Bush Boosts the Financial Plan — and McCain, Too (John D. McKinnon, 9/24/08, WSJ: Washington Wire)
Giving a political boost to Republican presidential nominee John McCain as well as his own financial rescue plan, President George W. Bush on Wednesday evening called for a summit meeting on the financial crisis on Thursday to include congressional leaders as well as the two major-party presidential candidates.McCain called for exactly such a meeting on Wednesday afternoon, at the same time he announced he would be suspending his presidential campaign to focus on resolving the financial markets problems. McCain’s moves –- backed up by the White House announcement –- could give him a bit of momentum in voters’ eyes on the question of which candidate is better addressing the financial crisis. That in turn could help him close the advantage that his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, enjoys with voters on fixing the economy.
The Chosen One (Gary Smith, 12/23/96, Sports Illustrated)
It was ordinary. It was oh so ordinary. It was a salad, a dinner roll, a steak, a half potato, a slice of cake, a clinking fork, a podium joke, a ballroom full of white-linen-tablecloth conversation. Then a thick man with tufts of white hair rose from the head table. His voice trembled and his eyes teared and his throat gulped down sobs between words, and everything ordinary was cast out of the room.He said, "Please forgive me...but sometimes I get very emotional...when I talk about my son.... My heart...fills with so...much...joy...when I realize...that this young man...is going to be able...to help so many people.... He will transcend this game...and bring to the world...a humanitarianism...which has never been known before. The world will be a better place to live in...by virtue of his existence...and his presence.... I acknowledge only a small part in that...in that I know that I was personally selected by God himself...to nurture this young man...and bring him to the point where he can make his contribution to humanity.... This is my treasure.... Please accept it...and use it wisely.... Thank you."
Blinking tears, the man found himself inside the arms of his son and the applause of the people, all up on their feet.
In the history of American celebrity, no father has ever spoken this way. Too many dads have deserted or died before their offspring reached this realm, but mostly they have fallen mute, the father's vision exceeded by the child's, leaving the child to wander, lost, through the sad and silly wilderness of modern fame.
So let us stand amidst this audience at last month's Fred Haskins Award dinner to honor America's outstanding college golfer of 1996, and take note as Tiger and Earl Woods embrace, for a new manner of celebrity is taking form before our eyes. Regard the 64-year-old African-American father, arm upon the superstar's shoulder, right where the chip is so often found, declaring that this boy will do more good for the world than any man who ever walked it. Gaze at the 20-year-old son, with the blood of four races in his veins, not flinching an inch from the yoke of his father's prophecy but already beginning to scent the complications. The son who stormed from behind to win a record third straight U.S. Amateur last August, turned pro and rang up scores in the 60s in 21 of his first 27 rounds, winning two PGA Tour events as he doubled and tripled the usual crowds and dramatically changed their look and age.
Now turn. Turn and look at us, the audience, standing in anticipation of something different, something pure. Quiet. Just below the applause, or within it, can you hear the grinding? That's the relentless chewing mechanism of fame, girding to grind the purity and the promise to dust. Not the promise of talent, but the bigger promise, the father's promise, the one that stakes everything on the boy's not becoming separated from his own humanity and from all the humanity crowding around him.
It's a fitting moment, while he's up there at the head table with the audience on its feet, to anoint Eldrick (Tiger) Woods—the rare athlete to establish himself immediately as the dominant figure in his sport—as SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S 1996 Sportsman of the Year. And to pose a question: Who will win? The machine...or the youth who has just entered its maw?
Tiger Woods will win. He'll fulfill his father's vision because of his mind, one that grows more still, more willful, more efficient, the greater the pressure upon him grows.
The machine will win because it has no mind. It flattens even as it lifts, trivializes even as it exalts, spreads a man so wide and thin that he becomes margarine soon enough.
Tiger will win because of God's mind. Can't you see the pattern? Earl Woods asks. Can't you see the signs? "Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity," Earl says.
Sports history, Mr. Woods? Do you mean more than Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, more than Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe? "More than any of them because he's more charismatic, more educated, more prepared for this than anyone."
Anyone, Mr. Woods? Your son will have more impact than Nelson Mandela, more than Gandhi, more than Buddha?
