Sarah Palin continues to draw negative attention to herself.

There’s an old story that occasionally makes the rounds in Washington. In the 1970s, a magazine (now long defunct) named New Times reported that Sen. William Scott, a Virginia Republican, had been ranked the “dumbest” senator in a survey conducted by a public interest group. Subsequently, Scott held a press conference to deny the charge — thereby proving he was pretty darn dumb. After all, he only called more attention to the accusation.

Sarah Palin has taken a Scott-like position.

Earlier this month, PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times, awarded Palin the not-so-coveted “lie of the year” award for claiming last summer that President Obama’s health care reform initiative would set up “death panels” run by bureaucrats who would decide if seniors and disabled citizens “based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’ ” would be “worthy of health care.” PolitiFact.com explains:

On Aug. 10, PolitiFact rated Palin’s statement Pants on Fire [its highest -- or lowest -- rating]. In the weeks that followed, health care policy experts on both the right and the left said the euthanasia comparisons were inaccurate. Gail Wilensky, a health adviser to President George H.W. Bush, said the charge was untrue and upsetting.

“I think it is really unfortunate that this has been raised and received so much attention because there are serious issues to debate in health care reform,” she said at a forum on Sept. 3.

Responding to the initial Pants-on-Fire designation, Palin tried to have it both ways, claiming her phrase was metaphoric and accurate. In a Nov. 17 interview with National Review, she said she didn’t regret the remark:

“To me, while reading that section of the bill, it became so evident that there would be a panel of bureaucrats who would decide on levels of health care, decide on those who are worthy or not worthy of receiving some government-controlled coverage,” she said. “Since health care would have to be rationed if it were promised to everyone, it would therefore lead to harm for many individuals not able to receive the government care. That leads, of course, to death.”

“The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally,” said Palin. The phrase is “a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire.’ He got his point across. He got people thinking and researching what he was talking about. It was quite effective. Same thing with the ‘death panels.’ I would characterize them like that again, in a heartbeat.”

Not literal, but accurate — as in, well, you know what I mean.

Now Palin is again taking issue with being called a liar. In a new Facebook posting, she scoffs at “Nancy Pelosi and friends who have tried to call ‘death panels’ the ‘lie of the year.’ ” She doesn’t mention it was the neutral PolitiFact.com that branded her statement the whopper of 2009. And she claims she has proof she was correct in the first place. The pending Senate health care bill, she says, calls for an Independent Medicare Advisory Board to find ways to cut costs. This, she writes, “is also known as rationing.” If that’s the case, then every insurance company and health care firm in America is a death panel, for that’s what they do each day: seek ways to trim costs to bolster profits.

But there’s more. Palin cites a letter Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week, referring to the bill’s call for reducing Medicare spending by 2 percent. “It is unclear,” Elmendorf noted, “whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.”

Aha, Palin proclaims: This reduced ” ‘access to care’ and ‘diminish[ed] quality of care’ – is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.” (She’s back to calling it a metaphor.)

Not really. As Greg Sargent has pointed out, Palin is changing her definitions. When she first referred to “death panels,” she was portraying them as medical tribunes that would decide the fate of specific individuals. (“You’re IQ is too low, so no dialysis for you!”) Now, she’s essentially claiming that any cost-cutting that might influence access to care constitutes establishing a “death panel.” Not only is she being shifty; Palin is poisoning one policy debate that the nation needs to have about health care. Does this ardent foe of socialism really believe that the U.S. government ought to pay for any medical procedure that a Medicare recipient might want? What if a treatment costs several million dollars and at best can extend the life of a dying patient by a week? If you question such a practice, then, in Palin’s book, you’re for rationing and can be a charter member of a “death panel.”

Tough policy matters aside, Palin is playing loose with the facts about her own pronouncements — and calling even more attention to her dubious distinction of promoting the lie of year. The big question is, in this category, can she top herself in 2010?

David Corn
Politics Daily

I’m willing to bet that President Obama’s Christmas address this week will shine with religious significance about as bright as his unusually short Thanksgiving Proclamation, which gave a token reference to God via a quote from George Washington.

Even in Obama’s superstar Christmas interviews with Oprah and Gloria Estefan, there were discussions about Santa, Christmas trees, ornaments, gingerbread houses and even their dog’s Christmas stocking. Obama even gave a Christmas shout-out to all Hispanics. But there was not one discussion of religion or a hint of the real reason for the season.

Gone are the days when presidents and most politicians publicly rejoice in the birth of Christ.

But things were not always this way. As with many of you, I still remember a day even in Washington when Christ was central to Christmas. It was an America that was far less politically correct – an America that wasn’t afraid to stand up for its belief in the babe who was born in Bethlehem.

Here’s a small sample of that America represented in personal and public presidential Christmas proclamations and events, as documented in presidential library archives, at WhiteHouseChristmasCards.com and by historian David Barton in his treatise “Christmas with the presidents.”

On Christmas Day, 1795, President George Washington celebrated Christmas with members of Congress at his Mount Vernon estate, complete with a fox hunt, feast including “Christmas pie,” music, dancing and visiting that at times continued for a solid week.

America’s second president, John Adams, was the first to hold a White House Christmas party.

