December 31, 2004
THE DEER HUNTERS RELOAD:
Lessons for Democrats (E. J. Dionne Jr., December 31, 2004, Washington Post)
[B]ad years offer useful lessons. Here are a few:• Relentlessness pays off. President Bush won reelection by ignoring the conventional wisdom that vicious attacks on your opponent don't work and turn off voters. As soon as John Kerry won the Democratic nomination, Bush's campaign went on the attack and never stopped. It worked. [...]
• Cultural hypocrisy should be exposed. I cannot understand why liberals who regularly criticize the excesses of the economic market let conservatives get away with being the advocates of "traditional values."
When television networks and Hollywood exploit sex to make money, why aren't liberals asking why the free market so revered by the right wing promotes values the very same right wing claims to despise? The coarsening of the culture that traditionalist conservatives denounce is abetted by the very media concentration that economic conservatives defend. Why are liberals so tongue-tied in exposing this contradiction?
Boy, some old dogs really just can't learn anything, huh? The Democrats accused the President of everything from draft-dodging to being controlled by a little black box and he turned it around and handed them their heads--Mr. Dionne wants more of the same? And does he really think the GOP is going to shy away from an opportunity to hammer Hollywood, which is a 100% Democrat constituency?
CAGED FURY:
Martha Stewart Loses Decorating Contest (Fox News, December 31, 2004)
Martha Stewart, who built a billion-dollar media empire based on her holiday and home decorating tips, was unable to lead her team to victory in a prison decoration contest, a magazine reported.Stewart and a team of fellow inmates at a federal prison camp in Alderson, W.Va., crafted paper cranes to be hung from the ceiling, People magazine reported in an article posted on its Web site Wednesday.
They lost out to a competing team that built a nativity scene showing "pictures of snow-covered hills and sleds and clouds on the wall," the magazine quoted an inmate as saying.
Each team was given $25 worth of glitter, ribbons, construction paper and glue to build a display based on the theme "Peace on Earth," the magazine said.
It seems safe to say Ms Stewart hasn't been born-again behind bars. Cranes?
CAN'T MEASURE A 21ST CENTURY ECONOMY BY 20TH CENTURY STANDARDS:
Late Shoppers Help Online Retailers Sell More (Griff Witte, December 31, 2004, Washington Post)
Online retailers sold $14.8 billion worth of goods and services between Nov. 1 and Dec. 26, a 29 percent increase over the comparable period in 2003, according to statistics released this week by ComScore Networks, which tracks online spending. The increase was particularly pronounced in the week before Christmas, when online sales hit $1.22 billion, 53 percent higher than the corresponding week last year."We expected a solid season," said ComScore senior vice president Daniel E. Hess. "But the results for the final two weeks are far beyond our expectations." [...]
The late strength of online sales mirrored the trend for retailers overall this holiday season. Sales in November were disappointing, spawning fears that Christmas 2004 would be less than joyous for merchants. But the procrastinators showed up with a vengeance in late December and managed to provide most retailers with strong results and needed momentum heading into the new year.
Although online sales make up only a single-digit percentage of the retail business, they have a powerful effect on consumer choices, with many people researching prices and selection on the Web before they hit the stores. Hess said 90 million people a week visited at least one retail Web site in the lead-up to Christmas.
With shortages reported for some popular items such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod, many consumers racing against the clock -- and against other shoppers -- opted this year for a hybrid retail experience that involved both highways and high-tech. At Best Buy, for example, the company's customers made frequent use of a feature that allowed them to reserve a particular item online, and then get in the car and pick it up at a local store.
Sears offered much the same service. "When the holidays were getting close, it became an important option for those not wanting to leave anything to chance," Sears spokeswoman Rochelle Mangold said.
The popularity of gift cards this year also contributed to high rates of online shopping, since they could be ordered anytime and show up in the recipient's e-mail inbox within seconds.
The folks who were fretting about the "slowdown" on the Saturday after Thanksgiving sounded especially silly.
REALISTS NEED NOT APPLY:
A state of chaos: George Bush has purged the last of his father's senior advisers, handing over control to his neocon allies (Sidney Blumenthal, December 30, 2004, The Guardian)
[B]ush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgement dumped Brent Scowcroft, his father's closest associate and friend, as chairman of the foreign intelligence advisory board. The elder Bush's national security adviser was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration. [...]Bush has long resented his father's alter ego. Scowcroft privately rebuked him for his Iraq follies more than a year ago - an incident that has not previously been reported. Bush "did not receive it well", said a friend of Scowcroft.
In A World Transformed, the elder Bush's 1998 memoir, co-authored with Scowcroft, they explained why Baghdad was not seized in the first Gulf war: "Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."
Hopefully this is all true rather than just another one of Grassy Knoll's fantasies.
HEARD ABOUT THE Y2K05 BUG?:
The legacy of Y2K (Michael Socolow, December 31, 2004, Boston G;lobe)
From the distance of five years, the Y2K bug now appears a manifestation of our anxieties about our dependence on technology. We didn't know then -- and most of us still do not know -- anything about the systems that keep ATMs working, airplanes flying, and traffic lights flashing. Once these communications systems threatened us with failure we were forced to acknowledge our faith in incomprehensibly complex technologies.That kind of questioning evaporated once our systems proved reliable. Our machines served us well, and our faith was restored. Y2K reaffirmed our confidence in the technologies of everyday life.
From today's perspective the Y2K fears seem humorous. Yet to dismiss the moment as meaningless is to miss its wider import. There is one significant, yet far less well-known legacy of the Y2K scare. In the late 1990s, as computer programming companies were hired to check literally billions of lines of computer code, they faced an impossible task. How could such large volumes of code be checked in a cost-efficient and timely manner? How could a work force be put together for such a technically skilled yet labor-intensive (and tedious) job?
The answer to that question is the true legacy of Y2K. That skilled and cheap work force was discovered overseas. Over the previous decade technical schools in India and elsewhere produced a dependable and talented labor pool from which American programmers began to draw. There was a large expansion in the H1-B visa program, as the best and brightest from around the globe assisted us in solving our computer problems.
That work force proved so cost-effective and reliable that technology companies took notice after the millennium turned. To save money they continued to use this work force; the economic downturn in 2001 intensified this outsourcing of computer work. High salaried programming and quality control jobs, previously filled by Americans, moved to other countries.
The other, unfortunately induplicable, legacy of Y2K was that it forced the modernization of nearly every computer system in the United States, which likely fueled much of the productivity revolution of the late 90s. It would be helpful to cook up a new scare every five years or so.
INFLATED SELF-IMPORTANCE (via brian boys):
Human Hand behind earthquake and Tsunami? It is time for Indian Navy to investigate! (Balaji Reddy, December 29, 2004, India Daily)
Was this an earthquake creation experiment that ran out of control? Many countries are working on methods of creating massive earthquakes as means to defeat the enemy. The technologically advanced countries are working on this project.If an earthquake and Tsunami can be created artificially and directed to a specific enemy, it can literally create havoc to the enemy. Weather control, controlling tectonic plate movements, electromagnetic wave simulated weaponry are all on the table of many countries.
Many all around the world are puzzled with the fact that Tsunamis never happen in South Asia. Also is perplexing is the fact that Tsunamis traveled 1000 miles at a speed of 500 miles an hour and smashed the coastal lines of South and South east Asia where Tsunamis do not happen.
There are technologies on the research table that is used to create electromagnetic effects to release the gravitational effects which can cause this kind massive earth movements.
Another astonishing feature of this earthquake and Tsunami is the amount by which the Kar Nicobar Islands have displaced. The level of devastation simulates 10 or higher Richter scale earthquake.
Was this a show down by a country to show the region what havoc can be created?
We do not have the answers to this.
Now that those straw huts and fishing villages are wiped away no one can stop our plan for world domination!
MORE:
What's interesting is that there's really no difference between such a lunatic claim and the equally absurd one that "God did this to them," To God, an age-old question (Reuters, 12/31/04)
It is one of the oldest, most profound questions, posed by some of the most learned minds of every faith throughout the course of human history.It was put eloquently this week by an old woman in a devastated village in southern India’s Tamil Nadu. “Why did you do this to us, God?” she wailed. “What did we do to upset you?”
Perhaps no event in living memory has confronted the world’s great religions with such a basic test of faith as this week’s tsunami, which indiscriminately slaughtered Indonesian Muslims, Indians of all faiths, Thai and Sri Lankan Buddhists and tourists who were Christians and Jews.
In temples, mosques, churches and synagogues across the globe, clerics are being called upon to explain: How could a benevolent God visit such horror on ordinary people?
When God uses floods to serve His purposes He's rather direct about explaining why.
PEACE IS BREAKING OUT ALL OVER:
Sudanese Government, Southern Rebels Sign Final Peace Accords (VOA News, 31 December 2004)
The Sudanese government and southern rebels have signed peace accords, marking the completion of a deal to end 21 years of civil war.One of the accords signed Friday is a permanent cease-fire, while the other covers details of how the final peace deal will be implemented.
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and South African President Thabo Mbeki attended the ceremony in the Kenyan town of Naivasha, where previous talks have yielded several partial agreements.
Friday's signing fulfills a pledge by the government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army to reach an agreement by the end of 2004.
East African Customs Union Launched (Cathy Majtenyi, 31 December 2004, VOA News)
Officials in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda simultaneously launched the East African Customs Union, which goes into effect Saturday. This program is expected to increase regional and global trade.Kenyan assistant finance minister, Henry Obwacha, told reporters in Nairobi the tariff agreement among the three countries effectively establishes the area as a trading bloc that will improve the lives of people living there.
"We have pursued economic integration in order to attract investments and stimulate economic activity in our region," he said. "Through the East African Community, we seek to remove barriers to trade, facilitate movement of people, money, and capital."
The Customs Union sets up a single market of more than 90 million people with a combined gross domestic product of around $30 billion.
