpopular order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, to nominate him, though Bork was the finest legal mind of his generation.

Five years into the Reagan presidency, Chief Justice Warren Burger announced his retirement.  Reagan decided to elevate Associate Justice William Rehnquist to Chief Justice, the third internal promotion in the Court's history (after Charles Evans Hughes, Associate Justice 1910-1916, then returning to the Court as Chief Justice 1930-1941; and Harlan F. Stone, AJ 1925-41, CJ 1941-946).  Reagan chose Antonin Scalia, a brilliant legal mind and flamboyant personality, for AJ.  Scalia was confirmed easily, while Rehnquist, unquestionably brilliant and superbly qualified, was confirmed 65-33.

When in 1987 Bork was finally nominated to fill Lewis Powell's seat, it was too late.  Democrats used his hearing to change the nomination & confirmation process.  To "Bork" someone became Beltway speak for an all-out assault on a nominee, no holds barred.  Teddy Kennedy caricatured Bork as an atavist who would take the country back decades, to a dark time.  A weakened Ronald Reagan did not fight for his choice.  Bork's candor--explaining that while as a legislator he would vote for a generalized right of privacy, but as a judge he would not have created a judicial right of same--infuriated senators who, though lawyers, lacked his legal smarts, and sailed over the head of the lay public.

President Bush the Elder had two chances to swing the Court further to the right, botching the first and scoring narrowly on the second.  When in 1990 the first vacancy opened, everybody's favorite was Kenneth Starr, a first-rate lawyer with a moderate temperament, already a well-respected federal appeals judge.  But in a monumental act of hubris, key Bush advisers decided Starr was a tad wimpy, and thus would move left on the Court.  So chief of staff John Sununu & Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire sold their fellow state resident, David Souter, to President Bush.  Souter had little opposition from liberals, which, given his sparse judicial record, should have tipped off conservatives that Souter was anything but the "Bork without a paper trail" Teddy Kennedy feared.  Easily confirmed, Souter immediately joined the liberals, where he stayed for his 19 years just ended.  That catastrophic miscalculation led to a "no more Souters" refrain among conservatives.  As for Thomas, he was confirmed after a brutal hearing that he aptly termed "a high-tech lynching."

The 1993 & 1994 confirmations--easy & peaceful--of liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg & Stephen Breyer set in place an 11-year run with the Court unchanged, an all-time record.  Then things went wild.  O'Connor stepped down at the end of the 2004-2005 term.  Federal appeals Judge John Roberts, nearly everyone's idea of a perfect nominee, was nominated.  Days before his September confirmation hearing, CJ Rehnquist, who had hung on several years despite declining physical health, died.  Roberts was immediately upped to  CJ nominee, and O'Connor agreed to stay on until a new nominee could be found to fill her seat.

The solid favorite was federal appeals judge Samuel Alito, who had been runner-up to Roberts for the O'Connor seat originally.  But pressure mounted--from, among others, O'Connor & from Justice Ginsburg--for another female nominee.  The problem was that there was a paucity of qualified conservative candidates, in part due to unconscionable filibusters mounted by Democrats against highly qualified GOP non-white male candidates: Hispanic Miguel Estrada, African-American female Janice Rogers Brown, white female Priscilla Owen, lest they be credentialed, after some years as a federal appeals judge, for elevation to the Supreme Court.  For cynicism this is hard to top, and the policy paid off, as Sonia Sotomayor is the beneficiary of the Democrats blocking Miguel Estrada.

In the event, the woman only policy led to President Bush selecting his White House counsel, Harriet Miers.  Little known, she turned out ot be devoid of constitutional law experience, and thus performed poorly in senatorial interviews and pre-hearing prep sessions.  Outside activism by conservatives did not move President Bush, but the prospect of a nomination hearing train wreck did.  Miers was pressed to withdraw, which, reluctantly, he did.  And after a nasty confirmation hearing, Samuel Alito finally did get his well-deserved Associate Justice seat.

The intensity of the confirmation process has winnowed out those outside a closed circle of constitutional law scholars, and law clerks with apprenticeships at the Supreme Court of a major appellate court.  Lewis Powell, a respected jurist appointed ny President Nixon, was a top business lawyer who probably would not make it today.  Lifetime achievement for those who make it is now a track from early school days to the top, else confirmation battles over resume assume overriding importance.  No one who bounces around the way one Barack Hussein Obama did could become a Supreme Court Justice today--President, maybe, but not sit on the Court.  You make the call.

Court Cases & Politics.  Details of the cases I leave to those who will read this book.  But how internal Court dynamics a drive big decisions is another great reason to read it.  That Justices, despite their exalted status, are human is no surprise to anyone.  Trading a vote for change in a majority or dissenting opinion is no surprise.  And that draft opinions at times induce a Justice to switch sides is not surprising either.  But some dynamics do surprise.  Both O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, a middling California judge who got the seat Bork lost, were conservatives their first years on the bench.  But Scalia moved O'Connor left, and Thomas moved Kennedy left.  Staunch conservatives, they led their less conservative brethren to fear wholesale dismantling  of Warren Court liberal precedents, rather than narrowly circumscribing their reach.  In Kennedy's case, he also appears to have "gone Hollywood" in Washington, even pushing himself as future CJ, which will now not happen.  O'Connor and Kennedy reject the "clear predictable rules" lodestar that Scalia, Thomas and, to a lesser extent, Roberts & Alito, do; rather, they balance justice in the individual case, treating the Supreme Court as an all-purpose court of last resort.

Bottom Line.  Greenburg has spun a compelling and enlightening yarn.  The Supreme Court, our least understood major institution after the Federal Reserve, must be demystified once and for all.  The confirmation process is permanently altered by politics.  And the Court itself--never a purely legal institution--is more politicized than ever.  There is poetic justice (no pun intended) in this, as the Court has insinuated itself for than ever before into our political conversation.  The more political the Court becomes, the more politics will drives its rulings and the more politics will decide who sits there.  Conservative justices have generally tried to pull the Court back from the political arena, at least, more often than not; liberals, on the contrary, have pushed it deeper in, with relish.  This has led to Platonic Guardianship, in place of the democratic federal republic our Founders gave us.

Put simply, the more law is injected into politics, the more politics drives law.

LFTC - Footballica Fantastica!

I do not normally post sports stuff, but this NFL Fantasy Football video (2:36) captures in a nutshell the astonishing athleticism of America's pro players.  Problems off the field many have, but watch this to see some memorable feats.

LFTC - Index 7/27/09

3 posts: (1) North Korea Disses Hillary--Us v. Them; (2) Racial Politics: The President Walks It Back--The Home Front; (3) Climate Change: India Strikes--"It's the Earth Stupid!

LFTC - North Korea Disses Hillary

North Korea responded to Hillary's comparing the North to unruly children trying to get attention, which drew a sharp rebuke from an op-ed in the China Morning Post.  Likening Hillary's sally to "vulgar remarks" proving her "by no means intelligent," a flack for the North then really cut loose:

We cannot but regard Mrs. Clinton as a funny lady as she likes to utter such rhetoric, unaware of the elementary etiquette in the international community.  Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.

Bottom Line.  Chivalry, it seems, is not the hallmark of the North's undiplomatic diplomats.  But at least they are serious, in contrast to our more polite secretary of state.  Hillary's use of "unruly teens" to describe the North trivializes the danger posed by WMD proliferation.  Dealing with the North is more like dealing with a sociopathic killer than an unruly child.  Team Obama should understand this difference.

LFTC - Racial Politics: The President Walks It Back

A July 24 Rasmussen Presidential Daily Tracking Poll showed President Obama's overall approval rating below 50 percent for the first time.  The tally was 49-51 against the President; only 37 percent of Independents approve of his job performance. A Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll found 26-46 favorable-unfavorable on the 44's response to the incident, with 22 percent of whites but 71 percent of blacks approving.  Sunday's Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll showed 29 percent strongly approving of 44's performance, versus 40 percent strongly disapproving--an 11-point deficit that marks the first double-digit negative rating for 44.

TAS stalwart Ben Stein sees Americans having figured 44 out and thus increasingly opposing his initiatives--a stimulus targeting supporters, intrusion into the auto industry in favor of UAW, socialized health care, feckless failure to confront Iran, etc.

At Human Events, Jed Babbin sees in Obama a small man in large job, completely oblivious to constitutional limits to the reach of his Presidency:

The American presidency is a national office, not that of a Chicago ward-heeler. A president’s words carry the weight and power of the nation. His constitutional charter makes him the chief administrator of law and policy as well as commander in chief.  His charter does not extend to interfering in matters that are not within that charter. 

There is no precedent for Obama’s intervention in the Gates arrest.  Presidents do not interfere in law enforcement matters. That Gates is Obama’s friend makes it even worse.  It’s perfectly right for a president to express confidence in an embattled cabinet member, though that’s usually done right before the guy resigns.  It’s an abuse of power for a president to try to influence a law enforcement matter.

In short, Obama’s intervention was more than inappropriate: it was a wrongful exercise of the power of the office he holds.  According to the latest Rasmussen poll, only 26% of Americans approve of the way Obama responded to the question about Gates’ arrest.  It was a “teachable moment,” but the president didn’t learn from it. 

Two days after the July 22 presser, Obama defended his intervention. He said, “There are some who say that as President I shouldn't have stepped into this at all because it's a local issue. I have to tell you that that part of it I disagree with.  The fact that this has become such a big issue I think is indicative of the fact that race is still a troubling aspect of our society.  Whether I were black or white, I think that me commenting on this and hopefully contributing to constructive -- as opposed to negative -- understandings about the issue, is part of my portfolio.”

Barack Obama’s political power shrank as he spoke, doubly so as he compounded the offense. Obama is a small man, as deeply shallow as Paris Hilton. But unlike the Euro pop-tart, Obama is shrinking in influence and stature at an accelerating rate.

On Friday the President backpedaled: He telephoned Sergeant Crowley, the officer who arrested Professor Henry Louis Gates, and had an amicable conversation.  He suggested both sides went a tad too far, and both are good people.  He retracted his choice of word ("stupid") for the Cambridge Police Department.  While the President did not issue a formal public apology, his tone was clearly apologetic.  An African-American police officer on the scene backed up Sergeant Crowley's version of the arrest.

MONDAY AM NEWS: THE 9-1-1 CALLER WHO REPORTED THE INCIDENT TO POLICE DID NOT SPECIFY THE RACE OF THE TWO POSSIBLE BURGLARS, BECAUSE SHE ONLY SAW THEIR BACKAS THEY TRIED TO FORCE THEIR WAY INTO THE HOUSE .

Abigail Threnstrom sees 44 repeatedly giving "segregated" speeches: straddling both sides of the issue, racial & post-racial, to target distinct audiences (white & black).

William Tucker recounts a tale that illuminates the difference between what Gates did and what reasonable folks do, dealing with a cop.  Gates was, arguably, arrested for "contenpt of cop."

Miichael Moynihan discusses "Gates-gate" in the Weekly Standard, and identifies in a Gates quote from an interview the crux of the dispute: "America is just as classist and just as racist as it was the day before the elections."  What author Dinesh d'Souza once called "the racism industry" (in a 1995 book, The End of Racism) cannot abide whites using the election of an African-American president as an exit from the four decade race rap that American remains pervasively racist, even as signs of progress are evident.

Fox News analyst Juan Williams and ABC News analyst Donna Brazile both said the black males are instructed to be cooperative and non-confrontational with cops.  This is supposed to signify how blacks must take special precautions to avoid arousing the ire of the constable.  But that advice is EXACTLY what my father told me, growing up in an upscale white neighborhood in Manhattan.  And if I--EVER--had popped off at a cop they way Gates did, my father would have tanned my hide.

Washington Post columnist Colbert King writes in "The Black Man at the Door" that the reluctance of residents in an upscale mostly white neighborhood to open their doors to well-dressed black salesmen shows racism remains widespread.  He quotes former Clinton era telecom senior official Larry Irving, who sent in an -email:

Folks in these communities have Black friends and co-workers. They vote for Obama. They have all of Michael Jackson's and Miles Davis's recordings. But when they see a Black man at their door or their neighbor's door and he is not wearing a postal, FedEx or UPS uniform, they see thief, burglar or worse. And, they have no regret or remorse for that visceral reaction. That's just pathetic. And one day it could be tragic . . .

Larry Irving is a decent, honest guy, whose path crossed mine during my own telecom days.  Thus I do not question his good faith.  But there are two flaws in his assessment: (1) he offers no evidence that his white neighbors open their doors to white salesmen; (2) he has forgotten what Jesse Jackson said about 15 years ago.  Jackson, asked about rampant black male street crime, said he was sad to admit that walking at night on city streets and hearing someone coming up behind him, he was relieved if he looked over his shoulder and saw a white person.  Jackson's statement reflects numbers like those in New York City, where blacks, at 24 percent of the population, account for 68 percent of violent felonies; urban denizens may not know the precise numbers, but they are acutely aware of the vast disproportion.

Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald calls promoting racial paranoia the aim of Gates and his fellow racialists.  Mac Donald, the source of the above numbers, adds detail:

As for urban policing — where the police have victim identifications and contextual and behavioral cues to work with — blacks are stopped more, but only in comparison with their proportion of the entire population. Measured against their crime rate, they are understopped. New York City is perfectly typical of the black police-stop and crime rates. In the first three months of 2009, 52 percent of all people stopped for questioning by the police in New York City were black, though blacks are just 24 percent of the population. But according to the victims of and witnesses to crime, blacks commit about 68 percent of all violent crime in the city. Blacks commit 82 percent of all shootings and 72 percent of all robberies, whereas whites, who make up 35 percent of the city's population, commit about 5 percent of all violent crimes, 1 percent of shootings, and about 4 percent of robberies.

These figures are not police-generated; they come from the overwhelmingly minority victims of crime in their reports to the police. Such crime reports mean that when the police respond to community demands for protection against crime, information-based police deployment will send officers to minority neighborhoods where crime is highest. When the police respond to a call about a shooting, they will almost never be told that the shooter was white, and thus will not be searching for a white suspect.

National crime patterns are the same. Black males between the ages of 18 and 24 commit homicide at ten times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Such vastly disproportionate crime rates must lead, if the police are going after crime in a color-blind fashion, to disproportionate stop and arrest rates. To criticize the police for crime-determined enforcement activity is to blame the messenger.

Maureen Dowd, daughter of a cop, reveals details that speak volumes about Gates.  Witness the enormous self-regard of somehow who long ago "arrived"--His Harvard Eminence:

Gates told his daughter Elizabeth in The Daily Beast: “He should have gotten out of there and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, good luck. Loved your PBS series — check with you later!’ ”

Witness now His Royal Majesty:

Mike Barnicle warns that the next time Gates needs 911, he should call the Harvard faculty lounge instead. But Gates ripostes, “I have a feeling the Cambridge police will be especially attentive to my needs.” He said that, as he was packing for China, he got a call from the Cambridge police soliciting a donation and told them to try back in two weeks.

“I haven’t quite decided,” he said between coughs, “if I’m up to that right now.”

LA cop Jack Dunphy advises those stopped by a cop on what to expect:

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing.  You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly.  A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over.  At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you.  He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend.  And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

When the officer has satisfied himself that it was not you and your Hupmobile that were involved in the Piggly Wiggly heist, he owes you an explanation for the stop and an apology for the inconvenience, but if you’re running your mouth about your rights and your history of oppression and what have you, you’re likely to get neither.

Mark Steyn deliciously explodes the presumption Gates has as to his scholarship:

As to the differences between the professor's and the cops' version of events, I confess I've been wary of taking Henry Louis Gates at his word ever since, almost two decades back, the literary scholar compared the lyrics of the rap group 2 Live Crew to those of the Bard of Avon. "It's like Shakespeare's 'My love is like a red, red rose,'" he declared, authoritatively, to a court in Fort Lauderdale.

As it happens, "My luv's like a red, red rose" was written by Robbie Burns, a couple of centuries after Shakespeare. Oh, well. 16th century English playwright, 18th century Scottish poet: What's the diff? Evidently being within the same quarter-millennium and right general patch of the North-East Atlantic is close enough for a professor of English and Afro-American Studies appearing as an expert witness in a court case. Certainly no journalist reporting Gates' testimony was boorish enough to point out the misattribution.

Steyn sums up perfectly this "he said/VIP said" case, with what the Bard once did not quite say:

As professor Gates jeered at the officers, "You don't know who you're messin' with." Did Sgt. Crowley have to arrest him? Probably not. Did he allow himself to be provoked by an obnoxious buffoon? Maybe. I dunno. I wasn't there. Neither was the president of the United States, or the governor of Massachusetts or the mayor of Cambridge. All of whom have declared themselves firmly on the side of the Ivy League bigshot. And all of whom, as it happens, are African American. A black president, a black governor and a black mayor all agree with a black Harvard professor that he was racially profiled by a white-Latino-black police team, headed by a cop who teaches courses in how to avoid racial profiling. The boundless elasticity of such endemic racism suggests that the "post-racial America" will be living with blowhard grievance-mongers like professor Gates unto the end of time.

