Trifid of the North

Meet The New Boss, Different Than the Old Boss

Says it all, doesn't it? And, of course, good that the new Congress acted so quickly to overrule the odious Ledbetter decision. Although the Republican argument that civil rights are OK as long as nobody can enforce them is certainly very compelling!

...while the link at Feministe is down, see here.

The Hockey Stick Hoax

From Powerline;

More recent scientific work has thoroughly debunked the Mann "hockey stick" analysis. It has been shown to rest on "collation errors, unjustified truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, incorrect principal component calculations, geographical mislocations and other serious defects," as well as "incorrect mathematics." There are indications, at least, that some of the errors on the part of Mann and his collaborators were deliberate--an instance of the corruption of science by politics and perverse financial incentives that underlies the entire global warming movement.

Politicization of science? Who said that?

Blago Wants All Tapes Played: 'I'm The Anti-Nixon'

Interesting

"Before they remove a governor who's been elected twice by the people, hear the whole truth, every tape," Gov. Blagojevich said. "Richard Nixon, during Watergate, fought tooth and nail to keep those tapes from being heard because he knew there was something wrong on there. Me? I'm the opposite, the anti-Nixon. I want every one of those tapes heard in the impeachment trial, and every witness called in."

Federal Budget ‘09 and Canadian Foreign Policy

A

Website blues

It is a well-known fact that the production of high volume, professional websites can cost a bit of money to design, set up and run, however the Welsh Assembly Government are surely taking the biscuit if this news is correct.

This morning's Western Mail reports that they are spending £3.5m to set up two new websites. The paper tells us that details of the £3.5m contract can be seen on the Assembly Government’s existing business website, http://www.sell2wales.co.uk/:

A notice on the website says: “The Welsh Assembly Government is rationalising its business websites. There will be two primary websites: a single super site which will provide business information and will be the entry point for Assembly Government services for business; and the National Procurement Website (www.buy4wales.co.uk / www.sell2wales.co.uk) which provides businesses with access to procurement opportunities from across the public sector in Wales.

“Additional suppliers will be contracted to provide additional internet, online, software development and consultancy services as required and as need arises over the period to 2012.”
Cardiff-based digital company Sequence has won the major elements of the contract. A statement issued by Sequence said: “Sequence has been awarded the contract for the ongoing design, development, management and hosting of Flexible Support for Business (FS4B), the Assembly Government’s central Government-to-Business application. The contract is designed to allow the Assembly Government to consolidate their business support websites to work alongside the citizen focused www.wales.gov.uk and expand their provision of e-Government services.

“The deal is worth upwards of £750,000 for three years and for this the Assembly Government will have a dedicated on- demand team at Sequence providing consultancy, design and development services to ensure the Assembly Government remain in the best possible position to meet their online communications and business delivery strategy.

“As a public procurement tender, Sequence faced significant competition from across Europe, yet the Welsh agency achieved the highest scores. The successful bid draws on the extensive experience that Sequence have had in successfully delivering business services on behalf of the devolved government in Wales.”

Other elements of the contract have been won by web companies Reading Room, Fusion Workshop, Serco, Valtech, Precedent, Silverbear and Box UK.

The Assembly Government has form on this sort of thing of course. Their own website reportedly cost £2.7 million to develop and I understand that it is about to be revamped. Goodness knows how much that revamp will cost but you would have thought that for that price they could have got it right first time.

Who said that the financial settlement was tight? It seems that money is available for some things not for others, so whilst local government makes deep cuts in services and jobs we at least get top class websites. What a sense of priorities this One Wales Government has.

The End of an Error

Six of the sweetest words in the English language: "This is William Kristol's last column." Although it will really limit public discourse in this country now that Kristol's thoroughly uninteresting propaganda will be limited to his other seven or eight sinecures. I suppose the question now is who the replacement will be? Karl Rove? Erstwhile Dowd-for-a-painful-month Ann Althouse? Ace O' Spades? (I'd link to think that its financial crisis will cause the Times to question the value of paying a significant salary to writers who bring in approximately zero readers, but...)

Finally, since Kristol includes a quote from Harvey Mansfield, I have an excuse to remind readers of Martha Nussbaum's decimation of Mansfield's idiotic pensees about "manliness."

Europe, Russia, and the United States in the Age of Obama

His liberal opponents as well as the folks in the MSM have misconstrued the geopolitical position of the United States with regard to Europe under the Presidency of George Bush. Bush's opponents make the incorrect claim that as a result of his foreign policy choices we lost standing among our European partners. In fact, in reality what we saw was a reallignment of our alliances. No doubt that the Iraq War caused serious friction with much of Western Europe. Yet, what critics and opponents of George Bush fail to recognize is that while Western Europe thawed their alliance with the U.S. under Bush, our alliance with Eastern Europe saw a renaissance. Our alliance with countries like Poland, the Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltics has never been stronger. In fact, the U.S. has never seen better relations with most of the former satellites of the Soviet Union than we have under George Bush.

If President Obama holds to this fallacious world view, he may commit some serious geopolitical blunders. For instance, Charles Kupchan, of the Council on Foreign Relations, believes there is a window of opportunity for improved relations between Europe, Russia and the United States. There is however an inherent fallacy in such a policy. Many of our new allies fear Russia and see that nation as a threat to their own safety. In fact, Georgia got a first hand look at that threat when Russia invaded that much smaller nation and did as it pleased. This tension appears to be irrelevant to Kupchan.

The different American and European reactions to the Georgia war reveal a deep divergence in perspective. The United States tended to defend the Georgian government and put most blame squarely on the shoulders of Russia and wanted to react to the war by taking concrete steps to punish Russia and break off contacts, particularly within the context of NATO. And the Europeans had a somewhat more balanced view about the causes of the war, and saw the Georgian government as being partly responsible for the conflict which erupted over South Ossetia. Europe was less willing than the United States to see the war as a cause for a serious degradation of relations with Russia, and the EU has taken the lead in restoring dialogue between the European Union and Russia, and in restarting contacts between NATO and Russia.

If the Obama administration were to take the Western European view of Russia, he would also be jeopardizing our new allies in Eastern Europe. It's also important to note that Europe is more "balanced" as Kupchan characterizes it because they rely on Russia for much of their own energy needs. Western Europe wants a conciliatory policy toward Russia for this reason and because the Europeans are generally weak. As such, in order for the U.S. to renew our old alliances with Western Europe, at least as it relates to Russia, it would mean jeopardizing the safety of our new allies in Eastern Europe.

This very important geopolitical reality is something you'll never hear from any Bush opponent because that would mean acknowledging a significantly more complicated geopolitical reality under George Bush than they would ever admit. It is however a reality.

Our relationship with Russia is also significantly more complicated than folks like Kupchan will admit either.

During the campaign, Obama's position was for principled support for a missile defense system, but a more relaxed time frame for development and deployment, based upon the fact that the testing by the Pentagon has not yet been completed, and the quality of the technology remains in question; that is to say it's not clear how effective the system would be.

...

The administration will back the system in principle. In the aftermath of 9/11, and in light of the continuing nuclear activities of Iran, it would be imprudent to suggest that some kind of missile defense system is unnecessary. But there will be a deliberation about when and how to deploy such a system, and that might involve moving at a slower timetable to ensure that the technology is ready, but also doing due diligence on the diplomatic front. Many felt that the Bush administration moved in a clumsy fashion and dealt in too bilateral of a way, that is to say it negotiated with Poland and with the Czech Republic, without consulting NATO and without doing enough to try to bring in the Russians. And you might recall that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice actually went to Moscow at one point and said, "Let's make this a system for all, let's secure Russian participation." So it may well be that a new dialogue is started with the NATO allies and including Russia to try to defang the political antagonism that the system has created. It may well be that the system can be deployed in a more favorable political atmosphere.

Russia is vociferously against the missile shield and anything that brings any of the former satellites into NATO because Russia is determined to intimidate its neighbors in a long term goal of exerting as much control over the area as possible. The reason that the missile system has created "political antagonism" as Kupchan describes it is because the missile shield is a direct threat to Russia's goals in the region. It's also why there is "political antagonism" with Russia when any of the former Soviet satellites have their names floated for entry into NATO.