Colombian rebel extradited to U.S. on drug, terror charges (Associated Press, December 31, 2004)
Top Marxist rebel Ricardo Palmera was extradited to the United States on Friday, becoming the first leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to face U.S. drug and terrorism charges, officials said.Army commandos with assault rifles and U.S. DEA agents escorted Palmera, wearing handcuffs and a bulletproof jacket, to a U.S. government plane at a military airfield outside Bogota. The plane took off minutes later.
President Alvaro Uribe had given the FARC until Thursday to free 63 hostages or see Palmera, a former FARC negotiator known by the alias Simon Trinidad, stand trial in a U.S. federal court in Washington. The FARC never responded to the ultimatum.
Ukraine Looks to New Year for Pro-Western Political Course (Lisa McAdams, 31 December 2004, VOA News)
In a rare departure from tradition, the apparent winner of Ukraine's weekend presidential election, pro-reform opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko, has invited the leader of last year's peaceful "Rose Revolution" in Georgia to spend New Year's in Kiev.Mikhail Saakashvili, who led the massive opposition street protests in Tbilisi that swept long-time Communist leader Eduard Shevardnadze from power, accepted Mr. Yushchenko's invitation. He said he felt it very important to be in Kiev at, what he called," this decisive time in Ukraine's history."
Mr. Saakashvili, who attended college in Kiev, was the first foreign leader to congratulate Mr. Yushchenko on his apparent victory earlier this week. In a televised message broadcast on Ukrainian television, Mr. Saakashvili sent his best wishes in fluent Ukrainian to Mr. Yushchenko and the Ukrainian people for what he called their glorious victory.,/blockquote>
Just the start of what's shaping up to be peace-happy new year.
OR HAVE NO EFFECT?
Experts say response to tsunami could hurt or help US image in SE Asia. (CSMonitor Daily Update, 12/31/04)
SAYANORA:
'04 fourth year to set record for the fewest births (Japan Times, 1/01/05)
About 1.107 million babies were born in Japan in 2004, roughly 17,000 fewer than the previous year and the fourth straight year in which a record low was set, government estimates showed Friday.According to figures released by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, natural population growth, which is gained by subtracting the number of deaths from births, came to 83,000, the lowest figure since the end of World War II.
The government has already predicted that Japan's population will start to shrink in 2007, and the latest figures prove the nation is indeed on the threshold of contraction.
The ministry's estimates showed that 1.024 million people died during the year, the second-largest number in the postwar era after 1947 and the second consecutive year deaths have exceeded 1 million.
SECULARISM VS FREEDOM:
Liberty Quotes (12/31/04)
"Human freedom involves the capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight."
-- Rollo May (1909-1994)
Which, revealingly, materialism denies we can do.
STOP BUGGING US:
Gay marriage 'rights' (Thomas Sowell, December 31, 2004, Townhall)
Of all the phony arguments for gay marriage, the phoniest is the argument that it is a matter of equal rights. Marriage is not a right extended to individuals by the government. It is a restriction on the rights they already have.People who are simply living together can make whatever arrangements they want, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual. They can divide up their worldly belongings 50-50 or 90-10 or whatever other way they want. They can make their union temporary or permanent or subject to cancellation at any time.
Marriage is a restriction. If my wife buys an automobile with her own money, under California marriage laws I automatically own half of it, whether or not my name is on the title. Whether that law is good, bad, or indifferent, it is a limitation of our freedom to arrange such things as we ourselves might choose. This is just one of many decisions that marriage laws take out of our hands.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the life of the law is not logic but experience. Marriage laws have evolved through centuries of experience with couples of opposite sexes -- and the children that result from such unions. Society asserts its stake in the decisions made by restricting the couples' options.
Society has no such stake in the outcome of a union between two people of the same sex.
Gay marriage asdvocates have confused our increased willingness as a society to tolerate aberrance, so long as it's kept private, with the idea that we have a public interest in institutionalizing and protecting such transgressive behaviors. All we asked in exchange for not prosecuting/persecuting them was that they stop asking for our imprimatur. It's a deal, oddly, of which they seem incapable of upholding their end.
END THE BEGUINE (via Glenn Dryfoos):
Artie Shaw, Star Bandleader of Swing Era, Dies at 94 (Associated Press, December 30, 2004)
Artie Shaw, clarinetist and bandleader whose recording of "Begin the Beguine" epitomized the Big Band era, died today at the age of 94, the manager of his orchestra said.Shaw had been ill for some time, orchestra manager Will Curtis said, but he did not know the specific cause of death.
At his peak in the 1930s and '40s, Shaw pulled in a five-figure salary per week and ranked with Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller as the bandleaders who made music swing. But he left the music world largely behind in the mid-'50s and spent much of the second half of his life devoted to writing and other pursuits.
Brother Dryfoos informs us: "He stopped playing in the 50's and his last recordings with small groups were among his best ever. He also manage to marry both Ava Gardner and Lana Turner, so you've got to give the guy serious props. He was a brilliant, well-read, articulate man, who was more interested in being a musician than in being a pop star. When he realized he couldn't separate the two, he stopped playing."
We'd only add that the Mother Judd was on Password with him in the '60s and won, until the other star she had to play with tripped her up.
(Artie Shaw and the Mother Judd, February 26, 1963)
MORE:
ARTIE SHAW | 1910-2004: A Jazz Icon and Iconoclast Who Despised His Fame (Claudia Luther, December 31, 2004, LA Times)
Benny Goodman, another clarinetist bandleader of the swing era and a rival, was perhaps more famous, which galled Shaw. But Shaw's innovations, musical depth and swinging style placed him firmly in the pantheon of 20th century big band and jazz musicians."He was a real master of the clarinet, virtually incomparable in the beauty of his tone and unique in his flawless control," said composer Gunther Schuller, who has written extensively about jazz.
Highest on many music buffs' lists — and Shaw's own — is the so-called 1949 band, one of his last, which expanded its scope well beyond the big band genre and other popular music that had begun to entrap Shaw with their success. The short-lived band recorded " 'S Wonderful," among other tunes.
By then, however, Shaw was so far ahead of his fans musically that he was forced to fire the musicians in order to hire a band that played the sort of popular songs Shaw hated.
IT'S NOT JUST A SNORING PROBLEM:
White's death should put NFL on alert (RICK TELANDER, December 31, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)
Huge football players -- huge humans -- are not healthy.White died probably from a heart attack triggered by a little-understood disease called sarcoidosis, which, in his case, caused inflammation of his heart and lungs.
But the situation apparently was compounded by White's sleep apnea.
With sleep apnea, caused by relaxed tissue in the throat or neck blocking the air passageway, a person goes without oxygen for extended periods while sleeping, waking up constantly through the night to gasp for air, often putting the cardiovascular system under severe stress.
Older men have sleep apnea more than younger men.
Very heavy men, with very large necks, have it most of all.
And the NFL caters to very heavy men.
And Reggie White was very heavy.
Apnea can be very dangerous and I don't just say that because it's how the Wife puts groceries on our table.
NIMSY:
More complaints of scofflaw teachers (ROSALIND ROSSI, 12/31/04, Chicago Sun-Times)
Complaints about city teachers and other public school employees living illegally outside Chicago tripled during the last school year, fueling a sizable increase in the number of beefs to the Chicago Schools Inspector General, officials said Thursday.Chicago public school teachers were caught living as far away as Plainfield, Lockport and even in posh Glencoe, according to Inspector General James Sullivan's annual report, released Thursday.
The 38-page report summarizes the biggest volume of investigations in a year since the Chicago Schools Inspector General's Office was created in 1994. [...]
Almost all CPS employees hired after 1996 must live in the city, and this school year, principals were ordered to make sure new hires move into the city within six months of their starting date. Schools CEO Arne Duncan insists the system has been able to recruit more and better qualified teachers, despite the residency requirement.
But Marilyn Stewart, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, contends investigating residency fraud is "a waste of time."
"If you want quality teachers, your ZIP code shouldn't matter,'' Stewart said. "What kind of morale do you have in your building when a disgruntled employee, anyone in your building, can turn you in just because of where you live?''
The kind where the teachers actually have to care about the low quality education they're providing to those in the zip code?
OPPOSITE!:
Vatican paper raps Sri Lanka on Israeli aid (correction) (CWNews.com, 12/30/04)
The following is a corrected version of a story that appeared on CWNews.com earlier this week, in which a crucial error in translation caused a serious misinterpretation of the news. CWNews apologizes for the error.Vatican, Dec. 28 (CWNews.com) - The Vatican newspaper has denounced a decision by Sri Lanka to reject emergency aid offered by the Israeli government. Sri Lanka declined the Israeli aid because it would have been furnished by a military team.
Calling for "a radical and dramatic change of perspective" among people "too often preoccupied with making war," L'Osservatore Romano chastised the government of the stricken Asian nation for putting unnecessary restrictions on an Israeli offer to furnish medical help.
This was one of those stories that revealed much about those who grasped at the original in order to bash Catholics and nothing about the Vatican.
FITTING TRIBUTE:
Clemente Jr. sends aid to tsunami victims in tribute of father (Dec. 30, 2004, SportsLine.com wire reports)
Roberto Clemente's son is sending money, clothing and medical supplies to south Asia's tsunami victims.The aid was originally headed for Nicaragua to honor the anniversary of his late father's ill-fated humanitarian flight 32 years ago.
"My father always said, 'If you have an opportunity to make things better and you don't then you are wasting your time on earth,"' Roberto Clemente Jr. said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press from Puerto Rico on Thursday. [...]
Clemente Jr. was 7 when his father was killed. He said the death still haunts him because he had a premonition of his father's crash and pleaded with him not to get on the plane.
"I carry the guilt to this day of not doing enough to stop him," Clemente Jr. said. "He said, 'Don't worry, I'll see you when I get back."'