In a fairly typical "he said/VIP said" incident, the VIP was the author of his own misfortune but, with characteristic arrogance, chose to ascribe it to systemic racism, Jim Crow, lynchings, the Klan, slavery, Jefferson impregnating Sally Hemmings, etc. And so it goes, now and forever. My advice to professor Gates for future incidents would be to establish his authority early. Quote Shakespeare, from his early days with Hallmark:

"Roses are red
Violets are blue
Victims are black
Like 2 Live Crew."

Gates and his supporters argue that the country did not change overnight on November 4, simply by electing an African-American to the nation's highest office.  America, they argue, is just as racist a country the day after November 4 as it was the day before.  In this they are partly right--America was indeed as racist, NOT VERY.  But this argument is a giant misdirection.  November 4 was a watershed: it confirmed the vast change in American racial attitudes that had taken place over the preceding decades--America indeed did not change overnight, it had already changed; it was not a racist country on November 3, 2008, or on November 5, 2008, and is not one today.  More white Americans voted for an African-American candidate than voted for Bill Clinton--for a candidate whose resume was the thinnest of modern times, who would never have even been considered for the nomination had he been white.

The politics of racial grievance cannot survive such a change, because whites now know that change cannot reasonably be denied.  The retreat of the President confirms that the game has at long last changed.  In stark contrast to the Duke University fiasco of several years ago, when several rich white college kids were subjected to a multi-month public lynching, presumed guilty until eventually proven innocent--this time most of the the press did not bite, and the targets of racial grievance politics stood their ground, with African-American police standing at their side in solidarity.  (MacDonald links to a July 21  New York Times article that shows some outlets still shill for the racism industry: Gates's private chauffeur became, in the NYT's telling, a mere taxi driver--whisking away the elitist status of Gates to make him appear an ordinary black victim of white racism.)  A new era in racial politics has been ushered in, and those like Gates ardently pushing the race rap are left with praying for another Rodney King outrage to revive their cause.  (Larry Irving is far too decent to wish for this, as are most African-Americans, but a hard core of racialists remains, and they do wish for this.)

Bottom Line.  President Obama walked it back last week.  He reclaimed the mantle of post-racial governance, when jettisoning it backfired badly.  What Dinesh D'Souza saw 15 years ago has, it seems, at last come to pass.  Racism has hardly ended--nor, for that matter, reverse racism.  But the salad days of the "racism industry" are over.  Even the press, perhaps partly due to the Duke outrage, and partly due to 44's election, is no longer a pushover for the narrative of racial grievance.  And more people of all races, creeds and colors--witness the rainbow coalition of cops who confronted Gates--no longer roll over either.

America will deal with its racial problem increasingly on a case by case basis, sifting claims of fact in the fashion civilized publics do.  And racial intimidation of the Jesse Jackson & Al Sharpton style is no longer viable.  And when our African-American chief executive does a "Jesse & Al" he too will encounter resistance.

No, racism did not end November 4, 2008.  Nor did reverse racism.  Nor did phony claims of racism.  Nor did murder, rape, robbery and white collar and pink collar crime.  Nor did the racism industry go quietly into the not so gentle night.  But its gaggle of racialist agitators yelling "Racism!" routinely, are increasingly drowned out by the roar of the hurricane-force winds of change that have swept America over the past half-century.

44 learned that last week.  Time will tell if the lesson sticks.

LFTC - Climate Change: India Strikes

In what could be a lethal blow to climate change hawks, India is questioning scientific justification behind global warming.  The Financial Times reports:

Jairam Ramesh, the Indian environment minister, accused the developed world of needlessly raising alarm over melting Himalayan glaciers.

He dismissed scientists’ predictions that Himalayan glaciers might disappear within 40 years as a result of global warming.

“We have to get out of the preconceived notion, which is based on western media, and invest our scientific research and other capacities to study Himalayan atmosphere,” he said.

“Science has its limitation. You cannot substitute the knowledge that has been gained by the people living in cold deserts through everyday experience.”

The WSJ editors add more detail, noting that India wants a solution offered by Team Bush:

Mr. Ramesh’s remarks point to another cost India could bear even if New Delhi resists imposing its own emissions caps: the cost of protectionist measures imposed by developed countries to shield their businesses from the costs of their own national emissions targets. The cap and tax bill recently passed by the U.S. House is explicit in proposing tariffs on goods from countries that don’t follow the developed world’s anticarbon line.

Instead Mr. Ramesh repeated New Delhi’s longstanding call for developed countries to finance the import of expensive green technologies, which would in theory help India reduce emissions without incurring as many out-of-pocket costs. At the same time, India has rejected any calls for legally binding emissions targets.

If this concept sounds familiar, it should. President George W. Bush proposed such a framework almost exactly four years ago. The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate brought together the U.S., India, China and four other countries to find ways to spread green technologies. Environmentalists derided it at the time, partly because it didn’t set mandatory emissions reductions and partly because Mr. Bush had proposed it. It has since dropped off the radar screen, although it’s still in operation.

George Will sees China pushing back against carbon reduction hawks.  Enjoy his arch closing paragraphs:

Fortunately, skepticism about the evidence that supposedly supports current alarmism about climate change is growing, as is evidence that, whatever the truth about the problem turns out to be, US actions cannot be significantly ameliorative.

When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon "young Americans" to "get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon," another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: "If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade."

Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful clamors about carbon, and why, regarding climate change, the US government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the sagging US economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was dying.

Bottom Line.  The rise of China & India is undermining the push to throw trillions at carbon emissions reduction.  Two huge industrializing countries, who have nearly 40 percent of global population, cannot adopt aggressive carbon reduction without crippling their drive for prosperity.  Rich nations have the economic surplus to indulge environmental excess, but even in such places the grim global economic picture is undermining support for high carbon taxes--witness Australia, as LFTC recently reported.

Rich countries in fat times can afford to indulge the climate modelers, who increasingly, as the cooling that began in 1998 continues, seem more and more like intellectual cousins of the geniuses who gave us financial leverage models.  In case anyone has failed to notice, we are no longer living in fat times.

LFTC - Index 7/24/09

5 posts: (1) Neil & Buzz Landed on the Moon, Whoopi Lands on Mars, Marion on Venus--Cyber-Serendip; (2) Climate Change: Al, Call Home; Hillary, Go Home & Stay Home--"It's the Earth Stupid!; (3) Arresting Harvard's Gates; Obama Tosses Post-Racialism Overboard--The Home Front; (4) Farewell F-22 Production, F-35 Flies Farther Away--The Home Front; (5) Hotel Bombings: New Terror Target Model--Us v. Them.

LFTC - Neil & Buzz Landed on the Moon, Whoopi Lands on Mars, Marion on Venus

Begin Friday with a few laughs, before getting to the serious stuff: Check out this "The View" video (1:44) of Whoopi Goldberg questioning whether Neil & Buzz landed on the Moon.  Whoopi styles herself a fan of Capricorn One (1978), a Hollywood flick with a stellar cast (sorry about that), about a faked Mars landing that starred, among others, America's favorite 1990s multiple murderer & ex-NFL great, one Orenthal James Simpson.  Here is the summary, which, note well, is signed by Anonymous:

Classic conspiracy tale about the first manned mission to Mars. All appears to be going well until the astronauts are pulled off the ship just before launch by shadowy government types and whisked off to a film studio in the desert. It transpires that the space vehicle has a major defect which NASA just daren't admit. At the studio, over a course of months, the astronauts are forced to act out the journey and the landing to trick the world into believing they have made the trip. Meanwhile, a Journalist (played by Gould) is getting suspicious and every clue he uncovers seems to result in an attempt on his life! The astronauts are just about to splashdown when a further twist to the tale occurs, leaving them with no choice but to try and escape... Written by MT

When the head of NASA's manned Mars missions discovers that the capsule meant to carry the astronauts will suffer a catastrophic failure, he forces the three astronauts to participate in a hoax by broadcasting their 'Mission' from a studio built at a now abandoned air force base. Over the many months of the mission, the astronauts send broadcasts to Earth on their progress and all goes well until their space capsule burns up on re-entry. They soon realize that the only way for the hoax to be maintained is for them to die and they make a desperate attempt to escape their captors. Throughout this period, an investigative reporter gets wind of the fact that something is amiss with man's first mission to Mars and slowly puts together the pieces of the mystery. Written by garykmcd

Charles Brubaker is the astronaut leading NASA's first manned mission to Mars. Seconds before the launch, the entire team is pulled from the capsule and the rocket leaves earth unmanned much to Brubaker's anger. The head of the programme explains that the life support system was faulty and that NASA can't afford the publicity of a scratched mission. The plan is to fake the Mars landing and keep the astronauts at a remote base until the mission is over, but then investigative journalist Robert Caulfield starts to suspect something. Written by Col Needham {col@imdb.com}

Brolin, Waterston and Simpson play astronauts agreeing to spare the government embarrassment by faking their Mars landing after their spacecraft is unsafe for a manned takeoff. When mission controller Holbrook plots to kill them in a staged capsule fire, they try to expose the truth. Gould stars as a journalist determined to crack the conspiracy and Telly Savalas is an eccentric farmer coming to Gould's aid. Written by Anonymous.

To be fair, Whoopi has company: French actress Marion Cotillard, winner of an Oscar for her portrayal of Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose (2007), Cotillard believes not only that the Moon landing was faked, but that 9/11 was an inside job.  Cotillard's star-logic is that planes have hit other towers and those never collapse, so how come the WTC Towers collapsed so quickly?  Her answer: it was the cheapest way to destroy an uneconomic building.  She should stay out of the construction business.

Bottom Line.  NASA did not make it to Mars, but Whoopi did.  Whoopi could tell Marion about the WTC Towers actually having collapsed, except that Marion is on Venus.  Whoopi & Marion cannot communicate, because a cabal known as "The Neo-Matarese Circle"--NASA, the CIA and Sarah Palin--are blocking all transmissions between the two planets.

Bonus.  Enjoy this "La Vie en Rose" audio (3:09) of the real Edith Piaf singing one of her trademark songs.

LFTC - Climate Change: Al, Call Home; Hillary, Go Home & Stay Home

Monday July 21 featured a RECORD JULY 21 LOW for Nashville.  Local records date back to....1877.  Al, call your office, home, city of residence, whatever.  Claudia Rosett slams Hillary for apologizing--in India, of all places--for America's carbon footprint.  America does 95 percent of the apologizing for 5 percent of the world's sins; and we have done more to benefit freedom & prosperity worldwide than any other country, for which we get less and less approval.  The Marshall Institute has issued a 7-page Cocktail Conversation Guide to Global Warming (2009).

LFTC - Arresting Harvard's Gates: Obama Tosses Post-Racialism Overboard

A careful read of the 3-page Henry Louis Gates Jr. July 16, 2009 arrest report shows a very different picture than painted by President Obama at his July 22 press conference. The arresting officer stands by his arrest (2:26) of Gates for disorderly conduct in public, under Massachusetts law--Gates had come outside in response to the officer's request, and then been loud and profane before onlookers, including nasty references to the officer's mother.  (Whether the front porch qualifies as public is dubious, and may be why charges were dropped.)  The officer responded to a cell call from a passerby who saw a black man attempting to force the front door at 3 AM; the Gates residence had in fact been burglarized while he was away.

Here is a radio interview (22:29) with the arresting officer, Cambridge Police Department Sergeant Jim Crowley, who explained that he asked the suspect outside because he was alone without backup, and he had a wife & three kids at home to think about; the officer said he will never apologize.  The officer has what the interviewer noted is a "stellar record."  He expressed disappointment at President 44's comments.

It gets better: Sgt. Crowley teaches a class at the Lowell Police Academy on how cops can avoid racial profiling, by learning to recognize diverse cultural signals.  Crowley also, as a campus cop in 1993, administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in an unsuccessful effort to save the life of Boston Celtic African-American player Reggie Lewis, who collapsed during a workout at Brandies University.  Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said he was "troubled" by the arrest, while Cambridge's Mayor Denise Simmonds apologized; both leaders are African-American.

"CNN American Morning" reports that Commissioner Robert Haas told a CNN reporter, Don Lemon, that his department has worked hard on community relations and that his officers were "hurt" by the President's remarks.  Lemon reported that Gates intends to sue, but that the police may release tapes of the incident.

Here is the full exchange between the President and a reporter--the last Q&A exchange of his July 22 press conference:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Recently, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge. What does that incident say to you? And what does it say about race relations in America?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I -- I should say at the outset that Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here.

I don't know all the facts. What's been reported, though, is that the guy forgot his keys, jimmied his way to get into the house; there was a report called into the police station that there might be a burglary taking place.

So far, so good, right? I mean, if I was trying to jigger into -- well, I guess this is my house now, so -- (laughter) -- it probably wouldn't happen.

(Chuckling.) But let's say my old house in Chicago -- (laughter) -- here I'd get shot. (Laughter.) But so far, so good. They're -- they're -- they're reporting. The police are doing what they should. There's a call. They go investigate. What happens?

My understanding is, at that point, Professor Gates is already in his house. The police officer comes in. I'm sure there's some exchange of words. But my understanding is -- is that Professor Gates then shows his ID to show that this is his house, and at that point he gets arrested for disorderly conduct, charges which are later dropped.

Now, I've -- I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

And number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcing disproportionately. That's just a fact.

As you know, Lynn, when I was in the state legislature in Illinois, we worked on a racial profiling bill because there was indisputable evidence that blacks and Hispanics were being stopped disproportionately. And that is a sign, an example of how, you know, race remains a factor in the society.

That doesn't lessen the incredible progress that has been made. I am standing here as testimony to the progress that's been made. And yet the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, this still haunts us.

And even when there are honest misunderstandings, the fact that blacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently, and oftentime for no cause, casts suspicion even when there is good cause. And that's why I think the more that we're working with local law enforcement to improve policing techniques so that we're eliminating potential bias, the safer everybody's going to be.

Arrest Report Versus Gates & the President: Who Should We Trust?  The arrest report, if accurate, makes clear that the officer did not simply assume that a black man was burglarizing the house, nor did he disregard proffered identification.  Rather, Gates pulled a ploy prominent African-Americans have been pulling for years at the expense of cops, knowing full well that mainstream media likely would presume police racism.  Loud affirmations of the big shot he is, coupled with threats to make the officer regret having arrested him, and refusal to comply with the officer's requests, led to--surprise--an arrest for disorderly conduct.

President Obama conceded he knew only part of the story.  On that alone, he should have kept his mouth shut.  Presidential comments are big news, and especially in an emotionally-charged case should not be offered.  Worse, "Skip" Gates is, 44 admitted, a friend of his, making his comments susceptible to bias.  Yet there our post-racial President is, resurrecting the hoary specter of racial profiling.  While he acknowledged that his election signaled progress, clearly--as usual--our Omniscient One wants it both ways: be perceived as post-racial by most, but racialist by powerhouse minority supporters.  Ironically, the WSJ editors note, President Obama had just told the NAACP that there is now less racial discrimination in America than ever in our history.

Other Views.  A more nuanced, fault on both sides view, comes from Manhattan Institute scholar John McWhorter, a serious non-racialist African-American writer whose piece merits attention.  NRO's Jim Geraghty thinks the disorderly conduct charge is a stretch.  NRO's Andy McCarthy sees a setup in the last-minute press conference question.  Also on NRO, Jack Dunphy, cyber-alias for an LA cop, explains why Gates is probably lying and the officer telling the truth.  Bill Cosby chastised the President for judging a local matter from a distance.  The Cambridge police union condemned the President's remarks.   On Glenn Beck, David Horowitz said that Gates heads the only major black studies program that is non-racialist; Horowitz opined that Gates, normally not a race-baiter, succumbed to Harvard arrogance.  In a similar vein NRO's Rich Lowry sees arrogance and says that even after electing an African-American President, for whhes the lectures never stop.  On ABC Evening News with Charles Gibson, the incident was reported as another example of lack of racial progress; the report suggested that the First Family may be the only African-American family living in a post-racial world.

Bottom Line.  By gratuitously insinuating himself into a local incident, the President exacerbated racial tensions, and tossed post-racial governance overboard.  My guess is that his motive was personal--"Skip" Gates is a friend of his.  Which is all the more reason to have stayed out of it.  Yet if 44's post-racial image is tarnished, credit should be given to much of the press, for balanced reporting on this one.  Except for ABC, all the reporting I followed--CNN, MSNBC, Fox, plus online articles in myriad publications--was post-racial.  Thus, post-racial attitudes after the election of an African-American President make the racialism of Professor Gates seem out of a time warp.  Things have, as 44 told the NAACP, changed--and for the better.  Perhaps 44 will learn from this time to stay silent the next time a local incident makes national news.

One item not stressed in any of the reports & discussions I heard, but mentioned by the arresting officer in his radio interview: Gates insulted the officer's mother.  That, I surmise, tipped the balance against Gates.  And yes, a white guy who insulted an officer's mother likely would get the same treatment.  Moral: leave Mom out of it, when dealing with cops.