Once again, there is a natural tension between renewing our alliance with Western Europe and continuing our new alliance with Eastern Europe. The Western Europeans have a natural and an economic motivation not to confront Russia whenever it is aggressive toward any of its neighbors. Yet, a lack of a missile shield (or even a slow down of finishing the system) and a lack of entry into NATO, is a direct threat to most of the former Soviet satellites. As such, once again, there is a natural tension between our new allies and the allies with which our relationship thawed under Bush.

Kupchan also places a fair amount of value on Obama's affinity toward confronting global warming and closing GITMO. While those two moves may in fact mean that the United States will poll better in some poll of Europeans, it is unclear what geopolitical advantage this will give the United States.

The geopolitical reality of the situation is this. Russia is a tyrannical regime with imperial aspirations. Those aspirations threaten the safety of all our allies in Eastern Europe. Our traditional allies in Western Europe want nothing more than to look the other way while this occurs. In Europe our alliances have shifted, and soon enough, we will need to decide whether we stand with our new allies or drift toward our old ones.

Weekly Signals: An interview with Dacher Keltner the author of Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

An interview with Dacher Keltner the author of Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life.
Weekly Signals (Irvine, CA)
Hosts: Nathan Callahan and Mike Kaspar

In a new examination of the surprising origins of human goodness, Keltner demonstrates that humans are not hardwired to lead lives that are "nasty, brutish, and short"— we are in fact born to be good. He investigates an old mystery of human evolution: why have we evolved positive emotions like gratitude, amusement, awe, and compassion that promote ethical action and are the fabric of cooperative societies?

By combining stories of scientific discovery, personal narrative, and Eastern philosophy, Keltner illustrates his discussions with more than fifty photographs of human emotions. Born to Be Good is a profound study of how emotion is the key to living the good life and how the path to happiness goes through human emotions that connect people to one another.

Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, director of the Greater Good Science Center, and coeditor of Greater Good magazine. His research focuses on pro-social emotions, power, and moral reasoning.

To Listen to the Interview

1 million Malaysians could lose jobs this year

The government is slowly telling us the bad news. Yesterday, the Human Resources Ministry says 45,000 Malaysians could lose jobs over the Chinese New Year period alone! [Read here, the Dep Minister beats around the bush about people losing jobs temporarily and factories closing down business - also temporarily! - but you get the message].

The MEF says up to 400,000 Malaysians will lose their jobs by end of the year. In Singapore, another half a million Malaysians will be jobless as the republic buckles under the economic slowdown. [Read here]

If so, we are into times worse than 1985 or 1998.

President Obama's Multi Pronged Strategy for the Near Total Socialization of America

What we are witnesssing, right before our eyes, is the nightmare that all free market, small government conservatives have feared from President Obama. In the last week, we have had several different reports about only mildly related issues and each one of them points in the same direction. President Obama is determined to turn the United States of America into a Socialist Democracy on the order of France and Sweden.

The most obvious bit of news is the stimulus package. There are several things that are clear from this package. First, this will entail a massive expansion of government. Second, whatever jobs will be created will be created by the government. Third, the deficits will wind up being so high that it will be nearly impossible to cut taxes in the future and thus give stimulus to the private market. As such, the end result of this stimulus will be the government playing a far more important role in our economy than it ever has before.

The second announcement is the announcement that the Obama administration will allow individual states like California to set their own emission standards. Now, it's important to understand that the big three are soon going to need more money. They will of course come to the federal government for more money. President Obama will likely oblige however there will no doubt be strings attached. President Obama will demand that as a stipulation of getting this money the big three go on a serious campaign to build energy efficient automobiles. In fact, they will have no choice regardless. With stringent emissions standards in states like California, the big three will have to or they won't be complying with the law. Now, of course, everyone is in favor of energy efficiency. However, some are more than happy letting the government dictate it, while others would like to see the free market dictate energy efficiency. The Obama administration will be more than happy having the government tell the automakers just how energy efficient their cars have to be.

The last bit of news is the news that the Obama administration is likely to ask for a second round of bailout money for the banks. (that's on top of getting the second $350 billion released). Now, CNBC reports that full nationalization is the least likely option following the second TARP. Of course, ultimately it won't matter much. President Obama has already been on record as being displeased with the lack of oversight of how previous TARP money has been spent. As such, you are sure to see President Obama demand that it be spent exactly as he likes. After all, the TARP money is the government's money. One way or another, once the second TARP is rolled out, we will effectively have banks be nationalized.

So, in one fell swoop, President Obama will expand the size and scope of government exponentially. At the same time, he will effectively nationalize two major industries. The sum total will be an America that is much like the Socialist Democracy of France.

Charles Barton at The Oil Drum blog

Charles Barton, author of the Nuclear Green blog, just began a series at The Oil Drum blog about liquid fluoride thorium reactors. Be sure to stop by!

Update 1/23/09, 9:35 am: Barton has some deep thoughts on how the debate at The Oil Drum blog is going.

Leadership campaign derailed

After yesterday's piece reporting that Torfaen Council was to consider a congratulatory motion supporting Huw Lewis' campaign to dual the A465 I was anxious to know the outcome.

Alas, the Labour Councillor advocating patting Huw on the back changed his mind and amended his own motion to remove all reference to the Labour Assembly Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney.

Another false start on the leadership trail? I am so disappointed.

Permanent new home for Global Labor

I am now blogging at King Harvest, a new site I have launched to integrate my three separate blogs (Vallywood!, Global Labor and Politics, and Finance Capital) under one theme.

Join me there when you have a chance.

Fighting the bureaucracy

Interesting article in this morning's Western Mail about the problems facing those interested in getting projects off the ground with the help of European Convergence funding. They say that ambitious projects aimed at boosting the economy in Wales’ poorest communities are being held back by Assembly Government bureaucracy. Some project ideas first mooted more than 18 months ago have still not been approved by the Welsh European Funding Office causing immense frustration to those involved:

Wefo’s website, www.wefo.wales.gov.uk, contains a list of project ideas submitted by a variety of organisations. In some cases, ideas dating back to the first half of 2007 are still being evaluated.

One would-be project manager, who did not wish to be named, said: “The whole process is taking much longer than we expected. You fill in a form providing all the answers, and then you get a further set of questions. This goes on and on, and is immensely frustrating.

“The whole point is to create new jobs to raise the prosperity of the region, yet there seems to be no sense of urgency on the part of Wefo to make sure the evaluation is completed and a decision made.

“The Convergence programme has a finite timescale and the worry is that the longer the evaluation takes, the greater the chance that the project will have to be shortened.

“We have spoken to quite a few other projects, and we know they are as frustrated as we are. Ultimately it’s the people of Wales and the Welsh economy that are being let down by the failure to make decisions.”

Projects are also responsible for finding “match funding”, and some managers are worried that the failure to get the green light

Clearly there is a problem in getting money out to where it will do some good. That is not new. WEFO has always seemed to be an obstacle and has caused much frustration amongst all those who have had dealings with them. This though is our last chance. Once this convergence funding is spent it is likely that there will not be anymore.

We need to get it right but we also need to be seen to be creating jobs and moving the economy forward. If that is a priority for the One Wales government as well then they need to start doing something about this bureaucracy.

Is Al Qaeda Rattled by President Obama?

That appears to be the thesis purported Joby Warrick of the Washington Post.

That was just a warm-up. In the weeks since, the terrorist group has unleashed a stream of verbal tirades against Barack Obama, each more venomous than the last. Obama has been called a "hypocrite," a "killer" of innocents, an "enemy of Muslims." He was even blamed for the Israeli military assault on Gaza, which began and ended before he took office.

"He kills your brothers and sisters in Gaza mercilessly and without affection," an al-Qaeda spokesman declared in a grainy Internet video this month.

The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda's skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group

...

But for now, the change in Washington appears to have rattled al-Qaeda's leaders, some of whom are scrambling to convince the faithful that Obama and Bush are essentially the same.

...

Al-Qaeda's rhetorical swipes at Obama date to the weeks before the election, when commentators on Web sites associated with the group debated which of the two major presidential candidates would be better for the jihadist movement. While opinions differed, a consensus view supported Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) as the man most likely to continue Bush administration policies and, it was hoped, drive the United States more deeply into a prolonged guerrilla war.

Soon after the vote, the attacks turned personal -- and insulting. In his Nov. 16 video message, Zawahiri denounced Obama as "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" such as Malcolm X. He then used the term "house Negro," implying that Obama is merely a servant carrying out the orders of powerful whites.