Clemente's cargo plane crashed off the coast of Puerto Rico shortly after takeoff apparently because it was too heavy with supplies, his son said. His body was never recovered.
When Clemente Jr. turned 39 this year -- his father was 38 when he died -- he decided it was time to re-enact his father's "flight for humanity" to complete his mission.
He teamed with Project Club Clemente, a New York organization dedicated to the ballplayer's humanitarian projects, and held a dinner dance and food drive to raise money for the flight.
While he was in Puerto Rico finalizing plans, the earthquake and tsunami hit in southern Asia -- on the same day the earthquake rocked Nicaragua in 1972. He said he feels this is an omen.
Clemente Jr. said he is spearheading a campaign with the American Red Cross in Puerto Rico to help the victims of south Asia.
Donations can be made in Clemente's name to: the International Disaster Fund, American Red Cross, P.O. Box 9021067, San Juan, PR 00902.
CERTIFIABLE:
Doubts linger as Gregoire win certified (David Postman, 12/31/04, Seattle Times)
As has been the case since Election Day, much of the attention is focused on King County. Republicans are asking questions about why the county's list of registered voters who cast valid ballots in the election shows about 3,500 fewer people than the total number of votes certified in the race.
SUBTRACT DEFENSE AND THEY'RE RIGHT UP THERE:
U.S. Aid Generous and Stingy: It depends on how the numbers are crunched -- total dollars or a slice of the overall economy. (Sonni Efron, December 31, 2004, LA Times)
A different key measure of international generosity was devised by the Center for Global Development and Foreign Policy magazine. It ranked rich countries' contributions to the poor in terms of contributions through aid, trade, investment, technology, security, technology and the environment. Countries got points for the quality as well as the quantity of their aid and contributions.On that scale, the U.S. ranked seventh out of 21 nations, behind Canada, Britain, Australia, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Japan, which is one of the world's largest aid donors but collects huge interest payments on its development loans, ranked last.
The scale found that U.S. contributions of pure foreign aid was relatively much lower than other countries'. The U.S. scored higher on immigration and trade. Allowing foreigners and foreign products into the country are considered measures of how much a rich country is willing to help poorer ones.
But the study upended the commonly held view that shortfalls in U.S. government aid for the global poor were made up by private American contributions.
It found that U.S. government foreign aid in 2002 worked out to 13 cents per American a day. Private donations from U.S. citizens amounted to 5 cents per person a day.
But in 16 other countries, governments gave more. And in three other countries — Switzerland, Ireland and Norway — private citizens gave more.
The Norwegian government gave $1.02 per citizen a day while private giving came to 24 cents a day.
Cronin said that U.S. per capita giving would never match that of Norway, a nation of 4.5 million. On the other hand, the United States makes many other contributions that are hard to quantify in dollar terms, he said, including using its military prowess for worldwide peacekeeping operations that benefit others, or airlifting tsunami relief supplies to remote areas and sending in ships that desalinate water.
How many troops do they have on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, South Korea, the Philippines, Colombia, Darfur....
THAT'S THE TICKET:
Mr. Powell also moved on Thursday to step up coordination between the United Nations and a core group of countries organized earlier in the week by the Bush administration to speed aid and avoid duplication. The "core group" - consisting of India, Japan and Australia, as well as the United States - was established earlier this week.
The decision to send Mr. Powell and Governor Bush, President Bush's brother, was seen by administration officials as likely to help defuse whatever hurt feelings there might be in Asia that the president was slow to respond, at least compared with how quickly many other nations reacted to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Administration officials also said a diplomatic payoff might also grow out of the current crisis, if disaster relief efforts encourage cooperation in areas of Indonesia and Sri Lanka with long-running separatist insurgencies.
In reality, it's Jeb's first campaign swing for '08.
WHERE THE JOBS ARE:
Hospitals Fail Nurse Head Count: Fifteen of 28 institutions checked by the state this year after complaints were filed were found to be violating required nurse-to-patient ratios. (Jia-Rui Chong, December 31, 2004, LA Times)
State regulators discovered that more than half the hospitals they checked were in violation of California's strict nurse-to-patient ratios, a Times analysis of records found.The inspection reports indicate that hospitals are having the greatest difficulty meeting ratio requirements in specific departments: emergency rooms, medical-surgical wards and telemetry units where heart patients are monitored.
The state looked into allegations of nurse staffing violations at 28 hospitals between last Jan. 1, when a new state law took effect, and the end of October, the most recent records available.
If Americans aren't willing to do the necessary training to fill what will be high demand jobs, we'll end up importing them.
DICTATING TERMS:
Sharon Deputy Calls for Wider Withdrawals From West Bank: Israel should brace for failure in talks with Palestinians, the official says. The government, however, insists that its policy has not changed. (Ken Ellingwood, December 31, 2004, LA Times)
Israeli Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published Thursday that the government should pull settlers and soldiers from additional areas of the West Bank after the partial withdrawal planned for next year. [...]Israel has "no choice of sitting and doing nothing" after next year's planned withdrawal, Olmert told the Jerusalem Post. "Israel's interest requires a disengagement on a wider scale than what will happen as part of the current disengagement plan."
Olmert said Israel should be prepared for failure in negotiations with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is widely favored to win the election for Palestinian Authority president next month. Abbas, considered a pragmatist, has made it clear that he hopes to revive talks with Israel.
In case of a breakdown in negotiations, Olmert said, "Israel will continue to progress, by carrying out unilateral moves, including the possibility of further withdrawals that are in the interest of the state."
Olmert is a staunch Sharon ally who has advocated withdrawal from the West Bank more pointedly than the prime minister. Olmert, who has previously floated trial balloons to gauge reaction to possible shifts in government policies, spoke publicly of abandoning settlements before Sharon did last year.
Nothing has given unilateralism a better name than the Sharon?Bush/Sharansky policy towards Palestine.
ARE CARS REALLY PROGRESS?:
Honk! The quiet progress of Iraq.: Many Iraqi families have been able to afford cars as the government has doubled the salary of its million or so workers. (David R. Francis, 12/30/04, CS Monitor)
You can tell things are changing in Iraq by the traffic. Thousands of families have bought used cars from abroad - clogging city streets and boosting smog. Many Iraqi families have been able to afford the cars - and move from poverty to middle-class respectability - because the government has doubled the salary of its million or so workers.It's a sign that, despite the daily mayhem caused by the insurgency, Iraq's economy is quietly gearing up from its war-time low in 2003. How quickly it's picking up speed - and whether the momentum is adequate to dampen the insurgency by providing jobs for idle Iraqi men - is hotly contested. What's clear is that oil alone won't turn the tide: Small business and manufacturing need to revive.
Iraq's economy has expanded 40 to 50 percent this year from war-depressed 2003, says Alan Larson, undersecretary for economics in the US State Department. He predicts double-digit growth in 2005.
The irony of course is that an infrastructure as deteriorated and destroyed as Iraq's gives a nation a golden opportunity to rebuild in the most modern fashion and leap ahead of its competition, as Japan and Germany did after WWII. The question is whether the Shi'a can seize the opportunity.
NEOCONS WITH THE VAPORS:
Superpower no more? (Clifford D. May, December 30, 2004, Townhall)
Is the United States a superpower?For years, we've assumed this was true. It was an easy assumption to make based on the amount of money we spend on our military and the high-tech weapons we've developed, from stealth bombers to precision missiles to satellites that can read license plates.
But to be a superpower means being able to impose your will, by force of arms when necessary.
This isd inane in numerous ways, but we'll take just two:
(1) Search the history books high and low and you'll find no one who argues that Britain ceased to be a great power when it lost America, or the Soviet Union when it couldn't control Yugoslavia or America when it failed to get the Soviets out of Eastern Europe.
(2) All of the difficulties of fighting an insurgency disappear when it takes power. from a purely military standpoint nmothing would be better than for Zargawi to establish a government. Once they're in the open they're easy targets, as were the Baathists.
HYPERSLUG:
That 'Sluggish' Economy: It's still the strongest in the world. (Opinion Journal, December 30, 2004)
According to the November forecast of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, gross domestic product in the U.S. is expected to increase by 4.4% in 2004. Elsewhere, the OECD predicts growth of 4% for Japan, 2.7% for the U.K., 2.1% for France and 1.2% for Germany. For the 12-country euro zone, the figure is 1.8%. To put matters in historical perspective, the last time Japan, Britain, France and Germany had growth rates at or in excess of 4.4%, the years were 1990, 1994, 1989 and 1991, respectively.But, some say, America's current economic performance is sluggish compared with its past performance. So let's look at the data again. From 1997 through 2000--the great Clinton go-go years--U.S. growth averaged 4.25%. For Mr. Clinton's first term, the average was 3.3%. For the eight years of the Reagan presidency, it was 3.4%. By what standard, then, can this year's forecasted 4.4% be described as sluggish?
Maybe it can be argued that it's been sluggish in terms of job gains. It is true that in 2004 there were some months when job growth failed to meet expectations, although there were other months when expectations were exceeded.
Here again, however, it's worth putting things in an international perspective. Overall, the U.S. economy has added 2.3 million jobs since the third quarter of 2003, bringing the unemployment rate down to 5.4% from 6% in October 2003. In Germany, the unemployment rate is 10%; in France it's 9.5%. For the 27 countries of the OECD, the average unemployment rate is 6.8%. Only Britain and Japan, among the major economies, have unemployment rates lower than the U.S. [...]
Even more revealing are the figures for long-term (12 months-plus) unemployment, as the nearby table shows. Here again, the U.S. looks good. Put simply, about 90% of Americans who lose their job can expect to find another within a year. Lose your job in Europe, and you face far more daunting odds.
All right, but hasn't the U.S. spent its way out of recession, leading to dangerously high levels of debt? Well, again, no. Household debt may be at an all-time high of nearly $10 trillion. But net household worth is also at an all-time high of $46 trillion.