Thomas Jefferson loved celebrating Christmas, from his youth considering the day as a time of “merriment” and “The day of greatest mirth and jollity.” He threw elaborate parties at the White House and his Monticello estate for family and friends, played his violin, sang his favorite Christmas song, “Adeste Fideles” (“Oh Come All Ye Faithful”), and even gave his slaves a few days off each year to enjoy the holiday due to his abolitionist leanings.

(And let’s not forget, when at the White House during the eight years of his presidency, Jefferson attended church where he did each week in the Capitol building – something that continued through the Civil War – in 1867 it was the largest church in Washington with 2,000 people attending weekly.)

During the 1835 Christmas season, President Andrew Jackson sent out invitations and cards (of sorts) to local children inviting them to an event in the East Room on Christmas Day, in memory of a boy who had never heard of Christmas, never knew his father and whose mother died at a young age. That boy was Jackson himself.

President John Tyler also enjoyed hosting Christmas parties for children.

After a chaotic political season in December 1848, in which intense debate ensued over issues relating to slavery and expanding U.S. territory, President James K. Polk described Christmas Day as “perhaps the most quiet day of my presidential term,” despite apparently not accompanying Mrs. Polk and the children to church on that particular day.

President James Buchanan, a devout Presbyterian, would have his southern Pennsylvania estate extravagantly decorated at Christmas for the community to enjoy (a tradition that is still done to this day).

President Abraham Lincoln read the Bible throughout his life and attended services at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church on a regular basis, including at Christmas time. During the Civil War, he and his wife would visit hospitals on Christmas to help care for the wounded. During one political campaign, he declared “I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general. … I do not think I could myself be brought to support a man for office whom I knew to be an open enemy of … religion.”

In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the bill that made Christmas Day a national holiday.

Being credited with establishing the tradition of posting a Christmas tree in the White House (the first occurrence being with President Franklin Pierce), President Benjamin Harrison was also a deeply devout Christian, who wrote to his son Russell in 1887, “I hope you will renew your Christian faith and duties. It is a great comfort to trust God – even if His providence is [at times] unfavorable. Prayer steadies one when he is walking in slippery places – even if things asked for are not given.”

In 1898, two years before his assassination, the New York Times wrote of the encouragement that President William McKinley and his ailing wife received from these words in their pastor’s Christmas Day sermon: “God’s Christmas gift of freedom has come to the suffering and wronged through the agency of a nation that was obedient to His call, and helpfulness sent forth form angelic lips – ‘Goodwill toward men.’”

Each year on Christmas Eves, President Theodore (“Teddy”) Roosevelt traveled to Christ Church in Oyster Bay, N.Y., and, following the pastor’s sermon, gave one of his famous “sermonettes” on the meaning of Christmas. The service would end with his favorite hymn, “Christmas by the Sea.”

In 1927, in every major newspaper across the land, a Christmas admonishment from President Calvin Coolidge was published in his own hand about “the real spirit of Christmas – if we think on these things, there will be born in us a Savior and over us all will shine a star-sending its gleam of hope to the world.”

President Herbert Hoover wrote to the Nation’s Christmas Trees Association on Dec. 25, 1931: “Your annual Christmas service … is a dramatic and inspiring event of national interest. It symbolizes and vivifies our greatest Christian festival with its eternal message of unselfishness, joy, and peace.”

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared in his Christmas address to the nation on Dec. 24, 1944 (the first Christmas after D-Day), “Here, at home, we will celebrate this Christmas Day in our traditional American way – because of its deep spiritual meaning to us; because the teachings of Christ are fundamental in our lives; and because we want our youngest generation to grow up knowing the significance of this tradition and the story of the coming of the immortal Prince of Peace and Good Will. [FDR then prayed for the troops.] We pray that with victory will come a new day of peace on earth in which all the Nations of the earth will join together for all time. That is the spirit of Christmas, the holy day. May that spirit live and grow throughout the world in all the years to come.”

President Harry Truman gave these words during his Christmas Eve national broadcast on Dec. 24, 1949, “Since returning home, I have been reading again in our family Bible some of the passages which foretold this night. … We miss the spirit of Christmas if we consider the Incarnation as an indistinct and doubtful, far-off event unrelated to our present problems. We miss the purport of Christ’s birth if we do not accept it as a living link which joins us together in spirit as children of the ever-living and true God. In love alone – the love of God and the love of man – will be found the solution of all the ills which afflict the world today.”

President Dwight Eisenhower publicly proclaimed on Dec. 23, 1960, “Through the ages men have felt the uplift of the spirit of Christmas. We commemorate the birth of the Christ Child by the giving of gifts, by joining in carols of celebration, by giving expression to our gratitude for the great things that His coming has brought about in the world.”

It’s well known that President John Kennedy was a Catholic. What’s not so well known is that, in 1957, then Sen. Kennedy disclosed at the National Conference of Christians and Jews Dinner what he believed would remedy the ills in society: “Upon what can we rely? Where can we compete? In what can we find hope for the future? The answer, I believe, lies ultimately in the very principles which we honor tonight – the principles of our Judaic-Christian heritage.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson publicly declared on Dec. 22, 1963, “We were taught by Him whose birth we commemorate that after death there is life. … In these last 200 years we have guided the building of our Nation and our society by those principles and precepts brought to earth nearly 2,000 years ago on that first Christmas.”

