Michael Dukakis: What Obama Should Do Next (Max Fisher, 9/12/08, New Republic: The Plank)
The Unicorn Rider better borrow his tank helmet, he may need it Election Night.
Labour in civil war as rebels attempt to remove Gordon Brown: Rebel Labour MPs are attempting to remove Gordon Brown from power by provoking a "putsch" against the Prime Minister from inside the Cabinet, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal. (Patrick Hennessy and Melissa Kite, 13 Sep 2008, Daily Telegraph)
They claim that up to 45 MPs are prepared to put their names to the move against Mr Brown, which would place him under severe pressure in the run-up to Labour's annual conference, beginning in Manchester on Saturday.That would still be some way short of the 71 needed to force a contest. Leading opponents of Mr Brown said that their aim was to provoke a "substantial minority" of Cabinet ministers, numbering up to 10, into telling the Prime Minister: "The game is up."
Their tactics came to light as the revolt against Mr Brown gathered pace, with eight MPs publicly calling for a leadership contest.
Biden prepares for more prominent role in campaign (NEDRA PICKLER, 9/13/08, AP)
The vice presidential nominee you aren't hearing so much about, Democrat Joe Biden, is planning a more prominent role to help validate Barack Obama among white working-class voters and criticize the Republican rival he's long called a friend.Republican running mate Sarah Palin is soaking up the campaign spotlight with magazine covers and joint rallies with John McCain that draw thousands, while Biden has had a more traditional role of second fiddle to the man at the top of the ticket. But the campaign envisions a new role for its No. 2 in helping make the closing argument against McCain.
Don’t Know Much About History: A national shame. (Thomas F. Madden, 9/12/08, National Review)
Which brings up an interesting question: If history is such a good teacher, why do we teach so little of it to our young?Take, for example, history’s place in America’s higher education. Many institutions that are training tomorrow’s leaders don’t seem to think that history is just what they need. At Princeton, for example, those who receive A.B. degrees need take only one course in history — any history. Bachelor of Science students at Princeton can skip history altogether. So can those at Yale. At least Harvard requires its undergraduates to take a pre-modern history course. But that is rare. It’s increasingly difficult today to find a college or university that requires students to study Antiquity, or the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, or anything at all that occurred before the students’ own short lives. [...]
For too many Americans, the lessons of the past are restricted to the tiny portion of it with which they have personal experience.
Think about it. During the national debates on the war on terror, lessons from history were as thick in the air as rocket-propelled grenades in Iraq. Liberals launched salvos of Vietnam, arguing that Iraq and Afghanistan were unwinnable quagmires. Conservatives fired back with World War II, insisting that appeasement only emboldens the enemy.
Yet both of those wars are still within living memory. They occurred within the last few seconds of recorded history’s day. What about the rest of human experience? Relying on recent events to teach us historical truths is a perilous business. History needs room — lots of room — for perspective. Divining lessons from the experiences of the last few generations is like describing a Monet landscape with one’s nose touching the canvas. Those colors and dabs are pretty, but they just won’t make sense until you back up and experience them from a distance.
The Duty to Rescue: Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention by Gary J. Bass (Michael Ignatieff, New Republic)
Bass argues at length that while Western intervention in the Ottoman Empire was driven by both imperial and humanitarian motives, the two impulses were distinct. Many humanitarians -- Jeremy Bentham, for example -- were vehement opponents of their own empires. Byron did not die for the British Empire. He died for the Greeks, and of course for his own glory. Despite these examples, it is possible that Bass works too hard to persuade us that humanitarianism is unclouded by imperial impulse. Imperial racism toward Muslims in general and Turks in particular played a recurring role in propelling the European conscience to action. Gladstone's famous pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East -- one of the Magna Carta documents of the modern human rights movement -- was, as Bass rightly notes, a mixture of over-the-top moralizing and raw anti-Turkish bigotry. Gladstone knew exactly nothing about Islam, the Turks, or the Ottoman Empire. But this did not stop him from characterizing the Turks as "the great anti-human specimen of humanity."Humanitarians may be as racist as realists. The same condescension that prompts realists to stay out of the quarrels of little peoples can prompt humanitarians to plunge in to save them. If humanitarians -- then and now -- often underestimate the costs of intervention, it may be because they condescend to the capabilities of the butchers they are out to defeat. If they overestimate the gratitude of the people on whose behalf they intervene, it may be because they are too much in love with the fantasy of helpless and thankful victims.