We do need to tweak that job creation number upwards to keep the climate hospitable to immigrants.
LIGHT IT:
For the Chinese masses, an increasingly short fuse: China is having more trouble than at any time since the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989 maintaining social order (Joseph Kahn, December 31, 2004, The New York Times)
The encounter, at first, seemed purely pedestrian. A man carrying a bag passed a husband and wife on a sidewalk. The man's bag brushed the woman's pant leg, leaving a trace of mud. Words were exchanged. A scuffle ensued.Easily forgettable, except that one of the men, Yu Jikui, was a lowly porter. The other, Hu Quanzong, boasted that he was a ranking government official. Hu beat Yu using the porter's own carrying stick, then threatened to have him killed.
For this Yangtze River port city, the script was incendiary. Onlookers spread word that a senior official had abused a helpless porter. By nightfall, tens of thousands of people had swarmed Wanzhou's central square, where they toppled official vehicles, pummeled police officers and torched City Hall.
Minor street quarrel provokes mass riot. China's Communist Party, obsessed with enforcing social stability, has few worse fears. Yet the Wanzhou uprising, which occurred on Oct. 18, is one of nearly a dozen major incidents of spontaneous social unrest in the past three months, many sparked by government corruption, police abuse and the unequal riches accruing to the powerful and well-connected.
"People can see how corrupt the government is while they barely have enough to eat," said Yu, reflecting on the uprising that made him an instant proletarian hero and later forced him into seclusion. "Our society has a short fuse, just waiting for a spark."
Yeah, but what's the disintegration of your nation compared to our current accounts deficit?
THEY EVEN HAVE EQUALLY INEPT OPPOSITION:
Blair says 'No' to plea for G8 emergency summit as the death toll passes 125,000 (GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN, 12/31/04, The Scotsman)
Mr Blair has also faced calls from the Conservatives to cut short his holiday in Egypt to take charge of Britain’s response to the crisis, but Downing Street has insisted that he is in regular contact with Cabinet colleagues who are leading Britain’s actions.
THERE'S CERTAINLY PLENTY OF HIM TO BEND OVER THE RED SOX KNEE AND SPANK:
Yankees Continue Refurbishing With a Luxury Unit: Proving they don't need Dodgers' help, New York, Arizona agree on trade to bring Johnson to Bronx. (Tim Brown, December 31, 2004, LA Times)
According to a baseball official familiar with the negotiations, the Yankees will get Johnson, who has grown impatient with the rebuilding Diamondbacks but would waive his no-trade clause only for the Yankees.In return, the Diamondbacks will get Vazquez, left-hander Brad Halsey, catcher Dioner Navarro and about $9 million, ostensibly to cover much of Vazquez's salary next season.
The terms are expected to be forwarded to Commissioner Bud Selig as soon as today. Selig must approve the trade because of the cash involved.
The players must undergo and pass physical examinations. As compensation for lifting his no-trade clause, Johnson is expected to negotiate a two-year contract extension worth about $32 million with the Yankees, to be settled in a 72-hour window granted by the commissioner's office. Because of those details, the trade is not expected to be announced until next week. [...]
Along with Johnson, who could cost them $16 million in each of the next three seasons, the Yankees signed free-agent pitchers Carl Pavano (four years, $40 million) and Jaret Wright (three years, $21 million) and traded for relievers Mike Stanton and Felix Rodriguez. They also signed second baseman Tony Womack and are in the bidding for center fielder Carlos Beltran, expected to be the most expensive free agent of the off-season.
Even without Beltran, the Yankee payroll will be well more than $200 million, some of that tied up in Jason Giambi, who is due at least $82 million over the next five seasons, but whose status is unclear after he allegedly admitted steroid use in a federal grand jury hearing. The Yankees' pursuit of free-agent first baseman Tino Martinez would suggest Giambi's immediate future in New York, at least, is in doubt.
He's 41 and doesn't exactly have the mechanics of Seaver/Koosman/Ryan.
December 30, 2004
JUST LIKE ANY OLD NEIGHBOR:
GOP's Soft Sell Swayed the Amish: Unlikely Voters Cast Lot With Bush (Evelyn Nieves, December 30, 2004, Washington Post)
Yes, the Republicans, true to their vow to leave no vote unwooed, came to Lancaster County hoping to win over the famously reclusive Old Order Amish -- who shun most modern ways -- along with their slightly less-strict brethren, the Mennonites. Democrats laughed at the very idea. The Amish had no use for politics. Were the Republicans that desperate? But the GOP effort, underscored by President Bush's meeting with some Amish families in early July, did the trick."Yup, we voted this time," said an elder Old Order Amish man approached at his home-based quilt shop on Route 340. He had a beard that straggled down to his chest and bright blue eyes. His first name, he said, is Amos, but in keeping with the Amish edict against calling attention to oneself, he would not give his last name.
"I didn't vote for the last 30 years," he said, puffing on a pipe. "But Bush seemed to have our Christian principles." [...]
In recent months, reports of child abuse in Amish country have made local papers and national news. The reality show "Amish in the City" has brought a slew of curiosity seekers asking all kinds of questions. (Do you take showers? Read newspapers? Ride buses? Yes, yes and yes.) And the plain people have daily worries as well. "We've been worrying about liquor and beer being sold in the grocery stores," said Sam, a gazebo maker and writer who said he would "get into trouble" if his last name was printed.
"We were down," Sam said, "and when the president visited, it cheered us right up. We got a firsthand look at him, and it really warmed our hearts."
In short, as Sam and half a dozen other Amish men explained (women were hard to find, and harder to talk to), Bush won votes with a time-honored campaign convention: He showed up. On July 9 his campaign bus rolled down Route 340, hoping to fire up the base in Republican Lancaster County. The Amish, watching the spectacle from the road, became part of it.
"We came out," Amos said. "We were about 70 people. One of his security said he wanted to meet us and invited us to meet with him across the road at Lapp's Electric."
"They knew we didn't like publicity," said Amos, smiling at the recollection. "So the president met with us all in an office at Lapp's. He shook everyone's hand -- even the littlest ones in their mother's arms -- and he told us all he hoped we would exercise our right and vote."
Did Bush ask them to vote for him?
"Nope," Amos said. "That's another thing we liked about him."
You can't find this story surprising if you were paying attention, Bush quietly meets with Amish here; they offer their prayers (Jack Brubaker, 7/16/04, Lancaster New Era)
President Bush met privately with a group of Old Order Amish during his visit to Lancaster County last Friday. He discussed their farms and their hats and his religion.He asked them to vote for him in November.The Amish told the president that not all members of the church vote but they would pray for him.
Bush had tears in his eyes when he replied. He said the president needs their prayers. He also said that having a strong belief in God is the only way he can do his job.
This story has not been reported before. You might think an observant press follows the president everywhere, especially during a re-election campaign, but no reporter attended this meeting.
Sam Stoltzfus, an Old Order historian and writer who lives in Gordonville, spoke with a number of people present at the session with the president.
He related what happened to the Scribbler, saying the Amish “caught Bush’s heart.’’
The 20-minute meeting with Bush occurred immediately after the president addressed a select audience at Lapp Electric Service in Smoketown Friday afternoon.
An Amish woman who lives on a farm across Witmer Road from Lapp Electric that morning had presented a quilt to the president with a card thanking him for his leadership of the country.
Bush said he would like to talk to the quilter and her family.
So the Secret Service invited the family to meet the president. Friends wanted to come along, and the entire assembly eventually numbered about 60. They were evenly divided between adults and children of all ages.
The group walked together across the road to Lapp Electric.
Stoltzfus reports: “It took a while to get them through the metal detectors as these were farmers and shop men, with vice grips, pocket knives, and nuts and bolts in their pockets. Some ladies had baby gear. All pockets had to be emptied.’’
When the Amish were “found not to be a serious threat to national security,’’ they were allowed inside the office area of Lapp Electric and waited about 30 minutes for the president to appear.
“Babies got restless. Children squirmed,’’ Stoltzfus reports. “Suddenly the president and five Secret Service men stepped into the room. One housewife said, ‘Are you George Bush?’’’
The president replied in the affirmative and shook hands all around, asking the names of all. He especially thanked the “quilt frau,’’ who operates her own business selling quilts and crafts.
“He seemed relaxed and just like an old neighbor,’’ says Stoltzfus.
"OUT"ING THE DEMOCRATS (via GraniteProf):
On Nov. 2, GOP Got More Bang For Its Billion, Analysis Shows (Thomas B. Edsall and James V. Grimaldi, December 30, 2004, Washington Post)
In the most expensive presidential contest in the nation's history, John F. Kerry and his Democratic supporters nearly matched President Bush and the Republicans, who outspent them by just $60 million, $1.14 billion to $1.08 billion.But despite their fundraising success, Democrats simply did not spend their money as effectively as Bush. That is the conclusion of an extensive examination of campaign fundraising and spending data provided by the Federal Election Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and interviews with officials of the two campaigns and the independent groups allied with them.
In a $2.2 billion election, two relatively small expenditures by Bush and his allies stand out for their impact: the $546,000 ad buy by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Bush campaign's $3.25 million contract with the firm TargetPoint Consulting. The first portrayed Kerry in unrelentingly negative terms, permanently damaging him, while the second produced dramatic innovations in direct mail and voter technology, enabling Bush to identify and target potential voters with pinpoint precision.
Those tactical successes were part of the overall advantage the Bush campaign maintained over Kerry in terms of planning, decision making and strategy. The Kerry campaign, in addition to being outspent at key times, was outorganized and outthought, as Democratic professionals grudgingly admit.
Other than that how did you enjoy the election, Mr. Soros?