President Richard Nixon was a Quaker and hosted church services in the East Room of White House while he was president, initiated on his first Sunday in office by none other than Rev. Billy Graham.

President Gerald Ford publicly declared on Dec. 18, 1975, “In our 200 years, we Americans have always honored the spiritual testament of 2,000 years ago. We embrace the spirit of the Prince of Peace so that we might find peace in our own hearts and in our own land, and hopefully in the world as well.”

President Jimmy Carter spoke to the nation on Dec. 15, 1977, “Christmas has a special meaning for those of us who are Christians, those of us who believe in Christ, those of us who know that almost 2,000 years ago, the Son of Peace was born to give us a vision of perfection, a vision of humility, a vision of unselfishness, a vision of compassion, a vision of love.”

President Ronald Reagan repeatedly affirmed his and the nations’ Christian faith at Christmas time, like these words on Dec. 16, 1982, “In this holiday season, we celebrate the birthday of One who, for almost 2,000 years, has been a greater influence on humankind than all the rulers, all the scholars, all the armies and all the navies that ever marched or sailed, all put together. … [I]t’s also a holy day, the birthday of the Prince of Peace, a day when ‘God so loved the world’ that He sent us His only begotten Son to assure forgiveness of our sins.”

President George H. W. Bush stated to the nation on Dec. 18, 1989, “At Christmas, we, too, rejoice in the mystery of God’s love for us – love revealed through the gift of Christ’s birth. Born into a family of a young carpenter and his wife, in a stable shared by beasts of the field, our Savior came to live among ordinary men. Yet, in time, the miraculous nature of this simple event became clear. Christ’s birth changed the course of history, bringing the light of hope to a world dwelling in the darkness of sin and death. Today, nearly 2,000 years later, the shining promise of that first Christmas continues to give our lives a sense of peace and purpose. Our words and deeds, when guided by the example of Christ’s life, can help others share in the joy of man’s Redemption.”

President Bill Clinton addressed the nation on Dec. 21, 1999, with these words, “Saint Matthew’s Gospel tells us that on the first Christmas 2,000 years ago, a bright star shone vividly in the eastern sky, heralding the birth of Jesus and the beginning of His hallowed mission as teacher, healer, servant, and savior.”

And President George W. Bush spoke in his Christmas message on Dec. 21, 2007, “During the Christmas season, our thoughts turn to the source of joy and hope born in a humble manger on a holy night more than 2,000 years ago. Each year, Christians everywhere celebrate this single life that changed the world and continues to change hearts today. … Christmas is a time to rejoice and remember the birth of Jesus Christ.”

Will President Obama’s Christmas address rival those Christian confessions of past presidents? Or will his yuletide cheer be another politically correct concoction that has already adorned the first year of his presidency?

Based upon President Obama’s first year’s utter disregard for America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and promotion of a secular-progressive agenda and pro-Islamic platforms, the only white Christmas I would count on at the White House is a continued whitewashing of religious tradition in Washington. But does America really need another version of “Away with the Manger”?

First, even during his campaign for the presidency, Obama sarcastically belittled America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and degraded its adherents with trite remarks typical of any atheistic antagonist: “Whatever we were, we are no longer a Christian nation”; “The dangers of sectarianism are greater than ever”; “Religion doesn’t allow for compromise”: “The Sermon on the Mount [is] a passage that is so radical that our own defense department wouldn’t survive its application”; and “To base our policy making upon such commitments [as moral absolutes] would be a dangerous thing.” (See the YouTube video: “Barack Obama on the importance of a secular government.”)

Second, President Obama has already denied America’s rich Judeo-Christian heritage before the eyes and ears of other countries, as he publicly declared in Turkey on April 6, 2009, for the whole world to hear: “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.” (Who are the “we” to whom he refers? Would our former presidents agree with his “we”?)

Third, quite contrary to Obama’s negative tone and sentiments about Judeo-Christian belief, in countless speeches over the past year he has sympathized and supported pro-Islamic theology and practice. Just recently, he encouraged Americans “not to jump to conclusions” about the Fort Hood shooter being a Muslim extremist. And he refused to say anything when the Muslim extremist and president of Iran publicly accused the U.S. of actively planning and plotting to stop mankind’s real savior: i.e. Mahdi, the imam that Muslims believe will be the ultimate savior of mankind.

Fourth, President Obama has enabled an anti-Christian agenda unlike any former president by revising America’s religious history, minimizing the role of religion today, passing secular-progressive legislation and turning a blind eye to issues like atheists’ lawsuit to remove the national motto (“In God We Trust”) off of the walls of the new Capitol Visitors Center in Washington, D.C., or the ACLU’s disposal of Veteran memorial crosses in the Mojave Desert and at Mount Soledad. Every time President Obama has had an opportunity to stand for Christianity in any way, he has not only denied it but disdained it.

A grave manifestation is Obamacare’s incorporation to use federal funds to pay for abortion and thereby force people of conscience who are pro-life to pay for the terminations of life in the womb across the country. (What a tragic piece of legislation to pass in the shadow of the day when we celebrate the birth of the world’s savior, Jesus Christ.)