Now Warrick may not be aware of the view of American Presidents by Al Qaeda, however here is how they view all American Presidents. To Al Qaeda, all American Presidents are the same. It matters not whether they want to withdraw from Iraq, stop enhanced interrogations, or any other liberal fantasy that some think will make the world love us.

In fact, that Al Qaeda is viciously verbally attacking the new President ought to hint to some of the liberals just how much goodwill all of their policies will gain with Al Qaeda itself. The insults should NOT however be a hint that Al Qaeda is scared or on the run. They are verbally abusing the new President with the same vigor that they did the old President. That's because they hate America and all it stands for. They will attack every symbol, verbally or otherwise, of the country.

In order for these verbal assaults to stop all the U.S. needs to do is meet the demands of Al Qaeda. This includes removing all troops from the Middle East. Immediately, become an Islamic nation that follows the Wahhabi sect. Finally, relinquish all support for Israel. Now, if the President does all of this then Al Qadea will stop hurling insults. Until then though, we should not interpret their insults as a sign of weakness.

How Google Makes The Net Suck

Some people like to compare developers to artists. When it comes to web development, some people say there's always a man behind the curtain. Whether you agree or not, there are definitely certain freedoms that web developers enjoy. As a web developer, what are the greatest limitations and obstacles in your way? Once it may have been browser quirks. Now maybe it's all those annoying users who still use IE6. However, I think the greatest obstacle to progress is Google.

Now Google would have you believe just the opposite. I do not think they are disingenuous. In a large organization, it's all too easy for different groups to have different motivations. But ask yourself this, how much money does Google from Chrome? What does Google make money from? That's easy: advertising on search. And that is what is hold us all back.

If you have endured my purple prose to this point, I will finally cut to the chase. One of the most important aspects of any web page is how its PageRank. If your web page is all about deep sea diving, where does it surface when somebody searches Google for deep sea diving? The black art of making your page get a higher PageRank has given birth to an entire cottage industry known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO.)

As a developer I have never given much thought to SEO. I always thought that SEO was about the content of the page, and web developers are not responsible for the content. We are responsible for retrieving/generating that content from all kinds of sources, as well as creating applications that are easy and intuitive for the user to interact with a meaningful way. But, if we go back to the deep sea diving example, we're not responsible for providing information about deep sea diving. Heck you are lucky if most developers even known how to swim, but I digress.

But I was wrong. SEO is not just about content. It is about structure. If you want a good PageRank, then quality content about deep sea diving will lead to other people linking to your page and that will increase your PageRank. But there are much more instantly gratifying things you can do. For example, your page should a title and it better contain the term deep sea diving. No big deal, right? The title is really just part of the template outside of the main contents of the page. Its value has little effect on anything, besides PageRank that is. However, it gets worse.

To maximize your PageRank, then immediately after your page's body tag you should have an H1 tag whose contents should contain the term deep sea diving. Oh maybe you put the phrase on the page, but you put it in a div that styled quite nicely? Not good enough. It needs to be in an H1 tag. Maybe you used some JavaScript to create the H1 tag? That is no good at all. Why? Because The All-Mighty Googlebot does not understand how the page looks to a user. It only understand basic HTML constructs. That's right, it's time to party like it's 1999.

Oh, maybe your organization hired an artist who created a killer deep sea diving logo and you load it on to the page as an image? Not good enough. If you put deep sea diving as the alt text, that will win you some bonus points from the Googlebot, but it is still dwarfed by the rewards you could receive by busting out the H1. Nothing compares to the mighty H1 tag. And don't just put that H1 tag anywhere on the page. Heck you might even get penalized for having more than one! Nope only one, and it better appear (in the HTML source code) as close to the body tag as possible.

Ok, so maybe you give in and put the catch phrase in an H1 tag. That wasn't too bad, right? Now back to your regularly scheduled hacking? Not so fast. Do you have some hierarchical information on the page? Sections, headings, menus, etc? How are you going to do those? Again you better not even think about using things like JavaScript to create them dynamically. Nope, they have got to be static on the page. Back to divs, spans (maybe a table or two), along with some oh-so-clever CSS? Forget about it. Let me introduce you to H1's other friends: H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. That's right, if you want that damn Googlebot to "understand" the hierarchy of concepts on your page, then you better put away your divs and spans.

Maybe you think that's going overboard, but it's not. Do you have a section on your deep sea diving page called "Gear" ? Then if you want to show up on a search for deep sea diving gear, you better have the term Gear wrapped in an H2 or an H3 tag.

What about RIA technologies? Again, if you dynamically create things with JavaScript, it will get picked up, but it is non-optimal. You have to do things the way that the Googlebot wants it done to get best results. What about Flash or Silverlight or JavaFX? Flash will get you screwed on about the same level as JavaScript. Silverlight or Java might as well be black holes. Whatever is in there, is never getting out.

There are tricks you can employ like progressive enhancement. There you do things the way that the Googlebot wants them, then dynamically obliterate that garbage and replace it with rich content that your users actually want. This can backfire. If the Googlebot figures out that you are tricking it, then it will banish you to purgatory.

What if you just make a great web application that users will love and don't bother to worry about the Googlebot? That's fine of course, it just means that people will not find your application by searching for it. Is your business model and marketing efforts robust enough to not need SEO? Yeah, I didn't think so.

So now do you understand? The Googlebot ties your hands, or at the very least makes you jump through all kinds of hoops. There are all these great technologies you could use to make your site as interactive as any desktop application, but The Googlebot does not like this. You've got to play his game whether you like it or not.

Bad News Comes Early for Senate Republicans

By Nathan L. Gonzales

The 2010 election cycle is just a couple months old, and Senate Republicans have almost equaled their number of retirements from last cycle, when their party lost eight seats. But this time around, Senators with one foot out the door appear to be making their decisions earlier, instead of keeping party strategists guessing.

Just in the last two weeks, Ohio Sen. George Voinovich (R) and Missouri Sen. Kit Bond (R) announced their decisions not seek re-election. They join Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback (R) and Florida Sen. Mel Martinez (R), who announced last year their plans to exit the chamber.

“These Senators did the right thing for the party by making their decisions early, and in each state, Republicans now have a solid bench of potential candidates who are already hard at work,” said Brian Walsh, communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Last cycle, then-Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.) officially announced he wouldn’t seek re-election in January 2007, more than 20 months before Election Day. But the next four Republican announcements didn’t come until much later.

Former Sens. John Warner (R-Va.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) didn’t announce their retirements until September 2007. And former New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) waited even a month later. Former Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) never officially said he wasn’t seeking re-election, but now-Sen. Jim Risch (R) launched his campaign to succeed Craig in October 2007.

Republicans lost three of the five open seats last November, only retaining control of the seats in the two most Republican states (Idaho and Nebraska).

“At a time when statewide candidates need to raise millions of dollars to run a competitive campaign, there is no getting around the fact that an extra six months to raise money, develop an organization and travel around the state provides a tremendous advantage,” Walsh said.

There is no guarantee that Republicans would have won Virginia or New Mexico last cycle if Warner and Domenici had announced earlier. An early Allard decision didn’t help the GOP effort in Colorado.

Republicans would have preferred their incumbents run for re-election. But the early retirement decisions are better than waiting in limbo, and while an early start can’t change the political environment, it does give candidates more time for critical fundraising.


This story first appeared on RollCall.com on January 16, 2009. 2009 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Viriginia's Tax Dollars At Work

Tool: Schism

Three Errors

1. Trying to change what can never change.
2. Not trying to change what can be changed.
3. Not knowing the difference between 1 and 2.

Yes, this was inspired by Niebuhr's famous prayer. Can you name it?

Carlos Slim And The New York Times

Carlos Slim, by some accounts the world's richest man, has pumped 3,497,100,000 Mexican pesos ($250 million) worth of liquidity into the varicose veins of the Grey Lady. The New York Times needed the infusion: By some provocative accounts, contested indignantly by the Times, the newspaper was--is--plummeting toward a swift death.

HEH

Mark Steyn: Obama raises heart rates, lowers expectations

I could not help contrasting the pretty good essay Krauthammer (Leaving the People Hungry) wrote about Obama's inaugural speech and this perfectly polished gem from Mark Steyn:

Subhead:

His boring inaugural doesn't diminish his hotness in the eyes of his usual acolytes.