WHAT'S LEFT TO UNDERMINE?:
Bush 'Undermining UN with Aid Coalition' (Jamie Lyons, 12/30/04, The Scotsman)
United States President George Bush was tonight accused of trying to undermine the United Nations by setting up a rival coalition to coordinate relief following the Asian tsunami disaster.The president has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world’s response.
But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN.
“I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got and the one that needs building up,” she said.
Imagine for a moment that you've just been through what the tsunami victims have been through and you're told that you can either get help from Kofi Annan or the US, Japan, India and Australia.
ALL THE ROOM IS TO THE RIGHT:
Why the Democrats Keep Losing (Joshua Muravchik, January 2005, Commentary)
The era of Democratic dominance in the 20th century was shaped by the muscular presidency of Franklin Roosevelt—activist at home as well as abroad. FDR’s New Deal defined a domestic liberalism that consisted of government intervention in the economy to provide jobs and social insurance. Its constituency was blue-collar, and its exemplars, after Roosevelt, were Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson.This tradition was ruptured in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when the movement against the Vietnam war redefined liberalism around the issues of peace, race, and freedom of “lifestyle,” and on behalf of a new constituency of college students and graduates. The new liberalism was effective in defeating the old liberalism in the battle for control of the Democratic party, but it proved pitifully weak against the Republicans.
In the 30 to 40 years following this transformation, only two Democrats captured the White House. The first was Carter in 1976 and the second was Clinton. Both were governors from the South who were taken for conservatives and who labored to reinforce that impression. Carter, as one of his long-time associates explained at the time, liked to “campaign conservative and govern liberal.” It was a formula that could work for one election with any given electorate. He used it to become governor of Georgia, then forsook reelection to run for the presidency. For this it also proved successful, but when he sought reelection, his true colors having been revealed, he was roundly trounced by the upstart Reagan.
Clinton’s was a more complicated story. He campaigned in 1992 as a “New Democrat,” code for “not a liberal.” Once in office, he too shifted abruptly to the Left, but, perhaps to his good fortune, retribution came down on him faster than on Carter. In the mid-term elections of 1994, the Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich touting his “contract with America,” won a stunning sweep, impelling the agile Clinton to execute a sharp turn back to the center. Announcing that “the age of big government is over,” he signed conservative legislation on welfare reform and the “defense of marriage, and spoke out for stronger anti-crime measures,” V-chips on televisions, school uniforms, and restrictions on teen smoking. In short, he made himself the champion of what were then called “family values,” more or less the same issues that in the 2004 exit polls acquired the label “moral values.”
Liberals, like one-time Kennedy aide Richard N. Goodwin, protested that “the venerable principles of the party . . . have been abandoned.” But few Democratic politicians were willing to argue with Clinton’s success. “We’re all New Democrats now,” declared the then House minority leader Richard Gephardt.
One lingering illustration of the change was the bipartisan support for the war against terrorism following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Not only did most Democrats support the Republican President in using force to oust Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, but Senate Democrats voted to authorize the more controversial war in Iraq by 29 to 21. By comparison, when Bush’s father had sought authorization for war in 1990 in the face of Iraq’s outright aggression against Kuwait, only ten Democratic Senators had voted “yea” to 45 “nays.” (In the House, Democrats opposed the recent war by a ratio of three to two; they had opposed the first Gulf war by more than two to one.)
But no sooner had the presidential sweepstakes opened than the Democrats’ newfound hawkishness started to fade. Howard Dean, an obscure Vermont governor, leaped to the head of the pack by positioning himself as the party’s antiwar candidate. Conversely, contenders like Gephardt and Senator Joseph Lieberman, who supported the war on terror and in Iraq, soon saw their campaigns founder. Only Kerry managed to withstand the Dean momentum and eventually subdue it. He tilted his message toward the antiwar camp by voting in the Senate against an $87-billion appropriation of funds for the occupation and reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, and, much to the relief of the party establishment, succeeded in besting Dean in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.
Kerry, however, was a peculiar standard-bearer for Democratic centrism. He was from Massachusetts, the only state that had voted for George McGovern in 1972, and analyses of congressional voting records, whether by non-partisan sources like National Journal or by liberal groups like Americans for Democratic Action, showed him to be one of the Senate’s most liberal members. As Newsweek’s correspondent described it, Kerry was “a little hurt that Dean had run as the ‘movement’ candidate against” him, since he “still saw himself as the reform-minded antiwar protester who had . . . tossed away his ribbons.”
The reference was to a 1971 demonstration sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), a radical group of which Kerry was the most prominent leader. In 1970 and again in 1971, he had traveled to Paris to meet with representatives of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, and he had returned as an ardent advocate of their official “eight-point peace plan.” While working hand in hand with the Communists, he accused American forces of war crimes “committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”
The publicity Kerry garnered as an antiwar spokesman was his springboard to public office. He served first in local and state government, but on winning election to the Senate in 1984 he declared that his “passion” remained the “issue of war and peace.” As his first major foreign-policy cause, he championed the “nuclear freeze.” He sought cancellation of numerous American weapons systems, both nuclear and conventional, railing against what he called “the military-industrial corporate welfare complex.” He criticized the U.S. intervention in Grenada as “a bully’s show of force,” and made himself one of the two most implacable Senate critics of aid to anti-Communist guerrillas in Nicaragua.
This dovishness lasted throughout the cold war but did not end with it. When Saddam Hussein swallowed up Kuwait in 1990, Kerry was one of the Democrats voting no on the use of force against him. And in 1995, he was one of 29 Senators to oppose lifting the embargo on Bosnian Muslims facing ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Serbs.
A record like this would have been too much baggage to carry in a presidential race even in normal times, much less with the nation at war. But Kerry held a trump card of sorts—his four months of perilous service captaining a Swift Boat in Vietnam—and he played it artfully. First, he arranged for the respected historian Douglas Brinkley to publish a 500-page book at the start of the election year based on Kerry’s own war-time diaries, chronicling those intense days in vivid detail. Then, he made his service in the Navy the theme of the Democratic convention: the dais appeared designed to evoke a nautical setting, the stage was jammed with officers, and Kerry introduced himself with a salute and the corny declaration, “I’m reporting for duty.”
The stratagem seemed to be working perfectly. Unfortunately for Kerry, it also roiled a group of veterans still bitter over his antiwar declamations, including a few of his old mates and commanders who had come in for rough treatment in Brinkley’s book. They organized Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, published a book of their own, and produced a string of TV ads impeaching Kerry’s war record and decrying his antiwar activities. In the ads, former POW’s testified that they had endured torture for refusing to make the kind of war-crimes accusations against American forces that Kerry had tossed around so blithely. While some of Kerry’s fellow sailors appeared by his side at campaign stops, a larger number of the Swift Boat crewmen associated themselves with his detractors.
The response from Kerry’s supporters in the press was quick in coming. The New York Times weighed in with a 3,500-word, front-page article debunking the claims of the Swift Boat ads as “riddled with inconsistencies” and revealing, as if this meant anything, that the group had received donations from some individuals who also helped finance Republican causes. Thereafter, Times news stories mentioning the Swift Boat group regularly carried the description, “whose past accusations have frequently been unsubstantiated,” or similar words. But the Times’s indictment cast doubt only on what these veterans said about the battles in which Kerry had won his medals. The more important part of their case focused on his antiwar activities, and on this the paper was notably quiet.
In fact, no doubt fell on the Swift Boat veterans’ charges on this score, whereas it was Kerry himself who misrepresented his record. He had, for example, denied being present at a climactic November 1971 leadership meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which debated whether the group should launch a campaign of assassination of U.S. political leaders. The proposal was voted down, but the very fact that it was seriously considered shows just how far out VVAW was. When FBI files (released under the Freedom of Information Act) revealed that Kerry had indeed been present at the meeting, he changed his story, admitting he may have been there but claiming he had “no personal recollection” of it. The FBI files, however, show Kerry to have been a main protagonist in two days of ferocious debate, culminating in his withdrawal from leadership of the group. This was high drama, a turning point in his career—and impossible to forget.
Nor was this the only untruth that Kerry told about Vietnam. Again and again over 25 years, in news interviews and in one dramatic speech on the Senate floor, he claimed that he had been sent across the Vietnamese border into Cambodia on a secret and illegal mission that was “seared” in his memory. Kerry’s Swift Boat mates called this into question, and it emerged that he had simply made up the story out of whole cloth. The Times passed lightly over this episode, as if the lies or fantasies of a man who might be President were less newsworthy than the “unsubstantiated” statements of his critics.
Despite the Times, the veterans’ broadside was probably the turning point of the campaign. It punctured Kerry’s image as a hero, and it reinforced questions about his suitability to lead the country in wartime. These questions stemmed not only from his past but also from his recent stance, or rather stances, on the Iraq war.
Kerry’s vote against the $87-billion appropriation was hard to square with his prior vote to authorize the war. His explanations only made things worse—like his famous statement that “I actually did vote for the 87 billion before I voted against it,” or his assertion that he had voted to authorize force because he believed it would help avert the use of force. As if this were not confusing enough, Kerry told an interviewer in August that if he had to do it over again, knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he would have supported the war nonetheless; and then he unleashed the campaign slogan that Iraq was “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” To Kerry, Iraq showed that the U.S. should meet a “global test” before using force, but in 1990, after the elder Bush had passed the global test by winning authorization from the UN Security Council, Kerry voted against the use of force anyway—and then in 2004 he said that, despite that vote, he had actually been in favor of the use of force.
The Times’s election postmortem put the best face on it: “Kerry[’s] nuanced statements about Iraq gave the [Republicans] an opening . . . to attack him as a ‘flip-flopper.’” [...]
Asked in a Newsweek poll whether Kerry was too liberal, 48 percent said yes while 45 percent said no. The same poll asked if Bush was too conservative. Thirty-seven percent said yes, 58 percent said no. A Gallup poll, with a question worded somewhat differently, showed a smaller discrepancy but pointed in the same direction.