What President Obama, like many other liberal politicians, needs is a paradigm shift – a new way of seeing America, which is really an old way. It’s the way our founders viewed America, and it incorporates a good ol’ fashioned Christmas proclamation of Christ’s birth. That America is the one I outline in my new (January 2010) paperback expansion of my New York Times best-seller, “Black Belt Patriotism,” which is ironically the same Christmas gift I’m sending to the president!

And there is one gift that I propose the president give this nation. Since Obama prides himself on being the technological president, in lieu of his Christmas proclamation this year, I suggest that he just send out across the nation the online link to a YouTube video that I had posted under the title, “Ronald Reagan Christmas Address (12/23/81).”

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=119611

1992: Clinton-Gore

In light of Senator Harry Reid implying that the Republican party defended slavery, I’m republishing my review of Wrong On Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, by Bruce Bartlett:

“[V]irtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat.”

On December 5, 2002, Republican senator Trent Lott toasted 100-year-old Republican senator Strom Thurmond, a former segregationist, at a private birthday party, saying that if the rest of the country had voted for Thurmond for president as he had (Thurmond ran in 1948 as a Dixiecrat), “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”

About a year and a half later, on the Senate floor (and on taxpayers’ time), Democrat Chris Dodd said that Democrat Robert Byrd (who said on cable TV a few years earlier that he’d seen a lot of “white niggers” in his time), a former segregationist and KKK recruiter, would have been “a great senator” during America’s founding, crafting of the Constitution, and the Civil War.

The backlash against Lott was fierce. He apologized and groveled on Black Entertainment Television (BET) but was eventually drummed out of his leadership post. The backlash against Dodd? Non-existent. He neither prostrated himself before the PC gods nor played the fool on BET.

This double standard was the result of a long distorted history of both parties. The Democrats, seen as the civil rights party, supported slavery, opposed civil rights legislation, instituted the “Black Codes,” and created the Jim Crow system. The Republican Party, in contrast, was founded in opposition to slavery, and supported post-Civil War and Civil Rights Movement-era legislation.

“All of the racism that we associate with [the southern] region of the country originated with and was enforced by elected Democrats,” writes Bruce Bartlett, a former domestic policy advisor to President Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official under President George H.W. Bush. In Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, Bartlett goes deep into the history of the Democratic Party and attempts to set the record straight.

Bartlett discusses the motivations of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson to maintain slavery and how Andrew Johnson (whom the author says was “a Democrat his whole life”) tried to block post-Civil War legislation designed to protect newly freed slaves. He includes obscure figures like Senator Benjamin Tillman from South Carolina, whose “consistent theme…was that black men had some sort of compulsion to mate with white women,” and Senator Theodore Bilbo from Mississippi, whose “permanent resolution of the race problem” in 1938 was to send blacks back to Africa and/or create a 49th state for them “somewhere in the West.”

Woodrow Wilson, a liberal who implemented progressive reforms while in office, also instituted racial segregation throughout the federal government. And Bartlett notes that Wilson’s attorney general “did far more to repress free speech and political freedom” than Senator Joe McCarthy, a Republican, ever attempted. But when was the last time Hollywood made a movie about A. Mitchell Palmer?

Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had a “reputation for being a progressive on the race issue,” wasn’t much better on civil rights. He appointed a Klan member to the Supreme Court and ordered the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during WWII.

Republican Dwight Eisenhower, “conventionally portrayed as having done nothing for blacks during his eight years,” passed civil rights bills in 1957 (the first since Reconstruction) and 1960. Eisenhower also sent federal troops to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Bartlett praises Democrat Harry Truman for signing an executive order establishing a presidential committee on civil rights, an unpopular move in the party, but spares none for President John F. Kennedy, who receives far more credit on civil rights than he deserves. Kennedy did nothing substantive on civil rights, contends Bartlett, and what he did do was largely symbolic as he tried to avoid antagonizing Southern Democrats.

He credits President Lyndon B. Johnson for “finally repudiating both his own segregationist past and the Democratic Party’s” in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination.

And what about President Richard M. Nixon’s so-called Southern strategy? Bartlett calls it a myth. There was no strategy “to carry racist votes through coded messages about crime and welfare, as is often alleged.” During his campaign in 1968, Nixon emphasized his support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and picked Spiro Agnew as his vice president, a man reputed to be strong on civil rights.

The shift in Southern voting patterns from Democratic to Republican had to have been about race, right? According to Bartlett, economic changes in the South were the primary factor. During the Democrats’ political reign, the South had been the poorest region. As the South’s wealth increased, southerners became receptive to Republican messages of low taxes and small government.

People tend to forget that Nixon pushed to desegregate schools, denying federal aid to segregated school districts. “Just one month into his presidency,” Bartlett writes, “any idea that Nixon was pursuing a Southern strategy had been thoroughly discredited.”

Unfortunately, Nixon also implemented government race preferences.

Bartlett’s meticulously researched Wrong on Race concludes with suggestions on how Republicans can reach out to black voters, including connecting through immigration policy and this stunner: getting behind the idea of slavery reparations. Bartlett tries to make the case on legal, public policy, and political grounds.