Bass argues strenuously that these nineteenth-century interventions reveal a conspicuously modern human rights consciousness, secular and universal in character. It is less clear to me that the humanitarians drew a distinction between saving fellow Christians and saving fellow human beings. This is not to say that abstract moral universalism was not available to the humanitarians of the nineteenth century. Since Grotius in the 1620s, philosophers of law had argued that the moral duty to protect and to save extends to human beings per se and not simply to co-religionists or fellow subjects. Enlightenment figures such as Adam Smith had castigated the moral partiality of religious sectarians. It is also true that unbelievers such as Byron went to Greece to save the Greeks, not fellow Christians. Still, the fact that the enemy was Muslim and the victims were Christian seems to have shaped the moral partialities of a devout Christian such as Gladstone.
While Bass does make the case for an independent self-subsisting moral universalism in Western culture, in the instances of intervention that he discusses Christian solidarities seem more salient as motives than the human solidarity of the modern human rights variety. But these are minor quibbles about a book that is a spirited and elegant contribution to the moral history of humanitarian emotions and their tangled relation to imperial interest and religious faith.
Homeownership Push Is Rethought: Both Candidates Weigh the Best Path To American Dream (NICK TIMIRAOS, September 12, 2008, Wall Street Journal)
The government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is forcing John McCain and Barack Obama to consider the proper fix for the companies' long-term structure. A key question in that effort: How aggressively should a new administration promote homeownership?Most of the discussion from the candidates has been about how to stem rising foreclosure rates. Both tout homeownership as a central pillar of the American dream. But with many borrowers defaulting on loans and housing prices plummeting in some areas, both also are rethinking how best to achieve that goal.
"This is something the next administration will have to deal with: Are they going to be pushing people into homeownership?" said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington and a critic of the government's advocacy of homeownership.
Obama's credibility gap is visible (Gerard Baker, September 13, 2008, The Australian)
The essential problem coming to light is a profound disconnect between the Barack Obama of the candidate's speeches, and the Barack Obama who has been in politics for the past decade or so.Speechmaker Obama has built his campaign on the promise of reform, the need to change the culture of American political life, to take on the special interests that undermine government's effectiveness and erode trust in the system itself.
Politician Obama rose through a Chicago machine that is notoriously the most corrupt in the country. As David Freddoso writes in a brilliantly cogent and measured book, The Case Against Barack Obama, the angel of deliverance from the old politics functioned like an old-time Democratic pol in Illinois. He refused repeatedly to side with those lonely voices that sought to challenge the old corrupt ways of the ruling party.
Speechmaker Obama talks about an era of bipartisanship, He speaks powerfully about the destructive politics of red and blue states.
Politician Obama has toed his party's line more reliably than almost any other Democrat in US politics. He has a near-perfect record of voting with his side. He has the most solidly left-wing voting history in the Senate. His one act of bipartisanship, a transparency bill co-sponsored with a Republican senator, was backed by everybody on both sides of the aisle. He has never challenged his party's line on any issue of substance.
Speechmaker Obama talks a lot about finding ways to move beyond the bloody battlegrounds of the culture wars in America; the urgent need to establish consensus on the emotive issue of abortion.
Politician Obama's support for abortion rights is the most extreme of any Democratic senator. In the Illinois legislature he refused to join Democrats and Republicans in supporting a bill that would require doctors to provide medical care for babies who survived abortions. No one in the US Senate - not the arch feminist Hillary Clinton nor the super-liberal Edward Kennedy - opposed this humane measure.
Here's the real problem with Obama: the jarring gap between his promises of change and his status quo performance.
There are just too many contradictions between the eloquent poetry of the man's stirring rhetoric and the dull, familiar prose of his political record.
MORE:
A BARACK-AND-FORTH VOTER (GINGER ADAMS OTIS, February 17, 2008, NY Post)
When a controversial bill allowing riverboat casinos to operate at dockside came before him in 1997, it passed the Illinois Senate - despite vocal opposition from many church groups - by a two-vote margin.Among those who voted "yes" was Obama, then starting his first term as a state senator.
Moments after voting to authorize the bill, the Democrat told the floor he had goofed.
"I'd like to be recorded as a 'no' vote," he said, according to transcripts, adding that he had mistakenly voted in favor of the legislation.
By claiming to have made an error, Obama's "intent" to vote against the measure was noted in the record. But his initial "yes" stood.
