One point raised by Sarah Palin’s supporters is that she has military experience as Commander of the Alaskan National Guard. That point struck me as a little lame, although Palin has taken her military job more seriously than many governors (visiting troops in the Middle East and injured troops in Germany), it still didn’t seem very substantial. Certainly it never seemed convincing when Governor Bill Clinton made that point.
But, it turns out that there is much more substance to the Alaskan National Guard than I thought. A National Review correspondent writes that, due to Alaska’s location next to Russia, its National Guard is much more serious than any other. For example, it has a unit on permanent active duty manning a missile interceptor system protecting all of North America.
I’m glad to hear it. But, it still sounds lame. They need to get the facts out, and fast.
UPDATE and BUMP: Here’s two articles on the Alaskan Guard’s missile defense mission, from 2006 and 2007. (Via the Corner.)
Extremely cool. I agree with Glenn Reynolds that the deniability aspect doesn’t make much sense, but it would be just as awesome used overtly:
According to the developers, the accuracy of this weapon is little short of supernatural. They claim that the pinpoint precision can make it lethal or non-lethal at will. For example, they say it can either destroy a vehicle completely, or just damage the tires to immobilize it. The illustration shows a theoretical 26-second engagement in which the beam deftly destroys “32 tires, 11 Antennae, 3 Missile Launchers, 11 EO devices, 4 Mortars, 5 Machine Guns” — while avoiding harming a truckload of refugees and the soldiers guarding them. It reminds me of how the Lone Ranger could always shoot the gun out an opponent’s hand without injuring them; if that could really be done from an aircraft circling overhead, it would certainly be an impressive feat.
This precision should make the ATL a highly effective anti-personnel weapon, able to target (or “assassinate,” depending on your politics) a specific individual in a group with sniper-like precision.
A few months ago, researchers discovered that they could create stem cells from adult cells, thereby saving time and effort and avoiding ethical issues. Now, that discovery has been one-upped. A new technique skips the middle-man: it converts an adult cell into a different sort of adult cell, without creating any stem cell at all.
RideLust makes a great observation (within a larger article summarizing the extensive evidence that red-light cameras don’t work):
Under our current democratic government, good laws (laws that benefit everyone) are a “public good” (their “producers” don’t receive enough of their value to make it worth the effort) and thus are under-provided; while bad laws (laws that benefit special interests at the expense of everyone else) are a “private good” (their “producers” receive most of their value) and thus over-provided.
UCLA professor Tim Groseclose (known to readers of this blog as an author of the Groseclose-Milyo media bias index) is a former member of UCLA’s Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools. He has resigned from the committee, alleging that UCLA is breaking California law by considering race in its admissions.
As the old adage goes, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. Much of Groseclose’s evidence (pdf) is damning but circumstantial. (For example, the university chancellor’s made remarks to the committee lamenting the decline in minority admissions and demanding that they put into place a new “holistic” system that would make it impossible for judge academic achievement separately from personal factors (pp. 3-4).) So Groseclose, an economist, set out to look at hard numbers to see what the new admissions policy was actually doing.
Despite serving on the committee that oversees admissions, he was refused access to even a sample of the data. After further agitation, it was decided that a “workgroup” would conduct a study that would be an official product of the committee. Groseclose was appointed to the workgroup (they could hardly refuse him), but then the chair of the workgroup determined that the workgroup would not be permitted to look at the data either (p. 9)! Instead, the workgroup’s sole purpose would be to hire an independent researcher who would do the study.
Groseclose’s motion that the workgroup should get access to a sample of the data was defeated by a 3-3 vote (pp. 9-10). The same block of three votes (including the chairmen of the committee and the workgroup) that dismissed the motion also rejected several candidates to do the study and selected UCLA sociologist Robert Mare to do the study. (Groseclose volunteered to do the study himself for free, which would have saved UCLA about $100k (p. 10), and with considerably stronger privacy guarantees than Mare (p. 11).)
The process gives every impression that UCLA has something to hide. In fact, the workgroup chairman himself made an unguarded remark (p. 9) stating explicitly that he wished to control access to the data to prevent any dissenting report.
