“We’re not going to be anybody’s attack dog against Sarah Palin,” Clinton insider said yesterday. Is it possible? Will Hillary finally stop standing by abusive men who repeatedly humiliate her in public? Doubtful. She is on her way to Florida to sell him. Nor is she going to be the only abused Democratic female politician to do so. I am sure other women not considered for the vice presidential slot such as Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano and Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill will be dutifully selling him, too. They will constitute a real “sisterhood.”
If this does not upset you, I do not know what will. In his acceptance speech Obama equated serving in the military with “serving” the country at home by community organizing and such:
I have always assumed that Barack Hussein Obama paid for his law school in the manner most students do, by taking out loans. Not so, reports Kenneth R. Timmerman. In his autobiography he describes the qualms he had about leaving “his people” to go to Harvard and better himself. Apparently he did more than that. He used his community organizing ties to raise funds to finance his expensive legal education. His good fairy was a Muslim radical named Dr. Khalid al Mansour. A lawyer with close ties to Saudi princes. As they were not sure Obama can get in on his own merits, Mansour got Percy Sutton to write letters to all his Harvard buddies.
Today in a talk broadcast by C-Span Joe Biden told an elderly Jewish group that Israel is so important to him that he would not have given up his job as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee and agreed to become a candidate for the less important position of vice president had he not been assured that Barack Obama shares his commitment to Israel.
The selection of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as your wing woman presents you with the opportunity to organize your campaign around the national security/economic conundrum our dependence on expensive foreign oil presents. You must remind the American people that the good old Clinton years with their budgets surpluses were based on cheap oil and our current economic difficulties on expensive oil. You need a unifying theme to give momentum to your candidacy. Our energy conundrum is at the center of both our foreign and domestic problems. We cannot improve or even protect our safety net with ever diminishing resources and our resources will continue to diminish if we do not stop the outflow of funds to autocratic foreign oil producers such as Ahmadinejad, Putin and Chavez.
Ahmadinejad has been telling anyone who would listen that Iran is going to go nuclear and there is nothing the US can do about it. Biden went further. He told Israeli officials that there is nothing Israel can do about it. Leftist Israel daily Haaretz reported:
Gail Collins is offended. Just when Hillary Clinton succeeded in convincing the nation that she is merely incidentally a woman candidate, she writes, Sarah Palin comes and undermine all her good work. She ends her column, Baked Alaska, thus:
True, Sarah Palin was not on my list. Kay Bailey Hutchison was. The trouble is that her appearance on Larry King left too much to be desired. The other two women had never run or served in office. Palin simply has not occurred to me. Having seen her eloquent acceptance speech, I could not be happier with the choice.
The effort to hide the good news about the US economy continues regardless of the obvious difficulties presented by the need to revise growth numbers upwards. Consider today’s FT article entitled: Weak Dollar leads to US import gloom
Something scares me this mornings and it is a feeling that Republicans are beginning to feel that the presidential elections are theirs to lose. Hence, all they need to do is avoid rocking the boat.
Lest we forget the nature of the enemy, this multi award winning documentary by Andre Hovsepian, an Iranian born American is not only a son’s tribute to his martyred father but it sheds lights on the hell hole that is Iran. Watch. But there is yet another cry from Iran. This one comes from Ahmadinejad’s opponents. They have been hoping to use the upcoming 2009 to oust him not because of his nuclear policy but because of Iran’s wrecked economy. Guess what? Ayatolla Khamenei, the “moderate cleric” with whom Obama is hoping to negotiate has just signaled that the presidential elections, will be as “predictable” as the parliamentary ones have been:
Accepting an unwanted job out of a sense of duty to one’s people is, thankfully, a common enough occurrence. The Bible considered shunning of power, a sign of worthiness. Moses, famously, set the precedent by tried to convince G-d he is the wrong man to lead Israel out of Egypt. America’s founding father, George Washington, too was reluctant to accept the presidency. Things seemed to have changed but maybe not always. Try the following:
Tom Friedman asks: What did we expect from Russia? After all, we expanded NATO because we assumed that Russia will behave aggressively when opportunity strikes. High energy prices provided the opportunity and Russia behaved as we expected, with “brutish stupidity.” It showed Georgia who’s the boss in the near abroad. In other words, they acted in the manner we assumed. If you assume Tom Friedman is going to praise Western policy makers for using Russia’s temporary weakness to improve NATO’s strategic position, you’d be wrong. Friedman argues that Russia is merely acting according to form because we assumed it would. Debatable, to say the least. History certainly does not support such an ideological assumption.