Obama made six similar "mistakes" during his state Senate years, twice on hotly contested measures.
Whether those errors were by design, as his critics charge, or by accident, as his presidential campaign insists, Obama's desire to placate both sides on contentious issues is a hallmark of his lawmaking career.
Gioia Leaves NEA After Changing Debate Over Arts Funding (KATE TAYLOR, September 12, 2008, NY Sun)
Among the programs Mr. Gioia initiated are Shakespeare in American Communities, a program that funds professional theater companies to tour Shakespeare productions in schools; the Big Read, which encourages communities to read and discuss one of 26 selected works of American and world literature; NEA Jazz Masters, which includes both live performances and educational resources about jazz; Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation contest for high school students, and Operation Homecoming, which provides writing workshops for troops and their spouses.During Mr. Gioia's tenure, the NEA has also produced several major research reports, including "Reading at Risk" (2004), which found dramatic declines in adult reading of literature; "The Arts and Civic Engagement" (2006), which showed that people who participate in the arts also participate in other civic activities, and "Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005" (2008), a nationwide look at artists' demographic and employment patterns.
Under Mr. Gioia, the NEA has also dramatically broadened the geographic impact of its funding through an initiative called Challenge America, which awards grants to small- and midsize organizations that bring art to underserved populations. Previously, in an average year, direct grants reached only three-quarters of the country, as measured by congressional district. Since 2005, grants have reached at least one organization in every congressional district.
"I can go into a congressman's office and ask him to name any high school in his district, and we've been there," Mr. Gioia said. "That changes the conversation."
The NEA's grants are largely one-to-one matching grants — that is, they require that the recipient get the same amount of funding from a private source, as well.
"The NEA does not subsidize the arts: We give the grants that make a project possible," Mr. Gioia said, offering what is clearly a finely honed argument. "If we give [our] grant, it tells other potential funders that on a national basis this project was selected as of the highest quality." An organization can go to a potential funding source and say, "'[I]f you don't match this we'll lose it,'" Mr. Gioia said. "It gives it a level of urgency. And that's the leverage that makes the American system, which is largely privately funded, work better."
MORE:
Farewell Mapplethorpe, Hello Shakespeare : The NEA, the W. way. (Roger Kimball, 2004, National Review)
Within a matter of months, Mr. Gioia has transformed that moribund institution into a vibrant force for the preservation and transmission of artistic culture. He has cut out the cutting edge and put back the art. Instead of supporting repellent "transgressive" freaks, he has instituted an important new program to bring Shakespeare to communities across America. And by Shakespeare I mean Shakespeare, not some PoMo rendition that portrays Hamlet in drag or sets A Midsummer Night's Dream in a concentration camp. (Check the website www.shakespeareinamericancommunities.org for more information.)Mr. Gioia is moving on other fronts as well. He has hired a number of able deputies who care about art and understand that what the public wants is more access to good art — opera, poetry, theater, literature — not greater exposure to social pathology dressed up as art. After a couple of decades of cultural schizophrenia, the NEA has become a clear-sighted, robust institution intent on bringing important art to the American people.
It's quite odd, really. People keep telling us — that is, professors and CNN commentators and Hollywood actors keep telling us — how very stupid President Bush is. Yet everywhere one looks he is supporting some of the most intelligent and dynamic people ever to occupy their cultural posts. Dana Gioia at the NEA, his counterpart Bruce Cole at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Leon Kass and his panel of distinguished scientists and philosophers at the President's Council on Bioethics (see their website www.bioethics.gov to get a sense of the good work they are doing on clarifying the enormous moral issues surrounding the debate over biotechnology). The Left keeps screaming about how dim George Bush is, but in the meantime, he has illuminated one area of public life after another with immensely talented and articulate people.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=ec9895a4-b549-4159-b739-4b62f0171c5c)
Oil dips below $US100 (The Age, September 13, 2008)
Oil prices closed narrowly mixed on Friday amid a near-total shutdown of offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, where a massive Hurricane Ike was bearing down deep in the heart of the US oil industry. [...]About an hour earlier, the New York contract briefly dipped to $US99.99, crossing the psychological $US100 threshold for the first time since April 1.
Oops, Obama ad mocks McCain's inability to send e-mail. Trouble is, he can't due to tortured fingers (Andrew Malcolm, 9/13/08, LA Times: Top of the Ticket)
Here's a passage from a lengthy Boston Globe profile on McCain that was published the last time he ran for president. It was headlined "McCain character loyal to a fault." It was written by Mary Leonard.And it was printed more than eight years ago, on March 4, 2000.