UCLA has responded to the allegations in an unconvincing fashion. It trumpets the upcoming study when Groseclose has already shown the study to be part of the cover-up effort.
My paraphrase, of course. A Politico article discusses how Obama keeps blaming his staff for misrepresenting him on policy and tone (giving several examples, the latest being a nasty statement about Sarah Palin). Nevertheless, he relies on them utterly:
Obama’s penchant for publicly rebuking his staff stands in sharp contrast to his declarations about how important they are to his management strategy, as well as the all for one, one for all mentality that he encourages in them. . .
And at the Las Vegas debate, Obama said he relies on his staff to neutralize his disorganization, which he said was his greatest weakness.
“I ask my staff never to hand me paper until two seconds before I need it, because I will lose it,” he said, drawing laughter from the audience. “I’ve got to have somebody around me who is keeping track of that stuff. And that’s not trivial; I need to have good people in place who can make sure that systems run. That’s what I’ve always done, and that’s why we run not only a good campaign but a good U.S. Senate office.”
Their first encounter was last February at the National Governors Association meeting in Washington. Sarah Palin was one of several governors who met privately with Sen. John McCain, by then well on his way to capturing the Republican presidential nomination, and her directness and knowledge were impressive.
Later that day, at a largely social gathering organized by his campaign, McCain spent 15 minutes in private conversation with the first-term Alaska governor. “I remember him talking about her when he came back,” a McCain adviser said. “He said she was an impressive woman. He liked her.”
But few people outside McCain’s inner circle were privy to just how much of an impression Palin had made that day. . . By the time she arrived in Arizona last Wednesday to meet first with two top McCain advisers and then the next day with the candidate and his wife, Cindy, the job was hers to lose. . .
Far from being a last-minute tactical move or a second choice when better known alternatives were eliminated, Palin was very much in McCain’s thinking from the beginning of the selection process, according to McCain’s advisers. The 44-year-old governor made every cut as the first list of candidates assembled last spring was slowly winnowed. The more McCain learned about her, the more attracted he was to her as someone who shared his maverick, anti-establishment instincts.
It has dropped out of the news, but Russia is still flagrantly violating the cease-fire it agreed to by remaining in Georgian territory (even outside the breakaway regions) and blocking Georgian refugees from returning to their homes.
This AP story ran last week, before Gustav targeted New Orleans:
Signs are emerging that history is repeating itself in the Big Easy, still healing from Katrina: People have forgotten a lesson from four decades ago and believe once again that the federal government is constructing a levee system they can prosper behind.
In a yearlong review of levee work here, The Associated Press tracked a pattern of public misperception, political jockeying and legal fighting, along with economic and engineering miscalculations since Katrina, that threaten to make New Orleans the scene of another devastating flood.
When your city’s life depends — literally — on levies, you ought to take them seriously. Instead, New Orleans made them part of its system of patronage and corruption. Apparently it still is.
It’s a little known fact that Katrina probably actually saved thousands of lives. The Army Corps of Engineers investigation showed that the levies weren’t constructed properly and were doomed to fail eventually. By breaking the levies when the city was largely evacuated, Katrina probably saved countless lives. Imagine what would have happened if the levies had given way while the city was full.
Video here of a conversation with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo about energy policy, from before she became McCain’s running mate. There’s nothing particularly newsworthy here, but she clearly knows what she’s talking about. She also gets in some jabs at Biden for opposing the Alaskan pipeline.
I was just thinking, this Gustav is proof that there is a God in heaven,” Moore said, laughing. “To have it planned at the same time – that it would actually be on its way to New Orleans for day one of the Republican Convention, up in the Twin Cities – at the top of the Mississippi River.”
The thing is, I don’t know why anyone would be surprised at this. Moore’s reaction to 9/11 (other than to blame America), was to lament that the hijackers hadn’t attacked red states instead. This is not a good person.