LFTC - Farewell F-22 Production, F-35 Flies Farther Away

The Pentagon announced that the 2014 initial operational capability date for the F-35 has slipped two years, to 2016.  Here is the Lockheed Martin site for the F-35 "Lightning II" Joint Strike Fighter.  Tapped to replace the F-16, it is the first plane to take off vertically and then break the sound barrier in level flight.  Intended for all three air services (Air Force, Navy, Marine versions), the plane incorporates multiple advanced technologies.  Let us pray 2016 does not further slip.  The Pentagon's decision to end production of the F-22 Raptor Air Superiority Fighter is looking dicier.

To be fair, the F-22 (which entered operational service in 2007) and F-35 are not aerial clones.  The F-22's prime mission is air superiority--clearing the skies of enemy fighters.  For this mission it is in a class by itself, vastly superior to anything else flying.  It also has, in the F/A (fighter.attack) configuration a substantial ground attack capability.  The F-22 is designed to replace the F-15.  F-22s are now capped at 187, about 25 percent of the original planned deployment.  The F-22 is not intended for export, whereas the F-35 is being sold to major allies.  As an all-around versatile plane, the F-35 is not a one-on-one match for the F-22 in pure high-end performance.

Bottom Line.  The Pentagon is making two wagers: (1) that the F-35 will not slip further, and will meet its design goals; (2) America will not get into the kind of war for which the F-22 was designed, such as a confrontation over Taiwan with China.  These are both large wagers.

LFTC - Hotel Bombings: New Terror Target Model

The following essay explains why terrorists have shifted attention from airliners & embassies, which have become more hardened targets, to an iconic soft target: luxury international hotels.  The essay is reprinted with permission from Stratfor.

Examining the Jakarta Attacks: Trends and Challenges
July 22, 2009
by Scott Stewart & Fred Burton

On the morning of July 17, a guest at the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta came down to the lobby and began walking toward the lounge with his roll-aboard suitcase in tow and a backpack slung across his chest. Sensing something odd about the fellow, alert security officers approached him and asked him if he required assistance. The guest responded that he needed to deliver the backpack to his boss and proceeded to the lounge, accompanied by one of the security guards. Shortly after entering the lounge, the guest activated the improvised explosive device (IED) contained in the backpack, killing himself and five others. Minutes later, an accomplice detonated a second IED in a restaurant at the adjacent Ritz-Carlton hotel, killing himself and two other victims, bringing the death toll from the operation to nine — including six foreigners.

The twin bombings in Jakarta underscore two tactical trends that STRATFOR has been following for several years now, namely, the targeting of hotels in terrorist attacks and the use of smaller suicide devices to circumvent physical security measures. The Jakarta attacks also highlight the challenges associated with protecting soft targets such as hotels against such attacks.

Hotels as Targets

During the 1970s the iconic terrorist target became the international airliner. But as airline security increased in response to terrorist incidents, it became more difficult to hijack or bomb aircraft, and this difficulty resulted in a shift in targeting. By the mid-1980s, while there were still some incidents involving aircraft, the iconic terrorist target had become the embassy. But attacks against embassies have also provoked a security response, resulting in embassy security programs that have produced things like the American “Inman buildings”, which some have labeled “fortress America” buildings due to their foreboding presence and their robust construction designed to withstand rocket and large IED attacks. Due to these changes, it became far more difficult to attack embassies, many of which have become, for the most part in our post-9/11 world, hard targets. (This is certainly not universal, and there are still vulnerable embassies in many places. In fact, some countries locate their embassies inside commercial office buildings or hotels.)

Overall, however, this trend of making embassies hard targets has caused yet another shift in the terrorist paradigm. As STRATFOR has noted since 2004, hotels have become the iconic terrorist target of the post-9/11 era. Indeed, by striking an international hotel in a capital city, militants can make the same type of statement against Western imperialism and decadence that they can make by striking an embassy. Hotels are often full of Western businessmen, diplomats and intelligence officers, providing militants with a target-rich environment where they can kill Westerners and gain international media attention without having to penetrate the extreme security of a modern embassy.

Our 2004 observation about the trend toward attacking hotels has been borne out since that time by attacks against hotels in several parts of the world, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, India and Egypt. In addition to attacks against single hotels, in the attacks in Mumbai, Amman, Sharm el-Sheikh — and now Jakarta — militants staged coordinated attacks in which they hit more than one hotel.

Hotels have taken measures to improve security, and hotel security overall is better today than it was in 2004. In fact, security measures in place at several hotels, such as the Marriott in Islamabad, have saved lives on more than one occasion. However, due to the very nature of hotels, they remain vulnerable to attacks.

Unlike an embassy, a hotel is a commercial venture and is intended to make money. In order to make money, the hotel needs to maintain a steady flow of customers who stay in its rooms; visitors who eat at its restaurants, drink at its bars and rent its banquet and conference facilities; and merchants who rent out its shop space. On any given day a large five-star hotel can have hundreds of guests staying there, hundreds of other visitors attending conferences or dinner events and scores of other people eating in the restaurants, using the health club or shopping at the luxury stores commonly found inside such hotels. Such amenities are often difficult to find outside of such hotels in cities like Peshawar or Kabul, and therefore these hotels also become gathering places for foreign businessmen, diplomats and journalists residing in the city, as well as for wealthy natives. It is fairly easy for a militant operative to conduct surveillance of the inside of a hotel by posing as a restaurant patron or by shopping in its stores.

Of course, the staff required to run such a huge facility can also number in the hundreds, with clerks, cooks, housekeepers, waiters, bellboys, busboys, valets, florists, gardeners, maintenance men, security personnel, etc. These hotels are like little cities with activities that run 24 hours a day, with people, luggage, food and goods coming and going at all hours. There are emerging reports that one of the suicide bombers in the Jakarta attack was a florist at one of the hotels and it is possible that he used his position to smuggle IED components into the facility among floral supplies. If true, the long-term placement of militant operatives within the hotel staff will pose daunting challenges to corporate security directors. Such an inside placement could also explain how the cell responsible for the attack was able to conduct the detailed surveillance required for the operation without being detected.

Quite simply, it is extremely expensive to provide a hotel with the same level of physical security afforded to an embassy. Land to provide standoff distance is very expensive in many capital cities and heavy reinforced-concrete construction to withstand attacks is far more expensive than regular commercial construction. Such costs must be weighed against the corporate bottom line.

Moreover, security procedures at an embassy such as screening 100 percent of the visitors and their belongings are deemed far too intrusive by many hotel managers, and there is a constant tension between hotel security managers and hotel guest-relations managers over how much security is required in a particular hotel in a specific city. In fact, this debate over security is very similar to the tension that exists between diplomats and security personnel at the U.S. Department of State. And the longer the period between successful attacks (there had not been a successful terrorist attack in Jakarta since September 2004 and in Indonesia since October 2005), the harder it is to justify the added expense — and inconvenience — of security measures at hotels. (Of course, in very dangerous places such as Baghdad, Islamabad and Kabul heavy security is far easier to justify, and some hotels in such locations have been heavily fortified following attacks on other hotels in those cities.)

In many places, hotel guests are subjected to less security scrutiny than visitors to the hotel, as the hotel staff seeks to make them feel welcomed, and it is not surprising that militants in places like Mumbai (and perhaps Jakarta) have been able to smuggle weapons and IED components into a hotel concealed inside their luggage. We have received a report from a credible source indicating that one of the Jakarta attackers had indeed been checked into the JW Marriott hotel. The source says the attacker, posing as a guest, was an Indonesian but was likely from a remote area because he did not appear to be familiar with how to use modern conveniences such as the room’s Western-style toilet. That the attackers were Indonesians supports the theory the attack was conducted by the Southeast Asian group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) or a JI splinter group. JI has conducted (or is a suspect in) every high-profile terror attack in Indonesia in recent years.

Sources advise that significant similarities exist between the unexploded device discovered in the attacker’s hotel room in the JW Marriott and known JI explosive devices used in past attacks and recovered in police raids. This is another strong indication JI was involved.

One other important lesson that travelers should take from this string of hotel attacks is that, while they should pay attention to the level of security provided at hotels, and stay at hotels with better security, they should not rely exclusively on hotel security to keep them safe. There are some simple personal security measures that should also be taken to help mitigate the risk of staying at a hotel.

Size is Not Everything

As STRATFOR has noted since 2005, the counterterrorism tactic of erecting barricades around particularly vulnerable targets — including government buildings such as embassies and softer targets such as hotels — has forced militants to rethink their attack strategies and adapt. Instead of building bigger and bigger bombs that could possibly penetrate more secure areas, operational planners are instead thinking small — and mobile. In fact it was the October 2005 triple-bomb attacks against restaurants in Bali, Indonesia, by JI and the November 2005 triple suicide-bombing attacks against three Western hotels in Amman, Jordan, that really focused our attention on this trend.

Like the July 7, 2005, London bombings, these two attacks in Jakarta and Amman used smaller-scale explosive devices to bypass security and target areas where people congregate. Such attacks demonstrated an evolution in militant tactics away from large and bulky explosives and toward smaller, more portable devices that can be used in a wider variety of situations. Flexibility provides many options, and in the case of the operative who attacked the JW Marriott on July 17, it appears that he was able to approach a meeting of foreign businessmen being held in the lobby lounge and attack them as a target of opportunity. A vehicle-borne IED (VBIED) detonated in front of the hotel would not likely have been able to target such a group so selectively on the fly.

Of course, this trend does not mean that large VBIEDs will never again be employed any more than the trend to attack hotels means aircraft and embassies will never be attacked. Rather, the intent here is to point out that as security has been increased around targets, militants have adapted to security measures designed to stop them and they have changed their tactics.

At first glance, it would seem logical that the shift from large VBIEDs would cause casualty counts to drop, but in the case of JI attacks in Indonesia, the shift to smaller devices has, in fact, caused higher casualty counts. The August 2003 attack against the JW Marriott in Jakarta used a VBIED and left 12 people dead. Likewise, the September 2004 attack against the Australian embassy in Jakarta used a VBIED and killed 10 people. The use of three smaller IEDs in the 2005 Bali attacks killed 23, more than JI’s 2003 and 2004 VBIED attacks combined. Additionally, the 2005 attacks killed five foreigners as opposed to only one in the 2003 attack and none in the 2004 attacks. The operatives behind the July 17 attacks surpassed the 2005 Bali attacks by managing to kill six foreigners.

The reason that smaller is proving to be more effective at killing foreigners is that the rule for explosives is much like real estate — the three most important factors are location, location and location. Though a larger quantity of explosives will create a larger explosion, the impact of an explosion is determined solely by placement. If a bomber can carry a smaller explosive into the center of a heavily packed crowd — such as a wedding reception or hotel lobby — it will cause more damage than a larger device detonated farther away from its intended target. These smaller devices can also be used to target a specific person, as seen in the December 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto .

A person carrying explosives in a bag or concealed under clothing is much more fluid and can thus maneuver into the best possible position before detonating. In essence, a suicide bomber is a very sophisticated form of “smart” munition that can work its way through gaps in security and successfully seek its target. This type of guidance appears to have worked very effectively in the July 17 Jakarta attacks. As noted above, of the seven victims in this attack (the nine total deaths included the bombers), six were foreigners. JI has received criticism from the Islamist community in Indonesia for killing innocent bystanders (and Muslims) and such targeted attacks will help mute such criticism.

In addition to being more efficient, smaller IEDs also are cheaper to make. In an environment where explosive material is difficult to obtain, it is far easier to assemble the material for two or three small devices than the hundreds of pounds required for a large VBIED. An attack like the July 17 Jakarta attack could have been conducted at a very low cost, probably not more than a few thousand dollars. The three devices employed in that attack (as noted above, there was a third device left in the hotel room that did not explode) likely did not require much more than 60 pounds of explosive material.

This economical approach to terrorism is a distinct advantage for a militant group like Noordin Mohammad Top’s faction of JI, Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad. Due to the Indonesian government’s crackdown on JI and its factions, the Indonesian militants simply do not have the external funding and freedom of action they enjoyed prior to the October 2002 Bali attack. This means that, at the present time, it would be very difficult for JI to purchase or otherwise procure the hundreds of pounds of explosive material required for a large VBIED — coming up with 60 pounds is far easier.

Even though JI is fragmented and its abilities have been degraded since the 2002 Bali attack, a cell like the one headed by Top certainly maintains the ability and the expertise to conduct low-cost, carefully targeted attacks like the July 17 Jakarta bombings. Such attacks are easily sustainable, and the only real limiter on the group’s ability to conduct similar attacks in the future is finding attackers willing to kill themselves in the process. Perhaps a more significant limiter on their operational tempo will be the law enforcement response to the attack, which could force the cell to go underground until the heat is off. It might also be difficult to move operatives and IEDs from safe houses to targets when there is more scrutiny of potential JI militants.

Increased security at potential targets could also cause the cell to wait until complacency sets in before attacking a less wary — and softer — target. Of course, the group’s operational ability will also be affected should the Indonesian government capture or kill key operatives like Top and his lieutenants.

From the standpoint of security, the challenges of balancing security with guest comfort and customer service at large hotels will continue to be a vexing problem, though certainly it would not be surprising to see an increase in the use of magnetometers and X-ray machines to screen guests and visitors at vulnerable facilities. This may also include such measures as random bomb-dog searches and sweeps in areas where dogs are not a cultural taboo. Additionally, in light of the threat of suicide bombers using smaller devices or posing as guests, or even placing operatives on the hotel staff, much more effort will be made to implement proactive security measures such as protective intelligence and countersurveillance, which focus more on identifying potential attackers than on his or her weapons.

Hotel staff members also need to be taught that security is not just the role of the designated security department. Security officers are not omnipresent; they require other people on the hotel staff who have interactions with the guests and visitors to be their eyes and ears and to alert them to individuals who have made it through security and into the hotel and appear to be potential threats. Of course, the traveling public also has a responsibility not only to look out for their own personal security but to maintain a heightened state of situational awareness and notify hotel security of any unusual activity.

This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to www.stratfor.com

LFTC - Index 7/23/09

2 posts: (1) Health Care: 44 Steps Up, Congress Steps Back--The Home Front; (2) Hillary's Umbrella of Phuket Leaks All Over Israel--Wobble Watch.

LFTC - Health Care: 44 Steps Up, Congress Steps Back

President Obama answered a GOP senator's charge that health care is 44's Waterloo, as follows: "This isn't about me. This isn't about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America's families, breaking America's businesses, and breaking America's economy."  At his press conference last night, President Obama ignored the bait offered by Waterloo excess.  He reiterated his program and its claimed virtues.  He sold it with iconic aplomb, ignoring contrary arguments.

Obama repeated in summary form what he recently said of efforts to defer consideration of health care legislation: "It is important just to keep the pressure on members of Congress because what happens is there is a default position of inertia here in Washington."

One form of inertia is Congress's Cadillac plan, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan, which media player Matt Miller informs us, costs taxpayers $9,000 annually per Member of Congress (69 percent of the $13,000 total cost).  With 47M uninsured, giving them a comparable plan would cost taxpayers $423B.  Karl Rove sees ObamaCare in trouble.  Health care ace Betsy McCaughey explains how ObamaCare hurts seniors.

Here is a July 22 telephone interview of 44 with a Washington Post reporter.  The New York Times reports on misstatements by Obama during his July 22 evening press conference.  But the experts polled by NYT missed the biggest one, a real whopper--not, like other missteps were, mere mistakes: 44 says ObamaCare does not ration care.

FALSE: Every major system--health care or otherwise--for which there is massive demand rations supply.   With demand nearly infinitely expansive and supply far less so, health care MUST ALWAYS be rationed.  The questions that matter are two: (1) how care is rationed; and (2) how socially undesirable outcomes of rationing are remedied.  Broadly speaking there are two rationing systems: market systems, which ration by price--economics; government systems, which ration by queuing, per bureaucratic decree--politics.

Each offers remedies for harsh outcome: market systems can be supplemented by directing subsidies to enable those of modest means to purchase basic primary and catastrophic care insurance.  Government systems ameliorate queuing by targeting exceptions to favored political constituencies--with politicians finding ways to jump to the head of the line (along with family & friends).  Thus, the market system. while far from perfectly equitable--nothing is--is less susceptible to political favoritism.

Meanwhile, Michael Barone counts noses in Congress and sees no 218 votes for ObamaCare to date.  He discusses first the Blue Dogs Letter--moderate Democrats--sent to Nancy Pelosi citing multiple objections:

On the first Thursday after Congress got back in session, July 9, 40 members of the Democratic Blue Dogs Coalition sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter opposing any health care bill that increases the federal deficit, fails to reform delivery systems, and doesn't protect small businesses and rural health providers. Signers included two committee chairmen. The House bill, they wrote, "lacks a number of elements essential to preserving what works and fixing what is broken."

A second, "Polls letter" was sent, over taxes on higher earners:

That same day, freshman Rep. Jared Polis of Boulder, Colo., sent Pelosi a letter signed by 21 House freshman and one sophomore opposing the increased taxes on high earners imposed by the two House committee bills. "Especially in a recession," the letter read, "we need to make sure not to kill the goose that will lay the golden eggs of our recovery."