"Yes, because he has a larger forum than any of them. Because he's playing a sport that's international. Because he's qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish miracles. He's the bridge between the East and the West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don't know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power."
Sarah Palin to Make SNL Cameo? (OK, 9/24/08)
Two weekends ago, Tina Fey ignited an internet sensation with her hilarious, spot-on spoof of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. And now, according to sources close to the show, it looks like there's a possibility the Alaska Governor could get a chance to get her on-air revenge with a cameo appearance of her own!
America rises to the occasion as storm heads for Europe: An almighty crash has been averted, very narrowly. There is no guarantee that the revolutionary actions of the US government will prevent a full-fledged global slump, but at least we now have a fighting chance. (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 21 Sep 2008, Daily Telegraph)
By taking the colossal wreckage of the credit bubble onto its own books in a $700bn (£382bn) taxpayer sink, Washington has forestalled a run on the world banking system, and may hopefully have saved the viable core of modern capitalism.Hank Paulson's "Super Sink" is the "game changer" we have all been waiting for in this interminable crisis. It puts a floor under the toxic debt that is bleeding the banking system to death, and ends the downward spiral of CDOs, CLOs, HELOCs, and such instruments of leveraged excess that lie at root of the credit terror.
No doubt the Fed, the Treasury, and Congress have made a string of mistakes but they are now rising to the occasion – the reflexes of a wounded but still formidable superpower. The US has shown time and again that it has the institutions and flair to pull itself out of disaster.
We will find out soon enough whether the rest of the world can respond with such dispatch as the hurricane smashes into them. As of today, the core risk is no longer in the US. It has rotated to the weaker and more brittle polities of Europe, Latin America, and Asia – especially China.
Bush Invites McCain, Obama to White House To Discuss Bailout (JENNIFER LOVEN, 9/24/08, Associated Press)
The White House press secretary, Dana Perino, said Mr. Bush called Mr. Obama on tonight to extend the invitation.She said the president and Mr. Obama spoke for several minutes and had a good conversation about the country's financial crisis.
The meeting in Washington, DC will include Sen. McCain and other congressional leaders.
It's not even his fault that he just got played by Maverick and W. It's just the dynamics of the situation.
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Joint Statement of Sens. Obama and McCain on the Financial Crisis (WSJ: Washington Wire, 9/24/08)
Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain issued the following joint statement on the financial crisis, about six hours after agreeing to do so:Joint Statement of Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain
“The American people are facing a moment of economic crisis. No matter how this began, we all have a responsibility to work through it and restore confidence in our economy. The jobs, savings, and prosperity of the American people are at stake.
“Now is a time to come together – Democrats and Republicans – in a spirit of cooperation for the sake of the American people. The plan that has been submitted to Congress by the Bush Administration is flawed, but the effort to protect the American economy must not fail.
This is a time to rise above politics for the good of the country. We cannot risk an economic catastrophe. Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country.”
McCain Calls for Debate Delay to Focus on Financial Crisis (Michael D. Shear and Robert Barnes, 9/24/08, Washington Post: The Trail)
Democratic rival Barack Obama declined to follow suit, saying he would return only if congressional leaders requested his presence and said there was no reason to suspend the campaign or delay Friday night's presidential debate.A president, Obama said, "is going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time."
The dramatic events on the campaign trail began after Obama called McCain early this morning to seek a joint statement on on their goals for the bailout measure now being negotiated between Congress and the Bush administration. But before that statement was issued, McCain went before television cameras to say he was putting the campaign on hold and wanted to delay Friday night's presidential debate on foreign policy. Among other things, McCain senior adviser Steve Schmidt said McCain would begin unilaterally pulling down his campaign ads and cease fundraising.
"It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the Administration's proposal,'' McCain said in a brief statement to reporters. "I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time.''
McCain said he is calling on President Bush "to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Obama and myself. It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem."
President Bush said he welcomed the gesture. "We are making progress in negotiations on the financial markets rescue legislation, but we have not finished it yet,'' said press secretary Dana Perino. "Bipartisan support from Sens. McCain and Obama would be helpful in driving to a conclusion.''
Fearing a political backlash against Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has told the White House that it must serve up support from Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) if it hopes to ensure bipartisan backing for a massive economic bailout package by week's end.