It is available online, where Jonah Goldberg of The Corner blog at the National Review found it.
"McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain's severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain's encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He's an avid fan -- Ted Williams is his hero -- but he can't raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball."
Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer denied the freshman Illinois senator's ad was making an issue of McCain's age. "It's extraordinary," he said, "that someone who wants to be our president and commander in chief doesn't know how to send an e-mail."
Will Obama's Aggressive New Tone Work? (Chris Cillizza, 9/13/08, The Fix)
[Illinois Rep. Rahm] Emanuel, on the call this morning, argued that the new strategy "doesn't fundamentally alter that people see Barack as the candidate of the future," adding that "the American people know this is a big election."Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, was out within minutes of the conclusion of the Obama conference call with a push back. "What is becoming clear to the American people is the fact that Barack Obama has no record of bipartisan legislative accomplishment, no history of bucking his party and no chance of bringing change," Bounds said.
One other potential complication that presents itself when considering the efficacy of Obama's new aggressive approach is that it is focused entirely on painting McCain as out of touch on the economy at a time when many Democrats are clearly itching for the Illinois senator to go at Palin in a meaningful way.
The liberal base of the Democratic party detests Palin in a visceral way and wants to destroy her, regardless of whether it is a sound political strategy or not. Several of the questions asked on today's conference call were centered not on the idea that McCain is out of touch on the economy but rather on why the Obama campaign wasn't hitting Palin more aggressively on some of her perceived weaknesses.
While it's clear that the economic message is the right one for Obama -- take a look at any recent national poll and you will see it as BY FAR the most pressing issue on the minds of voters -- in order to get that attack to stick, the Illinois senator probably needs the activist base as well as the party's chattering class on board. The question is whether anything other than a full frontal assault on Palin will energize the base in the way that can help Obama carry the fight to McCain.
In the absence of any positive economic ideas, what can he run on but negatives?
Unfortunately for him, negative campaigning requires a deep reserve of past positive impressions, because even as you attack an opponent you drive up your own negatives. Thanks to his own personal history and the cynical support of the Democratic Party and the MSM, John McCain has a tremendous reserve to draw upon. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, is so little known that he makes voters feel uncomfortable. This is the time that most are drawing their first concrete impression of him. The danger that they'll associate him primarily with an "assault" on Sarah Palin and John McCain basically destroys the entire theory of his candidacy and renders him just a partisan hack. Even more dangerous is that there is ample support for that image in his rather meager record as a legislator and his past associations with the Reverend Wright's, Alinskyites ad William Ayres's of the Chicago political scene.
Reading about Queen Esther helped guide Palin (Gov. Linda Lingle, 9/10/08, The Jewish Journal)
It is also clear that Gov. Palin is a woman of deep personal faith. She has established a good relationship with the Jewish communities of Alaska, supported the residents' desire to create the Alaska Jewish Historical Museum and was present at the reading of Alaska's resolution commemorating Israel's 60th anniversary.In her office in Juneau, Gov. Palin has hung an Israeli flag. She displays the flag because Israel is in her heart.
One of the finest qualities Gov. Palin has demonstrated recently is her tremendous grace under fire. Since the announcement of her selection as our vice presidential nominee, she has faced an onslaught of rumor, smear and innuendo. Yet Gov. Palin has remained strong and resolute. She has let the truth speak for itself.
Shortly after coming into office, Gov. Palin asked her former pastor for examples of biblical people who were great leaders and what was the secret of their leadership. The pastor suggested she re-read the story of Queen Esther, the Jewish woman who rose to help her people and became queen of Persia.
Like Queen Esther, Gov. Palin has faced tremendous adversity, and time and again she has risen to overcome obstacles. This is the sign of a true leader.
Pigs, Dogs, Fish and Frogs. Oh My! (Craig Crawford, September 10, 2008, CQ)
Long before Karl Rove put his name on the politics of distraction, a top Republican operative who specializes in electing weak candidates once explained to me how you derail a powerful foe who's winning on issues. He called it the ugly frog routine.Ugly frogs in this game can be anything that opposing candidates do or say that, out of context, puts them on the defense.
"Stick that frog right in their face, shake it all around, and say, 'Here, look at this BIG UGLY FROG,'" the GOP consultant said. "Then, as they defend themselves and explain the context, real quick grab another ugly frog. Repeat often until they've spent most of the campaign reacting to your agenda."