If reaching out to black voters has to involve reparations race pandering, don’t bother. (Besides, it wouldn’t work, anyway.) Despite that shocker at the end, Wrong on Race provides ammunition for Republicans fed up with being called racists

http://lashawnbarber.com/archives/2009/12/08/harry-reid-forgets-democrats-history/

What’s better than a dad? A superhero dad. And, yes, my friends, they do exist. Look no further than John Wesley Shipp. Not only did he play a bonafide masked crusader in The Flash as, um, The Flash but he was also the most kick ass dad Capeside ever had on Dawson’s Creek.

Shipp and I discussed Mitch’s most memorable scenes, the heyday of soap operas and his independent film work.

TeenDramaWhore: What was it like living and filming in Wilmington? It’s so far from Los Angeles where most things are filmed.

John Wesley Shipp: You know, it’s funny. Not just in terms of where to work but at different points in my career when I’ve really wanted to have an experience, I’ve noticed that if I really hold it in my mind, the experience will present itself. Right before Dawson’s happened, I was thinking, you know, I’m sick of living in L.A., the land of perpetual glare. I sure would like to do a series somewhere that had seasons. I’m from the Southeast, so close to my family, which is all in Atlanta, would be nice. Not a series like The Flash, where I’m killing myself every day, practically opening a vein with each episode. But something that had some interest and was cool. Dawson’s Creek presented itself so it’s kind of what I asked for. At least in the beginning, the parents had vital storylines. Of course, they were subsidiary but they were independent and intersecting with what the kids were experiencing. That was fun. It was fun for a couple of years and then it was fun again at the very end. But in terms of working in Wilmington, Wilmington’s a cool town. I love the fact that the water–which Dawson’s Creek used very effectively–was almost a character in the series. It was very effectively used. It’s very much a part of the landscape. And the town is sort of like traditional, small town, historical society, Southeastern coastal town meets Hollywood. And then there’s the beach culture. On one side, it’s all new, the Outer Banks, cool places, houses to rent, condos. The other side, which is on the Cape Fear River, is older, historical. They had downtown candlelit carriage rides to view the houses that had been restored. There’s a river culture. There’s even a little sophistication in it. They had this wild club there for a while. They have cool cigar bars and eateries and restaurants down on the river. So I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot. I also think that given the fact that the show exploded the way it did and we had such a young cast–and I know it was a pain in the ass for them being separated as the years went on–I think the production probably benefited from the fact that we weren’t in L.A. or we weren’t in the fastest-track place, because those kids became international stars overnight. Even as intelligent and well-intentioned as they were, it probably would’ve been very heady stuff for them had we been, say, in L.A.

TDW: Let’s throw New York into the mix, because you filmed in New York City, too, when you were on Guiding Light.

Shipp: Yeah, I lived in New York City for 14 years. I love New York City. I started my career there and I had my first success there. When I was living there, I was living there the way you’d want to live there. I had a great apartment on the Upper West Side overlooking the river and I had a house on six-and-a-half acres in Woodstock to go to on the weekends. So that kind of was the ideal way to live in New York. Then I went back in 1992 for a year when I did Dancing with Lughnasa on Broadway and a stint on All My Children. I don’t know if it was my youth or my success that I remember fondly or if it’s entirely New York but I’m actually wanting to move back there. L.A. can be very oppressive. There’s many opportunities about L.A.; I don’t want to be a whiner about it. But it is a one-industry town and everyone is in the motion picture industry. Everyone has a script in tow and everyone is an actor and everyone is a producer and everyone is on the hustle, getting this project made–you know what I mean? It can be a bit mind-numbing. Plus all that sun. New York is, as they call it, the great teeming metropolis. It’s teeming with life. Everybody does something different and nobody is particularly impressed with what you do because everybody is so busy carving out a piece of the rock themselves, a piece of that island for themselves. It’s just such a melting pot and it’s exciting. You walk out onto those streets and you’re alive. So many different people from so many different worlds. I think for an artist or an actor, it’s probably much healthier creatively to live in New York than L.A. But I’ll only speak for myself.

TDW: If you came back to New York City, would you want to do Broadway again or another soap? One of the ones that’s still here, anyway.

Shipp: I don’t know about daytime. Daytime seems to be in a pretty tough spot at the moment. I wonder, and I’ve heard speculation, about whether there will be any daytime dramas left in 5-7 years. Certainly I would like to do theater. I’m attached right now to the production of a little play with the Firebone Theatre Company called Song of the Bow. I’m attached to that and they’re looking at production next September. I’m also, after our phone interview, talking to a producer from Atlanta. He’s actually in New York right now checking out theater space. They’re taking the play from Atlanta to New York in January and he’s talking to me about the possibility of whether it would be a good fit for me. I would love that. I would love going back to New York doing a play. I think it would be the best thing for me right now so we’ll see. We’ll see if it holds true that what I hold in my mind happens. Of course, first choice, I’d really like to do an interesting series in New York because (whispers) that’s a lot more money. We’ll see what happens.

TDW: What was your reaction when you found out Guiding Light was going off the air after 72 years?

Shipp: Well, the Guiding Light I knew, from everything I had heard, no longer existed. They weren’t shooting in a studio anymore. It was practically students with handheld cameras in driveways.

TDW: That was very much my understanding of it as well, from what I’ve read and from watching it.