This difference was crucial. Thirty-four percent of voters described themselves as conservative, and they went for Bush overwhelmingly. Twenty-one percent called themselves liberals, and they overwhelmingly preferred Kerry. As always, moderates were the largest bloc (45 percent), and they tilted modestly toward the Democrat (54 to 45); but that was not enough to overcome the 3-to-2 ratio of conservatives to liberals. Unsurprisingly, four-fifths of the voters who said their family’s financial situation was better now than four years ago favored Bush, and the same proportion of those who said they were worse off favored Kerry. But even this most personal and self-interested of indicators was a less powerful vote-determinant than ideology.
The exit poll yielded many interesting and suggestive correlations. Men preferred Bush by 11 percentage points, while women preferred Kerry by 3, adding up to a “gender gap” of 14 points. This was dwarfed, however, by a 33-point “marriage gap,” with married voters favoring Bush by 15 points while the unmarried favored Kerry by 18. There was also a large church-going gap. Those who said they attended religious services one or more times per week went for Bush 61 to 39; those who attended only occasionally preferred Kerry 53 to 47; and those who never attended gave Kerry a margin of 62 to 36. A majority of Hispanics voted for the Democrat, but a much smaller one than four years earlier. Other minority groups—Asians, blacks, Jews—also backed Kerry, but again gave Bush a little more support than last time.
It was in light of these numbers that Democrats after the election began to ask themselves what to do, and where to look, next. A few voices urged their party rightward. The Times’s Nicholas Kristof cited the model of Tony Blair’s revivification of the British Labor party, adding: “I wish that winning were just a matter of presentation, but it’s not. It involves compromising on principles.” A group of Senators from states that voted for Bush announced the formation of a new organization, Third Way, aimed at pushing the party away from the Left. This was reminiscent of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), created in 1972 following George McGovern’s disastrous loss to Richard Nixon, and of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), established in 1984 following Mondale’s loss to Reagan.
But neither of those earlier groups succeeded in overcoming the weight of opinion among party activists and thinkers. CDM was soundly defeated by party liberals, while the DLC was largely coopted by liberal Democratic politicians who flocked to its “moderate” banner without much changing their stands on issues.
Other voices urged the party leftward. The Times’s Bob Herbert warned that “Some Democrats are casting covetous eyes on voters whose values, in many cases, are frankly repellent.” His colleague Paul Krugman argued in a similar vein that “rather than catering to voters who will never support them, the Democrats . . . need to become equally effective at mobilizing their own base.” And Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager, argued that what has done in the Democrats has been “ignoring their base” by “running to the middle.”
This group is likely to be reinforced by the considerable muscle of organized labor within the party. Once, under the leadership of George Meany and Lane Kirkland, the labor movement provided ballast for Democratic centrists against the party’s Left. But a decade ago the Left triumphed within the labor movement itself, ousting Kirkland from the presidency of the AFL-CIO in favor of John Sweeney, a member of Democratic Socialists of America. Sweeney failed in his pledge to make the movement grow, and today he is being pressed by insurgents who stand even further to the Left.
Still other Democrats called on their party to adopt the language of values and religion, as if these were foreign tongues that could be mastered through effort. E.J. Dionne urged “religious moderates and progressives to insist that social justice and inclusion are ‘moral values’ and that war and peace are ‘life issues.’” The liberal columnist Harold Meyerson said the party should put forward candidates “who can wrap the values of tolerance in the language of faith.” A consortium of liberal church groups released a poll purporting to show that what the largest number of Americans think of as moral issues are the war in Iraq, “greed and materialism,” and “poverty and economic justice.”
All of this seemed to rest on the premise that religious voters or those emphasizing values do not really know their own minds, and it rightly earned a reprimand from Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel: “People aren’t going to hear what we say until they know that we don’t approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment.”
Mr. Kerry was caught on the horns of a dilemma which, instructively, is unique to the Democrats. In order to secure either party's nomination you have to cater to its activists and true believers; but when a Democrat does so they generally have to jog so far to the Left as to make themselves unpalatable to the nation as a whole. Here it is important to note that not only did Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton position themselves as conservatives, but each had the good fortune to have his main threat come from further Right--Scoop Jackson in '76 and Paul Tsongas in '92. When Al Gore ran Left, in an inexcplicable over-reaction to Bill Bradley, he squandered what should have been an easy victory in 2000.
Consider, on the other hand, that lurching Right enabled George H. W. Bush, a notorously weak candidate, to win in '88; got Bob Dole far closer to beating Bill Clinton in '96 than anyone would have dreamed possible; and did not prevent George W. Bush from beating a popular incumbent vice president in a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
Whatever else may be true of the two parties, it appears that a Democrat has to run Right and a Republican can not ever be so far Right that it will hurt his prospects.
TRY $60 BILLION A YEAR:
Pentagon Said to Offer Cuts in the Billions (ERIC SCHMITT, 12/30/04, NY Times)
The Pentagon plans to retire one of the Navy's 12 aircraft carriers, buy fewer amphibious landing ships for the Marine Corps and delay the development of a costly Army combat system of high-tech arms as part of $60 billion in proposed cuts over the next six years, Congressional and military officials said Wednesday.The proposed reductions, the details of which are still being fine-tuned and which would require Congressional approval, result from White House orders to all federal agencies to cut their spending requests for the 2006 fiscal year budgets, which will be submitted to lawmakers early next year.
Since the November elections, the White House has been under growing pressure to offset mounting deficits and at the same time pay for the unexpectedly high costs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which combined now amount to more than $5 billion a month.
The proposed Pentagon cuts, which include sharply reducing the program for the Air Force's F/A-22 fighter and delaying the purchase of a new Navy destroyer, would for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks slow the growth in Pentagon spending, which has risen 41 percent in that period, to about $420 billion this year. Military and Congressional officials said the Pentagon was looking to trim up to $10 billion in the 2006 budget alone.
The budget-cutting is likely to foreshadow additional reductions of weapons designed in the cold war and the revamping of America's arsenal as the Pentagon prepares for its quadrennial review of military weapons and equipment to address current and long-term security threats, including the insurgency in Iraq and a possibly resurgent China.
That's why Don Rumsfeld's job is safe, but the War on Terror having been won, cuts should be far deeper.
WHY WOULDN'T YOU BORROW TO FUND SUCH A VITAL REFORM?:
What transition costs? (Robert Novak, December 30, 2004, Townhall)
In the more than 41 years that I have been writing columns, nothing has generated more unfavorable comment from conservatives than my Dec. 6 report on Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham's Social Security plan. He would finance the transition costs for private Social Security accounts by raising payroll taxes. Of all the outraged critics from the Right who contacted me, economist Larry Hunter had the most pungent rebuttal: "There are no transition costs."If that is so, I asked Hunter, can you write me a one-page explanation to buttress your remarkable claim? Nearly a month later, he gave me three single-spaced typewritten pages plus four colored graphs. Actually, they portray an increase in federal expenditures forced by private accounts -- that is, transition costs. Hunter's point: There would be no long-term net transition costs. Doing nothing will cost much more, beginning as early as 35 years from now. (Hunter's analysis will be published by the Institute for Policy Innovation.)
That amounts to no real transition costs. The problem with this argument is that we are talking about red ink far into the future when nearly everybody now debating the issue will be dead.
Isn't that the point--such debt never has to be repaid. The Brits haven't paid for the Napoleonic War yet--hasn't seemed to do much harm.
WAITING FOR THE MARSHALL PLAN:
Disparity of Change: China's Northeast, once the nation's proud industrial belt, has lagged behind other areas in seizing on market reforms and is suffering high unemployment. (Don Lee, December 30, 2004, LA Times)
The contrasting picture on Corruption Street illustrates the challenges Beijing faces as it pushes to revitalize the once-proud industrial belt, crack down on bribery and fraud in government and regain the trust of people living in a region with the highest unemployment rate in China. [...]"In the Northeast, the big problem is that we don't have a lot of private economy in manufacturing and high-end service businesses such as finance and accounting," said Song Donglin, deputy director of the economics school at Jilin University in Changchun, a center of China's auto manufacturing.
Lack of access to financial services discourages outside investment, he added, and makes it difficult for laid-off workers to find jobs or start businesses.
"If the Northeast cannot develop," he said, "it will impose very negative influences to the sustainable development of China's economy."
Realistically, such massive revitalization is only likely to follow the devastation of a war.
DEMOGRAPHICS AND DEFLATION:
Sales of Existing Homes Surge to a Record High: The year-over-year increase in November is 13.2%, with the median price rising 10.4%. (Roger Vincent, December 30, 2004, LA Times)
Sales of previously owned homes in the U.S. climbed to a record high in November as low interest rates and a rising economy kept pulling buyers into the market.Existing-home sales rose 13.2% from a year earlier to a 6.94-million annual rate, the National Assn. of Realtors reported Wednesday. The previous high was 6.92 million in June. Buyers paid more too: The median price rose 10.4% to $188,200.
November sales in the West increased 16.6%, the most of any region. Every region showed gains year over year, although sales in the Northeast slipped 1.3% from October to November. [...]
Several factors are keeping the market bubbling, including low mortgage rates.
"Mortgage interest rates dropped a quarter of a percentage point in late summer and then stabilized," said David Lereah, chief economist for the Washington-based real estate trade group. "Coupled with a growing labor market and a rising economy, this created optimal conditions for the housing sector."
Fixed 30-year mortgage rates averaged 5.72% last week, up from 5.69% the previous week, the Mortgage Bankers Assn. said Wednesday. That helped send mortgage application activity down 1.7%.
Mortgage rates are still relatively low on a historical basis and are at the same level as a year ago. When they finally start a widely predicted rise, the market will slow, said Keitaro Matsuda, senior economist at Union Bank of California, but for now "it seems to be relatively healthy, going strong."