I’ve been following Sarah Palin since she came out of nowhere to save Alaska in 2006. I’ve also been following Bobby Jindal, the other future superstar on the GOP bench. It’s an unfortunate fact that the GOP bench is not very deep right now. I would have rather not have tapped either of them for another four years, but the fact is McCain needs a running mate now.
That said, Palin is simply awesome. She has certainly accomplished more in her time as governor and mayor than Obama has in his time as senator and state senator. This is easy since Obama has accomplished nothing at all, but we needn’t rely on that, because she has accomplished quite a lot in her short time in office. First, she single-handedly cleaned up her state and saved the Alaska GOP, and had to scale mountains to do it: she came out of nowhere to defeat incumbent Frank Murkowski in the primary and former governor Tony Knowles in the general election, and then forced through ethics reforms that were opposed by her own party.
She has also fought against earmarks (again, sadly, against her own party). She was the one who killed the most famous pork-barrel project ever, the “bridge to nowhere.” Better yet (from Alaska’s perspective) she managed to hold on to the Federal money and spend it on more worthwhile projects.
She’s also been a leader on energy issues. She negotiated a pipeline with Canada (not one of the other three candidates can make any such claim) and has been fighting to open up Alaska’s north slope for oil drilling.
Beyond her CV, Palin is simply really cool. Her personal story is awesome, and she’s a terrific speaker. Her first speech with McCain yesterday was electric and I think she’ll be very effective on the stump and at the convention.
Palin’s greatest weakness is her lack of experience compared to Biden. Although one can argue that she has much more executive experience than all three other candidates combined, most people won’t see it that way, at least at first. She needs to convince people that she is prepared for the office. If she can do that, she’ll be a great running mate.
POSTSCRIPT: I confess to being overly glib above where I said that Obama has no accomplishments. Obama does have one accomplishment, the Coburn-Obama-McCain-Carper earmark reform act. Of course, he shares that accomplishment with McCain.
Michael Totten is in Georgia and has a lengthy account of the origins of the war, but he leads with a huge scoop:
Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.
Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn’t start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.
Via Instapundit, who reports that, by curious coincidence, Totten’s site was under a denial of service attack earlier today. I can confirm that I had trouble loading it earlier today, and it usually stands up perfectly well under an Instalanche.
Car-free days is part of Mayor Greg Nickels’ campaign to encourage people to walk, bike or take mass transit. One neighborhood is closed off to car traffic during selected weekends this summer. On Sunday it was the area around 14th and Republican on Capitol Hill, a residential area that’s normally quiet anyway.
“I think it promotes awareness of whatever we’re promoting awareness of,” said resident Thomas Hubbard.
“A car passes by every once in a while, just people trying to get home. And they don’t know how to get home,” said resident Matt O’Connor. . .
Adding insult to injury, the cars owned by some residents in the neighborhood were towed because the city wanted to clear the streets.
Human Rights in China has a post-mortem on the Beijing olympics. Here’s their conclusion:
The total costs of staging a show of national glorification will be borne by the ordinary people in China, a fact perhaps not immediately apparent to the foreign visitors who marveled at the splendid new architecture on the temporarily cleaned-up streets of Beijing. The Chinese government spent close to $43 billion to host the Beijing Olympics, the most expensive Games ever in Olympic history. That is almost one-third of the projected $146 billion needed to rebuild the areas devastated by the earthquake in Sichuan.
The serious air pollution and water shortage crisis in China was both temporarily addressed and worsened by hosting the Games. Although Chinese authorities and the IOC insisted that the air quality posed no problems for the athletes, it is Chinese citizens who will bear the health costs for the ongoing impact of environmental pollution, especially after temporary Olympics air pollution measures are lifted. The Beijing Olympics also consumed an estimated 200 million cubic meters of water—the equivalent of the annual water supply for one million people—all diverted from Hebei, a nearby province facing a severe drought over the past several years.
As the post-Beijing Olympics assessments begin, Human Rights in China looks forward to a time when the Chinese government truly puts the people first, and celebrates those working to build a true harmonious society in China.