Barone does House math and finds only 200 of 257 potential Deomctraic votes on board:

There are 256 Democrats in the House, with one vacant Democratic seat. Only five Democrats signed both the Blue Dogs and the Polis letters. That means that 57 Democrats signed one letter or the other, pledging to oppose central features of the Democratic health care bills. Few if any Republicans are expected to support either bill. You do the math. The Democratic leadership seems well short of the 218 votes needed for a majority on the floor. No wonder Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said it was time to "go back to the drawing board."

Gallup polled adults 7/17-19 and found health care 44's second weakest issue, after his handling of the federal deficit.  Two Tennessee House Members offer four warnings, based upon Tennessee's calamitous TennCare reform along the lines of ObamaCare: (1) "free" care is expensive; (2) employers prefer "free" care to private care; (3) that care is legally & financially accessible does not mean it will in fact be available; (4) a public option means more government intrusion into private medical care.

American Enterprise Institute health care maven Robert Goldberg explains why the grand treatment Teddy Kennedy got for a brain tumor in his 76th year would not, under ObamaCare, be available to ordinary Americans.  A Human Events piece reports a statement by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) regarding whether legislators had read the 1,000+ page health care monstrosity they voted on: “If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes.”  Health care expert Jeffrey H. Anderson notes that Medicare & Medicaid undermine ObamaCare's premise that the government can deliver quality health care at lower prices.  Louisiana GOP Governor Bobby Jindal identifies three Team Obama lies and offers seven principles for health care reform; visit the link and digest them.  Manhattan Institute scholar David Gratzer explains why health care is four times as expensive In New York than in Wisconsin:

Take two very different states: Wisconsin and New York. In Wisconsin, a family can buy a health-insurance plan for as little as $3,000 a year. The price for a basic family plan in the Empire State: $12,000.

The stark difference has nothing to do with each state's health sector as a share of its economy (14.8 percent in Wisconsin as of 2004, the most recent year for which data are available, and 13.9 percent in New York). Rather, the difference has to do with how each state's insurance pools are regulated.

In New York State, politicians have tried to run the health-insurance system from Albany, forcing insurers to deliver complex Cadillac plans to every subscriber for political reasons, driving up costs. Wisconsin's insurers are far freer to sell plans at prices consumers want.

The gulf in insurance-premium prices among American states is a sign that too much government intervention--not too little--is what's distorting prices from one market to the next.

Bottom Line.  ObamaCare needs blood transfusions, in the form of major compromises, to have any chance of passing even the House, let alone what it may need in the less liberal Senate.  President 44's press conference did not materially alter the probable political calculus of ObamaCare passage.

LFTC - Hillary's Umbrella of Phuket Leaks All Over Israel

Hillary had to clarify her "defense umbrella" comment re Iran, made while she was in Phuket, Thailand.  Her remarks, as reported by Yahoo:

"We will still hold the door open (for talks with Iran) but we also have made it clear that we'll take actions, as I've said time and time again, crippling action, working to upgrade the defense of our partners in the region," she said in a program taped for Thai television.

"We want Iran to calculate what I think is a fair assessment ... that if the U.S. extends a defense umbrella over the region, if we do even more to support the military capacity of those in the Gulf, it's unlikely that Iran will be any stronger or safer because they won't be able to intimidate and dominate as they apparently believe they can once they have a nuclear weapon."

Israeli officials were neuralgic, seeing American acquiescence in an Iran nuclear capability.  To which Hillary later said at a news conference:

"I was simply pointing out that Iran needs to understand that its pursuit of nuclear weapons will not advance its security or achieve its goals of enhancing its power both regionally and globally."

"The focus that Iran must have is that it faces the prospect, if it pursues nuclear weapons, of sparking an arms race in the region. That should affect the calculation of what Iran intends to do and what it believes is in its national security interest because it may render Iran less secure, not more secure."

Hillary's statement may reflect Team Obama's apparent decision to bet on deterrence rather than preventive action, as to Iran's program.  Her public reaffirmation of this policy--I see no reason to believe her statement signals otherwise--fails to assess implications of two timelines moving in opposing, not parallel, directions.  On one hand, Iran's nuclear program moves ahead, at a constant or possibly accelerating pace.  On the other hand, the struggle for leadership inside Iran freezes nuclear program negotiations, because one first must know with whom one will negotiate, and that the negotiator has genuine agency authority to cut a deal, before one can seriously negotiate.  Yet negotiating with a discredited regime only undermines prospects for regime change.

Bottom Line.  Hillary seems to think that the Iranian leadership will take her advice.  Whether her belief in her own persuasiveness drives this, or in the persuasiveness of her boss, or whether she thinks Iran has not thought through possible responses to nuclearization is unclear.  Israel understands that the two timelines work at cross purposes, and that Team Obama is stalled while a nuclear Iran comes closer.  Stay tuned.

LFTC - Index 7/22/09

5 posts: (1) North Korea: Kim's Dynasty Dying?--Us v. Them; (2) Hillary's Tour d'Horizon--Wobble Watch; (3) Iran-Russia Rumblings--Us v. Them; (4) Portrait of a Terrorist--Us v. Them; (5) One "Wise Latina" Was a Tad Wiser--OOPS!

LFTC - North Korea: Kim Dynasty Dying?

Newsweek details North Korea's First Family and finds considerable doubt that any of the three sons can succeed their dying father.  The sons are weirdly colorful, but do not seem to me like rulers of the future.  As LFTC recently noted, let the games begin and may the best warlord win.

LFTC - Hillary's Tour D'Horizon

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a major tour d'horizon policy address at the Council of Foreign Relations last Thursday.

Hillary first framed the administration's foreign policy approach:

And here’s how we’ll do it: We’ll work through existing institutions and reform them. But we’ll go further. We’ll use our power to convene, our ability to connect countries around the world, and sound foreign policy strategies to create partnerships aimed at solving problems. We’ll go beyond states to create opportunities for non-state actors and individuals to contribute to solutions.

We believe this approach will advance our interests by uniting diverse partners around common concerns. It will make it more difficult for others to abdicate their responsibilities or abuse their power, but will offer a place at the table to any nation, group, or citizen willing to shoulder a fair share of the burden. In short, we will lead by inducing greater cooperation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition, tilting the balance away from a multi-polar world and toward a multi-partner world.

Now, we know this approach is not a panacea. We will remain clear-eyed about our purpose. Not everybody in the world wishes us well or shares our values and interests. And some will actively seek to undermine our efforts. In those cases, our partnerships can become power coalitions to constrain or deter those negative actions.

And to these foes and would-be foes, let me say our focus on diplomacy and development is not an alternative to our national security arsenal. Our willingness to talk is not a sign of weakness to be exploited. We will not hesitate to defend our friends, our interests, and above all, our people vigorously and when necessary with the world’s strongest military. This is not an option we seek nor is it a threat; it is a promise to all Americans.

The new approach has five pillars:

Smart power translates into specific policy approaches in five areas. First, we intend to update and create vehicles for cooperation with our partners; second, we will pursue principled engagement with those who disagree with us; third, we will elevate development as a core pillar of American power; fourth, we will integrate civilian and military action in conflict areas; and fifth, we will leverage key sources of American power, including our economic strength and the power of our example.

Hillary could not resist a shot at the prior administration:

We’ve also begun to adopt a more flexible and pragmatic posture with our partners. We won’t agree on every issue. Standing firm on our principles shouldn’t prevent us from working together where we can. So we will not tell our partners to take it or leave it, nor will we insist that they’re either with us or against us. In today’s world, that’s global malpractice. 

On Israel & the Palestinians, Hillary called on both sides to act accordingly:

So I say to all sides: Sending messages of peace is not enough. You must also act against the cultures of hate, intolerance and disrespect that perpetuate conflict. 

On Iran, Hillary offered engagement:

With this in mind, I want to say a few words about Iran. We watched the energy of Iran’s election with great admiration, only to be appalled by the manner in which the government used violence to quell the voices of the Iranian people, and then tried to hide its actions by arresting foreign journalists and nationals, and expelling them, and cutting off access to technology. As we and our G-8 partners have made clear, these actions are deplorable and unacceptable.

We know very well what we inherited with Iran, because we deal with that inheritance every day. We know that refusing to deal with the Islamic Republic has not succeeded in altering the Iranian march toward a nuclear weapon, reducing Iranian support for terror, or improving Iran’s treatment of its citizens.

Neither the President nor I have any illusions that dialogue with the Islamic Republic will guarantee success of any kind, and the prospects have certainly shifted in the weeks following the election. But we also understand the importance of offering to engage Iran and giving its leaders a clear choice: whether to join the international community as a responsible member or to continue down a path to further isolation.

Direct talks provide the best vehicle for presenting and explaining that choice. That is why we offered Iran’s leaders an unmistakable opportunity: Iran does not have a right to nuclear military capacity, and we’re determined to prevent that. But it does have a right to civil nuclear power if it reestablishes the confidence of the international community that it will use its programs exclusively for peaceful purposes.
Iran can become a constructive actor in the region if it stops threatening its neighbors and supporting terrorism. It can assume a responsible position in the international community if it fulfills its obligations on human rights. The choice is clear. We remain ready to engage with Iran, but the time for action is now. The opportunity will not remain open indefinitely. 

Hillary addressed nuclear nonproliferation and climate change:

That is certainly true when it comes to key priorities like nonproliferation and climate change. President Obama is committed to the vision of a world without nuclear weapons and a series of concrete steps to reduce the threat and spread of these weapons, including working with the Senate to ratify the follow-on START agreement and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, taking on greater responsibility within the Non Proliferation Treaty Framework and convening the world’s leaders here in Washington next year for a nuclear summit. Now we must urge others to take practical steps to advance our shared nonproliferation agenda.

Our Administration is also committed to deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, with a plan that will dramatically change the way we produce, consume and conserve energy, and in the process spark an explosion of new investment, and millions of jobs. Now we must urge every other nation to meet its obligations and seize the opportunities of a clean energy future. 

Hillary included one line especially intriguing, Thomas Paine's famous quote: "We have it within our power to start [sic] the world all over again."  (Paine actually said "begin.")  This last reference is odd in two ways: First, Paine's incendiary pamphlets were written more in the spirit that animated the French Revolution, which was the intellectual fount for the twin totalitarian scourges that devastated the twentieth century, Nazism & communism.  But credit Hillary here with benign motives.  Yet second, one American leader who frequently quoted the identical Paine phrase was the un-Hillary President, Ronald Reagan.

Al-Qaeda.  Author Steve Coll (Charlie Wilson's War) sees al-Qaeda on the run, still militarily potent, but losing support across Muslim communities.  Of recent successful Islamist terrorist attacks, he writes:

...[T]he Jakarta bombings are a true indicator of Al Qaeda’s present military capability, as is observable in its pattern of attacks: low-technology terrorism that is repetitive, limited, politically self-defeating, and yet capable of creating shocks, and still driven by an aspiration—if not any apparent capacity—to pull off another big one every so often. American intelligence officials believe that Al Qaeda’s military capacity is considerably diminished today compared with what it was even a year ago, as a result of the pressure it has come under in Pakistan. Even if that is true, bombings like the ones in Jakarta will recur for an indefinite time.

Coll notes recent election triumphs in Indonesia--where he believes last week's hotel bombings will reinforce anti-Islamist sentiment in the world's largest Muslim nation--and also in the returning to power of the Indian government on whose watch November's Mumbai Massacre occurred, after which, despite enormous pressure to go to war, the Indian government responded with restraint.

Asia.  Hillary told Thais that America is back.  Paul Wolfowitz praises grand progress for Indonesia after a decade of Muslim democracy.  A WSJ op-ed sees Asian luxury hotels as the perfect targets for Islamists.  Hillary inked several military & civilian deals in India, and got nothing in climate change push, despite yet another abject apology for America's climate change abuses.  India openly rejected Hillary's call for carbon emission cuts.  Yet Hillary did, the Washington Post reports, make a good impression with her interest in India:

Clinton is an Indiaphile, clearly fascinated by the country, its people and its food. Speaking to about 700 students at Delhi University on Monday, she said it would be a mistake to allow stereotypes portrayed in popular culture to influence relations between the two countries.

"People watching a Bollywood movie in some other part of Asia think everyone in India is beautiful and they have dramatic lives and have happy endings," Clinton said to laugher. "And if you were to watch American TV and our movies, you'd think that we don't wear clothes and we spend a lot of time fighting with each other."

Another India plus: the lone surviving terrorist from the Nov. 26, 2008 Mumbai Massacre confessed in open court.  Japan's US envoy likes F-22s, missile defense and does not like North Korea.  Jonah Goldberg notes Hillary's astonishingly blithe dismissal of the North Korean threat:

Meanwhile, North Korean nuclear brinkmanship and ballistic saber-rattling guarantee that outside governments will not exert an ounce of effort on the ongoing humanitarian crisis. "Talking to them about the camps is something that has not been possible," David Straub, a senior State Department official under presidents George W. Bush and Clinton, told the Post. "They go nuts when you talk about it." And so, we pretend it's just not happening.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday compared North Korea to "small children and unruly teenagers ... demanding attention." She says we shouldn't give them the attention -- "they don't deserve it, they are acting out."

Seen through the window of nuclear diplomacy, Clinton's neo-Bushian stance is entirely defensible. Seen through a moral prism, it's at worse a horror and at best a profound failure to bear witness.

Afghanistan.  Thomas Friedman visits a rural school in Afghanistan and sees moderate secular education as the way to defeat militant Islam.  His column is an engaging, heartwarming read.

Iraq.  Daniel Pipes has a blog post on Iraq that informs us that the Iraqi government is pushing America aside ASAP.  President 44 will own Iraq sooner than he thinks.

Iran.  Former Iran President Muhammad Khatami called for a referendum to decide Iran's presidential election dispute.  A New York Times front-pager details how the Revolutionary Guard is working to crush opposition to the regime.  Washington Institute for Near East Policy scholar Michael Singh asks what if Iran's leaders do not want to negotiate?  He writes, of the problem in getting Iran to the table to bargain meaningfully:

Hence, as the violence has subsided, attention has turned to whether President Obama still intends to talk to Iran, and if so how.

But this question misses the point. It is a bit like me wondering whether I should invite Angelina Jolie over for dinner: The question isn’t really whether I should ask, but how on earth I would get her show up. When it comes to Iran, the question isn’t so much whether to engage, but how to get Iran’s leaders to want to engage earnestly with us.

While in the past the United States pursued engagement intermittently, in recent years the effort has gained new urgency as Iran has neared the nuclear threshold. It’s worth remembering why the Iranian regime wants the bomb, despite all the trouble involved in getting one: Not primarily for prestige, and not primarily to achieve a balance of power with potential foes. Iran wants a nuclear weapon because the regime is insecure to the point of paranoia.

Iran seeks, in the end, assurances of its regime security we cannot provide, and hence might be made to bargain only under parallel pressure:

Also evident in the recent violence in Iran, however, was the inescapable fact that neither the United States nor any of its allies can provide the regime with meaningful “security guarantees,” which are so often proffered as the key to unlocking a grand bargain with Tehran. No U.S. president would, or for that matter could, protect the regime against the greatest threat to its continued prosperity — popular resentment.

If we cannot alleviate the pressure on the regime as a means to induce them to accept our offer to negotiate, the only path that remains is to add to that pressure. The free world should fully and speedily respond to Iranian dissidents’ calls for support, but we should not aspire to supplant or direct their activities.

Robert Kagan sees in recent turmoil in Iran and China the lesson that turbulence is the global norm and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Israel.  On May 19 Elena Bonner, human rights activist and widow of Andrei Sakharov (father of Soviet hydrogen bomb, later leading Soviet dissident), called for action by the international community to press Palestinians to release a captured Israeli soldier held hostage.  The failure to do so evinces, said Bonner, anti-Semitism.  Israel rejected Team Obama's call to stop settlements construction of housing in East Jerusalem.  Jonathan Tobin sees President 44 exhibiting a condescension towards Israel that drives a "beat on Israel" policy, and wonders why American Jewish Democrats continue to support 44.  Ex-Bush 43 senior official Elliott Abrams writes that a settlement freeze also hurts Palestinians.  Abrams acidly explains:

Why Netanyahu and his government loathe this entire Obama project is clear. Morally, it accepts the argument that Israelis have no right to live in the West Bank (or even some parts of Jerusalem). Politically, agreeing to any sort of “freeze” threatens the governing coalition. And how does Bibi Netanyahu get out of the “freeze”? What’s the exit strategy when the agreed time (Three months? Six? Nine or twelve?) ends — and Obama says, “I just need a bit more time to bring peace and freedom to the Middle East.”