Does Biden Have a Catholic Problem? (Amy Sullivan, Sep. 12, 2008, TIME)
When Barack Obama announced that he had chosen Joe Biden as his running mate, Catholic Democrats knew some kind of religious rumble was inevitable.They had spent the 2004 campaign watching John Kerry pummeled by charges that he was not a good Catholic and by warnings that he could be denied communion because of his support for abortion rights. Already this year they had seen pro-choice Catholic Kathleen Sebelius knocked out of vice presidential contention after her archbishop imposed a "pastoral action" on her, demanding she no longer receive the Eucharist. [...]
On Wednesday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops publically called out Biden for comments he made about abortion on NBCs Meet the Press. Even Kerry, whose support for abortion rights is much stronger than Biden's and who was running at the top of the ticket, never generated attention from more than a handful of the most extreme bishops. The involvement of the bishops conference is a clear signal that the communion wars are not over. And it has Catholics Democrats worriedly asking themselves: Can one of their own ever again win national office?
Mark Penn, Clinton strategist, warns Obama -- and the media (Andrew Malcolm, 9/12/08, LA TIMES: Top of the Ticket))
"I think the media so far has been the biggest loser in this race. And they continue to have growing credibility problems."And I think that that's a real problem growing out of this election. The media now, all of the media -- not just Fox News, that was perceived as highly partisan -- but all of the media is now being viewed as partisan in one way or another. And that is an unfortunate development."
So does the strategist, who had his own complaints about sexism in media coverage about Sen. Clinton, think the media is being harder on Palin than other candidates?
"I think that the media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they're not doing on the other candidates. And that's going to subject them to people concluding that they're giving her a tougher time. [...]
"What happened here very clearly is that the controversy over Palin led to 37 million Americans tuning into a vice-presidential speech -- something that is unprecedented -- because they wanted to see for themselves," Penn adds. "This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility with them."
Charles Gibson of ABC News was out for blood and inherently applied a double-standard compared with the kid gloves George Stephanopoulos used on Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on Sunday night.Gibson was out to embarrass Palin and expose her presumed ignorance from the word go. By contrast, when Obama referred to his "Muslim faith" on Sunday and did not correct himself, Stephanopoulos rushed in at once to help him and emphasize that the senator had really meant to say his Christian faith.
By contrast, Gibson tried to embarrass Palin by referring to her Christian faith in asking people to pray for U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Palin countered by pointing out she was following the precedent set by Abraham Lincoln.
Palin also expressed her support for Georgia and Ukraine joining the U.S.-led NATO alliance. That statement was predictable and consistent with the current policy of the Bush administration. The policy has dangerously raised tensions with Russia, but Palin is hardly alone in the conservative/Republican consensus in expressing her support for it.
Palin's assessment of foreign policy was competent and not embarrassing. Although she initially exhibited ignorance of the Bush Doctrine on pre-emptive strikes that has been a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she recovered quickly and then made the case clearly. Tactically, she made the mistake of trying to be friendly and informal with Gibson, who assumed a superior, professorial and critical stance toward her. She would have been far better going on the attack to rattle him.
The double-standard Gibson applied to Palin, compared with the uncritical media platforms repeatedly offered to Obama, who has had zero executive experience running anything, was especially striking.
MORE
Many Versions of 'Bush Doctrine': Palin's Confusion in Interview Understandable, Experts Say (Michael Abramowitz, 9/13/08, Washington Post)
After a brief exchange, Gibson explained that he was referring to the idea -- enshrined in a September 2002 White House strategy document -- that the United States may act militarily to counter a perceived threat emerging in another country. But that is just one version of a purported Bush doctrine advanced over the past eight years.Peter D. Feaver, who worked on the Bush national security strategy as a staff member on the National Security Council, said he has counted as many as seven distinct Bush doctrines. They include the president's second-term "freedom agenda"; the notion that states that harbor terrorists should be treated no differently than terrorists themselves; the willingness to use a "coalition of the willing" if the United Nations does not address threats; and the one Gibson was talking about -- the doctrine of preemptive war.
"If you were given a quiz, you might guess that one, because it's one that many people associate with the Bush doctrine," said Feaver, now a Duke University professor. "But in fact it's not the only one."