The Obama campaign is asking the Department of Justice to silence Harold Simmons, a man spending his own money to attack Barack Obama:
Sen. Barack Obama has launched an all-out effort to block a Republican billionaire’s efforts to tie him to domestic and foreign terrorists in a wave of negative television ads.
Obama’s campaign has written the Department of Justice demanding a criminal investigation of the “American Issues Project,” the vehicle through which Dallas investor Harold Simmons is financing the advertisements. The Obama campaign — and tens of thousands of supporters — also is pressuring television networks and affiliates to reject the ads. The effort has met with some success: CNN and Fox News are not airing the attacks.
What part of “freedom of speech” don’t they understand? In addition to trying to get the DOJ to investigate this guy (which presumably will not happen), they are threatening stations that accept the ads:
Obama’s campaign has written a pair of letters to station managers carrying the ads.
The letter calls the ad’s attempt to link Obama to terrorism “an appalling lie, a disgraceful smear of the lowest kind on the senator’s patriotism and commitment to the rule of law.”
Airing the ad “is inconsistent with your station’s obligations under Federal Communications Commission regulations,” the letter continues.
Also, remember the time when the word “lie” was reserved for statements or implications that were, you know, factually untrue? Here’s the ad Obama wants to squelch. It’s nasty, but every word is true.
Obama has also decided to run a response ad. Unlike Simmons’s ad, it actually does lie, by implying that McCain is running the ad when he isn’t. Other than that, the response strikes me as pretty weak. That’s mainly because there’s very little in Simmons’s ad to contradict.
POSTSCRIPT: Setting everything else aside, isn’t it strange that the Obama campaign has decided to make a big deal out of this? The media was covering it up for him before, but now they can’t.
This is over a week old, but I’ve only now noticed it. The Telegraph reports:
Another section of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony has been exposed as faked - the children supposedly representing the country’s 56 ethnic groups were in fact all from the same one, the majority Han Chinese race.
The children carried the national flag into the Bird’s Nest National Stadium, before handing it over to soldiers to raise at the most solemn moment of the ceremony.
They were dressed in costumes associated with the country’s ethnic minorities, including those from troubled areas such as Tibet and the muslim province of Xinjiang. Such displays of “national unity” are a compulsory part of any major state occasion.
But the children were all from the Han Chinese majority, which makes up more than 90 per cent of the population and is culturally and politically dominant, according to an official with the cultural troupe from which they were selected. . .
The official guide to the opening ceremony said that the children did not just represent but came from China’s ethnic groups.
With new polls showing Barack Obama’s once-commanding lead over John McCain all but evaporated, the Obama campaign announced today it has begun deploying its vast volunteer army of downtown hipster douchebags to help reconnect the presumptive Democratic candidate with middle-American voters.
It took seven years, but Charles Ulrich did something many people dream about, but few succeed at: He beat the IRS in a tax dispute.
Not only that, but tax experts say potentially millions of other taxpayers could benefit from his victory.
The accountant from Baxter, Minn., challenged the method the IRS has used for more than 20 years to tax shares and cash distributed by mutual life insurance firms to their policyholders when they reorganize as public companies.
A federal court recently agreed with his interpretation.
Alas:
It’s not clear how many people could benefit from the ruling. Many of the 30 million policyholders are probably too late to seek refunds, since claims must be filed within three years of the April 15 tax deadline. That means the statute of limitations for taxes paid for 2004 ran out April 15, 2008.
And:
The government could appeal the ruling and likely will fight future refund claims, perhaps hoping for a different outcome in a separate court, tax experts said.
According to National Journal (which rated Obama the Senate’s most liberal member), Joe Biden is the Senate’s third most liberal member. Although he scored less liberal than Barack Obama, he managed to beat out Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders, who came in fourth.
So the Democrats have taken it on themselves to nominate nearly the most liberal ticket possible out of the Senate. Hillary Clinton is a moderate by comparison, ranked 16th most liberal.
US Army officials continue to push for speedy production of Future Combat Systems (FCS), saying they are confident the system will save lives after observing its performance in a limited preliminary user test near Fort Bliss, Texas in late July.