All this is familiar — but look at what the Obama administration has done to its friends in Ramallah as well. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and his negotiator Saeb Erekat are on record demanding a total freeze — including in Jerusalem, without a time limit, all over the West Bank, every settlement, all sorts of buildings. No exceptions for construction now under way, for kindergartens, not even (or, perhaps, especially?) for synagogues. Where do they stand when the United States government announces its deal — allowing several thousand units to be completed and remaining silent on Jerusalem? Compared with the current situation — daily denunciations of settlements by Washington, while Palestinians are asked to do nothing — all of a sudden the U.S. will seem to have switched sides. All of a sudden the actual construction work you see before you is okay, Washington blesses it; and as to Jerusalem there will be no stated limits at all. “There are no middle-ground solutions for the settlement issue: Either settlement activity stops or it doesn’t stop,” Erekat told Voice of Palestine radio last week. Under all the possible compromises, it doesn’t stop — or so it will seem to Erekat and his boss Abbas, and to any Palestinian listening to Hamas’s radio and TV denunciations of such a deal.

Which is why the actual Palestinian position is to pray for Mitchell to fail. If he fails and there is no compromise deal, they are sitting pretty. Washington denounces Jerusalem, bad feeling between them continues, and Obama effectively demands nothing of the Palestinians. Of course, settlement construction continues as well, but the Palestinian leaders aren’t stupid; they know it’s a made-up issue. They know that life in the West Bank is getting better, the economy is improving, the Israelis are removing roadblocks and obstacles to movement — and they know that settlement construction provides badly needed employment for Palestinian construction workers. So, Mitchell’s failure would be sheer heaven for them, while a compromise — well, Erekat said it. Bad news.

Abbas has said a hundred times in the last few months that he will not agree to resume negotiations with Israel unless there is a settlement freeze. The United States will call whatever compromise Mitchell reaches a “settlement freeze” and will then turn the pressure on Abbas to go back to the table — forcing him to eat his words. Either he, too, will have to call any partial moratorium a real freeze, returning to the table while Hamas happily explains that he has once again given away Palestinian rights — or he’ll have to refuse to negotiate, which would anger Obama. Lose-lose.
 
So, this Obama settlement mania will end up damaging not only Netanyahu but Abbas as well. What a triumph of American diplomacy.

Soft Power Deficit.  NRO's Rich Lowry sees more need for America to use its "arsenal of soft power" as part of its diplomacy:

If this is the era of “smart power” — the Obama administration’s phrase for its sophisticated deployment of soft power in contrast to George W. Bush’s supposed militarism — few investments are smarter than RFE/RL. But its funding has languished. From roughly $200 million a year in the late 1980s and early 1990s, its budget has dropped to $90 million. As the president of RFE/RL, Jeffrey Gedmin, puts it, that’s about the cost of four Apache helicopters.

But Radio Farda’s impact has stirred Washington. People have noticed that for an amount that is a fraction of a rounding error in the federal budget — $6.2 million a year — Radio Farda deeply disturbed our foremost enemy in the Middle East. The question about RFE/RL has changed from “Didn’t they go out of business with the end of the Cold War?” to “How do we augment its impact?” Increased funding included in a bill a few weeks ago will allow it to ramp up operations in Afghanistan and expand into the Pakistani border region, while Radio Farda will almost certainly get more resources, too.

RFE/RL is a crucial tool of our soft power. If we don’t realize it, our adversaries assuredly do.

Law professor Jeremy Rabkin & computer science student Ariel Rabkin call for pushing technology to enable Iranians to undermine censorship, including cyberwar aimed at Iran's censorship apparatus.

Overall.  Strategist Thomas Barnett praises Hillary's policy shift.  I think him wrong, but his is a serious voice.

Bottom Line.  Hillary's speech was pretty good, with two notable irritants: (a) bashing Bush 43's tenure; and (b) embracing (yet again) Team Obama's moral equivalence between Israeli settlements & defensive measures, versus Palestinian terror & rejection of Israel's right to exist.  In asking "both sides" to "act against the cultures of hate, intolerance and disrespect that perpetuate conflict" I wonder what on Israel's part she thinks fits those categories.  The truth is, there is nothing--NOTHING--in Israeli policy that comes close to anything of the kind, and those Israeli politicians who hold such extreme views rarely play a major role in Israeli policy.

But in the end, no secretary of state can be truly successful without a successful President.  So, stay tuned.

LFTC - Iran-Russia Rumblings

The following essay is reprinted with permission from Stratfor.  It suggests that Russia was behind the crackdown in Iran, to keep America on the hook with Iran.  Team Obama can read it and investigate.

Russia, Ahmadinejad and Iran Reconsidered
July 20, 2009

By George Friedman

Related Link

• The Geopolitics of Iran: Holding the Center of a Mountain Fortress

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• Iranian Elections 2009

At Friday prayers July 17 at Tehran University, the influential cleric and former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani gave his first sermon since Iran’s disputed presidential election and the subsequent demonstrations. The crowd listening to Rafsanjani inside the mosque was filled with Ahmadinejad supporters who chanted, among other things, “Death to America” and “Death to China.” Outside the university common grounds, anti-Ahmadinejad elements — many of whom were blocked by Basij militiamen and police from entering the mosque — persistently chanted “Death to Russia.”

Death to America is an old staple in Iran. Death to China had to do with the demonstrations in Xinjiang and the death of Uighurs at the hands of the Chinese. Death to Russia, however, stood out. Clearly, its use was planned before the protesters took to the streets. The meaning of this must be uncovered. To begin to do that, we must consider the political configuration in Iran at the moment.

The Iranian Political Configuration

There are two factions claiming to speak for the people. Rafsanjani represents the first faction. During his sermon, he spoke for the tradition of the founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who took power during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Rafjsanjani argued that Khomeini wanted an Islamic republic faithful to the will of the people, albeit within the confines of Islamic law. Rafsanjani argued that he was the true heir to the Islamic revolution. He added that Khomeini’s successor — the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — had violated the principles of the revolution when he accepted that Rafsanjani’s archenemy, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had won Iran’s recent presidential election. (There is enormous irony in foreigners describing Rafsanjani as a moderate reformer who supports greater liberalization. Though he has long cultivated this image in the West, in 30 years of public political life it is hard to see a time when has supported Western-style liberal democracy.)

The other faction is led by Ahmadinejad, who takes the position that Rafsanjani in particular — along with the generation of leaders who ascended to power during the first phase of the Islamic republic — has betrayed the Iranian people. Rather than serving the people, Ahmadinejad claims they have used their positions to become so wealthy that they dominate the Iranian economy and have made the reforms needed to revitalize the Iranian economy impossible. According to Ahmadinejad’s charges, these elements now blame Ahmadinejad for Iran’s economic failings when the root of these failings is their own corruption. Ahmadinejad claims that the recent presidential election represents a national rejection of the status quo. He adds that claims of fraud represent attempts by Rafsanjani — who he portrays as defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi’s sponsor — and his ilk to protect their positions from Ahmadinejad.

Iran is therefore experiencing a generational dispute, with each side claiming to speak both for the people and for the Khomeini tradition. There is the older generation — symbolized by Rafsanjani — that has prospered during the last 30 years. Having worked with Khomeini, this generation sees itself as his true heir. Then, there is the younger generation. Known as “students” during the revolution, this group did the demonstrating and bore the brunt of the shah’s security force counterattacks. It argues that Khomeini would be appalled at what Rafsanjani and his generation have done to Iran.

This debate is, of course, more complex than this. Khamenei, a key associate of Khomeini, appears to support Ahmadinejad’s position. And Ahmadinejad hardly speaks for all of the poor as he would like to claim. The lines of political disputes are never drawn as neatly as we would like. Ultimately, Rafsanjani’s opposition to the recent election did not have as much to do with concerns (valid or not) over voter fraud. It had everything to do with the fact that the outcome threatened his personal position. Which brings us back to the question of why Rafsanjani’s followers were chanting “Death to Russia”?

Examining the Anomalous Chant

For months prior to the election, Ahmadinejad’s allies warned that the United States was planning a “color” revolution. Color revolutions, like the one in Ukraine, occurred widely in the former Soviet Union after its collapse, and these revolutions followed certain steps. An opposition political party was organized to mount an electoral challenge the establishment. Then, an election occurred that was either fraudulent or claimed by the opposition as having been fraudulent. Next, widespread peaceful protests against the regime (all using a national color as the symbol of the revolution) took place, followed by the collapse of the government through a variety of paths. Ultimately, the opposition — which was invariably pro-Western and particularly pro-American — took power.

Moscow openly claimed that Western intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, organized and funded the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. These agencies allegedly used nongovernmental organizations (human rights groups, pro-democracy groups, etc.) to delegitimize the existing regime, repudiate the outcome of the election regardless of its validity and impose what the Russians regarded as a pro-American puppet regime. The Russians saw Ukraine’s Orange Revolution as the break point in their relationship with the West, with the creation of a pro-American, pro-NATO regime in Ukraine representing a direct attack on Russian national security. The Americans argued that to the contrary, they had done nothing but facilitate a democratic movement that opposed the existing regime for its own reasons, demanding that rigged elections be repudiated.

In warning that the United States was planning a color revolution in Iran, Ahmadinejad took the Russian position. Namely, he was arguing that behind the cover of national self-determination, human rights and commitment to democratic institutions, the United States was funding an Iranian opposition movement on the order of those active in the former Soviet Union. Regardless of whether the opposition actually had more votes, this opposition movement would immediately regard an Ahmadinejad win as the result of fraud. Large demonstrations would ensue, and if they were left unopposed the Islamic republic would come under threat.

In doing this, Ahmadinejad’s faction positioned itself against the actuality that such a rising would occur. If it did, Ahmadinejad could claim that the demonstrators were — wittingly or not — operating on behalf of the United States, thus delegitimizing the demonstrators. In so doing, he could discredit supporters of the demonstrators as not tough enough on the United States, a useful charge against Rafsanjani, whom the West long has held up as an Iranian moderate.

Interestingly, while demonstrations were at their height, Ahmadinejad chose to attend — albeit a day late — a multinational Shanghai Cooperation Organization conference in Moscow on the Tuesday after the election. It was very odd that he would leave Iran during the greatest postelection unrest; we assumed he had decided to demonstrate to Iranians that he didn’t take the demonstrations seriously.

The charge that seems to be emerging on the Rafsanjani side is that Ahmadinejad’s fears of a color revolution were not simply political, but were encouraged by the Russians. It was the Russians who had been talking to Ahmadinejad and his lieutenants on a host of issues, who warned him about the possibility of a color revolution. More important, the Russians helped prepare Ahmadinejad for the unrest that would come — and given the Russian experience, how to manage it. Though we speculate here, if this theory is correct, it could explain some of the efficiency with which Ahmadinejad shut down cell phone and other communications during the postelection unrest, as he may have had Russian advisers.

Rafsanjani’s followers were not shouting “Death to Russia” without a reason, at least in their own minds. They are certainly charging that Ahmadinejad took advice from the Russians, and went to Russia in the midst of political unrest for consultations. Rafsanjani’s charge may or may not be true. Either way, there is no question that Ahmadinejad did claim that the United States was planning a color revolution in Iran. If he believed that charge, it would have been irrational not to reach out to the Russians. But whether or not the CIA was involved, the Russians might well have provided Ahmadinejad with intelligence of such a plot and helped shape his response, and thereby may have created a closer relationship with him.

How Iran’s internal struggle will work itself out remains unclear. But one dimension is shaping up: Ahmadinejad is trying to position Rafsanjani as leading a pro-American faction intent on a color revolution, while Rafsanjani is trying to position Ahmadinejad as part of a pro-Russian faction. In this argument, the claim that Ahmadinejad had some degree of advice or collaboration with the Russians is credible, just as the claim that Rafsanjani maintained some channels with the Americans is credible. And this makes an internal dispute geopolitically significant.

The Iranian Struggle in a Geopolitical Context

At the moment, Ahmadinejad appears to have the upper hand. Khamenei has certified his re-election. The crowds have dissipated; nothing even close to the numbers of the first few days has since materialized. For Ahmadinejad to lose, Rafsanjani would have to mobilize much of the clergy — many of whom are seemingly content to let Rafsanjani be the brunt of Ahmadinejad’s attacks — in return for leaving their own interests and fortunes intact. There are things that could bring Ahmadinejad down and put Rafsanjani in control, but all of them would require Khamenei to endorse social and political instability, which he will not do.

If the Russians have in fact intervened in Iran to the extent of providing intelligence to Ahmadinejad and advice to him during his visit on how to handle the postelection unrest (as the chants suggest), then Russian influence in Iran is not surging — it has surged. In some measure, Ahmadinejad would owe his position to Russian warnings and advice. There is little gratitude in the world of international affairs, but Ahmadinejad has enemies, and the Russians would have proved their utility in helping contain those enemies.

From the Russian point of view, Ahmadinejad would be a superb asset — even if not truly under their control. His very existence focuses American attention on Iran, not on Russia. It follows, then, that Russia would have made a strategic decision to involve itself in the postelection unrest, and that for the purposes of its own negotiations with Washington, Moscow will follow through to protect the Iranian state to the extent possible. The Russians have already denied U.S. requests for assistance on Iran. But if Moscow has intervened in Iran to help safeguard Ahmadinejad’s position, then the potential increases for Russia to provide Iran with the S-300 strategic air defense systems that it has been dangling in front of Tehran for more than a decade.

If the United States perceives an entente between Moscow and Tehran emerging, then the entire dynamic of the region shifts and the United States must change its game. The threat to Washington’s interests becomes more intense as the potential of a Russian S-300 sale to Iran increases, and the need to disrupt the Russian-Iranian entente would become all the more important. U.S. influence in Iran already has declined substantially, and Ahmadinejad is more distrustful and hostile than ever of the United States after having to deal with the postelection unrest. If a Russian-Iranian entente emerges out of all this — which at the moment is merely a possibility, not an imminent reality — then the United States would have some serious strategic problems on its hands.

Revisiting Assumptions on Iran

For the past few years, STRATFOR has assumed that a U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran was unlikely. Iran was not as advanced in its nuclear program as some claimed, and the complexities of any attack were greater than assumed. The threat of an attack was thus a U.S. bargaining chip, much as Iran’s nuclear program itself was an Iranian bargaining chip for use in achieving Tehran’s objectives in Iraq and the wider region. To this point, our net assessment has been accurate.

At this point, however, we need to stop and reconsider. If Iran and Russia begin serious cooperation, Washington’s existing dilemma with Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its ongoing standoff with the Russians would fuse to become a single, integrated problem. This is something the United States would find difficult to manage. Washington’s primary goal would become preventing this from happening.

Ahmadinejad has long argued that the United States was never about to attack Iran, and that charges by Rafsanjani and others that he has pursued a reckless foreign policy were groundless. But with the “Death to Russia” chants and signaling of increased Russian support for Iran, the United States may begin to reconsider its approach to the region.

Iran’s clerical elite does not want to go to war. They therefore can only view with alarm the recent ostentatious transiting of the Suez Canal into the Red Sea by Israeli submarines and corvettes. This transiting did not happen without U.S. approval. Moreover, in spite of U.S. opposition to expanded Israeli settlements and Israeli refusals to comply with this opposition, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will be visiting Israel in two weeks. The Israelis have said that there must be a deadline on negotiations with Iran over the nuclear program when the next G-8 meeting takes place in September; a deadline that the G-8 has already approved. The consequences if Iran ignores the deadline were left open-ended.

All of this can fit into our old model of psychological warfare, as representing a bid to manipulate Iranian politics by making Ahmadinejad’s leadership look too risky. It could also be the United States signaling the Russians that stakes in the region are rising. It is not clear that the United States has reconsidered its strategy on Iran in the wake of the postelection demonstrations. But if Rafsanjani’s claim of Russian support for Ahmadinejad is true, a massive re-evaluation of U.S. policy could ensue, assuming one hasn’t already started — prompting a reconsideration of the military option.

All of this assumes that there is substance behind a mob chanting “Death to Russia.” There appears to be, but of course, Ahmadinejad’s enemies would want to magnify that substance to its limits and beyond. This is why we are not ready to simply abandon our previous net assessment of Iran, even though it is definitely time to rethink it.

LFTC - Portrait of a Terrorist

The New York Times article on the Monday court confession by a lone surviving terrorist who carried out the Mumbai massacre (11/26/08) reports that "It is clear from the electronic record that the attackers seemed unworldly tools of their handlers."  The killers were plucked from poverty in rural villages, paid and brainwashed, then sent on a suicide mission:

His journey to Mumbai was at once banal and strange.

He told Judge M. L. Tahilyani that he was broke and tired of his job working for decorator in Jhelum, a small town in Pakistan, and making a pittance. He and a friend had hatched a plan. They would earn cash by robbing people. And to improve their banditry skills they would seek out military training from the easiest source available to a young Pakistani man: Islamic militants.

Mr. Kasab and his friend went to Rawalpindi, he said, and asked in the market where they might find mujahedeen. They were directed to the office of Lashkar-e-Taiba. Indian and American investigators say that Lashkar-e-Taiba planned the attacks in Pakistan. Although Pakistan initially denied that any of its citizens had been involved, it has now charged five men believed to be Pakistan-based Lashkar operatives with involvement. The organization’s founder, Hafez Saeed, has not been charged.

In the months before the attack, Mr. Kasab said in court, he and the other attackers were taken to a safe house in Karachi, the coastal city that is the commercial capital of Pakistan and is a world away from the Punjabi village where his family lived.