This debate may ordinarily be little more than cocktail chatter for the foreign policy establishment, but political blogs were buzzing yesterday over Palin's entire interview with Gibson, including the confusion about the doctrine. Liberals said it was yet another case of Palin's thin grasp on foreign policy, while conservatives replied that she handled herself well by putting the question back on Gibson.
After she asked Gibson to clarify what he meant, the anchor pressed Palin on whether the United States has "a right to make a preemptive strike against another country if we feel that country might strike us."
"Charlie," Palin replied, "if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend."
So what might shift contemporary impressions of President Bush? I can only speak for myself here, but something I did not expect was the discovery that he reads more history and talks with more historians than any of his predecessors since at least John F. Kennedy. The President has surprised me more than once with comments on my own books soon after they’ve appeared, and I’m hardly the only historian who has had this experience. I’ve found myself improvising excuses to him, in Oval Office seminars, as to why I hadn’t read the latest book on Lincoln, or on—as Bush refers to him—the “first George W.” I’ve even assigned books to Yale students on his recommendation, with excellent results. [...]So is there a Bush Doctrine, and if so will it meet this test of transferability? To answer this question, I’d look first for a statement delivered in a suitably august setting: Durable doctrines don’t appear as casual comments. Then I’d look for one that’s clearly labeled as a policy, not as a portrayal of adversaries or an explanation of methods for dealing with them: That’s why terms like “Axis of Evil” or “preemption” don’t constitute doctrines. Finally—especially in an historically conscious president—I would look for historical echoes.
The speech that best fits these criteria is the one President Bush delivered from the steps of the Capitol on January 20, 2005. As a student of Lincoln, he would have attached special meaning to the term “second Inaugural Address.” That was the moment to draw lessons from a past extending well beyond his own, to apply them to a current crisis, and to project them into an uncertain future. And indeed the President did announce—in a single memorable sentence—that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
Strip of Iraq 'on the Verge of Exploding': Kurds Extend Role Beyond Autonomous Borders, Angering Arabs (Amit R. Paley, 9/13/08, Washington Post)
The long-cherished dream of many of the world's 25 million ethnic Kurds is an independent state that encompasses parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. All but Iraq adamantly oppose Kurdish autonomy, much less a Kurdish state. Iraqi Kurds continue to insist they are not seeking independence, even as they unilaterally expand the territory they control in Iraq.The predominantly Arab-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in recent weeks has sent the Iraqi army to drive Kurdish forces out of some of the lands, ordering Kurdish troops, known as pesh merga, to retreat north of the boundary of the Kurdish autonomous region.
The face-off between the Iraqi army and pesh merga has stoked fears of Arab-Kurdish strife just as Iraqis begin to recover from years of sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunnis.
A week-long journey across four provinces that abut the southern boundary of the autonomous region illustrated just how pervasive the Kurdish presence has become. Pesh merga fighters were seen manning 34 checkpoints, most of them proudly flying the Kurdish flag, some as far as 75 miles south of the regional border. Kurds say they have historical claims to the territory, citing then-President Saddam Hussein's use of violence and coercion to drive Kurds from their lands in the 1970s.
Although officials in Washington and Baghdad have focused on the Arab-Kurd conflict in Kirkuk, the ethnically mixed, oil-rich city where more than 100 people have been killed in political violence this year, the animosities between the two ethnic groups fester throughout Nineveh, Tamim, Salahuddin and Diyala provinces. Arabs and Kurds in various areas often have unique grievances, confounding efforts to reach an all-encompassing solution.
Kurdish leaders have maintained warm relations with U.S. officials, who have seen the Kurds as allies in the effort to promote democracy and stability in Iraq. The Kurdish region, compared with other parts of the country, is a zone of relative peace and prosperity.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=f7c18c13-119b-4528-ab55-4b77597af9bc)
Tehran - A tale of two cities? (BBC, 9/13/08)
The political mood in the bustling bazaars of the Iranian capital may be changing.Iran's conservative non-reformist President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad faces re-election next year - and many of the country's senior figures are despairing of his record in power and looking for other potential candidates.
For Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent, Hugh Sykes went to Tehran to gauge the feeling on the streets.