Steyn shows you the dagger:

How dazzling is President Obama? So dazzling that he didn't merely give a dazzling inaugural speech. Any old timeserving hack could do that. Instead, he had the sheer genius to give a flat dull speech full of the usual shopworn boilerplate. Brilliant! At a stroke, he not only gently lowered the expectations of those millions of Americans and billions around the world for whom his triumphant ascendancy is the only thing that gives their drab little lives any meaning, but he also emphasized continuity by placing his own unprecedented incandescent megastar cool squarely within the tradition of squaresville yawneroo white middle-aged plonking mediocrities who came before him.

Plunges it in:

At a stroke – OK, that's two strokes, like an Italian moped, but that just shows how cosmopolitan he is – anyway, Obama artfully charted a middle course between the Scylla of unmeetable expectations and the Charybdis of his own charisma and chugged instead in the placid rhetorical shallows of "gathering clouds," "raging storms," "icy currents"… In a speech on climate change, this would send the crowd fleeing in terror to hole up in the hills and forage for berries. But, in an inaugural address, this was Obama's most inspired gambit yet. Only a truly great leader would have the courage to reach for the skies in such leaden and earthbound prose.

Twists the knife:

Oh, well. So much for the consensus of the expert analysts. Meanwhile, The New Yorker put him on the cover dressed as George Washington – a Founding Father for a new America! Disdaining such insulting and belittling comparisons to discredited old slaveowners with bad teeth and wigs even more obvious than that Illinois governor's, the actress-activist Susan Sarandon compared him with Jesus. "He is a community organizer like Jesus was," she said, "and now we're a community and he can organize us." What sort of community should we be? Surveying the "rapt eyes" of the congregation, Ethan Baron, writing in the Vancouver Province, said he hadn't seen anything like it "since a guy I used to work with brought me to visit his weird sex cult in California." And he meant it as a compliment.

The prose does not get any more purple:

But don't worry, the sex isn't gonna be weird or anything. "Oh, yes, yes, yessssssss, we can!" I whimpered, as his smoldering eyes bored deep into the very core of my being and our souls met and I knew he was the only man who would ever win my heart, a heart beating so fast and loud I could barely hear what he was saying – something about executive orders, I think. "Oh, yes, give me one right now!" I cried, as my palpitating bosom burst the ties of my bodice causing my leg to vibrate so much my bustle fell off.

"Aye, you're a comely lass," said Squire Barack, as my tresses tumbled over my stays and his riding crop fluttered teasingly up my thigh. "But I don't need to go a-wenchin' in the White House Press Room…"

"No, please, good sir," I begged, as he glided past me and gave a saucy wink to the chamber maid from The Washington Post…

The man is a genius.


From Texas Eagle at FreeRepublic:

Steyn should write romance novels. I can almost see the cover. Fabio Obama carrying a half-dressed Chris Matthews out of the surf...

Merriam-Webster Word of the Day: Implacable

implacable

im-PLAK-uh-bul

adjective

Meaning

: not placable : not capable of being appeased, significantly changed, or mitigated

Global Warming, the Climate Envoy, and the Erosion of Sovereignty

Any doubts about just how serious the Obama administration would treat global warming were obliterated when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named Todd Stern Climate Envoy for the State Department.

In the June 2007 issue of the American Interest, Washington lawyer Todd Stern and think tank executive William Antholis wrote a memo to the next president. Addressed from the "United States Department of Brainstorms" to "The 44th President of the United States," the action memorandum laid out the case for "creating the E-8" -- a novel international group uniting leading developed nations and developing ones for an annual gathering focused on combating global warming.

Now, as Al Kamen noted this morning, Stern will be in a position to write memos to the president for real. This morning, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that Stern will be the special envoy for climate change.

"With the appointment today of a special envoy, we are sending an unequivocal message that the United States will be energetic, focused, strategic and serious about addressing global climate change and the corollary issue of clean energy," Clinton said at the announcement.

In the Obama administration, climate change won't merely be an environmental issue, an energy issue, but it will also be a foreign policy issue. Of course, if you take climate change as seriously as the Obama administration it makes perfect sense to make this a foreign policy issue. After all, it makes no sense for the United States to get serious about climate change if the rest of the world doesn't follow. As such, the answers to climate change must be done on a global level.

Of course, there is a very serious and pernicious side effect to making climate change a foreign policy issue. While the liberal elites were busy condemning Bush for not joining the Kyoto Treaty, they also dismissed his concerns over such a treaty. The main concern for me is that Kyoto is a great first step toward ceding our own sovereignty.

Making climate change a foreign policy issue also means that one day it will be the world that decides just how much greenhouse gases a company in Cleveland can emit. At some point bureaucrats in Belgium will tell our domestic companies how to run their companies. After all, making global warming a foreign policy issue means creating a world consensus on how much global warming is allowed. At some point, it also means that the rest of the world will tell our companies just how much in greenhouse gases they can emit. If you believe that we will soon melt away and die from global warming, then such sacrifices are a small price to pay. If you are at all skeptical about global warming such ceding of sovereignty is unacceptable.

The Prophetic Vision of Owen Harries

Just before the Clinton Administration took office in January 1993, Owen Harries penned his "Fourteen Points for Realists". Some of the points he raised are quite useful to be considered by the incoming Obama Administration.

Among them--"stop thinking of as a matter of course in terms of a unified political entity called 'the West' .... Already the French and Germans and the Japanese clearly do not think or act in terms of a united West."

Where should the U.S. focus its attention? "On the north Pacific, where the intersecting interests of three great powers and a divided Korea make the danger of a general conflagration real" and "on the Middle East where the combination of oil, religion, passionate hatred, sophisticated weaponry, an old-fashioned readiness to resort to force and commitment to Israel requires American involvement."

Interestingly enough, given the recent Moscow-Kyiv spat: "The regional relationship between Ukraine and Russia is of great importance, but it is difficult to see how the United States could play a major role if the relationship were to deteriorate seriously. Good offices, yes--but beyond that intervention would be both dangerous and probably ineffectual."

And, of course, his comments on democracy promotion--and his conclusion that, echoing Brent Scowcroft, "America should be content merely to 'nudge' other countries, rather than attempt to interfere deeply in their internal affairs" and his prediction of "only trouble" otherwise--are quite prescient.

After KT: Who's irrelevant now?

PAS - 32,883
BN - 30,252
Bebas - 193
Majority - 2,636
Spoilt - 665

A Political Monsoon. Nobody in the BN's camp should be terribly shocked (or upset) with the victory.

A pre-analysis ranting You are a born loser, Farid! on the by-election by Jailani Harun, who has been at KT since early this month to cover the by-election, which has placed Pakatan Rakyat's "ketua umum" Anwar Ibrahim one step closer to Putrajaya.

In my opinion, the BN's defear in KT complete's Abdullah Badawi's failure as chairman of the coalition and president of Umno.
What some others said:
YB Wee Choo Keong:
"A PAS win is a rejection of BN. It is also a rejection of Abdullah Badawi for Datuk Wan Ahmad Farid Salleh is Badawi’s man!"
A Voice
Sebab Kekalahan di KT: Calun, Calun, dan Calun
Sakmongkol:
"The people of Terengganu have done the opposite of what Dato Najib wishes them to do. His pontificating about how to behave- humble, shake hands firmly, be folksy, wear a sarong, didn’t go down well. He has probably antagonised the Terengganu people, in sufficient number so as to cause them to go over the dark side."
Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah:
"Actually this was more than a referendum on the leadership. It was a test of the relevance of UMNO in its present form. If UMNO is no longer relevant to the Malays, the BN formula is dead".

p.s. I wonder if the PM, who has left the country for a tour of the Middle East, still thinks that Dr M was "irrelevant" to the KT by-election.

Chris Matthews Underwear?

Gillibrand

NY politics maven Julia has more. If I read her correctly, although my framing was more negative (and my title may have -- like some others -- implied that I wanted Kennedy; for the record, my choice among the two was "neither") I don't think I actually disagree. Here's Julia's bottom line:

Now, none of this means that I'm enthusiastic about having a Senator to the right of the one I currently have, or that I think the state which supports Virginia's gunrunning should have a Senator with a 100% NRA voting record, or that I like the position she took on gay rights (although she's already said that's going to change now that she doesn't have to vote her district), or that I'm happy about her family ties to Joe Bruno, George Pataki and Al D'Amato, or that I think that people to the left of her shouldn't primary (as Carolyn McCarthy of Long Island is already planning to do) or that I don't think that progressives should donate to those primary candidates if they're so moved.