There the young men were cut off from the world. He said they and their trainers were not told where they would go next nor were they given any details about their mission, though it was clear that it would involve lethal weapons and deadly force.

“They told us we were to wait for some time,” Mr. Kasab said in court. “There was some problem.” They were warned sternly that “nobody will disobey” their orders.

In a month and a half, they were allowed out of the house only once for a training exercise when they were taught how to navigate the inflatable boats that they would use to leave Pakistani waters.

Bottom Line.  In no foreseeable time can we abolish poverty in rural Pakistan, or in scads of other remote places on the map.  Thus, so long as financing is available from terrorists to buy human sacrificial pawns, they will be found.  On the brighter side, Islamist ideology did not recruit them; their handlers, likely, but not them.

LFTC: One "Wise Latina" Was a Tad Wiser

In my Monday "Unwise Latins" LFTC posting (scroll down to Monday's posting) I chastised one of the four Latina contributors to an LA Times discussion of the Sotomayor "wise Latina" issue.  She stated that for 200 years every jurist in America had been racist.  I cited two Supreme Court jurists who dissented in landmark cases, Benjamin Curtis in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and John Marshall Harlan in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).  I noted Harlan's famous "color-blind" description of the Constitution.  I had forgotten, having read the dissent decades ago, that the full passage is less edifying:

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guarantied by the supreme law of the land are involved. It is therefore to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.

I checked Justice Curtis's dissent in Dred Scott.  It runs 88 pages and I did not have time to go through it and verify the absence of racist sentiment.  Nor is there an online bio I could find, with sufficient detail.  So I will retract his name, too, in that I should not have inferred from his dissent what his personal beliefs were, and error a lawyer like me should know to avoid.

But the rest of my comment on the "wise Latina's" piece stands.  As civil rights progress in the court picked up in earnest several decades before the 200th birthday of America, her damning all jurists as racist was over the top.

LFTC - Index 7/21/09

2 posts: (1) Uncle Walter and Dangerous Dan--Class & Crass; (2) Health Care:The Public Speaks, But Will Obama Listen?--The Home Front.

LFTC - Uncle Walter and Dangerous Dan

Reid Collins informs us of something I never knew: Walter Cronkite was pushed over the side.  He did not decide to retire March 6, 1981.  Uncle Walter actually intended to retire upon turning 65, on November 4, 1981.  He was pushed aside by his successor, Dan Rather.  Dangerous Dan couldn't wait all of 8 months.  He threatened to jump to ABC.  So the man who made CBS News, and exemplified television news in its 3-networks heyday, was unceremoniously dumped to placate his successor.  Apart from what this says about Dan, CBS does not look so pretty either.

Bill O'Reilly was at CBS briefly, including Cronkite's last days.  He said last night on the air that in 1984 he interviewed Cronkite, and that after, off the record, he told Cronkite what he thought of Rather.  Cronkite responded: "You're on to something.  He won't succeed, and shouldn't."

One final injustice: Due to Dan's dirty deed, Cronkite did not get to broadcast during the flight of STS -1 Columbia, the first space shuttle mission.  Launched April 12--exactly 20 years after Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth--STS-1's lift-off and first-ever spaceship touchdown runway landing April 14 would have been fitting as a capstone to Cronkite's long association with, and celebration of, America in space.

LFTC - Health Care: The President Resets

President Obama has rebooted his health care initiative, dropping his demand that passage in both houses of Congress be effected before the August recess.  GOP leaders are gearing for a big push to stop ObamaCare.  Bill Kristol of the weekly Standard calls for a full court press to kill ObamaCare and start over; as ObamaCare would not kick in until 2103 anyway, the administration's now-or-never argument is undermined.  The Washington Post reports that polls show support for ObamaCare now below 50 percent.  Teddy Kennedy calls for bureaucratic rationing of health care.

Bottom Line.  There are two theories of how to kill ObamaCare: full court press, or let your adversary self-destruct.  Objections should be directed at the plan itself, rather than engaging 44, whose charisma still counts.  Calls to make health care Obama's Waterloo and "break him" could swing the pendulum back to the President. Americans may prove willing to kill ObamaCare.  But they show no sign of wishing to destroy a Presidency in its first year.

The GOP would do well to direct its fire at the right target--an unpopular health care bill, and not at a popular President.

LFTC - Index 7/20/09

2 posts: (1) Moonwalk + 40 (Neil & Buzz, Not Michael)--The Home Front; (2) Sotomayor: Unwise Voices of "Wise Latinas"--The Home Front; (3) Sonia, Barack, Tarzan & Students--The Home Front; (4) Sotomayor: What Should "a Wise GOP Senator" Do?--The Home Front.

LFTC - Moonwalk + 40 (Neil & Buzz, Not Michael)

Start with NASA's 40th Anniversary webpage for the Moon landing.  Explore--whilst being Earthbound--its links.  Savor this 363-foot tall Saturn V moon rocket launch video (8:12) set to music--stay with it, as it starts slowly and builds to a spectacular climax.  The watch this real-sound full-motion Apollo 11 launch video (3:31) and marvel at the awesome power unleashed.  The watch this 1969 black & white TV quality video of man's first steps on the Moon (1:44), and see what we saw then.  Go also to the CBS website for remembrances of Walter Cronkite, and the videos page too; he is gone at 92, passing on in a poignant grace note on the very anniversary weekend of the Moon mission.  Conservatives soured on him when his liberal biases became evident, but Uncle Walter was indeed, for the last nearly two decades of his career, "the most trusted man in America."  Spaceflight was simply never the same after he retired.

Apollo From France.  Those of us of "a certain age" vividly recall the Apollo 11 mission--what we saw (everybody same the same things) and where we were (lots of different places).  I was, just over a month after I graduated college, spending a lovely 10-week summer in Europe, with the first 9 weeks in France.  The launch took place at lunch-time there, versus shortly after dawn in the States.  But payback came with the 2-hour landing, aired 10 PM - Midnight EST on Sunday, July 20, versus 4 - 6 AM GMT Monday, July 21 in France.  Viewing TV in France then meant seeing grainy black & white video (and missing Walter Cronkite).

In the Internet Age it is hard to convey how relatively isolated being in France was then.  Phoning the States meant waiting for a circuit.  Voice quality was akin to a very bad cell phone connection.  Prices were astronomical--probably $10 per minute then, equal to $60 per minute today.  News was in print newspapers.  I ignored most stuff, settling for the International Herald Tribune a few times per week.  I was barely aware of Woodstock, and dimly aware that Teddy Kennedy had gotten into a ghastly mess at a strange place called Chappaquiddick.  Sports was my focus, with the main feature being Reggie Jackson's pursuit of Roger Maris's 61-homer mark.  Jax--whose pathological narcissism was unknown then to me--had 40 homers by August, but then faded badly, failing even to reach 50.

I was of course aware that thousands of my countrymen were dying in an Asian sinkhole named Vietnam, and that the war was not going well.  I was opposed to the war, but knowing one college classmate who had left school to enlist, I hoped for our troops' safe return.  The war I thought lost--I later learned that it was lost at home, not on the battlefield.  Meanwhile I drank some extraordinary wine, saw beautiful sights, saw a profoundly disturbing anti-US film called "Z", read The Godfather and heard in person a concert given by the world's greatest flamenco guitarist of his generation, the justly-legendary Manitas de Plata ("Little Hands of Silver")--savor Sangre Flamenco (5:16) & Por el Camino de Ronda (8:05).

Space Race Memories. Below, slightly edited, is my October 4, 2007 LFTC posting on the 50th anniversary of the launching of Sputnik.

Sputnik I (the word is Russian for "traveling companion") was launched Friday, October 4, 1957.  I recall it vividly, because at age 10 I spent the better part of a day reading every one of the myriad articles in the New York Times.  USA Today presents comments from one of the prime Soviet rocket designers.  It seems that the launch was hastily cobbled together, to make sure the USSR scored a "first" in space.  It worked.  A Newsweek piece argues that Eisenhower knew the Russians were near, and wanted them to be first, so as to galvanize US action.  In September 1956 a Jupiter-C rocket blasted 682 miles into space--higher than Sputnik's orbital altitude of 560 miles, but the fourth stage of the Jupiter-C was filled with sand, instead of with more rocket fuel and a satellite.  Ike thought the Army's program too military, and preferred the Navy's Vanguard, which had a disastrous few-second flight on December 6, 1957.  Back to Werner von Braun, and 56 days later, on January 31, 1958, Explorer I was launched.  It, unlike Sputnik, made real science, discovering the Van Allen radiation belts.

Famously, Sputnik induced JFK to announce on May 25, 1961, a goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade., a goal reached July 20, 1969.  Perhaps Sputnik's best spur to the US was its role in creating DARPA in the Pentagon: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.  DARPA spurred networking research that culminated, in 1969, in the launching of the original INTERNET (then called ARPANET).  It is also fitting that during Sputnik's 50th anniversary week week the military announced that America's Ballistic Missile Defense system is now fully operational, and thus capable of targeting launches from Asia.

Russia's anniversary pronouncement warned the US not to "militarize space"--yet another effort (sadly, probably to prove successful) to get the US to surrender its technological edge and decline to develop potentially immensely useful weapons.  But in the spirit of science, let a former Russian super-insider have his say on his country's greatest day.  Nikita Khrushchev's son, Sergei, tells why the USSR lost the race for the Moon.  It seems that the Bard's "green-eyed monster" was the culprit--at least, in Sergei's telling.

Looking Back: A 2009 Memory.  I visited the Kennedy Space Center in early February 2009.  Toured the massive Vehicle Assembly Building with the huge Saturn V rocket laid down horizontally--a yard longer than a football field plus both end zones.  I watched a replay of the actual last 3 minutes of control room activity--from the original room--of the December 1968 launch (3:50--different camera angles than the Apollo 11 footage above) of Apollo 8, the mission that was the first to put men in orbit around the Moon, and which gave us the unforgettable "Merry XMAS" message from the Apollo 8 crew.  The final Moon mission, in 1972, began with a stunning Dec. 7, 1972 Saturn V night launch (1:09); a culmination of JFK's dream was a Moon-based hammer throw (0:34).

As I stood in NASA's Apollo 8 control room I noticed in front of me a boy, probably about 10.  I tried to imagine how distant in time, from his personal point of reference, the Apollo 11 Moon landing would seem to him.  Born 1999 (if I am right that he was 10 at the time), he was looking at an event that took place 30 years before he was born.  For me, born 1947, that would mean how 1917, the year America entered World War I, seemed in time to me in 1957, the year Sputnik was launched.  As for Sputnik, 42 years before the boy in front of me was born, it would seem to him as 1905 seemed to me, that being the year that Russia's last Tsar unleashed the Cossacks on Bloody Sunday, and the year President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War.  Oh, that boy will (if my age guess is right) reach my current age of 62 in...2061--more then one century after Sputnik, and one century after Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit Earth, on April 12, 1961.

Looking Forward: Constellation?  Paul Beston reminds us that von Braun thought we could have reached Mars by 1982 (and also that JFK's interest was not space or the Moon but beating the Russians).  Charles Krauthammer's Moon + 40 column lauds NASA's Constellation project, designed to put America back on the Moon by 2020.  CK bemoans than in 14 months (if NASA's schedule holds) America will be without a manned space capability for the first time since...1962.  The past 40 years have sent us backward:

So with the Apollo moon program long gone, and with Constellation, its supposed successor, still little more than a hope, we remain in retreat from space. Astonishing. After countless millennia of gazing and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we'd landed on the moon. Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers, and, in the decades since, nothing.

To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying, well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We've done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated -- and ultimately, hopelessly impractical -- machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a tinkertoy we call the International Space Station, itself created in a fit of post-Cold War internationalist absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can sing "Kumbaya" while weightless.

The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile and too expensive. Seven more flights and then it is retired, going -- like the Spruce Goose and the Concorde -- into the museum of Things Too Beautiful And Complicated To Survive.

We are, CK fears, losing the spirit of adventure, so much a part of the American republic, even given that we always have had pressing problems here on Earth:

Why do it? It's not for practicality. We didn't go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." And when you do such magnificently hard things -- send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong -- you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

The greatest example? Who could have predicted that the moon voyages would create the most potent impetus to -- and symbol of -- environmental consciousness here on Earth: Earthrise, the now iconic Blue Planet photograph brought back by Apollo 8?

Ironically, that new consciousness about the uniqueness and fragility of Earth focused contemporary imagination away from space and back to Earth. We are now deep into that hyper-terrestrial phase, the age of iPod and Facebook, of social networking and eco-consciousness.

But look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." We came, we saw, we retreated.

Polling ace Karlyn Bowman presents American public attitudes towards space exploration.  She looks at surveys taken over the past 60 years, and finds consistent positions: (1) a large majority of the public supports space exploration, manned and unmanned; (2) presented with specific costs, support drops; (3) since 1969, the public regards the space program & Moon landing as America's greatest achievement of the past half-century.  Setbacks such as the two Space Shuttle disasters have not put any real dent in levels of public support.  Which makes the failure to pursue greater missions--including Mars--all the more sad.  These results suggest that our elites are demoralized, not the great maass of the American public.

Veni, vidi, victa.  (With apologies to Julius Cesar, "I came, I saw, I was conquered.")

As noted above, symbolic of this weekend is that former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite died at age 92.  He was the greatest news anchor fan of the space program.  Here is Katie Couric's warm tribute to Cronkite.  His liberalism made him controversial in some quarters, but for him to pass on during Apollo 11 Weekend is apt symbolism for a generation who watched him bring the Space Age into our living rooms.

Bottom Line.  If in 1969 you had told me that 40 years later we would have gone no further, and that it would have been 37 years since anyone walked on the Moon, I'd have thought you daft.  Surely, by 2000 we would have landed on Mars.  And we'd be flying coast-to-coast in one hour.  Well, we fly today at maybe 100 miles per hour faster in the air than back then, and we orbit the Earth at much the same altitude we did back then.  While amazed in 1969, we had by 1972 taken for granted that we would land periodically on the Moon, paying much less attention to the final Moon missions than to the early ones.  Perhaps our failure to return since then is a fit price for our presumption that it would become routine--it turned out to be a classic case of false linear extrapolation.  As much as anything, we who so foolishly presumed then, now fully appreciate how awesome a feat it was as we look back now, knowing how little progress has been made since.  I was 22 when we first landed on the Moon.  With luck, we will land there again around 2020, when, Lord willing, I will be 73.

Sputnik I (the word is Russian for "traveling companion") was launched Friday, October 4, 1957.  I recall it vividly, because at age 10 I spent the better part of a day reading every one of the myriad articles in the New York Times.  USA Today presents comments from one of the prime Soviet rocket designers.  It seems that the launch was hastily cobbled together, to make sure the USSR scored a "first" in space.  It worked.  A Newsweek piece argues that Eisenhower knew the Russians were near, and wanted them to be first, so as to galvanize US action.  In September 1956 a Jupiter-C rocket blasted 682 miles into space--higher than Sputnik's orbital altitude of 560 miles, but the fourth stage of the Jupiter-C was filled with sand, instead of with more rocket fuel and a satellite.  Ike thought the Army's program too military, and preferred the Navy's Vanguard, which had a disastrous few-second flight on December 6, 1957.  Back to Werner von Braun, and 56 days later, on January 31, 1958, Explorer I was launched.  It, unlike Sputnik, made real science, discovering the Van Allen radiation belts.

Famously, Sputnik induced JFK to announce on May 25, 1961, a goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade., a goal reached July 20, 1969.  Perhaps Sputnik's best spur to the US was its role in creating DARPA in the Pentagon: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.  DARPA spurred networking research that culminated, in 1969, in the launching of the original INTERNET (then called ARPANET).  It is also fitting that during Sputnik's 50th anniversary week week the military announced that America's Ballistic Missile Defense system is now fully operational, and thus capable of targeting launches from Asia.

Russia's anniversary pronouncement warned the US not to "militarize space"--yet another effort (sadly, probably to prove successful) to get the US to surrender its technological edge and decline to develop potentially immensely useful weapons.  But in the spirit of science, let a former Russian super-insider have his say on his country's greatest day.  Nikita Khrushchev's son, Sergei, tells why the USSR lost the race for the Moon.  It seems that the Bard's "green-eyed monster" was the culprit--at least, in Sergei's telling.

Looking Back: A 2009 Memory.  I visited the Kennedy Space Center in early February 2009.  Toured the massive Vehicle Assembly Building with the huge Saturn V rocket laid down horizontally--a yard longer than a football field plus both end zones.  I watched a replay of the actual last 3 minutes of control room activity--from the original room--of the December 1968 launch (3:50--different camera angles than the Apollo 11 footage above) of Apollo 8, the mission that was the first to put men in orbit around the Moon, and which gave us the unforgettable "Merry XMAS" message from the Apollo 8 crew.  The final Moon mission, in 1972, began with a stunning Dec. 7, 1972 Saturn V night launch (1:09); a culmination of JFK's dream was a Moon-based hammer throw (0:34).