Note both the Feds loss of control over mortgage rates and that the only decline occurred in the only place in the country that has a state losing population.
INFLATION IS DEAD, LONG LIVE BONDS!:
Bond market surprises analysts, ends low on high note: The economic recovery was supposed to put the damper on bonds' stellar run. But this year's bond market defied expectations. (RACHEL BECK, 12/30/04, Associated Press)
The bond market wasn't supposed to finish out the year this way. With the dollar slumping, the U.S. economy improving and the Federal Reserve taking action to keep growth in check, the good times were supposed to fizzle.But that didn't happen. In fact, it turns out the yield on the 10-year Treasury note -- the benchmark for everything from mortgage rates to how much corporations have to pay to borrow money -- might close out 2004 lower than where it started.
Sure, that's higher than the near half-century lows that the yield dropped to more than a year and a half ago, but this market hasn't been performing over the last 12 months like anyone expected.
It's starting to sound a bit like a broken record when you talk about bonds. Over the last year or so, there have been forecasts predicting an imminent retreat leading to prices dropping and yields rising -- they move in opposite directions.
And at points along the way, it has looked like the pullback was beginning. Then the market would switch course.
This seesawing has surprised many market watchers, who believed it was inevitable that yields would surge as more bearish factors loomed over the bond market.
The bond market appears appears to have figured out deflation, even if few others have.
BITTER ENDERS:
Group holds fast to Kerry cause with Beacon Hill vigil (Donovan Slack, December 29, 2004, Boston Globe)
The election is long over. A new year is starting, and even most of the more ardent liberals are moving on. But in Louisburg Square this week, one determined group isn't quite ready to let go. About a half dozen supporters of John Kerry are holding vigil in front of his house, still hoping for a Kerry presidency.The little knot of demonstrators, calling themselves the Coalition Against Election Fraud, stood shivering in the cold yesterday, hoisting signs and pressing fliers into the hands of bewildered passersby. Taxi drivers, neighbors digging cars out of the snow, and Beacon Hill residents who happened to be strolling by were subjected to earnest pleas to join the cause.
''Who knows? Maybe we'll overturn the election," said Sheila Parks, a vigil organizer.
A: Everyone else.
SEPARATION OF DEMOCRATS AND VOTERS:
Mass. Governor to File Death Penalty Bill (STEVE LeBLANC, December 29, 2004, Associated Press)
Hoping to bring capital punishment to Massachusetts, Gov. Mitt Romney is preparing to file a death penalty bill early next year that he says is so carefully written it will guarantee only the guilty are executed.Based in part on the findings of a death penalty panel he appointed, the bill would limit capital punishment to the "worst of the worst" crimes including terrorism, the murder of police officers, murder involving torture and the killing of witnesses. It also would use evidence such as DNA testing to protect the innocent.
Romney wants his death penalty bill to be a model for other states.
"The weakness in the death penalty statutes in other states, of course, is the fear that you may execute someone who is innocent. We remove that possibility," Romney said.
Massachusetts is one of a dozen states without capital punishment. The bill fulfills one of the Republican governor's key campaign pledges, but faces a skeptical Democrat-controlled state Legislature.
Taking 70-30 social issues to the voters helps the GOP in MA and Mr. Romney in the '08 primary.
Recipe of the day (Dallas Morning News, 12/30/04)
Fiesta Pork Tenderloin with Oven-Roasted Vegetables1 1/2 lb pork tenderloin
2 small baking potatoes, quartered
2 small green and/or red bell peppers, sliced
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 pkg (1.25 oz.) fajita seasoning mix
Garnish with salsa and sour creamProcedures
PREHEAT oven to 400 degF. Line roasting pan or 15x10-inch jelly-roll pan
with foil.PLACE tenderloin, potatoes, bell peppers, onion, oil and seasoning mix
in largeBAKE, stirring vegetables halfway through, for 40 to 45 minutes or until
tenderloin reaches an internal temperature of 170 degF and potatoes are
tender. Let stand for 5 minutes before serving. Garnish as desired.
December 29, 2004
FIVE FOR FIGHTING:
How five newcomers could change Senate: Staunch GOP conservatives shift from the tightly organized House to the prestigious club of 100. (Gail Russell Chaddock, 12/30/04, CS Monitor)
Call them the five horsemen of the Republican Revolution: incoming US Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, John Thune of South Dakota, and David Vitter of Louisiana.Their arrival in the US Senate next week gives a powerful boost to both fiscal and social conservatives on issues ranging from judicial nominations and abortion rights to tax reform. It also tips the number of former House members in the Senate to 52 percent - the first time it has passed a majority. More than just an additional five GOP votes, they bring a hard-driving style and ideological focus that is at odds with the collegial culture of the Senate.
"The big question is to what extent they will maintain their House attitudes and behavior ... and the uncompromising, disputatious positions that House members are likely to take," says Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
There's already speculation about how this group will interact with Republican colleagues, especially the moderates who often swayed key votes in the last Congress. They could transform the tone of an institution that has been tottering between its clubby past and the more disciplined, partisan style of the US House.
The Senate could use some hard driving.
RACE MEN:
The Birth of a 'Latino Race' (Ian Haney López, December 29, 2004, LA Times)
What's behind the Census Bureau seeking suddenly to drop the "other race" option, a fixture of every census since 1910? And why should Latinos see retaining this option as a victory? The answers touch on the latest wrinkles in the politics of race and demography in the United States.First, some background: Historically, "other race" served as a catchall — a category for those who did not fit easily into the official census races, which today are white, black, Asian, Pacific Islander and Native American. For the bureau, "other race" indicates not a discrete population group but an accounting trick. In tabulating racial populations, the "other race" numbers are simply reallocated to the official categories, and data on the characteristics of this population are not compiled. This made statistical sense so long as those denominated "other" represented a small number and a miscellaneous mixture of racial outliers, not a distinct social group.
But in 1980 the Census Bureau introduced two changes that completely transformed the nature of this category: First, it added to its race question a companion item, inquiring of all Americans whether they were ethnically "Hispanic." Second, it moved to a system of racial self-reporting. Instead of census enumerators assigning racial identities, the bureau asked every person filling out census forms to identify his or her own race.
Suddenly, the "other race" population exploded, increasing tenfold. And 97% of those claiming to be "some other race" also identified themselves as "Hispanic."
Creating a new race category wasn't what the bureau had in mind. In 1990 and 2000, in hopes of reducing the number of Latinos identifying as "other," it tried to convey more clearly that its ethnicity and race questions should be answered independently. But to no avail. Today, about 6% of Americans, or more than 1 in 20, count themselves as "some other race," and the overwhelming majority of them are Latinos. Like it or not, nearly half of the Latino population considers itself a race.
That means, of course, that many Latinos still see themselves as members of the bureau's usual racial categories. According to Brown University professor John Logan's analysis of the census and survey data, Latinos generally divide themselves into three racial camps. There are black Latinos, who identify as Latino ethnically and as black racially. This group, steady at just under 3% of the Latino population since 1980, numbers nearly a million in the United States. Next come white Latinos, who grew from 9 million in 1980 to just shy of 18 million in 2000. This doubling did not, however, keep pace with the growth of the Latino population as a whole. The proportion of Latinos claiming to be white has steadily declined, from 64% in 1980 to just under 50% in 2000.
Then there are those Logan calls "Latino Hispanics," who identify as "Hispanic" on the ethnicity question and as "other" on the race item. This population has steadily gained among all Latinos, from 34% in 1980 to nearly 47% in 2000.
The bureau hasn't said much publicly about this trend, or about why it sought to do away with the "other race" category. It claims to be primarily concerned with the rising number of people opting out of its official categories. But one can't help but ponder deeper implications.
The irony is that activists see claiming racial status as a way of grabbing political power but instead the confusion it causes over how many Latinos there actually are here and in what numbers they turn out to vote has diminished their clout.
AFTER KIM:
Talk Swirling of North Korean Regime Collapse: Since Kim ordered his portraits removed from buildings in the capital, activists flooded the Net with unsubstantiated rumors of instability. (Barbara Demick, December 29, 2004, LA Times)
"We are seeing a lot of fabricated tales going around lately," said Woo Jung Chang, an editor of the Chosun Monthly, an influential Seoul-based magazine."There is a lot of wishful thinking when it comes to predictions of North Korea's collapse," agreed Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.
The subject of North Korea's stability is most sensitive in South Korea, where polls show that people are less fearful of a communist invasion than they are of a messy collapse that could send streams of hungry refugees across the border.
The South Korean government is so touchy about the issue that it recently threatened to prosecute an opposition assemblyman who publicly discussed the contingency plan for a North Korean collapse.
The strategy, which dates to the 1960s but has been revised, calls for the establishment of an interim civilian government to fill the vacuum that would be left by the collapse of the Pyongyang government and for emergency refugee shelters to be set up near the demilitarized zone separating the two nations.
"This is a realistic scenario and something we need to plan for and refine in detail…. Instead, we're not even allowed to talk about it," said the assemblyman, Chung Moon Hun.
At least officially, the South Korean government insists that such plans are unnecessary.
"It seems there's almost no possibility North Korea will collapse," President Roh Moo-hyun said in a sharply worded statement this month.
Like his Nobel laureate predecessor, Kim Dae Jung, Roh has pursued a number of projects designed to bolster the North Korean economy. This month, the two Koreas held a ceremony to celebrate the start of production at an industrial park in Kaesong, just north of the DMZ.
But Roh's stance is drawing fire from conservatives who accuse him of propping up a morally and economically bankrupt regime.
Michael Horowitz, a former Reagan administration official who has been one of the most articulate U.S. advocates of toppling Kim, shocked the South Korean media during a recent visit here when he accused Roh of "making love to a corpse."
As Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have both demonstrated, talk of the collapse produces it.