Army officials tested the FCS ‘Spin Out 1′ kit during a training exercise from 27 to 31 July, operating the network of weapon systems in a mock village between White Sands Missile range and Fort Bliss. . .
FCS Spin Out 1 consists of a Non-Line-of-Sight Launch System (NLOS-LS) for precision fires; a ‘B-kit’ computer system to share imagery; unattended sensors; an aerial drone known as the Class I Block 0 Micro Air Vehicle (MAV); and a ground-based robot known as the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle.
When I first learned about Islam, I was taught that “jihad” was the Islamic doctrine of holy war. Certainly this is Hamas’s view:
The Slogan of the Islamic Resistance Movement:
Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.
Since 9/11, however, we’ve been told that jihad refers not to violence, but to a personal struggle for self-betterment. It’s even suggested that the violent interpretation of jihad is Western (!) in origin. So who’s right?
A Muslim group at USC has compiled a searchable database of the Koran and ahadith. (It’s a very impressive and professional effort, I must say.) So I searched it for “jihad”, and found some informative passages. Here are just a few:
Allah’s Apostle said, “There is no Hijra (i.e. migration) (from Mecca to Medina) after the Conquest (of Mecca), but Jihad and good intention remain; and if you are called (by the Muslim ruler) for fighting, go forth immediately.
A man came to Allah’s Apostle and said, “Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward).” He replied, “I do not find such a deed.” Then he added, “Can you, while the Muslim fighter is in the battle-field, enter your mosque to perform prayers without cease and fast and never break your fast?” The man said, “But who can do that?” Abu- Huraira added, “The Mujahid (i.e. Muslim fighter) is rewarded even for the footsteps of his horse while it wanders bout (for grazing) tied in a long rope.”
Allah’s Apostle (p.b.u.h) ordered (a person) to collect Zakat, and that person returned and told him that Ibn Jamil, Khalid bin Al-Walid, and Abbas bin ‘Abdul Muttalib had refused to give Zakat.” The Prophet said, “What made Ibn Jamll refuse to give Zakat though he was a poor man, and was made wealthy by Allah and His Apostle ? But you are unfair in asking Zakat from Khalid as he is keeping his armor for Allah’s Cause (for Jihad). As for Abbas bin ‘Abdul Muttalib, he is the uncle of Allah’s Apostle (p.b.u.h) and Zakat is compulsory on him and he should pay it double.”
Mohammed certainly seemed to see jihad as a military struggle, at least in many cases.
UPDATE (12/30): Updated link to the Hamas “covenant”.
Sen. Barack Obama’s wife and three close advisers have been involved with a program at the University of Chicago Medical Center that steers patients who don’t have private insurance — primarily poor, black people — to other health care facilities.
Michelle Obama — currently on unpaid leave from her $317,000-a-year job as a vice president of the prestigious hospital — helped create the program, which aims to find neighborhood doctors for low-income people who were flooding the emergency room for basic treatment. Hospital officials say such patients hinder their ability to focus on more critically ill patients in need of specialized care, such as cancer treatment and organ transplants.
Obama’s top political strategist, David Axelrod, co-owns the firm, ASK Public Strategies, that was hired by the hospital last year to sell the program — called the Urban Health Initiative — to the community as a better alternative for poor patients. Obama’s wife and Valerie Jarrett, an Obama friend and adviser who chairs the medical center’s board, backed the Axelrod firm’s hiring, hospital officials said.
It’s quite possible that the poor patients that Obama is holding at arms length are better off for it. Certainly the University of Chicago would make that argument. But does anyone think that the argument would avail a Republican if his people were tied to this? A Republican would be crucified for it.
Nancy Pelosi says that the Roman Catholic church has condemned abortion for only about 50 years. Ed Morrissey says she’s lying, but I think it’s much easier to assume she’s simply an idiot. Morrissey goes on to refute her claim, but that hardly seems necessary, does it?
ASIDE: Recalling last Earth Day, Pelosi really does seem to have a problem when she speaks on religion.