As I stood in NASA's Apollo 8 control room I noticed in front of me a boy, probably about 10.  I tried to imagine how distant in time, from his personal point of reference, the Apollo 11 Moon landing would seem to him.  Born 1999 (if I am right that he was 10 at the time), he was looking at an event that took place 30 years before he was born.  For me, born 1947, that would mean how 1917, the year America entered World War I, seemed in time to me in 1957, the year Sputnik was launched.  As for Sputnik, 42 years before the boy in front of me was born, it would seem to him as 1905 seemed to me, that being the year that Russia's last Tsar unleashed the Cossacks on Bloody Sunday, and the year President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War.  Oh, that boy will (if my age guess is right) reach my current age of 62 in...2061--more then one century after Sputnik, and one century after Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit Earth, on April 12, 1961.

Looking Forward: Constellation?  Paul Beston reminds us that von Braun thought we could have reached Mars by 1982 (and also that JFK's interest was not space or the Moon but beating the Russians).  Charles Krauthammer's Moon + 40 column lauds NASA's Constellation project, designed to put America back on the Moon by 2020.  CK bemoans than in 14 months (if NASA's schedule holds) America will be without a manned space capability for the first time since...1962.  The past 40 years have sent us backward:

So with the Apollo moon program long gone, and with Constellation, its supposed successor, still little more than a hope, we remain in retreat from space. Astonishing. After countless millennia of gazing and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we'd landed on the moon. Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers, and, in the decades since, nothing.

To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying, well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We've done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated -- and ultimately, hopelessly impractical -- machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a tinkertoy we call the International Space Station, itself created in a fit of post-Cold War internationalist absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can sing "Kumbaya" while weightless.

The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile and too expensive. Seven more flights and then it is retired, going -- like the Spruce Goose and the Concorde -- into the museum of Things Too Beautiful And Complicated To Survive.

We are, CK fears, losing the spirit of adventure, so much a part of the American republic, even given that we always have had pressing problems here on Earth:

Why do it? It's not for practicality. We didn't go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." And when you do such magnificently hard things -- send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong -- you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

The greatest example? Who could have predicted that the moon voyages would create the most potent impetus to -- and symbol of -- environmental consciousness here on Earth: Earthrise, the now iconic Blue Planet photograph brought back by Apollo 8?

Ironically, that new consciousness about the uniqueness and fragility of Earth focused contemporary imagination away from space and back to Earth. We are now deep into that hyper-terrestrial phase, the age of iPod and Facebook, of social networking and eco-consciousness.

But look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." We came, we saw, we retreated.

Polling ace Karlyn Bowman presents American public attitudes towards space exploration.  She looks at surveys taken over the past 60 years, and finds consistent positions: (1) a large majority of the public supports space exploration, manned and unmanned; (2) presented with specific costs, support drops; (3) since 1969, the public regards the space program & Moon landing as America's greatest achievement of the past half-century.  Setbacks such as the two Space Shuttle disasters have not put any real dent in levels of public support.  Which makes the failure to pursue greater missions--including Mars--all the more sad.  These results suggest that our elites are demoralized, not the great maass of the American public.

Veni, vidi, victa.  (With apologies to Julius Cesar, "I came, I saw, I was conquered.")

As noted above, symbolic of this weekend is that former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite died at age 92.  He was the greatest news anchor fan of the space program.  Here is Katie Couric's warm tribute to Cronkite.  His liberalism made him controversial in some quarters, but for him to pass on during Apollo 11 Weekend is apt symbolism for a generation who watched him bring the Space Age into our living rooms.

Bottom Line.  If in 1969 you had told me that 40 years later we would have gone no further, and that it would have been 37 years since anyone walked on the Moon, I'd have thought you daft.  Surely, by 2000 we would have landed on Mars.  And we'd be flying coast-to-coast in one hour.  Well, we fly today at maybe 100 miles per hour faster in the air than back then, and we orbit the Earth at much the same altitude we did back then.  While amazed in 1969, we had by 1972 taken for granted that we would land periodically on the Moon, paying much less attention to the final Moon missions than to the early ones.  Perhaps our failure to return since then is a fit price for our presumption that it would become routine--it turned out to be a classic case of false linear extrapolation.  As much as anything, we who so foolishly presumed then, now fully appreciate how awesome a feat it was as we look back now, knowing how little progress has been made since.  I was 22 when we first landed on the Moon.  With luck, we will land there again around 2020, when, Lord willing, I will be 73.

LFTC -Sotomayor: Unwise Voices of "Wise Latinas"

The Los Angeles Times printed reactions from four "wise Latinas" to the Sotomayor hearings.  Reading the comments is depressing, but revealing.  Sadly, what emerges are reasons why racialist and gender obsessions are so poisonous.  Let's look at excerpts from each contributor and see why.

Latina One, publisher of a prominent New York Spanish language daily, offers this gem:

I must have been 8 or 10 when Billie Jean King played Bobby Riggs. I came up in that era of "women can do it better" and "you've come a long way, baby." People said Ginger Rogers did the same thing Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels -- not to denigrate Fred Astaire. For us, all of that meant you could aspire. It was a time when the whole issue of women's rights was dealing with fighting the perceptions.

What did Billie Jean King actually, in real life, do?  Just shy of age 30, in the latter par of her prime competitive years, she beat Bobby Riggs, age 55 in Sept. 1973, 25 years past his last major match series (1948 against tennis great Jack Kramer) and 26 years past his last major singles title.  Why does anyone think this kind of match proves anything, other than the infinite capacity of network television to air trash-sport events?  It happens that I once watched, at a private residence in 1974, a match pitting a long-retired tennis star, age 47, against a rising star, age 20, who was to win his first big public recognition the following year.  Richard (Dick) Savitt had been, 15 years earlier, national US indoor tennis champ; Vitas Gerulaitis was then a local New York name, but within a few years was at the top of the tennis world.  The match was very close, with Savitt prevailing, using finesse to compensate for power.  Had Savitt been the same age as Riggs, he likely would have lost.  But Savitt was playing a male star.  (BTW, check out Savitt's Wiki bio; it is amazing--Savitt taught himself to play tennis, with no lessons, ever!)  Here is Savitt's 1951 Time Magazine cover.

QUESTION: How would Billie Jean have done in 1973 playing a serious match against Arthur Ashe or Jimmy Connors?

Now, on to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  First, view this solo "Puttin' on the Ritz" clip (4:36) from Easter Parade and then watch this Fred + Ginger "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" clip (3:01) from Roberta.  What do we learn?  (1) Ginger did NOT do everything Fred did as a dancer; (2) When they danced together, Fred went backwards as often as did Ginger.  Add to that the Fred had 10 other dance partners, and you have a vastly more versatile dancer.  Add to that Fred's singing (bland voice, perfect presentation), playing piano & drums (high-amateur level) and, you get the picture: Ginger was simply not in Fred's league--nor, to be fair, was anyone else.  As for dancing in high heels, Astaire, who had classical ballet training, I will guess likely could have done all the steps Ginger did in heels.  (We'll never know for sure.)

Thus, Billie Jean & Ginger are examples of faux equality--self-pitying feminist tropes that will never die.

Latina Two, a union activist, contributes this:

For me, a wise Latina means diversity. I think she brings the experiences of people of color, the experiences of families struggling from lower socioecon backgrounds. She brings the experience of overcoming enormous obstacles to go to an Ivy League school and graduate cum laude. It's a very good experience to bring to the judiciary because her background represents more people in this country than the background of those members of the court who come from well-to-do families.

Several male Justices now on the Court came from very modest backgrounds.  The Supreme Court's Justice Biographies page gives birth location, schooling and professional information, but nothing of economic or social class.  Wiki provides more.  Check out Clarence Thomas, whose African-American status and poverty in childhood gave him no protection from liberal assailants, due to his conservative views.  Or Samuel Alito, whose father taught at a public high school, also roughed up, to the point of causing his wife to burst into tears and leave the hearing room.  Had any GOP senator gone after Sotomayor like Democratic senators tore into Thomas or Alito, there would have been Hell to pay.

Latina Three, president of a non-profit community group, writes of minority social activism:

But the negative is the way they have picked on her for being involved with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund. I don't know many minorities of my generation -- black, brown, Asian -- who weren't involved in social movements as volunteers. Tocqueville said that what made Americans unique was the way we volunteer and participate in civic life. But the message here is that, if you want to be appointed to any position as a lawyer, and particularly to the judiciary, you'd better not volunteer. What kind of message are they sending? Sessions, who took the lead on this, doesn't come with clean hands -- he once called the NAACP "un-American." He's carrying forward his preconceived notions of race and ethnicity to what he's doing today. They are attacking it because it's racial identity, and they're attacking someone for being on the board of a nonprofit organization that is seeking to change the system from within the system.

The attacks on Sotomayor charge that the group she served is radical.  The Puerto Rican Defense & Education Fund, on whose Board Sotomayor served and whose litigation strategy she played a central role in directing--contrary to her confirmation testimony--filed a legal brief likening restrictions on abortion to slavery.  Most Americans would reject such a label.   Perhaps Latina Three needs to talk to folks held in real, lifetime bondage to learn the difference.

Latina Four, a playwright & screenwriter, calls every white jurist for 200 years racist:

But the negative is the way they have picked on her for being involved with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund. I don't know many minorities of my generation -- black, brown, Asian -- who weren't involved in social movements as volunteers. Tocqueville said that what made Americans unique was the way we volunteer and participate in civic life. But the message here is that, if you want to be appointed to any position as a lawyer, and particularly to the judiciary, you'd better not volunteer. What kind of message are they sending? Sessions, who took the lead on this, doesn't come with clean hands -- he once called the NAACP "un-American." He's carrying forward his preconceived notions of race and ethnicity to what he's doing today. They are attacking it because it's racial identity, and they're attacking someone for being on the board of a nonprofit organization that is seeking to change the system from within the system.

All white guys on the Court were racist for 200 years?  Was Justice Benjamin Curtis, who dissented in the 1857 Dred Scott slavery case, and resigned in protest at the decision, racist?  Was Justice John Marshall Harlan, Sr., lone dissenter in the separate-but-equal 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, who wrote in his dissent that the Constitution is "color-blind," racist?  Justice Hugo Black, a Klansman in his youth, supported many pro-civil rights rulings while on the bench.  Civil rights law began changing four decades before America reached the two-century remark, which even a Hollywood type should know.  Meanwhile, Earl Warren, a hero to many civil rights activists for Warren Court rulings such as Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954), which interred Plessy, supported internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Bottom Line.  Perpetuating faux comparisons, faux history and silly tropes will not help anyone get ahead--though they may, as the four Latinas quoted above, get ahead in spite of such things.  Real equality--and real equal achievement--should--must--be celebrated.  Encouraging people to wallow in their racial and gender resentments will not help anyone get ahead.  No society--EVER--has perfect equal opportunity.  This country has turned itself upside down over the past generation trying to rectify past wrongs--even enacting reverse discrimination into law.  The depressing entries above suggest that even as societal barriers continue to fall, more than a few people will be so intensely consumed by anger so as to deny progress and perpetuate laws framed when America was a vastly harsher, more race- and gender-discriminatory place.  When facts change, so should attitudes of members of historically disadvantaged groups.  Judge Sotomayor will do her level best, on all odds, to perpetuate negative, false stereotypes about white males, and perpetuate reverse discrimination whenever possible.

LFTC - Sonia, Barack, Tarzan & Students

Jeffrey Lord recounts a great story that sheds light on Sotomayor's Latina obsession, about one of Sonia's predecessors in the seat she will take, Justice James C. McReynolds, a Wilson appointee, and an African-American attorney in a 1938 oral argument before the Supreme bench.  Lord has written a brilliant, highly informative 7-pager.

Beyond that I would add this: It is disturbing to see Judge Sotomayor defining herself at her core as a Latina--the title of her "wise Latina" Lecture was "A Latina Judge's Voice."  And her speech was, as LFTC has shown, drenched in racialist and gender obsession.  What a shame, that she defines herself at her core by her immutable characteristics, possessed upon birth.

Sotomayor will, after all, joining one of America's most exclusive clubs: the roster of Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.  In all, 112 Justices have served in the 221 years of the American Constitutional republic: 17 Chief Justices and 98 Associate Justices, of whom 3 were elevated to Chief (hence the total is 112 and not 115.  Why not define oneself by this mark of distinguished achievement?

Or how about this exchange between Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sotmomayor, on how her persistence and ingenuity as a city prosecutor enabled her to win a conviction of a serial killer:

LEAHY: Well, you -- let's go into some of the particulars on this. One of the things that I found appealing in your record, that you were a prosecutor, as many of us, both the ranking member and I had that privilege, and you worked on the front lines, an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan D.A.'s office.

Your former boss, District Attorney Robert Morgenthal, the dean of the American Prosecutors, said one of the most important cases you worked on was the prosecution of the man known as the Tarzan Burglar. He terrorized people in Harlem. He would swing on ropes into their apartments and rob them and steal, and actually killed three people.

Your co-counsel, Hugh Mo, described how you threw yourself into every aspect of the investigation, the prosecution of the case. You helped to secure a conviction, sentence of 62 years to life for the murders. Your co-counsel described you, quote, as a "Skilled legal practitioner who not only ruthlessly pursued justice for victims of violent crimes, but understood the root cause of crime and how to curb it."

How did that experience -- did that experience shape your views in any way as -- both as a lawyer but also as a judge? I mean, this was getting into about as nitty-gritty as you could into the whole area of criminal law.

SOTOMAYOR: I became a lawyer in the prosecutor's office. To this day, I owe who I have become as a -- who I became as a lawyer and who have --who I have become as a judge to Mr. Morgenthal. He gave me a privilege and honor in working in his office that has shaped my life.When I say I became a lawyer in his office, it's because in law school, law schools teach you on hypotheticals.

SOTOMAYOR: They set forth facts for you. They give you a little bit of teaching on how those facts are developed, but not a whole lot. And then they ask you to opine about legal theory and apply legal theory to the facts before you.

Well, when you work in a prosecutor's office, you understand that the law is not legal theory. It's facts. It's what witnesses say and don't say. It's how you develop your position in the record. And then it's taking those facts and making arguments based on the law as it exists.

That's what I took with me as a trial judge. It's what I take with me as an appellate judge. It is respect that each case gets decided case by case, applying the law as it exists to the facts before you.

You asked me a second question about the Tarzan murderer case, and that case brought to life for me in a way that perhaps no other case had fully done before the tragic consequences of needless deaths.

In that case, Mr. Maddicks was dubbed "the Tarzan murderer" by the press because he used acrobatic feats to gain entry into apartments. In one case, he took a rope, placed it on a pipe on top of a roof, put a paint can at the other end, and threw it into a window in a building below and broke the window. He then swung himself into the apartment and, on the other side, shot a person he found.

He did that repeatedly, and, as a result, he destroyed families. I saw a family that had been in tact, with a mother living with three of her children, some grandchildren. They all worked at various jobs. Some were going to school.

They stood as they watched one of their -- the mother stood as she watched one of her children be struck by a bullet that Mr. Maddicks fired and killed him because the bullet struck the middle of his head.

That family was destroyed. They scattered to the four winds, and only one brother remained in New York who could testify. That case taught me that prosecutors, as all participants in the justice system, must be sensitive to the price that crime imposes on our entire society.

At the same time, as a prosecutor in that case, I had to consider how to ensure that the presentation of that case would be fully understood by jurors. And to do that, it was important for us as prosecutors to be able to present those number of incidences that Mr. Maddicks had engaged in, in one trial, so the full extent of his conduct could be determined by a jury.

SOTOMAYOR: There had never been a case quite like that, where an individual who used different acrobatic feats to gain entry into an apartment was tried with all of his crimes in one indictment. I researched very carefully the law and found a theory in New York law, called the Molyneax (ph) theory then, that -- that basically said if you can show a pattern that established a person's identity or assisted in establishing a person's identity -- simplifying the argument, by the way -- then you can try different cases together.

This was not a conspiracy under law because Mr. Maddicks acted alone. So I had to find a different theory to bring all his acts together. Well, a presented that to the trial judge. It was a different application of the law. But what I did was draw on the principles of the Molyneax (ph) theory. And arguing those principles to the judge, the judge permitted that joint trial of all of Mr. Maddox's activities.

In the end, carefully developing the facts in the case, making my record -- our record, I should say -- Mr. Moe's (ph) and my record complete -- we convinced the judge that our theory was supported by law.
That harkens back to my earlier answer which is that's what being a trial judge teaches you.

Now, THAT is real accomplishment, and public service to boot.

Which brings me to my real worry: Race- and ethnicity- and gender-obsessed adult mentors may well poison the minds of students seeking role models, by embedding such hyper-fixation on immutable characteristics and barriers still unbroken.  Here are the closing paragraphs of "A Latina's Voice":

I also hope that by raising the question today of what difference having more Latinos and Latinas on the bench will make will start your own evaluation. For people of color and women lawyers, what does and should being an ethnic minority mean in your lawyering? For men lawyers, what areas in your experiences and attitudes do you need to work on to make you capable of reaching those great moments of enlightenment which other men in different circumstances have been able to reach. For all of us, how do change the facts that in every task force study of gender and race bias in the courts, women and people of color, lawyers and judges alike, report in significantly higher percentages than white men that their gender and race has shaped their careers, from hiring, retention to promotion and that a statistically significant number of women and minority lawyers and judges, both alike, have experienced bias in the courtroom?

Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering. We, I mean all of us in this room, must continue individually and in voices united in organizations that have supported this conference, to think about these questions and to figure out how we go about creating the opportunity for there to be more women and people of color on the bench so we can finally have statistically significant numbers to measure the differences we will and are making.

I am delighted to have been here tonight and extend once again my deepest gratitude to all of you for listening and letting me share my reflections on being a Latina voice on the bench. Thank you.  (Emphases added.)

Counseling students "to judge when their opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate" is the antithesis of what mentors should be preaching.  Mentors should counsel students to be aware of their "sympathies and prejudices not to indulge them "when appropriate," but to set them aside.  To teach otherwise will only perpetuate racial, ethnic and gender conflict in America.  This is, of course, the precise opposite of the post-racial campaign Barack Obama waged for the Presidency, which he won by getting more white votes than former President Clinton did.  Instead, Sotomayor should talk to students about her many life achievements--such as nailing serial murderer Tarzan.

Bottom Line.  The elevation of Sonia Sotomayor to the nation's highest court should signal not only ethnic progress in representation on an august institution for America's fastest-growing and largest minority population.  It should signal to students that the future is theirs, if they achieve greatly, and that remaining barriers will not stop them.  Instead, a passionate racialist will join passionate genderist Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Court.  When next she speaks to impressionable students after the first Monday in October, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor will be in a position to exercise immense tutorial influence.  I shudder to think how students counseled "to judge when their opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate" will approach their life challenges.

LFTC - Sotomayor: What Should "A Wise GOP Senator" Do?

Who is Sonia?  Legal eagle Stuart Taylor of National Journal sees a Sotomayor Puzzle: Will the real Sonia please stand up?  Taylor's column is the best one-stop summary of how evasive and dishonest Sotomayor's confirmation testimony was.  Peggy Noonan applies a non-lawyer's gimlet eye to the Sotomayor hearing and finds an over-rehearsed nominee, robotic in gesture and obfuscatory in syntax, trying to avoid saying anything plain that might rile lay viewers:

....Looking at things shallowly, and let's, Sonia Sotomayor seemed weirdly overrehearsed, speaking v e r y   s l o w l y, gesturing with her hands in a way that was no doubt supposed to look natural and warm, like grandma in the kitchen, but instead came across as artificial and mildly animatronic.

She took refuge (as did some of her questioners) in the impenetrable language of the law, and in what seemed (and this is becoming a regular strategy in politics) to be the deliberate jumbling of syntax, so people at home won't be able to follow what is being said. To be clear and succinct is to look for trouble. Better to produce a mist and miasma of jumbly words, and sentences that do not hold. You're talking, so you'll seem alive—in fact people using the syntax dodge are often quite animated—but as to meaning, you can leave that to the TV producers, who'll wrestle around trying to get something that makes sense and then settle for the Perry Mason soundbite.

Byron York presents missed opportunities in GOP questioning of Judge Sotomayor.  His main focus is on Sotomayor's role as a member of the Board of Directors of the radical leftist Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund.  She played down her role, and distanced herself from litigation policy.  But York unearthed minutes of Board meetings which show that the Judge played an active role in shaping the Fund's litigation strategy.  A May 28 New York Times story (which I missed, while on vacation), fleshed out details of Sotomayor's Board service:

....Ms. Sotomayor joined its board in 1980 when she was a young prosecutor in Manhattan and fresh out of Yale Law School. It was full of young, idealistic Latino lawyers like her who were eager to make a mark.

“She just believed in the mission,” Luis Alvarez, a former chairman of its board, said of Ms. Sotomayor. “This was a highly refined group of individuals who came from the premier academic institutions. It was almost like Camelot. It was a wonderful growth period.”

But Ms. Sotomayor stood out, frequently meeting with the legal staff to review the status of cases, several former members said. And so across her 12 years on the board — she left when she was appointed a federal judge in 1992 — she played an active role as the defense fund staked out aggressive stances on issues like police brutality, the death penalty and voting rights.

The board monitored all litigation undertaken by the fund’s lawyers, and a number of those lawyers said Ms. Sotomayor was an involved and ardent supporter of their various legal efforts during her time with the group. (Emphases added.)

Anyone who has ever sat on a Board knows perfectly well that Board members apply their professional knowledge and skill when they pertain to an organization's needs.  It is simply inconceivable that Sotomayor was not involved in such matters.  GOP senators were too busy hashing repeatedly over the same ground, evidence that they had not coordinated their efforts.

The WSJ editors flag another area--the right to bear arms--in which Sotomayor danced around questioning:

Those watching Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings this week didn't learn much about what she really thinks about judging. But they were treated to an Abbott and Costello legal moment on Thursday between the judge and South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham. In the wake of the Supreme Court's recent decision in D.C. v. Heller recognizing an individual right to bear arms, Mr. Graham wondered what template Judge Sotomayor would use to determine whether that "fundamental right" also applies to the states?

"The rule of law," Judge Sotomayor answered.

So "isn't the rule of law, when it comes to what you consider to be a fundamental right, your opinion as to what is fundamental . . .?" Senator Graham asked. Or "is there sort of a legal cookbook that you can go to and say this is a fundamental right, A, and B is not?"

No, the judge replied, no cookbook, but you hire judges "for the purpose of understanding whether they respect law, whether they respect precedent." Who's on first?

Another missed opportunity, argue international lawyers David Rivkin & Lee Casey, was questions on the reach of habeas corpus on foreign battlefields.  The authors note that the case of Maqaleh v. Gates (2009) in which a federal dsitrict court ruled that non-Afghan detainees rendered to and held at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan can be reached by habeas if captured outside Afghanistan.  The upshot:

This new state of play has already affected U.S. military operations. American special forces, have now limited their activities in the Afghan-Pakistan border region -- where al Qaeda and the Taliban are now most active -- to avoid claims by enemy fighters that they were captured outside of Afghanistan, in Pakistan. If those enemy fighters were captured outside of Afghanistan, then according to the Maqaleh decision, they are eligible for habeas relief. This provides a strategic sanctuary for Pakistan-based enemy operatives, who are now effectively immune from U.S. ground attacks.

Reading the court case (see link above: it is 53 pages) re Bagram, in which a federal district judge in DC declined to dismiss a habeas petition filed by non-Afghans rendered into Bagram, it seems likely that the judge will, at the end of trial, rule in favor of the detainees.  It is the first major case since the Supreme Court's Boumediene ruling last year on habeas rights of detainees at Gitmo.  I will not be the last.  And Judge Sotomayor will be on the bench.  She will very likely vote to extend habeas rights, but in that she replaces a reliable vote, David Souter, who would do the same.  She showed little knowledge of wartime law at her hearing, which suggests that she will not be persuasive on the Court on such issues.  For national security jurisprudence she will be a liberal Vote, but not a wider Voice.

Zoe to Kimba to Janet.  All the above noted, the GOP senators did the right thing in not going all out to try to kill the nomination.  First, they likely could not muster the votes.  Better to hold their fire and save political capital for seeking Democrats to help stave off ObamaCare.  Second, they should heed the ancient Chinese admonition about being careful for what one wishes for, lest one get their wish.  Recall a pair of confirmation kerfuffles from Bill Clinton's first months in office.

Mr. Bill's first two Attorney-General nominees were moderate Democrats Zoe Baird, a corporate attorney, and Judge Kimba Wood.  They both went down over the first Nannygate scandals: failing to pay Social Security taxes on full-time maids they had hired.  The upshot: we got Janet Reno for eight years, the ultimate A-G "Nightmare on Elm Street" who gave us:

(1) the Waco Massacre in 1993, which led to the Oklahoma City bombing two years later;

(2) the 1995 "wall" separating law enforcement and intelligence activities by more than statutory and judge-made the law actually required--this even after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing carried out by Egyptian Islamists, which gave us, 6 years later, the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda atrocities;

(3) the 2000 snatching at gun-point of little Elian Gonzalez, frustrating the wishes of his mother, who gave her life to the Caribbean porting Elian to freedom, and delivering him into the clutches of his deadbeat Dad and, worse still, into the clutches of Fidel Castro, who made Elian into a Communist poster child.

Lani to Deval to Bill Lann.  Radical lefty professor Lani Guinier was Clinton's first choice to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.  Conservative opposition to confirmation of a Quota Queen prevailed, and Guinier withdrew to avoid the embarrassment of being voted down.  The upshot?  She was followed by two Quota Kings, Deval Patrick and Bill Lann Lee.  Both of these appointees were very smart and highly skilled politically, and were extremely effective in promoting Team Clinton's racial quota agenda.  Patrick even parlayed his stint into getting elected Governor of Massachusetts, where now he sits.  Guinier, by contrast, was an ivory-tower academic with far less political savvy, who would have been far less effective, while being, as the first African-American female to head the Civil Rights Division, impossible to fire absent gross misconduct.

Who Might Follow Sonia, Were She Voted Down?  So let us assume that somehow the GOP managed to stop Judge Sotomayor by winning just enough Democrats to their side.  Who would President 44's next nominee be?  A clone of Scalia?  John Roberts?  Robert Bork?  One close intimate of 44 is none other than...Deval Patrick, who would easily win confirmation---think of conservative Democrats, having alienated Hispanic supporters by voting against Sotomayor, then alienating black voters, the Democratic Party's core voter constituency, by voting against Patrick.

Supreme Sotomayor: "A Latina's Vote" Only.  What I heard at last week's hearings convinces me that Sotomayor is likely to prove more Vote than Voice on the High Court.  A Vote is what David Souter was, someone who sided with the liberal bloc but never, to my knowledge, persuaded wavering colleagues or inspired law professors or students to look at the law differently; Souter lacked the power of persuasive reasoning that a Breyer on the left or Scalia on the right possesses in abundance.  Breyer and Scalia are Voice Justices, as are several other on the Court, plus some top-tier appellate judges like Laurence Silberman, whose gun-control opinion led the Court to issue its landmark District of Columbia v. Heller ruling.

Bottom Line.  GOP Senators can safely vote their consciences, secure that Sotomayor will nonetheless be confirmed.  They will have an issue to take to the voters in 2010 and 2012.  And President Obama may wind up having replaced one liberal Vote with  another, instead of getting not just a Vote but a new liberal Voice.  Of course, only time will tell whether my guess is correct.

LFTC - Index 7/17/09

6 posts: (1) Health Care: Dr. Coburn's Congress Rx--The Home Front; (2) CBO v. Bidenomics: No Way Out--The Home Front; (3) Kneecapping FedEx--The Home Front; (4) North Korea: Let the Succession Games Begin--Us v. Them; (5) Intelligence: Congress Crashes--9/11, 3/11 & N/11; (6) F-22 Math--The Home Front.

LFTC - Health Care: Dr. Coburn's Congress Rx

WSJ politics ace John Fund reports on a Senate Health Committee vote (12-11) in favor of adding a proposal by GOP Senator Tom Coburn (OK), a physician, to Team Obama's health care bill: require members of Congress, who now enjoy the high-choice cafeteria Federal Employees' Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP), to switch to any "public option" included in the HC bill.  Coburn reasons that ObamaCare will force out private insurers, and thus Congress should have to live with what it foists off on voters.  Several Democrats supported the measure, but watch for it to be stripped out of any final bill--probably in the middle of the night.

HC ace Betsy McCaughey details how ObamaCare will force those with private insurance into public care--contrary to 44's campaign promise to preserve HC choice:

Two main bills are being rushed through Congress with the goal of combining them into a finished product by August. Under either, a new government bureaucracy will select health plans that it considers in your best interest, and you will have to enroll in one of these "qualified plans." If you now get your plan through work, your employer has a five-year "grace period" to switch you into a qualified plan. If you buy your own insurance, you'll have less time.

And as soon as anything changes in your contract -- such as a change in copays or deductibles, which many insurers change every year -- you'll have to move into a qualified plan instead (House bill, p. 16-17).

When you file your taxes, if you can't prove to the IRS that you are in a qualified plan, you'll be fined thousands of dollars -- as much as the average cost of a health plan for your family size -- and then automatically enrolled in a randomly selected plan (House bill, p. 167-168).

She adds this nugget about US HC quality: "[T]he World Health Organization ranked the United States No. 1 out of 191 countries for being responsive to patients' needs, including providing timely treatments and a choice of doctors."

The WSJ editors call Congressional Democrats reckless for trying to ram through massive, costly HC legislation, whose consequences would include pushing US marginal tax rates (combining federal + state) to 52.4 percent; among the 30 OECD countries only Denmark, Sweden & Belgium would still have higher marginal tax rates.  And this is true even using figure fakery from Team Obama, which understate HC financing needs by an estimated $300B. WSJ pundit Kimberely Strassel spotlights the 2-prong "Greassley Test" that Iowa GOP Senator Chuck Grassley set as the benchmark for his signing on to ObamaCare: preserve private choice and no deficit increase.  The current Senate bill is flunking that test, and Grassley is standing firm (for now, at least).

Coburn's law embodies a safeguard James Madison noted in Federalist 57:

I will add, as a fifth circumstance in the situation of the House of Representatives, restraining them from oppressive measures, that they can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society. This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds by which human policy can connect the rulers and the people together. It creates between them that communion of interests and sympathy of sentiments, of which few governments have furnished examples; but without which every government degenerates into tyranny. If it be asked, what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer: the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America -- a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it.  (Emphasis added.)

Winston Churchill said of socialism:

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.  Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."

Congress knows better.  Under the FEHBP, while health care for the rest of America goes socialist, Congress, pace Federalist 57, stays capitalist.

Bottom Line.  Sitting in Congress today is not James Madison, but the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank.  Federalist 57 to them means no more than do the other 84 Federalist Papers.

LFTC - CBO v. Bidenomics: No Way Out

Begin with the July 16, 2009 long-term budget outlook by the Congressional Budget Office.  It warns on p. 15 that spiraling public debt will drive interest rates up and lead to "a vicious cycle in which the government had to issue ever-larger amounts of debt in order to pay ever-higher interest charges."  There is even worse news on p. 18 for Team Obama:

Moreover, the fundamental cause of the rapidly rising debt in CBO's long-term scenarios is not economic fluctuations resulting from business cycles.  Instead, debt soars because of unrelenting growth in federal spending on health care programs and a rise in Social Security spending as a share of GDP, combined with a much smaller increase in tax revenues.  The ever-greater budget deficits Projected under these scenarios would negatively affect the economy through several channels.  (Emphasis added.)

Hudson Institute scholar Diana Furchtgott-Roth notes that CBO's has costed ObamaCare as adding $1 TR to the deficit over the next decade; she also notes that Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) offered an amendment whereby with $16B over a decade the federal government could subsidize private insurers to fix the uninsured care problem.  Naturally, this will go nowhere.  HC maven Robert Golderg points out that ObamaCare fully protects union HC benefits, and subsidizes union retirees with incomes as high as $90,000 per year.

A WSJ front-pager provides valuable detail on the CBO's input re health care costs, and notes--deliciously--that CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf was picked for the post by none other than..House Speaker Nancy Pelosi & Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid!!!

Meanwhile, Joe Biden hit a home-run yesterday, noting national bankruptcy and offering a novel solution, as reported at CNS News:

“And folks look, AARP knows and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not acceptable,” Biden said at the event on Thursday in Alexandria, Va. “It’s totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially.”
 
“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.
 
“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that's what I’m telling you.” (Audio)

Fittingly, Biden said this in remarks to the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP).  (Now, imagine the mainstream media reaction had Sarah Palin said this; instead of amusement--"That's just Joe...", it would have been scathing derision.  Indeed, as I typed these words this AM, on "Morning Joe" Mika, Willie & Mike were chuckling about Joe's goof, and previewing that they plan to play on today's "MJ" a clip of Jesse Venture attacking Palin.)

In the Biden spirit, with classic government efficiency, NASA admitted last week that the original Moonwalk tapes were re-used and thus the video erased.  Yes, you heard me, ERASED.  And after all, what was the Big Deal, right?  And NASA is far, far more efficient than the typical government bureaucracy.

Former hedge fund manager Andy Kessler sees Bernanke's economy, with Fed policy driving things.  Karl Rove sees Team Obama moving economic goal posts.  Here is a proposal to let private equity help banks.  Nouriel Roubini, who called the financial meltdown, sees a very weak economy for the next 6 months, and notes that deflationary pressures remain in the economy, which means the Fed will keep monetary policy loose for some time.  Business Week sees a major market overhang in $1.4 TR corporate debt added since 2001, of which more than half is due within five years.

Bottom Line.  The prospect that trillions in debt will act as an immense albatross on economic growth, and that the burden will be significantly driven by health care costs, will make fiscally conservative Democrats think long and hard about whether to support ObamaCare.