I basically agree with all of this. Indeed, I would if anything be more generous to Gillibrand; here dynastic ties to Republicans are a trivial issue (the proof is in etc.), and given the vanishingly small possibility of consequential gun regulation passing Congress in the near future, as long as she's not in state politics I don't much care about her NRA lockstep (and indeed can even see it as a point in her favor; if you have to attract Republican votes, better that than abortion.) It's likely that, with a statewide constituency that she'll be a generic moderate Democratic Blue State Senator (warning: my crumble under minor Republican pressure.) But, as Remo Gaggi says, why take a chance? There were solid progressives to choose from, which increases the possibility of a good senator rather than a DiFi-type wet. (And of course I agree with Julia about the political logic for Patterson, but that's really neither here nor there on the merits of the appointment.)

I'm also intruiged by Lance's argument that "[L's upstate father] is worried about losing that district, too, but the odds are that it'll be lost anyway after the next re-districting." If true, this is important; getting a worse Senator plus potentially losing a house seat was what was should have been a deal-breaker. Perhaps this wasn't an issue. But I also don't see why this would be true, although I hope Julia or Lance or other readers who know more than I do can fill me in if there's some quirk I'm missing. It seems to be that for Gillibrand to lose her seat in 2010 would represent gross incompetence on the part of Democratic leadership (not, admittedly, something than can be completely discounted.) I mean, it's Gerrymandering 101 that you never re-district out your own incumbents -- there must be plenty of ways to re-draw shrinking upstate areas that stick it to Republican instead. Am I missing something?

Alaska Senate: Polar Opposite Polling

By Nathan L. Gonzales

A newly released Dittman Research (R) poll showed Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) leading Gov. Sarah Palin (R) by a wide margin in a hypothetical 2010 GOP Senate primary matchup. The results were also the complete opposite of another public poll taken during the same time period.

Murkowski led 57 percent to 33 percent in the Dittman survey, taken Dec. 5-20, and paid for by the Alaska Standard, a Republican Web site. A Dec. 15-17 survey by the nonpartisan Research 2000 for the liberal, Democratic Web site DailyKos.com showed Palin leading a primary 55 percent to 31 percent.

Even though Palin defeated Lisa Murkowski’s father, the incumbent governor, in the 2006 gubernatorial primary, there is no indication that a 2010 matchup will materialize.

“In my opinion, Alaska is hard to poll accurately,” Dittman said, “Many outside research firms have problems here — Rasmussen is the exception, they have a very good record — but Kos is one of the worst. In the recent general election here, the final Kos survey was probably the most inaccurate poll in the nation.”

“One thing we learned in 2008, it’s that Alaska is clearly a difficult place to poll,” said Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos.com about the Senate and House races. “The state wasn’t kind to any pollster last year.” But Moulitsas did point out the accuracy of Research 2000 at the presidential level in Alaska.

Maryland-based Research 2000 showed Sen. John McCain (R) with a 58 percent to 39 percent lead in an Oct. 28-30 survey. Anchorage-based Dittman Research showed McCain with a 56 percent to 37 percent advantage in an Oct. 24-29 poll. And Rasmussen had McCain up 16 points on Oct. 28. The GOP nominee won the state 59 percent to 38 percent.

Pollsters inside and outside the Last Frontier took their lumps last year in Alaska’s downballot races.

In the House race, no public polls, dating back as far as fall 2007, showed Rep. Don Young (R) ahead of Democratic challenger Ethan Berkowitz, and most had him trailing by at least 5 points. Young, who is under investigation, was re-elected 50 percent to 45 percent.

In the Senate race, most of the polls gave Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich (D) a slight to narrow advantage over then-Sen. Ted Stevens (R) throughout the race, but there were only a couple of public polls after the Senator’s conviction on seven counts of corruption.

An Oct. 28-30 Research 2000/DailyKos.com (D) poll gave Begich a 22-point lead, Rasmussen gave Begich an 8-point advantage in an Oct. 28 survey, and Alaska-based Hays Research showed the mayor with a 7-point edge. Begich won the race 48 percent to 47 percent.

According to Dittman, his firm has correctly predicted every primary and general election winner for Senate and governor of Alaska for 34 years, even though its margin in last year’s Senate race was also wider than the final result. A Dittman poll on the House race was not listed on Pollster.com.

The strange thing about the 2010 Senate polls is that the difference is not really one of margin. The results are totally opposite, and the explanation is not clear.

Dittman expressed concern about the Research 2000 methodology in local media stories, but declined to give specifics.

His poll surveyed 505 adults, with an over-sample of 430 Republicans for a sample for the primary question, from Dec. 5-20 (much longer than the traditional research period). The survey was paid for by the Alaska Standard, a conservative, Republican Web site that lists Dittman and Lisa Murkowski as contributors. The site’s publisher, conservative talk show host Dan Fagan, is a well-known Palin critic.

Research 2000 surveyed 600 likely voters, including 400 likely GOP primary voters for the Senate question, from Dec. 15-17. The poll was paid for by Kos Media LLC, but Moulitsas does not have a hand in the way the survey is conducted and posts all crosstabs and results on his Web site. Research 2000 President Del Ali noted in an interview that screening and predicting likely primary voters almost two years before an election is difficult and a potentially fruitless exercise.

Even though the ballot question results were different, the surveys agreed that Palin and Murkowski are popular.

In the Research 2000 poll, Murkowski had a 51 percent favorable/43 percent unfavorable among all voters (including 72 percent favorable/22 percent unfavorable among Republicans), compared to 60 percent favorable/38 percent unfavorable for Palin among all voters and an overwhelming 88 percent favorable/10 percent unfavorable among Republicans.

Dittman Research tested job approval instead of person favorability. Seventy-six percent of all respondents gave Murkowski a “very good” or “quite good” job rating compared to 17 percent “not too good” or “pretty bad.” Palin held a lower 65 percent “very good” or “quite good” job rating and 34 percent “not too good” or “pretty bad.” Job numbers among just Republicans were not available.

For now, there are two very different polls for a race that will likely never exist. And in general, Dittman appears unwilling to specifically criticize the methodology because that would then give away the secret recipe to polling the state. So who is right? We’ll probably never know.

“I have no interest in a pissing match,” Moulitsas remarked. “Aggregating multiple polls gave us great predictive power in 2008 in pretty much every race except Alaska Senate and Alaska at-large. I want more polling. I see no point in trashing anyone doing reputable work.”


This story first appeared on RollCall.com on January 9, 2009. 2009 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

2009 Back Issues

The following are past races covered in the print edition of The Rothenberg Political Report. Back issues are not sold individually and are not available online. Subscriptions are available via credit card on the website or by check. All subscriptions are delivered via regular U.S. mail.

January 23, 2009, Vol. 32, No. 2
2009-2010 Gubernatorial Overview

January 9, 2009, Vol. 32, No. 1
2010 Senate Overview

Underlining the case for reform

Yesterday's allegations that four Labour peers were ready to amend laws for money did more than highlight the rather lax regulations in the House of Lords, they also drew attention to the bizarre practice in both Houses of Parliament whereby it is apparently alright for Parliamentarians to be paid as advisors but not to advocate on behalf of their paymasters. Frankly, it is a very thin line and not a system that should be allowed to continue in my view.

Whether the four Peers stepped over that line or not is a matter for others to determine but the fact that they were drawn into the Sunday Times' web in the first place highlights the confusion that apparently exists over what is acceptable and what is not.

Liberal Democrat Homes Affairs Spokesperson, Chris Huhne has called for a police investigation into the allegations. He is right to do so. However, it should not stop there. There needs to be a fundamental review of the rules so that there is clarity for all of us as to exactly what is allowed and what is not.

Iain Dale reports that Baroness Royall, Leader of the House of Lords told ITV News that "Peers don't get paid so they are free to do consultancy work." Really? Well as Iain points out they do get £330 every time they sign in for duty. But surely this is the problem. The Lords are not properly accountable. The case for a directly elected second House has never been stronger.

Graeme Hobbs: The Discreet Pleasures of Bunuel's Belle de Jour

The Discreet Pleasures of Bunuel's Belle de Jour
by Graeme Hobbs
Movie Mail (United Kingdom)



Although Luis Bunuel is notorious for the more outrageous scenes in his films, equally as interesting are their craftsmanlike elements - the self-effacing camerawork, their dialogue, their subtle reinforcements of character's situations, their editing and their nicely offhand moments. Here, Graeme looks at Belle de Jour, Bunuel's film of a bored bourgeois housewife finding an outlet for her fantasies through afternoon work in a brothel, with these things in mind.