UPDATE: Another (unnecessary) rebuttal (pdf). (Via the Corner.)
Trent Lott concedes the GOP might have gotten a little carried away with the pork:
“But you know what, in my heart I knew [John McCain] was right,” [Lott] said of his pork barrel ways. That’s no way to do business, we shouldn’t be doing all that earmarking — it got completely out of control.
“It got out of control with Republicans and that’s why we are being punished a little bit,” he added. “Because we forgot how we got there, what we believed in, the principles that after 30 years put us in the majority, gave us the White House, the congress, the senate, the house. And then we ran out of ideas…”
A 2006 analysis by Education Week found that Oklahoma and Georgia were among the 10 states that had made the least progress on NAEP. Oklahoma, in fact, lost ground after it embraced universal preschool: In 1992 its fourth and eighth graders tested one point above the national average in math. Now they are several points below. Ditto for reading. Georgia’s universal preschool program has made virtually no difference to its fourth-grade reading scores. And a study of Tennessee’s preschool program released just this week by the nonpartisan Strategic Research Group found no statistical difference in the performance of preschool versus nonpreschool kids on any subject after the first grade.
What about Head Start, the 40-year-old, federal preschool program for low-income kids? Studies by the Department of Health and Human Services have repeatedly found that although Head Start kids post initial gains on IQ and other cognitive measures, in later years they become indistinguishable from non-Head Start kids. . .
If anything, preschool may do lasting damage to many children. A 2005 analysis by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that kindergartners with 15 or more hours of preschool every week were less motivated and more aggressive in class. Likewise, Canada’s C.D. Howe Institute found a higher incidence of anxiety, hyperactivity and poor social skills among kids in Quebec after universal preschool.
The only preschool programs that seem to do more good than harm are very intense interventions targeted toward severely disadvantaged kids. . .
There’s a political angle too: Barack Obama seems to be making some insupportable claims about pre-school benefits.
Jane Hamsher and MoveOn think that the media coverage of Obama hasn’t been fawning enough; some critical articles have leaked through. They want the AP’s Washington bureau chief fired. (Via Jammie Wearing Fool, via Instapundit.)
Kos shows us why it’s best to delay evaluating something until it has actually happened:
This has been the best veep rollout EVER. But alas, all good things must come to an end. . . And is there a better example than this that old media is getting left out in the cold?
Wolf Blitzer on the Situation Room begging viewers to stay tuned so CNN can bring them coverage of a text message.
Brilliant! We’ve got a lot of campaign a head of us, but this has been the Obama campaign’s finest operation thus far.
I love seeing the old media left out in the cold as much as anyone, but I love seeing Kos be proved wrong even more, so I’m delighted to report that I learned about the choice of Biden from CNN around 1am last night, long before the next message went out. Hours even before that, Biden looked almost certain from Fox News’s report of activity at his home.
CNN and Fox getting the story early is presumably the reason why the text message went out in the middle of the night, rather than when people were awake as the campaign promised.
In retrospect (note to Kos: best time to evaluate things), dragging it out until the last possible moment was too clever by half. With camera crews camped outside the homes of all the candidates, there was no way to keep it a secret.
During his first months at Syracuse University Law School, in 1965, Biden failed a course because he wrote a paper that used five pages from a published law-review article without quotation marks or a proper footnote. Since Biden was allowed to make up the course, the revelation was front-page news only because it kept the copycat contretemps alive.
He was lucky not to be expelled. A youthful indiscretion? Perhaps, but remember the Biden has (bizarrely) held out his college performance as evidence of his superior intellect.
It’s a bright early October morning on Capitol Hill. Joe Biden is bounding up the steps of the Russell Senate Office Building, wearing his trademark grin. As he makes for the door, he is met by a group of airline pilots and flight attendants looking vaguely heroic in their navy-blue uniforms and wing-shaped pins. A blandly handsome man in a pilot’s cap steps forward and asks Biden to help pass emergency benefits for laid-off airline workers. Biden nods as the men and women cluster around him with fawning smiles. Then he speaks. “I hope you will support my work on Amtrak as much as I have supported you,” he begins. (Biden rides Amtrak to work every day and is obsessed with the railroad.) “If not, I will screw you badly.”