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Boehner favors McCain proposal (Politico, 9/24/08, Patrick O'Connor)
“Our economy is facing unprecedented challenges, and we must work together to find a solution," Boehner said. "I strongly support Sen. McCain’s proposal for a bipartisan leadership meeting of both Houses of Congress, including Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama. Given that it is only a few months before a new President takes the oath of office, it is vital that the next president play an active role in crafting this critical plan.”
McCain taking ads down (Jonathan Martin, 9/24/08, Politico)
Aiming to prove how serious he is about addressing the financial crisis, John McCain has instructed his staff to take all his campaign commercials off the air, a spokesman tells Politico."As John McCain said, now is the time to put partisanship aside and come together to do the work that the American people expect," said Tucker Bounds.
Similarly, with the Paulson Plan none of the details matter as much as passing something.
Our Generals Almost Cost Us Iraq (MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS, 9/24/08, Wall Street Journal)
In late 2006, President Bush, like President Lincoln in 1862, adopted a new approach to the war. He replaced the uniformed and civilian leaders who were adherents of the failed operational approach with others who shared his commitment to victory rather than "playing for a tie." In Gen. David Petraeus, Mr. Bush found his Ulysses Grant, to execute an operational approach based on sound counterinsurgency doctrine. This new approach has brought the U.S. to the brink of victory.Although the conventional narrative about the Iraq war is wrong, its persistence has contributed to the most serious crisis in civil-military relations since the Civil War. According to Mr. Woodward's account, the uniformed military not only opposed the surge, insisting that their advice be followed; it then subsequently worked to undermine the president once he decided on another strategy.
In one respect, the actions taken by military opponents of the surge, e.g. "foot-dragging," "slow-rolling" and selective leaking are, unfortunately, all-too-characteristic of U.S. civil-military relations during the last decade and a half. But the picture Mr. Woodward draws is far more troubling. Even after the policy had been laid down, the bulk of the senior U.S. military leadership -- the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, the rest of the Joint Chiefs, and Gen. Abizaid's successor, Adm. William Fallon, actively worked against the implementation of the president's policy.
If Mr. Woodward's account is true, it means that not since Gen. McClellan attempted to sabotage Lincoln's war policy in 1862 has the leadership of the U.S. military so blatantly attempted to undermine a president in the pursuit of his constitutional authority. It should be obvious that such active opposition to a president's policy poses a threat to the health of the civil-military balance in a republic.
The Fall of the Phillies (Joe Posnanski, 9/24/08)
[T]oday’s topic is possibly the most famous collapse in baseball history, the fall of 1964 Phillies, and also my good friend Bob Dutton. Bob is now the excellent Royals beat writer for the Kansas City Star and the president of the Baseball Writers Association of America … more to today’s point, though, he was a 9-year-old Philadelphia Phillies fan in 1964. He lived that collapse. It shaped him. As I watch the Mets try to fall apart in the final weeks for the second straight year (and also the Brewers) I think of those 9-year-old Mets fans (and also Brewers fans), who will take this with them forever.We can start our sad tale on Sept. 20, 1964, when the Phillies beat the Dodgers 3-2. JIm Bunning threw a five-hitter that day — both the runs he gave up were unearned and due to a Vic Power error — and the victory gave the Phillies a 6 1/2 game lead with 12 games to play. Bob remembers that the Wilmington Morning News ran a magic number on the front page — not the front of sports but the front page of the entire paper, which impressed him — and he remembers so clearly seeing that the Magic Number was 7. He remembers seeing that, of course, because it would stay at 7 for a very, very long time.
Funny thing is, even at age 9 Bob knew what most clear-thinking Philadelphia fans knew — the Phillies were winning with smoke, mirrors, trap doors, wires, sleight of hand, David Copperfield arrogance, planted audience members and all sorts of other magician tricks.
Bob says: “Yes, Richie Allen was a wonderful rookie talent. Johnny Callison was having a deal-with-the-devil year. Jim Bunning and Chris Short, especially Bunning, were terrific and capable of beating anyone. Gene Mauch was then, as he always would be, at his best in milking the maximum from an underdog club. … Even so, as the summer unfolded, the Phillies hung in there. You kept waiting for the collapse. We all did, really. I mean, we knew the Phillies weren’t as good as the Dodgers or the Giants or the Reds or the Cardinals. But they kept defying the odds.”