To Listen to the Episode

IR Hall of Fame

Stephen Walt proposes an opening class:

By a "classic work," I mean a book or article that is a genuine "must-read" in the field when it is published, and that retains that status for a decade or more. We're talking tape-measure home runs here, not singles. One doesn't have to agree with these works to recognize them as seminal contributions. I can think of plenty of scholars who have written one "classic" work, but not that many who have written two.

But let's raise the bar even higher. How many people can you think of who have written more than two "classic" works? Off the top of my head, here are three obvious candidates:

Kenneth Waltz: (1) Man, the State, and War; (2) Theory of International Politics; and (3) "The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better "(Adelphi Papers, 1981)

Samuel Huntington: (1) The Soldier and the State, (2) The Third Wave; and (3) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

Robert Jervis: (1) Perception and Misperception in International Politics; (2) The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution; and (3) "Cooperation under the Security Dilemma," (World Politics, 1978).

While I can't really quibble with the three proposed entrants, I do wonder whether the "two classic works" metric is the most helpful way to think about enshrinment. Hans Morgenthau, after all, hit .488 with 21 home runs back in 1947; sure, they counted walks as hits, but the schedule was only 82 games. More seriously, while it could be argued that E.H. Carr and Morgenthau only each published one "classic" IR work, both had enormous influence over the early history of the discipline, influence which proved enduring in Morgenthau's case. As to other potential enshrinees, Walt's comment sections yields several plausible candidates:

Robert Keohane
John Mearsheimer
John Gerard Ruggie
Robert Gilpin
Peter Katzenstein
Alex Wendt
Hedley Bull

Christ, that's a bit of a sausage fest, ain't it? My discipline sucks... maybe also Martha Finnemore? Other proposed candidates?

What Europeans Really Think?

Paul Taylor over at Reuters wonders whether Europeans have begun to sour on Georgia and Ukraine. Yes, he writes, the EU sympathizes with their democratic aspirations--but "the leaders of Ukraine and Georgia have fallen from grace among European policymakers" and "European Union officials have been exasperated by the behavior of the governments in Kiev and Tbilisi."

In private, he writes, Georgian president Saakashvili is blamed for provoking Russia in the Caucasus war and Ukrainian president Yushchenko is faulted for his political feuding with his rivals.

Two things: 1) Is what Taylor writes about a prevailing sentiment? and 2) if so, is Europe going to be honest with the incoming Obama Administration? Quoting officials who don't want to be identified because of the "sensitivity of the issue" leads me to suspect that Obama may experience what Bush did--hearing one thing at a NATO meeting when something else is being said at an EU one.

Canada and India: Beginning Again?

A

Oh, Dirk Bendict...

Yglesias says what needs to be said about Dirk Benedict's screed against the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. It takes some chutzpah to rant against a better actor taking a more richly written role in a critically acclaimed show that has, thus far, run four times as long as the original. And although I'd love to read Benedict's reaction to Katee Sackhoff taking the role of Faceman in an A-Team reprise, shows about roving bands of mercenary fugitive vigilantes went out with the decline of Reagan-Thatcher morality...

While on the subject, I think it's clear that Richard Hatch's decision to accomodate himself to the new BSG has worked out both for himself and for the show; he's actually been good, and the internal political conflict storylines have played out more productively than many of the other subplots (*COUGH* Starbuck-Apollo romance *COUGH*).

Height of Power: The Washington Fiefdom Looms Larger Than Ever

Washington gathers in the reins of power over everything and everyone.

For more than two centuries, it has been a wannabe among the great world capitals. But now, Washington is finally ready for its close-up.

No longer a jumped-up Canberra or, worse, Sacramento, it seems about to emerge as Pyongyang on the Potomac, the undisputed center of national power and influence. As a new president takes over the White House, the United States’ capacity for centralization has arguably never been greater. . . . The contrast between Washington and most of the United States has gradually become more pronounced. In good times and in bad, lawyers, lobbyists and other government retainers have continued to enrich themselves even as the Midwest industrial-belt cities have cratered and most others struggled to survive. “The vision of generations of liberals,” admitted the New Republic in the mid-1970s, “has created a prosperous and preposterous city whose population is completely isolated from the people they represent and immune from the problems they are supposed to solve.”

[Via Instapundit.]

For some reason, I was reminded of Paris and the court of the "Sun King."

In connection with that, read Obama’s Graciousness Deficit.

It's change and you can believe it.

President of Right to Life Speaks Out

Please read Dr. Wanda Franz's statement on the 36 anniversary of Roe vs. Wade decision that opened the door for abortion on demand and the killing of perhaps as many as 50 million human beings in the womb.

Today is a day to lament this fact and to redouble our efforts to resist the culture of death, come what may. Reject fetus fatigue.

The Desiccated Remains

We are in a battle we may not win, but it's a fight we must not shirk.

From the Book, The American Tradition:

[W]e are told that there is no need to fear the concentration of power in government so long as that power is checked by the electoral process. We are urged to believe that so long as we can express our disagreement in words, we have our full rights to disagree. Now both freedom of speech and the electoral process are important to liberty, but alone they are only the desiccated remains of liberty. However vigorously we may argue against foreign aid, our substance is still drained away in never-to-be-repaid loans. Quite often, there is not even a candidate to vote for who holds views remotely like my own. To vent one's spleen against the graduated income tax may be healthy for the psyche, but one must still yield up his freedom of choice as to how his money will be spent when he pays it to the government. The voice of electors in government is not even proportioned to the tax contribution of individuals; thus, those who contribute more lose rather than gain by the "democratic process." A majority of voters may decide that property cannot be used in such and such ways, but the liberty of the individual is diminished just as much as in that regard as if a dictator had decreed it. Those who believe in the redistribution of wealth should be free to redistribute their own, but they are undoubtedly limiting the freedom of others when they vote to redistribute theirs.

Effective disagreement means not doing what one does not want to do as well as saying what he wants to say. What is from one angle the welfare state is from another the compulsory state. Let me submit a bill of particulars. Children are forced to go to school. Americans are forced to pay taxes to support foreign aid, forced to support the Peace Corps, forced to make loans to the United Nations, forced to contribute to the building of hospitals, forced to serve in the armed forces. Employers are forced to submit to arbitration with labor leaders. Laborers are forced to accept the majority decision. Employers are forced to pay minimum wages, or go out of business. But it is not even certain that they will be permitted by the courts to go out of business. Railroads are forced to charge established rates and to continue services which may have become uneconomical. Many Americans are forced to pay Social Security. Farmers are forced to operate according to the restrictions voted by a majority of those involved. The list could be extended, but surely the point has been made.

And this:

Over the next four years, the "desiccated remains" of Americans' traditional freedom will come under ever more intense assault. This is guaranteed by liberals' assumption of their moral superiority and the steadily accumulating evidence against the beneficence and benevolence of liberal policies. Conservatives and libertarians must expect harsher and harsher attempts, both within and without the law, to silence them and to defraud them of victories at the polls. Violence will be involved more and more often as liberals' failures mount.

Read the whole thing.

Debate at Atheism and Religion

Christopher Hitchens (atheist) will be debating Dinesh D'Souza (Christian) at Mackie Auditorium at CU Boulder on January 26 at 7:00 PM. For more info go to St. Thomas Aquinas Center at CU Boulder.

Grand Old Police Blotter

New York Senate ex-leadership edition.

Cops on Facebook

This morning's Wales on Sunday reports that North Wales Chief Constable, Richard Brunstrom has urged his officers to join Facebook. He says he wants to take "community engagement into cyberspace" in a bid to engage with young people.

The article quotes a survey that suggests that children would find it less intimidating to contact an officer via the internet rather than face to face. This of course depends on how good the community police officer is but nevertheless it is a valid way forward.

As it happens my local community constable is already on Facebook and is one of my Facebook friends, so in the spirit of all-Wales cyber comradeship I logged onto my profile this morning and searched for Richard Brunstrom so as to extend the hand of friendship to him. Alas, there was no profile to be found.

What I found instead was a series of Facebook groups that reflected the controversial status of the North Wales Chief Constable. The biggest of these groups with 281 members rather unfairly goes under the name of 'Richard Brunstrom is an arse'. Thirty eight people believe that 'Richard Brunstrom is spot on', whilst 31 proclaim that we should 'Legalise all drugs. Back up Richard Brunstrom'. Twenty people mysteriously believe that 'Richard Brunstrom is a turd', but the membership of the group that wants Richard Brunstrom to be Prime Minister is just one less at 19 and 16 people assert that the Chief Constable is a legend.