In the city's crowded bread shops and vegetable markets, he found many people wanting change:
Quit Doling Out That Bad-Economy Line (Donald Luskin, September 14, 2008, Washington Post)
Overall, the pessimists are up against an insurmountable reality: In the last reported quarter, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, adjusted for inflation. That's virtually the same as the 3.4 percent average growth rate since -- yes -- the Great Depression. [...]The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) database, which allows rigorous apples-to-apples comparisons, only goes back to 1979. It shows that today's delinquency rate is only a little higher than the level seen in 1985. As to the foreclosure rate, it was setting records for the day -- the highest since the Great Depression, one supposes -- in 1999, at the peak of the Clinton-era prosperity that Obama celebrated in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention late last month. I don't recall hearing any Democratic politicians complaining back then.
Even if Obama is right that the foreclosure rate is the worst since the Great Depression, it's spurious to evoke memories of that great national calamity when talking about today -- it's akin to equating a sore throat with stomach cancer. According to the MBA, 6.4 percent of mortgages are delinquent to some extent, and 2.75 percent are in foreclosure. During the Great Depression, according to Wheelock's research, more than 50 percent of home loans were in default.
Moreover, MBA data show that today's foreclosures are concentrated in that small fraction of U.S. homes financed by subprime mortgages. Such homes make up only 12 percent of all mortgages, yet account for 52 percent of foreclosures. This suggests that today's mortgage difficulties are probably a side effect of the otherwise happy fact that, over the past several years, millions of Americans of modest means have come to own their own homes for the first time. [...]
According to the latest report from the National Association of Realtors, the median price of an existing home is up 8.5 percent from the low of last February. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median price of a new home is up 1.3 percent from the low of last December. Home prices may not be at all-time highs -- and there are pockets of continuing decline in some urban areas -- but overall they've clearly stopped going down and have started to recover. So why keep proclaiming a "crisis" after it's over?
"Turmoil" in the debt markets? Sure, but we've seen plenty worse. According to the FDIC, there have been a total of 13 bank failures in 2007 and so far into 2008. There were 15 in 1999-2000, the climax of the Obama-celebrated era of Clintonian prosperity. And in recession-free 1988-89, there were 1,004 failures -- almost an order of magnitude more than today. Since the Great Depression, the average number of bank failures each year has been 94.
Despite highly publicized losses in subprime mortgage lending, bank equity capital -- the best measure of core financial strength -- is now $1.35 trillion, more than the $1.28 trillion level of mid-2007, before the "turmoil" even began.
'I am a liberal, but I'm blown away by Sarah Palin' (Rebecca Johnson, 11/09/2008, Daily Telegraph)
[I] ran down to the beach to find my mother. A left-leaning Quaker who is president of the League of Women Voters in her Texas town, my mother is the least likely person to celebrate the election of a Republican to national office. [...]"Sarah Palin is the vice-presidential candidate," I told my mother when I found her under a beach umbrella.
We hugged each other joyfully. Politics be damned, Palin was a woman and she was an Alaskan! Moreover, I had been impressed with her when I interviewed her - not for her politics (I'm one of those east coast liberals she doesn't care about) but for the other things that people across the country are responding to right now:her warmth, her work ethic, her "can-do" attitude.
If life is simply a reprise of high school, Palin was the jock who attended church faithfully, ran the soup kitchen, and organised the bake sale. If her paper on the Lincoln-Douglas debate wasn't the most nuanced, so be it. Something has to give.
In my article, I wrote about how hard it is for Palin not to smile. The American media has been dismissive of that beauty-queen smile, but Palin really did enter the Miss Wasilla contest for the scholarship money. (To make extra money, her retired parents currently shoo the birds off the runway at the Anchorage airport so the birds' bodies don't muck up the engines' turbine.) Even then, Palin didn't like the pageant and was appalled when they asked her to turn around and show the judges her behind.
Once upon a time, I also would have been contemptuous of Palin's incurable optimism but, having been knocked around by life a bit, I now understand what a gift chronically happy people are given.
Life hands them difficulties -a Down's syndrome baby, a 17-year-old daughter pregnant before her life as an adult has even begun, a much-needed job on the oil and gas commission that comes with too many strings - and she is not flummoxed or depressed or angry or self-pitying. She endures.
My liberal friends were outraged when rumours about Barack Obama attending a Madrassa or being a Muslim surfaced on the internet, but all week they have been gleefully trading emails of Sarah Palin distortions.
There was the doctored picture of her carrying a rifle, wearing a stars-and-stripes bikini while a man in the background drank Schlitz beer. Or dopey quotes about God, creationism and moose, all of which have been subsequently debunked.
There have also been snide remarks about Wal-Mart and K-Mart, as if there is something shameful about trying to save money.