Shipp: I would watch it. It would be on at the gym and I’d look up. I just thought the production values had flipped. I was at a Guiding Light Emmy party at Krista Tesreau’s on August 29 in L.A. I have some pictures up from that party on my Facebook page. It seemed like ancient history. I left that show, what, 25 years ago? A quarter of a century. It was exciting. Guiding Light was a great time and it was a great time to be in daytime. That and when I went over and did the story on As The World Turns with Julianne Moore and Steven Weber. It was a time when the youth explosion, the numbers, the ratings were way up from what they had ever been before. As a consequence, the networks and Proctor & Gamble were putting money in. I went to the Spanish Islands on location. I went to St. Croix on location. Of course we also went more regionally. I don’t think they did even local locations anymore. We went up to Connecticut, Kent Falls, where we did the whole Laurel Falls Kelly-Morgan wedding and story. It was an exciting time. If you were going to do daytime, the early to mid-80s was the time to do it. I was very fortunate to work for Douglas Marland on both Guiding Light and As The World Turns. I had the best of the best in my daytime experience.

TDW: So if that was so wonderful, what 10-15 years later made you switch not only to primetime but a teen drama?

Shipp: It was what was offered. I mean, I had been through The Flash and that was disappointing in many ways. It was handled so badly by the network and that’s not just my opinion. That’s the network’s opinion. We had a number of things going against us for that show, even though we were a critical hit and the industry really dug us. But we had a network that had the oldest demographic so all of our in-house advertising fell on deaf ears. Plus we debuted in the fall and then we were off for baseball because CBS had the World Series that year. So we went on and off then we went back on. Then the Gulf War broke out. Then we went back on and George H.W. Bush threw up in Japan so we were preempted again. Then they moved our night. So it was impossible to find an audience, although it’s doing well now on DVD. It was released in 2006. So after that I went back to New York and did the play Dancing at Lughnasa on Broadway and a series of guest shots and TV movies and things like that. And then Dawson’s Creek presented itself. The interesting thing about that is they had already shot the 20-minute pilot presentation. I believe at the time they were auditioning for Mitch, I was in Moab, Utah with David Carradine, Lee Majors, Cathy Lee Crosby and Michelle Greene doing a movie called the Lost Treasure of Dos Santos. What a cast, huh? It was a riot. But, anyway, then I heard about this project. They were deciding to go in a different direction with the father and they sent me the pilot presentation. If you can think back to before Dawson’s Creek exploded on TV–and as a result of it, so many spin-offs and so many teen dramas and so much saturation and copy-cat shows to the point where it became something of a cultural joke almost–if you think back before Dawson’s Creek, there was nothing like it. I mean, yeah, you had Beverly Hills 90210 but it was completely different in tone. The kids were beautiful and–ours were, too–but theirs were popular and sexy and with it and hip, slick and cool and, let’s face it, didn’t have the brain power of our characters. What was interesting about Dawson’s is that it was not slick. The kids were not hip, slick and cool. They were a little bit on the outside. Joey Potter [Katie Holmes], that whole story–not exactly your typical teen queen there with the problems in her family. Pacey Witter’s [Joshua Jackson] father being a drunk. And that Michelle Williams [Jen] character being a real outcast at the beginning. And even Dawson [James Van Der Beek], his mom cheating on his dad and experimenting with an open relationship. There really was nothing like it. And, also, I noticed the language that these kids were using. I thought, wow! We were even criticized for that. We’re writing up to the youth audience; we’re not writing down to them. Why would you criticize that? Isn’t that a good thing? You mean the dialogue is too smart? That’s a criticism? But, anyway, how did I come to do it–I didn’t really look it as a teen drama. Now, when [creator] Kevin Williamson left the show [between seasons 2 and 3] and it became more and more of that and the parents were increasingly de-emphasized, that led to my leaving. At the end of the four seasons and the kids were going to be going to college, I saw the handwriting on the wall. We would be standing in the background with Lily and waving at Parents Day and I really had no interest in doing that. So when they wanted to renegotiate our contact, I set my price really high. Then they started production on the fifth season and two weeks into production, the WB shut them down because they had no story and that’s when Paul Stupin came to me in L.A. and said if we gave you the money you were asking, would you come back and kill the character? I kind of budged my heart for a minute but I have to tell you, it was a great decision. It was the perfect time to leave Dawson’s Creek. I did indeed get two beautiful episodes that made me feel like the previous four years had been about something. You know what I mean?

TDW: Yes. Those episodes [5.03, Capeside Revisited & 5.04, The Long Goodbye] are just incredibly moving. For a show that was, at times, a lot about sadness, those really stand out as sadder moments and turning points for Dawson, his mom, for the way that it affected his relationship with Joey. We got that in that episode after Mitch’s death. We see how his death has affected everyone as there’s those flashbacks or re-imaginings of Mitch with each of the characters.

Shipp: And imagine for me–what a sendoff?! And what a tribute to Mitch. I mean, I really got to tie up each relationship. I got a retrospective of what Mitch had been and, as you say, what he had meant to everyone and went out on a real high note. It worked out really well for me.

TDW: The other scene [in episode 2.05, Full Moon Rising] that stands out in my mind–and I was talking about it to someone just a few weeks ago; they were watching the series for the first time–was the scene where you’re in the kitchen with Dawson and he’s kind of confronting Mitch about having an open marriage and Mitch kind of breaks down and says, you know, “I was never taught what to do if my wife had an affair.” And the way that you just delivered that line was just heartbreaking.