A dozen faces fall in unison as Biden lectures on. “You’ve not been good to me. You’re also damn selfish. You better listen to me…” It goes on like this for a couple of minutes. Strangely, Biden keeps grinning–even fraternally slapping the stunned man’s shoulder a couple of times. When we finally head into the building, Biden’s communications director, Norm Kurz, turns to me. “What you just witnessed is classic Senator Biden.”
Another:
Biden’s mouth does him as much harm as good. ” He gives Castro-length speeches,” says one exasperated Senate staffer. In Democratic caucus meetings, he is famous for declaring, “I’ll be brief,” and then talking the room into a stupor. (Biden’s colleagues have been known to burst into laughter when he makes that promise.) People who know Biden also warn that his loose talk often reflects muddled thinking. In his classic study of the 1988 presidential candidates, What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer wrote, “Joe often didn’t know what he thought until he had to say it.” In one recent committee debate, recalls an observer, Biden delivered a rambling explanation of his opposition to a foreign aid amendment, by the end of which he had seemed to talk himself out of his original position.
And one more:
In fact, the only thing Biden likes better than reminding people about his anti-terrorism bill is reminding them that he predicted the September 11 attacks. On September 10 Biden delivered a foreign policy speech to the National Press Club complaining about the administration’s fixation on missile defense. “The real threat comes to this country in the hold of a ship, the belly of a plane, or smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack,” Biden said. So give the man credit. Just not as much as he’s been claiming. “Literally as recently as yesterday, I spoke to the National Press Club and talked about the fact it is just as easy to fly from National Airport into the White House as it is to, you know, do the same thing in New York,” Biden told ABC News. Unfortunately Biden said no such thing. His speech didn’t mention National Airport or the White House–or any kamikaze scenario at all.
I’m skeptical, but, for what it’s worth, the AP is reporting mixed signs of a Russian pullout.
UPDATE: It appears that at least a partial pullout is underway. The AP and the Washington Post are both reporting that Russia is out of Gori at least. They are also both reporting that the pullout is incomplete.
For the record: I still don’t really care whether China cheated in the “women’s” gymnastic events by falsifying their ages. But I do find it fascinating that the Chinese (and the IOC) see the Chinese government’s say-so as conclusive.
There seems to be a basic disconnect here between the Chinese authoritarian mentality and ours. We don’t trust our own government, much less the government of China. The disconnect seems to leave them unable to form actual arguments, leaving them to fall back to statements like:
“Surely it’s not possible that these documents are still not sufficient proof of her birthdate?” [Chinese coach Lu Shanzan] asked. “The passports were issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. The identity card was issued by China’s Ministry of Public Security. . .”
“The Chinese government and the Chinese athletes must be respected,” he added.
The Chinese government would have us believe that obedience to authority is a fundamental aspect of Chinese culture, and not just the training of its totalitarian regime. Is it true? I don’t think so; just look at Taiwan, and at Chinese expatriates throughout the world. But I suppose China would argue that those others have abandoned Chinese culture.
Another rumored VP candidate for Obama is Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius. Sebelius first came to my attention last year when she politicized a tornado disaster. For reasons unknown, her emergency management teams blocked volunteers from helping in the devastated town of Greensburg. But what made her famous was her claim that the war in Iraq was hampering recovery, because all the needed equipment was in Iraq. This briefly made her the darling of the media, but it turned out to be false. The Pentagon, when asked, said there was sufficient equipment in Kansas, plus additional resources she could have asked for (but did not) from neighboring states or the Federal government. Indeed, only a tenth of the Kansas National Guard was deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
In fact, Sebelius’s claim never made any sense in the first place. (This was obvious to me when I first saw it on the news.) Units don’t ship out to Iraq with their heavy equipment; they move personnel but use the equipment that is already there. The only way the Kansas National Guard’s equipment could have been in Iraq if it was part of the initial buildup. Even if that were true (which seems unlikely), they would have had plenty of time by 2007 to replace it, and would have had their own leadership (Sebelius) to blame if they had not.