It continues with twelve members of a group who want Richard Brunstrom sacked and ten who believe that he is an absolute idiot. Seven people want to 'remove Richard Brunstrom' and nine people have joined a group dedicated to 'The Richard Brunstrom pension fund'. This last group was set up in response to rumours that the Chief Constable is to retire in sixteen months and encourages people to contribute so as to bring the date forward.

This post has not been written to knock Richard Brunstrom, after all in terms of the internet he has been a trailblazer amongst Chief Constables. He still maintains his blog here and understands the uses that the internet can be put to. Maybe when he gets around to setting up his own Facebook profile he will send me a friend request.

Louisiana Senate: Jindal Not Endorsing Vitter For Now

By Nathan L. Gonzales

While Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) can point to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R) attendance at a recent fundraiser for his 2010 re-election race as evidence of the popular governor’s support, well-placed Republican insiders say that Jindal definitely is not yet in Vitter’s camp.

Instead, they say that Jindal is firmly in wait-and-see mode and has not endorsed the Senator.

“He’ll have to answer to the voters. He’s going to have a chance to do that in the next few years,” Jindal said recently, telling the Baton Rouge Advocate that it was too early to decide support. “I was asked to attend a fundraiser.”

Jindal’s neutrality is unusual, of course, because in virtually all cases, the sitting governor of a state supports the sitting Senator if they’re from the same party. But Vitter’s career has been anything but typical.

In July 2007, the Republican admitted to a “serious sin” after his phone number appeared on a client list of a high-end prostitution ring that was under investigation. According to GOP sources, private polling shows that the once-popular Vitter has close to even favorable and unfavorable ratings and is doing particularly poorly among women.

“Vitter has worked hard to sell the idea that he has fully recovered,” according to a GOP operative familiar with Louisiana. “That’s interesting, but not reflected in polling.”

At the moment, Vitter’s political prospects are uncertain. While some Republican insiders would like to find a strong primary challenger to the Senator, so far no one has come forward. And even Vitter’s critics within the GOP acknowledge that he has done a good job of securing the support of key donors in the state.

Vitter also appears to be trying to use votes to shore up conservatives. On Thursday he was the lone vote on the Foreign Relations Committee against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) nomination for secretary of State.

Part of the Republican concern about Vitter stems from doubts about his strength against a formidable Democratic opponent.

“Our chances of holding the seat are shaky. If [Vitter is] nominated, his chances depend on who he’s running against,” according to the concerned Republican operative, adding that Vitter is operating from a “very significant level of weakness.”

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is already looking to recruit a serious candidate into the race, and the longer Vitter’s numbers remain weak, the better the DSCC’s chances of succeeding.

Rep. Charlie Melancon, Louisiana’s only Democratic House member, could be the Republican’s worst nightmare, but it is unclear whether he has any interest in running. Former Rep. Chris John (D) could give Vitter problems as well, even though he ran an underwhelming race six years ago and some party insiders say that he isn’t likely to run.

It would certainly be helpful to Vitter to have Jindal on board, but it’s very unclear if or when the governor might get involved. Last cycle, he did late television ads for now-Reps. Bill Cassidy (R), John Fleming (R) and Anh “Joseph” Cao (R), as well as unsuccessful Senate nominee John Kennedy. But none of them had the ethical baggage that Vitter possesses.

This story first appeared on RollCall.com on January 15, 2009. 2009 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

"cc all your emails to Jacqui Smith" Day

I have just been invited to join a Facebook Group called "cc all your emails to Jacqui Smith" Day. The blurb starts with a quote, "No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls" but does not attribute it.

It continues: The government has unveiled plans for a private company to run a "superdatabase" that will track all our emails, calls, texts, internet use and so on. This is an immense infringement of civil liberties, not to mention a major risk to our private data - but it won't make us any safer. The sheer amount of information that the Government intends to collect will be impossible to analyse properly and will undoubtedly turn up false positives while missing potential security threats amongst the morass of spam emails and private chat.

So, for one day, we should send a message to the Home Office - "you want to see our emails? Ok then, here they are then!". We do this by simply cc'ing or bcc'ing every email we send (and if you like, forwarding every email you receive), regardless of importance or content, to public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk.

That way Jacqui Smith and the Home Office will be able to see how difficult it will be to get on with their actual work - keeping our country safe - when they're trying to monitor every harmless private thing we say and do.

All we need to know now is which day?

The Internet

Everyone is no one when they are (only) no-where.

A new blog for a new era....

I am now blogging at King Harvest, a new site I have launched to integrate my three separate blogs (Vallywood!, Global Labor and Politics, and Finance Capital) under one theme.

Join me there when you have a chance.

Raining on the Parade?

Donald Bandler and Wess Mitchell are worried that the trans-Atlantic honeymoon between Germany and the Obama administration won't last that long.

Germans love Barack Obama. When the aspiring presidential candidate traveled to Berlin in July of last year, the crowd of two hundred thousand that greeted him at Berlin’s Tiergarten was larger and more electrifying than Germany’s politicians would have drawn. On inauguration day, no nation in Europe celebrated more wildly or had higher hopes for the young president’s success on the staggering array of world problems he will inherit than Germany.

And yet, if things continue as they are, it could well be Germany—not Iran, Russia, or Palestine—that hands President Obama his first major setback. At the NATO summit in April, the president’s new team will find itself seated across the table from a German ally that is determined to block U.S. aims on nearly every important question facing the alliance.

I also have concerns, which I've noted in a response and reflection to some recent comments by Dov Zakheim, Vance Serchuk and Chris Brose.

Mitchell and Bandler offer some advice on getting the relationship moving--essentially a series of trade-offs and compromises:

Already, Washington and Berlin appear to be nearing an understanding on missile defense and Iran. As the U.S. side shows greater caution on the shield, the Germans may be more willing to ramp up their heretofore half-hearted support for the U.S. initiative with Tehran. A similar effort should be made on energy: in exchange for a more supple multilateral approach on climate change, the new administration should ask Berlin to take a more multilateral approach towards European energy security.

I think President Obama may be inclined to move in this direction--but we'll have to wait and see.

Crucial Friday meeting for Tony's Labu

With MoF and EPU. Air Asia's Tony Fernandes is still pushing for his own airport despite all the protests from members of the public and the arguments against the Labu airport, including the reservation expressed by Khazanah Inc, which is chaired by the Prime Minister.
According to sources, he will be making a last-ditch pitch with the Economic Planning Unit and the Minister of Finance to secure approval for the highly-contentious project.
It will be tough to get past the EPU and MoF guys. They know that the cost of building the LCCT would include constructing a fuel farm by Petronas, which will be borne by the Government. Unless Air Asia plan to build a pipeline from KLIA to feed LCCT, or drive fuel bowsers all the way from KLIA to Labu. And are Air Asia and Sime Darby planning to privatize Immigration, Customs, etc.?

Still, we await Friday's meeting.

p.s. An editor told me that if CIMB is planning to be involved in the project, that will add another problem. CIMB is headed by the Finance Minister's little brother. Conflict of interest.

Strategic Level Failure

Short term, tactical thinking:

When Israel first encountered Islamists in Gaza in the 1970s and '80s, they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.

"When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake," says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early '90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. "But at the time nobody thought about the possible results."

Read the rest.

Judge Obama on Performance Alone

Juan Williams pleads with the MSM to stop patronizing Blacks.

If his presidency is to represent the full power of the idea that black Americans are just like everyone else -- fully human and fully capable of intellect, courage and patriotism -- then Barack Obama has to be subject to the same rough and tumble of political criticism experienced by his predecessors. To treat the first black president as if he is a fragile flower is certain to hobble him. It is also to waste a tremendous opportunity for improving race relations by doing away with stereotypes and seeing the potential in all Americans.

Yet there is fear, especially among black people, that criticism of him or any of his failures might be twisted into evidence that people of color cannot effectively lead. That amounts to wasting time and energy reacting to hateful stereotypes. It also leads to treating all criticism of Mr. Obama, whether legitimate, wrong-headed or even mean-spirited, as racist.

This is patronizing. Worse, it carries an implicit presumption of inferiority. Every American president must be held to the highest standard. No president of any color should be given a free pass for screw-ups, lies or failure to keep a promise.