Shipp: Honey, thank you so much. I loved that. Kevin Williamson wrote that episode. I didn’t even have to act it, you know what I mean? Just the idea of this man and those words. You can barely even say them. I think I even heard you choke up trying to say them.

TDW: Yeah, it’s true.

Shipp: “My dad taught me how to do this, he taught me had to do that but he never taught me what to do if my wife cheated on me. I never knew to ask.” I mean, I can barely say those lines now. So beautifully written and so incredibly vulnerable, particularly for a male character on television. I love that scene. I love that episode.

TDW: Did you keep up with the show or its storylines after you left?

Shipp: Not at all. I never saw it after I left. And it’s not that I sat down and made a conscious decision and it’s not that I had a resentment about the way things went down, because it was totally a collaboration. They needed something from me and I wanted something from them and we both got it. But, having said that, when you’re such an integral part of a family–and that’s what you become and it’s also an impact of being in Wilmington because we only really had each other. So on the weekends, you’ll be going out on boats and going out to Masonboro Island, we’d throw the football around, ride around on wave runners. We did everything together so it was very much a family and to know that your family was going on without you, it was too sad for me. I really had to make a clean break. It’s interesting. They had asked me to come back recently. AFI–was it in AFI?

TDW: The Paley Center. They had the panel.

Shipp: They asked me to come and be a part of it but I couldn’t do it. I think James did it and Meredith [Monroe, Andie].

TDW: Yep. It was James, Meredith, Kevin, Paul Stupin and Busy Philipps [Audrey].

Shipp: They had actually asked me to do it and I wish I could’ve. That would’ve made me feel like a part–it would’ve completed something for me to be able to do it. But I’ve been up in San Jose. I’ve been very busy and I just got back from doing an independent film in Ohio that I’m very excited about and had another, a comedy with Jodie Sweetin, play to really good notices at two film festivals, one in Wilmington.  And another film I had premiered in New Orleans at the New Orleans Film Festival in the last several months so, you know, I’ve been busy. But one thing James had said–they said something about the death of his father and he said “I was really sad because I wouldn’t get to see John anymore” and that’s the way it was. I was literally killed off. When you leave a show, you leave a show. And it was accentuated by the fact that we were sequestered in Wilmington. So, no, I never saw an episode after I left.

TDW: Well, I can tell you that, in the series finale, Gale [Mary-Margaret Humes] actually remarried.

Shipp: Yeah, I knew that because I keep in touch with Mary-Margaret. But do you know that I just found out–and I mean a couple of months ago–that Jen died, right?

TDW: Yes.

Shipp: I just found that out, like two months ago.

TDW: If you have the time, I really recommend picking up the complete series and watching the last two seasons. The emotion that we talked about earlier was there for Jen’s and maybe that goes back to the fact that Kevin Williamson returned for the series finale after he had been gone for so long. You really had his voice, his emotion and his rawness that he would put into things.

Shipp: I’ll tell you, those are good words to describe it. It seemed to me that–this goes back to the pilot presentation when I first watched it–this had a sound and a look and a feel that was unlike anything that was on television. It’s difficult now to imagine as there’s been so many copy-cats and spin-offs and it’s been run into the ground. There was a rawness amidst the sophistication. There was a bumpiness, a sense of dis-ease about the emotional lives. And also I always felt that Kevin really was Dawson, I think. I haven’t had this discussion with him. I could be wrong. But I thought we were seeing all of this life on the creek through the eyes of Dawson, which were Kevin Williamson’s eyes. I felt for James after Kevin left because I really felt that Kevin is the only one that really gets Dawson and I’m sure that was difficult for James after Kevin left. It was much easier to write for Pacey, much easier to write for Joey. To a lesser degree I think it was easier to write for Jen. I don’t really think they quite knew–they experimented with different things. But it was easier to write for Pacey and Joey. But the more awkward unique perspective of a Dawson was Kevin’s voice. I mean, my god, Greg Berlanti is a wonderful writer and oh, god, the man–I just blanked on his name–who wrote my last two episodes was just brilliant and some of the best stuff I had. But I do feel the show suffered from Kevin’s awkwardness and the lack of the Kevin’s awkwardness. There was something really awkward in the writing of Dawson that Kevin really got that we missed after he left.

TDW: Going back to you and your storylines, did you think the show gave a realistic portrayal of parent-child and husband-wife relationships?