I remember this feeling in Kansas City in 2003. You KNEW the Royals weren’t good enough, and yet the summer went along and they stayed in first place, and after a while you just shrugged and decided that maybe they had the blessings of the gods. They didn’t, of course. But the Royals had the good sense to fall out of things early enough to make the year still seem cheerful. By September 20th, even the most cynical of Phillies fans had to move all his chips in with this team. Nobody blows a 6 1/2 game lead with 12 games to go.
McCain Seeks to Delay Debate (AP, 9/24/08)
Republican John McCain says he's directing his staff to work with Barack Obama's campaign and the debate commission to delay Friday's debate because of the economic crisis.
Bushism of the Day (Jacob Weisberg, Sept. 24, 2008, Slate)
"We're fixing to go down to Galveston and obviously are going to see a devastated part of this fantastic state."—Houston, Sept. 16, 2008
NPR Poll: Obama, McCain Even In Swing States (Mara Liasson, September 24, 2008, Morning Edition)
Even though the two candidates are viewed favorably by about the same number of people, there are some big cultural splits. Of people who get their coffee at Starbucks, 42 percent favor Obama while 39 percent prefer McCain. Of people who frequent Wal-Mart, 58 percent favor McCain while 33 percent prefer Obama.
A Stunning Pro-Drilling Victory : On October 1, 2008, the congressional bans on domestic offshore drilling will at last expire. (Phil Kerpen, 9/24/08, National Review)
The normal process of funding the U.S. government through appropriations bills broke down this year, forcing Congress to prepare a continuing resolution to keep the government funded at last year’s levels. Proponents of American oil and gas production have long suspected that the Democrats would use the resolution to hide an extension of the wildly unpopular bans on offshore drilling and oil-shale development. The theory was that by simply extending last year’s Interior Appropriations act, which included the bans, they could hide an extension without even mentioning it in the text of the bill.To pre-empt this strategy, Jim DeMint in the Senate and Jeb Hensarling and John Shadegg in the House collected signatures from enough members of Congress to make it clear that an expected presidential veto of any such extension of the drilling ban would be sustained. Meanwhile, free-market and conservative groups presented a united front to Congress and the White House, urging lawmakers to let the ban expire. Facing organized opposition in Congress and overwhelming public opinion in favor of drilling, Democrats signaled late last week that a continuing resolution would not include an extension of the drilling bans.
But that’s when the financial crisis struck and everything on Capitol Hill was thrown into the air.
With the Treasury’s proposed financial-market intervention drawing attention away from the energy debate, anti-drilling House Democrats were temporarily emboldened. On Monday they inserted language into their continuing-resolution draft that would permanently ban oil drilling within 50 miles of the U.S. coast, where the vast majority of offshore oil and gas is believed to be.
Their political calculation was that the White House would be willing to sign this into law and go along with the charade that it represented a real increase in offshore drilling. That calculation was wrong. News broke last night that President Bush threatened to veto the continuing resolution unless it allowed the bans to cleanly expire. As a result, Democrats backed down — no doubt aware of the strength of public opinion on the underlying policy issue.
Look Who's Irrational Now (MOLLIE ZIEGLER HEMINGWAY, 9/19/08, Wall Street Journal)
The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us."What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.
The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.
Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.
Fears grow in Lebanon as 10,000 Syrian troops arrive on the border (Nicholas Blanford, 9/24/08, Times of London)
Syria has massed thousands of troops along its border with northern Lebanon in what officials in Beirut fear is a prelude to the first incursion since Syrian forces pulled out three years ago.Although Damascus insists that its forces are conducting an antismuggling operation, the Lebanese Government is eyeing the moves with unease, believing that the unusual scale of the deployment has more to do with tensions between the two countries over recent sectarian clashes in northern Lebanon.
Japan's new PM vows to revive ailing economy (JOSEPH COLEMAN, 9/24/08, AP)
Outspoken conservative Taro Aso took power as Japan's prime minister Wednesday, promising "emergency measures" to revive the ailing economy and vowing to keep Tokyo in the fight against global terrorism. [...]Aso announced no details, but he has backed using fiscal spending to stave off a deep recession, and said he would not consider raising the 5 percent consumption tax for at least three years.