THE WORLD BILL CLINTON MADE
Aid Grows Amid Remarks About President's Absence (John F. Harris and Robin Wright, Washington Post, 12/29/04)
The Bush administration more than doubled its financial commitment yesterday to provide relief to nations suffering from the Indian Ocean tsunami, amid complaints that the vacationing President Bush has been insensitive to a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions.For better or worse, the President does not think that he was elected to be pain-feeler-in-chief.
THE THIRD PARTY TO ROE V. WADE:
Trucker sued over crash where fetus was killed (KELLYN BROWN, 12/29/04, Bozeman Daily Chronicle)
An Idaho man already accused of negligently rolling his tractor-trailer last year has now been sued by a woman who lost her unborn child in the accident.Brian Sala, 50, and his employer at the time, trucking company Edwards Brothers Inc., are named as defendants in the lawsuit.
Fatima Zukic was 35 weeks pregnant when Sala tipped his tractor-trailer on U.S. Highway 191 on August 7, 2003. [...]
Soon after the accident, the Gallatin County attorney's office filed misdemeanor charges against Sala, accusing him of negligent endangerment for driving too fast and possessing marijuana.
He is not charged in connection with the death of the unborn child. Under Montana law, a fetus is not considered a human life. It says "a human being is a person who has been born and is alive.
Blue America obviously hasn't grasped it yet, but in many ways Conner Peterson was the Man of the Year.
CANDLE IN THE WIND:
1010 WINS EXCLUSIVE: JERRY ORBACH DEAD AT 69 (1010WINS, 12/29/04)
1010 WINS has learned that "Law and Order" star Jerry Orbach has died of prostate cancer at the age of 69. His manager, Robert Malcolm confirmed Orbach's death this morning.
Farewell, Lumiere.
IF THINGS ARE SO BAD WHY ARE THEY GOING SO GOOD?:
The Next Economy (Robert J. Samuelson, December 29, 2004, Washington Post)
We are undergoing a profound economic transformation that is barely recognized. This quiet upheaval does not originate in some breathtaking technology but rather in the fading power of forces that have shaped American prosperity for decades and, in some cases, since World War II. As their influence diminishes, the economy will depend increasingly on new patterns of spending and investment that are still only dimly apparent. It is unclear whether these will deliver superior increases in living standards and personal security. What is clear is that the old economic order is passing. [...]Here are four decisive changes:
• The economy is bound to lose the stimulus of rising consumer debt. Household debt -- everything from home mortgages to credit cards -- now totals about $10 trillion, or roughly 115 percent of personal disposable income. In 1945, debt was about 20 percent of disposable income. For six decades, consumer debt and spending have risen faster than income. Home mortgages, auto loans and store credit all became more available. In 1940, the homeownership rate was 44 percent; now it's 69 percent. But debt can't permanently rise faster than income, and we're approaching a turning point. As aging baby boomers repay mortgages and save for retirement, debt burdens may drop. The implication: weaker consumer spending.
We're normally very deferential to Mr. Samuelson, but his point here seems confusing: In 1945, GDP was $223.2 billion and Household Net Worth was $727.6 billion--today those numbers are something like $11 trillion and $47 trillion. Given such numbers, and the fact that Household Net Worth is measured after debt is subtracted, isn't doubt far less of a problem now than then?
CATHEDRAL VS. CUBE:
Politics Without God?: Reflections on Europe and America (George Weigel, DEC. 24, 2004, Zenit.org)
At the far western end of the axis that traverses Paris from the Louvre down the Champs Elysées and through the Arc de Triomphe is the Great Arch of La Défense. Designed by a sternly modernist Danish architect, the Great Arch is a colossal open cube: almost 40 stories tall, faced in glass and 2.47 acres of white Carrara marble. Its rooftop terrace offers an unparalleled view of the French capital, past the Tuilleries to the Ile de la Cité, Sante Chapelle, and Notre-Dame.The arch's three-story high roof also houses the International Foundation for Human Rights. For President François Mitterrand planned the Great Arch as a human rights monument, something suitably gigantic to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Thus, in one guidebook, the Great Arch was dubbed "Fraternity Arch." That same guidebook, like every other one I consulted, emphasized that the entire Cathedral of Notre-Dame would fit comfortably inside the Great Arch.
All of which raised some questions, as I walked along that terrace in 1997. Which culture would better protect human rights and secure the moral foundations of democracy? The culture that built this rational, geometrically precise, but essentially featureless cube? Or the culture that produced the gargoyles and flying buttresses, the asymmetries and holy "unsameness" of Notre-Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals of Europe?
Those questions have come back to me, if in different forms, as I've tried to understand Europe in recent years. How, for example, should one understand the fierce argument in Europe over whether a new constitutional treaty for the European Union should include a reference to the Christian sources of European civilization? Why did so many European intellectuals and political leaders deem any reference to the Christian sources of contemporary Europe civilization a threat to human rights and democracy?
Was there some connection between this internal European debate over Europe's constitution-making and the portrait in the European press of Americans (and especially an American president) as religious fanatics intent on shooting up the world? Was there a further connection between this debate and the fate of Rocco Buttiglione's candidacy for the post of Commissioner of Justice on the European Commission?
Understanding these phenomena requires something more than a conventional political analysis. Nor can political answers explain the reasons behind perhaps the most urgent issue confronting Europe today -- the fact that Western Europe is committing demographic suicide, its far-below-replacement-level birthrates creating enormous pressures on the European welfare state and a demographic vacuum into which Islamic immigrants are flowing in increasing numbers, often becoming radicalized in the process.
My proposal is that Europe is experiencing a crisis of cultural and civilizational morale whose roots are also taking hold in some parts quarters of American society and culture. Understanding and addressing this crisis means confronting the question posed sharply, if unintentionally, by those guidebooks that boast about the alleged superiority of the Great Arch to Notre-Dame: the question of the cube and the cathedral, and their relationship to both the meaning of freedom and the future of democracy. [...]
Probing to the deeper roots of Europe's crisis of civilizational morale is important for understanding Europe today and for discerning whatever promising paths of European renewal there may be. Getting at the roots of "Europe's problem" is also important for understanding a set of problems Americans may face in the not-too-distant future. And that means that both Europeans and Americans must learn to think in new ways about the dynamics of history.
During 13 years of research and teaching in east central Europe, I've been impressed by what might be called the Slavic view of history. You can find it in a great thinker who lived in the borderland between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Vladimir Soloviev, who challenged the fashionable nihilism and materialism of the late 19th century.
You can find it in 19th-century Polish novelists, poets and playwrights, who, breaking with the Jacobin conviction that "revolution" meant a complete rupture with the past, insisted that genuine "revolution" meant the recovery of lost spiritual and moral values. You can find it in such intellectual leaders of the anti-communist resistance in east central Europe as Karol Wojtyla, Václav Havel and Václav Benda, who all argued that "living in the truth" could change what seemed unchangeable in history.
The common thread among these disparate thinkers is the conviction that the deepest currents of "history" are spiritual and cultural, rather than political and economic. "History" is not simply the byproduct of the contest for power in the world -- although power plays an important role in history. And "history" is certainly not the exhaust fumes produced by the means of production, as the Marxists taught.
Rather, "history" is driven by culture -- by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good and noble; by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on.
Poland is one embodiment of this way of thinking, which Poles believe has been vindicated empirically by their own modern history. For 123 years, from 1795 to 1918, the Polish state was erased from Europe. Yet during that century and a quarter the Polish nation survived with such vigor that it could give birth to a new Polish state in 1918. And despite the fact that the revived Polish state was then beset for 50 years by the plagues of Nazism and communism, the Polish nation proved strong enough to give a new birth of freedom to east central Europe in the Revolution of 1989.
How did this happen? Poland survived -- better, Poland prevailed -- because of culture: a culture formed by a distinctive language, by a unique literature, and by an intense Catholic faith (which, an its noblest and deepest expressions, was ecumenical and tolerant, not xenophobic, as so many stereotypes have it). Poles know in their bones that culture is what drives history over the long haul.
This "Slavic view of history" is really a classically Christian way of thinking about history, whose roots can be traced back at least as far as St. Augustine and "The City of God." Yet, it is the Slavs who have been, in our time, the most powerful exponents of this "culture-first" understanding of the dynamics of the world's story. [...]
If democratic institutions and procedures are the expressions of a distinctive way of life based on specific moral commitments, then democratic citizenship must be more than a matter of following the procedures and abiding by the laws and regulations agreed upon by the institutions A democratic citizen is someone who can give an account of his or her commitment to human rights, to the rule of law and equality before the law, to decision-making by the majority and protection of the rights of minorities. Democratic citizenship means being able to tell why one affirms "the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law," to cite the preamble to the European constitution. Who can give such an account?
Here is one of the richest ironies involved in the question of the cube and the cathedral. The original charge against Christians in the Roman empire was that they were "atheists": people who were "a-theos," people who had abandoned the gods of Rome and who were thus a threat to public life and public order. To be a-theos was to stand outside and over-against the political community.
The "Christophobia" of contemporary European high culture turns this indictment inside out and upside down: Christianity cannot be acknowledged as a source of European democracy because the only public space safe for pluralism, tolerance, civility, and democracy is a public space that is thoroughly a-theos.
It is all very strange. For the truth of the matter is that European Christians can likely give a more compelling account of their commitment to democratic values than their fellow Europeans who are a-theos -- who believe that "neutrality toward worldviews" must characterize democratic Europe. A postmodern or neo-Kantian "neutrality toward worldviews" cannot be truly tolerant; it can only be indifferent.
Absent convictions, there is no tolerance; there is only indifference. Absent some compelling notion of the truth that requires us to be tolerant of those who have a different understanding of the truth, there is only skepticism and relativism. And skepticism and relativism are very weak foundations on which to build and sustain a pluralistic democracy, for neither skepticism nor relativism, by their own logic, can "give an account" of why we should be tolerant and civil.
In contrast to this thin account of tolerance