During the Democrats' primaries and caucuses, candidate Obama often got affectionate if not fawning treatment from the American media. Editors, news anchors, columnists and commentators, both white and black but especially those on the political left, too often acted as if they were in a hurry to claim their role in history as supporters of the first black president.

For example, Mr. Obama was forced to give a speech on race as a result of revelations that he'd long attended a church led by a demagogue. It was an ordinary speech. At best it was successful at minimizing a political problem. Yet some in the media equated it to the Gettysburg Address.

The importance of a proud, adversarial press speaking truth about a powerful politician and offering impartial accounts of his actions was frequently and embarrassingly lost. When Mr. Obama's opponents, such as the Clintons, challenged his lack of experience, or pointed out that he was not in the U.S. Senate when he expressed early opposition to the war in Iraq, they were depicted as petty.

Bill Clinton got hit hard when he called Mr. Obama's claims to be a long-standing opponent of the Iraq war "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." The former president accurately said that there was no difference in actual Senate votes on the war between his wife and Mr. Obama. But his comments were not treated by the press as legitimate, hard-ball political fighting. They were cast as possibly racist.

This led to Saturday Night Live's mocking skit -- where the debate moderator was busy hammering the other Democratic nominees with tough questions while inquiring if Mr. Obama was comfortable and needed more water.

Will Obama be treated like any other President? Fat chance. As Rush Limbaugh has commented, the press has so much invested in him, he’s “too big to fail.”

Limbaugh’s black call screener, “Bo Snerdly” has been officially designated as black enough to criticize Obama. Is Juan Williams black enough? With a name like Juan, I’m sure his blackness will be called into question. There will be questions about the amount of his “slave blood” as there was about Obama’s by the grievance pimps in the black community. Funny how the “one drop” rule has been ripped from the handbook of white racists and installed in the lexicon of the black racists.

Canada-US Relations and Arctic Sovereignty

A

The Shadow Government of the Obama Administration II

Yesterday, I pointed out that the explosion of "Czars", advisors, and envoys has the potential of creating a shadow government in the Obama administration. That's because "Czars", advisors, and envoys have no standard or defined roles. They are the creation of the President himself. As such, they operate outside of the apparatus of the government. Whereas someone in the State Department is answerable to the Secretary of State who is then answerable to the President? Who exactly is the terrorism Czar answerable to? Sure, they are answerable to the President but a terrorism Czar has no defined role. It's been created by the imagination of the President.

Today, like clockwork, Politico has a story that incapsulates what I was talking about yesterday.

For all the talk of his “Team of Rivals” pick in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama last week handed the two hottest hotspots in American foreign policy to presidential envoys – one to former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, and the other to a man who knows his way around Foggy Bottom better than Clinton does, Richard Holbrooke."Czar" Carol Browner will head up Obama's fight on global warming, where once his energy and environmental chiefs might have stepped in. Tom Daschle scored a ground floor office in the West Wing not by running Health and Human Services – but because of his role as Obama's health-reform czar.

...

But Obama appears willing to take that chance. Aides say he believes the Cabinet structure is outdated because it doesn’t recognize that problems like global warming sprawl across several agencies, often requiring a sort of uber-Cabinet member – a czar – to confront them.

In other words, Obama doesn't believe the "outdated" structure of cabinets is fit to deal with today's problems. Such talk should scare everyone. After 9/11, President Bush created the Department of Homeland Security. A lot of folks criticized him for expanding our bureaucracy, but when he saw a problem, he created a government bureaucracy. Whatever problems that creates, it also means there is a government structure to deal with it. President Obama thinks that global warming is a problem, but he doesn't think that government structure is fit to deal with it. Instead, he will let Carole Browner go off as a free agent and do as she pleases in dealing with it.

Browner has no official staff. She doesn't even have any official duties. In fact, she has no official power. Worst of all, she wasn't even confirmed. She can pretty much do as she pleases and she only has the ear of one person to convince of any new ideas.

Just think about the potential for abuse. If the Department of Energy were in charge of climate change, that would mean an entire apparatus was in place. Any corruption would be seen by a whole bureaucracy. Any one person could become the whistle blower. Now, Browner herself will be solely in charge of executing climate change. The only oversight Browner will have is from President Obama. In fact, even the legislature won't have oversight over Browner. Likely, the Legislature won't even know what Browner is doing. She will be a free agent. She will run a shadow government right out of the White House out of the control of anyone but the President himself.

Of course, as the Politico story points out, this will happen in intelligence, health care, automakers, and in the hot spots of the Middle East and Afghanistan/Pakistan. All of these areas will be run by positions created out of whole cloth by the President himself. These folks will only be answerable to the President himself. You will have shadow departments run by free agents that only report to one person. There will be no apparatus in place to control them at all.

We have the beginning of an unelected, unconfirmed, shadow government answerable only to the President. Conveniently enough, they were all created by the President. Such combinations are all a recipe for disaster.

Out of the Past--Investigating Film Noir: Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)

Episode 9: Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)
Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir
Hosts: Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards



Otto Preminger's 1944 "Laura" marks an important transition in film history. Visually it harks back to Hollywood's Golden Era, flooding with light elaborate sets and the glamorous stars they hold--but at crucial moments a noir vision bubbles up to artfully blemish this smooth facade. It is a classic love story--except that it hinges on forbidden fantasy and murder. It at once gives a coy nod to the parlor psychology of the "Thin Man" variety of mystery, and looks forward to the dark Hitchcockian psychological thriller. It is a Janus of a film, and it may be eternally debated whether its double vision signals an end or a beginning.

To Listen to the Episode

Fighting for jobs

Recently I had a meeting with Union representatives from the Land Registry, who have two offices in Swansea employing more than 700 staff. The Land Registry was my employer before I became an Assembly Member so I have more than a passing interest in its future.

Being a demand-led service the Land Registry has been particularly badly hit by the collapse in the housing market. They operate as an independent trading fund and look set to make a loss for the first time ever. As a result they are embarking on a period of rationalisation and have earmarked £25 million to close down offices and to lay off staff.

In Swansea that could result in the two offices being merged and the loss of up to 220 staff posts. Management are seeking to achieve this through voluntary redundancy on compulsory terms and through transferring staff to other departments where there are vacancies but naturally there is a fair degree of cynicism as to whether this is achieveable.

I recall that the last time there was a slump in the property market spare capacity was used to improve the service to customers. Specifically, all of the Land Registers were computerised enabling a swifter service and a move towards e-conveyancing, of which more later. This meant that when demand picked there were skilled and well-trained staff in place who could deal with it.

The one thing I took away from the Land Registry was its ethos of investing in its staff and it is a slashing staff numbers by so much when they will need these people later on as the property market recovers.

Accordingly, I have written to the Chief Land Registrar to ask him to think again. Specifically, I have suggested using staff to computerise their filed plans and to consider changing legislation so as to bring in more work. They could also systematically seek out voluntary registrations from large land-owning public bodies such as Local Councils, the Ministry of Defence, the Forestry Commission or even charities like the National Trust?

If such work was obtained and kept within Wales then it would be possible to minimise job losses. It would also be possible to continue to concentrate staff in one office at the same time by taking up short term office space around the Wales Office to accommodate those who cannot be housed in the main Llansamlet office.

One aspect of their work that could have contributed to the present crisis is the Land Registry's attempt to get into e-conveyancing. Like other government computer projects this appears to have crashed and burned badly.

According to the current issue of Private Eye the Land Registry has written off £15 million of the £42 million spent up to last March on this project. The scheme was launched in 2002 by the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Irving and should have seen paperless conveyancing become the norm two years ago.

Private Eye says that under the 'chain matrix' system property sale chains should have been logged and tracked electronically enabling lawyers, estate agents, buyers and sellers to check on progress. But the system was so hopeless that only 10 such chains were successfully recorded, the longest covering just two transactions. They say that the idea has been abandoned with a promise to look at it again in a couple of years.

The magazine says that the Land Registry is now doing the market research that should have been done years ago to gauge 'the current and likely future market behaviours and preferences'. They believe that enough will emerge to justify keeping the multi-million pound contract with IT supplier, IBM despite their track record. For example according to the public accounts committee IBM was the company that supplied the IT contract for the Department of Transport which instead of saving £57 million, will end up costing taxpayers £81 million.

Long term planning does not appear to be one of the Land Registry's strengths.