The right-leaning political blueblood - his grandfather was a prominent postwar prime minister - also said he would push to extend Japan's maritime anti-terror mission in the Indian Ocean, despite the opposition's attempts to block it.
"The mission is not for Afghanistan, the U.S. or for Pakistan, but it's a responsibility as a member of the international community to fight against terrorism," Aso said. "We must continue the mission by all means."
Aso, Japan's first Catholic leader, will lead a country wracked by political divisions and spiking concerns over the economy, which has stalled amid the ballooning financial crisis in the United States.
Red Dusk: The Rosenberg bombshell (Martin Peretz, 10/08/08, The New Republic)
In all, communism has slaughtered well over 100 million, and still counting. How many souls its rule also ruined is harder to know. A new book, The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis, the existence of which I first noticed in a review by the myth-breaking American historian Ronald Radosh in National Review, unveils a wholly new topic: the deadly fate of the thousands of American communists and sympathizers who went to the Soviet Union to build socialism. For many, this was another form of aliyah, except not to the Jewish homeland that turned out to be a success, but to the fatherland of labor that ended in political, ideological, economic, demographic, and ethical ruin, not to mention the gulag.In America and in other Western societies, however, there still remain coteries of intellectuals and other high-minded people who have trouble absorbing the simplest historic truths, truths which ordinary workers in highly ideological Labour England, say, have had absolutely no difficulties absorbing. Even more so among unionized workers in the United States. The blindness of these meta-minds does not quite absolve Stalin of his crimes--but it willfully looks away from those of Castro or Che, who still hold a special place in the hearts of people calling themselves progressives. [...]
[T]hey no longer deny Stalin's crimes. They compare them to the crimes of others ... favorably. The exemplary master of this distorted moral relativism is George Steiner, thought of otherwise, if anyone still thinks of him at all, as a prophet of moral absolutism. You know the type: a person who cannot tolerate an Israeli lifting a gun. But, for his own sentimental purposes, Steiner does make comparisons: "[T]o infer," he writes in criticism of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, "that the Soviet terror is as hideous as Hitlerism is not only a brutal simplification but a moral indecency."
Last week, a bunker-buster hit the carefully preserved world of the postfellow-traveling fellow-traveler. No longer advertising the kindnesses of Stalin, as Lillian Hellman used to do, this strange but numerous social type had clung to the innocence and idealism of Stalin's sympathizers. They still think Alger Hiss innocent, Dalton Trumbo honest, Hellman a heroine, Elia Kazan a rat. In this world, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sent to their deaths pure as the driven snow, their only sin being belief in ... well, in what did they actually believe? In Marx, in Lenin, in Stalin, in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, devout, deluded, and disloyal to the country in which they lived.
There is a whole culture in America that has believed the innocence of the Rosenbergs as doctrine and dogma. The texts of this culture are not scrupulous histories because such histories would undermine its beliefs. They are, instead, one novel and one play, fiction being more amenable to false history, both these cases being tales of the Rosenbergs' innocence. The narrative is E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, a best-selling book of the 1970s. The drama is Tony Kushner's phantasmagoric Angels in America, which won the Pulitzer Prize and features Ethel haunting the last days of Roy Cohn, who had been on the legal team prosecuting the Rosenbergs and boasted in his autobiography of convincing the judge to sentence them to death, an ugly boast about an ugly deed by an ugly man. The position of these literary works tells you something about the culture in which they still shine. [...]
I wonder what the folks around The Nation were feeling when their underlying sense of postwar America essentially collapsed last week. And what Victor Navasky, its pater familias, is feeling, too. He has been the cheerleader of the "everybody was innocent" school in American sentimental thought about communism and its fellow-travelers. Hiss was innocent. The Rosenbergs were innocent. It was all a search for witches, as Arthur Miller tried to tell us in The Crucible. Except that there were no witches in seventeenth-century New England, not even in Salem. But there were communists who were disloyal to their country and communist spies who acted against their country.