Yes, I know she says she does not want to be vice president. Biden also said that. If offered she is not going to turn down the opportunity to make history. I know she will not be the first women running for vice president. But she will be the first QUALIFIED woman to do so. Geraldine Ferraro was the first one. But like Barack Obama, she was essentially an affirmative action choice. There can be no questioning of the first US female senator from the Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison’s qualifications or her vote getting ability.
Poland and the US sign a missile pact. Assad is visiting Moscow. He declares his support for Russia in its conflict with Georgia, urges it to cut its ties with NATO and the West and invites it to place missiles in Syria a la Cuba. Russia happily declares it is “ready to sell Syria arms.” Both agree that Iran has “nuclear right.” Not enough? Russia is sending an aircraft carrier to Syria
Pundits are tripping over themselves praising Vladimir Putin’s mastery checkmate of the West. Sorry, but I could not disagree more. Indeed, as I look at the front page of the paper and see pictures of Chinese athletes winning gold medals alongside pictures of Georgia burning, I cannot but wonder how much is Hu Jintau paying Vladimir Putin for making China look so good in comparison and doing so during the best of times, the Beijing Olympic games. When I wrote that the era of China’s surreptitious rise was over I failed to take into account that Putin’s Russia will be so kind as to distract the world from scrutinizing the Hu’s China by bombing democratic Georgia. Who can afford to worry about Tibetans, Wighurs, arrests of Chinese protestors or even trade imbalances when Russia lets loose rockets carrying the message: “This is for America,” “This is for NATO” and “This is for Bush?”
No, I am not employed by oil companies. No, I have not changed my mind about the need to end the era of oil. Indeed, the reason I want us to drill here and now is because I do believe that the era of King Oil, like that of King cotton is over and I am not the only one. Saudi insistence on keeping the oil price high is in part the consequence of their belief that their time is up and they might as well make the most of it. It made sense for us to conserve our oil while the price was low, it no longer does. The new reality is: Use it or lose it and with it American power.
No, not by sword alone. The rabbis said that the Torah (Judaism) saved the Jews more than the Jews saved Judaism. It, certainly, kept them involved and humane in spite of the price remaining Jewish has extracted. Here is a perfect example, Maimonides said: “One who is able to save and does not save, transgresses the commandment, “do not stand idly by while your friend’s blood is being spilled.” Be sure that Israeli doctors have seen enough to embitter them and yet, they and their enablers, God bless them, do not stand idly by:
“That so many American realists are clamoring for “victory” in Afghanistan while giving up on Iraq would probably surprise the proverbial man from Mars. Imagine him as Martian von Clausewitz landing in Washington this year. Based on hard-core geostrategic calculations, he would likely argue that the U.S. has more reason to remain engaged in Mesopotamia—including the need to maintain access to the energy resources in the Persian Gulf and to protect key allies in the region from the alleged threat of Iran—than to be drawn into Afghanistan’s civil war in the name of nation-building.”
In the past few days, bombs have been blowing up in India and Turkey and they have more in common than meets the eye and I do not mean merely the fact that both are developing countries that work hard to disprove the fashionable notion that democracy is too complex a form of government for Muslims, Hindus and Budhists. Could that be the reason they are repeatedly targeted?
Unfortunately, too much information is being released on the methods used to fool FARC. It turns out that 2 rescuers posed as journalists. Now the journalist complain that hence “terrorists will not trust us!”