Rumors are abounding that Obama will pick Joe Biden as his running mate. It strikes me as a bizarre choice. Biden is the premier windbag in an assembly of windbags (the U.S. Senate), a man who likes the sound of his voice so much he forgets to ask questions at confirmation hearings. It’s well known that he had to withdraw from the 1988 Presidential race after it was revealed that he plagiarized portions of his speeches.
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. issued a formal statement today acknowledging that he had misstated several facts about his past last April in a campaign appearance in New Hampshire. . .
Most of Mr. Biden’s statement was in response to a report in this week’s issue of Newsweek magazine on a tape recording made by the C-SPAN network of an appearance by Mr. Biden at a home in Claremont, N.H., on April 3. It was a typical coffee-klatch style appearance before a small group. . .
The tape, which was made available by C-SPAN in response to a reporter’s request, showed a testy exchange in response to a question about his law school record from a man identified only as ”Frank.” Mr. Biden looked at his questioner and said: ”I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.”
He then went on to say that he ”went to law school on a full academic scholarship - the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship,” Mr. Biden said. He also said that he ”ended up in the top half” of his class and won a prize in an international moot court competition. In college, Mr. Biden said in the appearance, he was ”the outstanding student in the political science department” and ”graduated with three degrees from college.” . . .
[The article goes on to show that four of these five claims were false. For example, he graduated 76th out of 85. The moot court prize was (probably) true.]
Mr. Biden acknowledged that in the testy exchange in New Hampshire, he had lost his temper. ”I exaggerate when I’m angry,” Mr. Biden said, ”but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.” Mr. Biden’s questioner had made the query in a mild tone, but provoked an explosive response from Mr. Biden.
So by his own admission, when Biden gets angry, he tends to make things up — or (worse) he can’t remember the truth.
Obama draws an equivalence between Operation Iraqi Freedom and Russia’s invasion of Georgia:
Democrat Barack Obama scolded Russia again on Wednesday for invading another country’s sovereign territory while adding a new twist: the United States, he said, should set a better example on that front, too.
The Illinois senator’s opposition to the Iraq war, which his comment clearly referenced, is well known. But this was the first time the Democratic presidential candidate has made a comparison between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia’s recent military activity in Georgia.
“We’ve got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies,” Obama told a crowd of supporters in Virginia. “They can’t charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point.”
It’s not just that Obama cannot see the difference between building a democracy and destroying one. But even in the analogy were valid, it’s not at all helpful to be giving Putin cover right now. Can’t he see that?
This man wants to be President of the United States. Lord help us.
Let’s take the hard power first. The Soviet Union was able to pose a serious military challenge to the US by pouring vast resources into its military - as much as 40 or 50 percent of GDP, according to some estimates. Today Russian military spending is a tiny fraction of America’s (about 10%). Even if it wanted to, Putin’s regime lacks the power to impose the kinds of draconian sacrifices on its people that it would need in order to rebuild its military power to Soviet-era levels. The poor performance of Russia’s military in conflicts with weak adversaries such as Georgia and the Chechen rebels suggests that its forces have deteriorated in quality as well as quantity.
Russia’s “soft power” deficit is even more glaring than its relative lack of military power. Unlike Communism, which at its height appealed to intellectuals and others all over the world, the ideology of Russian nationalism has little if any appeal to anyone who isn’t Russian. Indeed, most of Russia’s neighbors find it offensive and threatening, which is why they are now uniting behind Georgia and drawing closer to the West. States such as the Ukraine, Poland, and the three Baltic countries are no match for Russia individually; but they can certainly hope to counter it collectively - especially given the poor state of the Russian armed forces. The more nationalistic and aggressive Russia becomes, the more its neighbors - most of whom have powerful historical memories of brutal Russian imper
Posted by K. Crary
Posted by K. Crary
Posted by K. Crary