Militants shake off Pakistan's grip (Syed Saleem Shahzad, 9/24/08, Asia Times)
Journalist Rahimullah Yousufzai, a renowned expert on Pashtun culture, tribalism and the Taliban, argues that just as Islamabad's elite, foreign diplomats and undercover international intelligence agents are devastated by the Marriott bombing, the tribals are equally incensed by the daily aerial bombardment of Bajaur Agency and Dara Adam Khel in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas.The Pakistani security forces don't make any concessions for the holy Muslim month of Ramadan and its main rituals, such as the pre-dawn feast (sahur) and the evening breaking of the fast (Iftar).
The tribals believe that non-Pashtun Pakistanis don't care about the massacre of Pashtun tribes by the security forces or the large-scale displacement of people - over 400,000 have been displaced from Bajaur during recent operations there.
The upshot is that the writ of the state of Pakistan has been reduced to the offices of the chief minister and the governor's house in the capital of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Peshawar.
Information gathered by Asia Times Online through contacts in the Taliban suggests that over the past few months of military activities in the tribal areas, the Taliban have identified the main weakness of the Pakistani security forces in Bajaur - they cannot take control of land. Instead, they have resorted to aerial bombing, which allows the militants to easily take shelter in the maze of mountains that runs across the border into the Afghan province of Kunar.
If the Pakistani forces do try to establish land control, militants can quickly return to Bajaur and force them to retreat.
The failure to conform to civilizational norms has consequences.
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Afghan Leader Sees 'First' Hope in Winning Anti-Terror War (AFP, 9/24/08)
Karzai also endorsed a plan voiced by his defense minister for a joint US-Afghan-Pakistani military task force that would be empowered to operate on both sides of the border."A force to act together on two sides of the border? A new idea but a welcome idea, I'll back it," he said to a question.
He also said that any surge in international troops for the war in Afghanistan should be involved in flushing out militants in border "sanctuaries" in Pakistan instead of penetrating deeper into Afghan villages.
Underlining the need to have a regional approach to fighting terrorism, Karzai said any assault should be "concentrated on the sanctuaries -- on those that train extremists, equip extremists, motivate extremists and then send them across" to Afghanistan.
"The surge, in other words, will work only if you concentrate the deployment of troops at the right places where we need them," he said.
Markets boosted as Warren Buffett invests $5bn in Goldman Sachs (David Teather and Graeme Wearden, 9/23/08, guardian.co.uk)
Warren Buffett today agreed to invest $5bn (£2.7bn) in Goldman Sachs, giving the bank a strong vote of confidence following the tumultuous Wall Street events of the past few weeks.Analysts hailed the move by Buffett - known as the Sage of Omaha - as a sign that some stability could be returning to the markets. UBS called it "the ultimate stamp of approval".
After Milwaukee: The most heralded experiment in education teaches us valuable lessons. (Frederick M. Hess, September 24, 2008, The American)
Despite political victories, early promises about school choice have lost much of their luster. While research suggests that some participating students benefit from private school vouchers, these results may largely reflect the ability of students in places like New York City or Washington, D.C. to find empty seats in established parochial schools. There is little evidence that voucher or choice programs have succeeded in fostering the emergence or expansion of high-quality options.Similar concerns plague the charter movement nationally, even as the number of charter schools has surged above 4,000 and charter enrollment has passed the one million mark. The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has compared the performance of students in district and charter schools, reporting, “After adjusting for student characteristics, charter school mean scores in reading and mathematics were lower, on average, than those for public noncharter schools.” While there is reason to be quite cautious about inferring policy implications from such research—because it cannot determine how much students are actually learning during the school year and because charters spend less than do district schools—the results are hardly compelling. Stig Leschly, executive director of the Newark Charter School Fund, has observed that only about 200 of the thousands of existing charter schools “really close the achievement gap.” Nelson Smith, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, has argued for stepping up efforts to “cull the bottom-feeders.”
Milwaukee illustrates the uneven quality of new providers and reminds us that high performing schools are (like so many nonprofits) ill-equipped to expand in response to demand. Indeed, it has taken the celebrated KIPP schools—operated by an organization lauded for its aggressive expansion—14 years to grow to 65 schools enrolling 16,000 students in a nation where 95,000 K–12 district schools enroll 50 million students. Even today, the national KIPP network serves just one-sixth as many students as the Milwaukee public school system. The struggle to find capital and talent, overcome regulatory obstacles, and maintain quality has forced even growth-minded KIPP to move at a pace that would be considered maddeningly slow in almost any other sector (14 years, after all, was more than enough time for ventures like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to grow from boutique firms to omnipresent brands serving millions of customers).
Milwaukee isn’t the only city where choice advocates have been disappointed by developments. Among the eight cities where charter schools enroll 20 percent or more of students are Detroit, Michigan; Youngstown, Ohio; and Washington, D.C. In 2007, Education Week reported that, despite a substantial charter presence, Detroit had the highest dropout rate among the nation’s large school systems. A 2008 analysis found that just 57 percent of Youngstown’s charter schools, and just 38 percent of its district schools, met Ohio’s growth targets for student improvement in reading and math.
In a 2007 study of Washington, D.C., which has one of the nation’s highest rates of charter school enrollment, researchers Margaret Sullivan, Dean Campbell, and Brian Kisida found no evidence of improvement in D.C. public schools even as they lost nearly a third of their students to charter school competition. They traced inaction to a district “hampered by political dynamics and burdensome regulations.” They explained, “District leaders, preoccupied with leadership problems and administrative headaches, have concentrated their efforts on politics, budgeting, and school choice, leaving individual schools to respond to charter school competition on their own,” and principals have not responded “to competition from charter schools in the ways that elites expected because they do not have the appropriate autonomy and resources to do so.”
This is something less than was advertised. In fact, a decade ago, when charter and voucher enrollment was only a fraction of today’s, some proponents claimed the fruits of competition were already obvious. In 1999, David Osborne, coauthor of Reinventing Government, wrote in The New Republic, “Those who invented charter schools . . . wanted to improve all 88,000 public schools in the country [and] . . . empirical studies have demonstrated that, indeed, competition works just as the reformers predicted.” That same year, the Heritage Foundation’s Nina Rees reported, “Though still in their infancy, school choice programs have improved overall student academic achievement in public schools.”
In romanticizing school choice, enthusiasts have typically made two key mistakes. First, they have not fully considered what it takes for market-based reform to deliver results at scale. Second, they have mistaken the presence of choice for the reality of competition. Unless these challenges are addressed, political victories will prove pyrrhic—yielding modest results, sowing disillusionment, and fostering the perception that choice was just one more educational fad.
China's leaders brace for battle with regions (Willy Lam, 9/25/08, Asia Times)
The Hu-Wen team's worst headache could come from CCPCC members from the regions, who will be lobbying aggressively for Beijing to loosen its tight monetary policy as well as to boost transfer payments and preferential policies for provinces and cities hard hit by economic doldrums, such as the closure of medium-sized factories and falling property prices.Moreover, the "warlords" - a reference to resourceful regional party secretaries, governors and mayors - have continued to resist the central authorities' (zhongyang) decade-long objective of streamlining the grassroots bureaucracy.
The agenda of the third plenum of the party's 17th Central Committee is ostensibly to discuss agricultural issues. Yet given the post-Olympics economic downturn, political analysts in Beijing say a major leitmotif of the conclave will be how to ensure that the hard times will not exacerbate already severe "contradictions within the people". There are signs that the nightmare the CCP leadership fears most may come to pass sooner than anticipated: members of the middle class joining "disadvantaged sectors" such as peasants and migrant workers in staging protests and even riots to vent their grievances. [...]
At least on the surface, two major post-Olympics disasters might create more incentives for the Hu-Wen leadership to crack the whip on regional bureaucracies. The first is the mass poisoning of babies and small children who have taken milk powder contaminated with the lethal chemical melamine. More than 53,000 infants have become ill - and at least four have died - after imbibing the tainted milk product, which is manufactured by Sanlu, a dairy company based in Hebei province. Given that Hebei police knew about irregularities in the company as early as May, suspicions of a cover-up have focused on senior Hebei leaders. The latter are said to be on good terms with the bosses of Sanlu, which contributed 330 million yuan of taxes to provincial coffers last year.
The other incident was the death of 254 residents in Xiangfen county, Shanxi province, in a mudslide earlier this month. The accident was triggered by the collapse of the retaining wall of an illegal mining dump containing tons of liquid iron ore waste. These two disasters have apparently given Beijing the pretext to take action against dereliction of duty and other mistakes on the part of regional officials.