Shipp: I don’t know about realism. I think realism is overrated. I would say it gave an interesting perspective. One thing I will say is with the explosion of information with the Internet and the sophistication of kids–I mean, my nine-year-old niece and twelve-year-old nephew have their computers in school and their this and their that and they’re so much more aware of the world and what’s going on–that I sort of think that the parents, adults, have a much wider ranger of possibilities. They’re not locked into authoritarian roles in modern society. In other words, in the 40s and 50s you started wearing suits and you got a corporate job and the dad was the head of the house and the mother was the nurturer and the father was the provider and everybody knew what their roles were and everybody got old very soon. I sort of think after the 60s and 70s and all that, and certainly today, there’s a much wider range of possibilities and, in a sense, the kids are growing up faster and the parents aren’t growing up as fast, getting old as fast. So they’re meeting in the middle. Does that make sense? I know what I’m trying to say. It’s that consequently you have a lot of more options. What I enjoyed was when Kevin would turn the–and he did it many times–he would turn the father-son relationship on its head. Another thing we were criticized for. I read things saying what kind of parents were these, what kind of role models, blah, blah, blah. But what I enjoyed was the intentional flip-flopping, the parent becomes the child and the child becomes the parent. I think that was interesting writing. Is it realistic? I don’t know. Again, I think realism is overrated. If I want realism, I don’t have to ever turn on the TV. I just live my life. But I think it has to be true but it doesn’t have to necessarily be real if there’s a sense of truth in it, and I think there was. I was tickled to death that Dawson goes out on his first date and I’m more comfortable talking about it than he is. I tell him, “Have fun, play safe.” And he’s all “For chrissake, dad!”  You know, coming in and finding his parents making love on the coffee table, he’s totally grossed out and disgusted by that but I thought that was great. I loved that. It certainly was more fun for me as an actor than if I had to come in and be “the dad,” you know what I mean? I mean, who was Mitch? What did he do for a living? Who was this goofy, kind of lovable, sensitive, lost character? There was a certain wisdom that he had, simple wisdom. Certainly he wasn’t the stereotypical patriarch of the family and I was glad ‘cause that would’ve been boring as hell.

TDW: Are you recognized for the role at all when you walk down the street?

Shipp: Oh, yeah. Constantly. You know what I’m most amazed about? And my mom has picked up on this, too. The amount of times I get recognized for Guiding Light. I wouldn’t even recognize myself from Guiding Light! But the two things I get recognized the most for are, of course, Dawson’s Creek and The Flash.

TDW: Are you back in touch with any of the Dawson’s Creek cast or crew?

Shipp: Yeah. I never was out of touch with some of the people. Mary-Margaret and I, in fact, our friendship if anything has grown deeper since the show. We’re very close. We’re constantly in touch and she kind of plays the mom role and gets the gang together every now and then. I haven’t talked to Katie in years but she and I have messaged. She sent a message through an agent at the premiere of a movie but she’s got her own thing going on now and that’s consuming her. I’ve actually seen Meredith several times and her husband. Michelle, of course, has been in New York. The person I’ve most consistently been with–and I keep up with everybody through her–is Mary-Margaret.

TDW: One of the films–I think you already mentioned it–that you’ve been working on is Port City.

Shipp: Yeah, that was the comedy with Jodie Sweetin at the festival in Wilmington.

TDW: Well, coincidentally, that also stars Matthew Laurance and Barabra Alyn Woods, who also played parents on teen dramas.

Shipp: Oh, yeah.

TDW: Matthew was on 90210 [as Mel] and Barbara was on One Tree Hill [as Deb].

Shipp: It’s like, where do teen drama parents go to die? Port City. (laughs) And then this last film that I did–I just got back a couple of weeks ago from Ohio where we filmed it–was a company out of Chicago called Glass City Films. It’s a wonderful script called Separation Anxiety, in which a young man either falls to his death accidentally from an icy dam or commits suicide and we don’t know which. His two best friends, one female and one male–there’s also some sexual tension there that we find out about–and his father, who is me, spend the movie trying to make sense out of his death based on what we need to believe. Interestingly enough, the father needed to believe it was suicide, which I immediately found interesting. He saw his son as kind of a drifter, where his life was just sort of a series of accidents. It was intolerable for him to think that at the end of his life, it was just one more accident. He needed to believe that it was an intentional act that he set out to accomplish and accomplished. Now isn’t that an interesting perspective? That’s not something I’ve ever seen, where his father needs to believe his son committed suicide. We fight it out, the three of us–me and the two best friends. Most of my scenes are with the girl who–that’s a complicated relationship so I won’t go into it but it’s more than just best buddies with her and my son. We spend a lot of time hashing and thrashing that out and what we need to believe and finally come to an accommodation where I’m able to go bury my son. It was a good group of people, a talented crew and cast. I can’t wait to see it put together.

TDW: Where we can we actually see you next? Is Port City going to get a wide release or is it just doing festivals?

Shipp: I don’t know. Karma Police, which debuted at the Dallas Film Festival the year before last, is out on DVD and on I think–I can’t keep up with these sites–Blockbuster Online or Netflix, so I know it’s out there. Grotesque, my little short film that I’m so proud of, we banged out in New Orleans last year in about a week. I play a priest with a dubious past. That’s online and the trailer for that is in my Facebook videos and there’s a link to the actual 29-minute version. And then Separation Anxiety will also do the festival market.

TDW: Do you like the festivals better than a major motion picture that’s in theaters everywhere?

Shipp: No. I would rather it be straight to theaters. Again, it’s a matter of what’s offered. I will say one thing–and it’s not just my particular insight–but there’s a lot more creative freedom the less money there is riding on a project, you know what I mean? The more money, the more hands in the pie. The more sets of suits that have their handprints on the script and the edit and the this and the that, the more of a business it is. I understand that. It’s wonderful and spontaneous and creative working in an independent film atmosphere but make no mistake: I would not turn down an A film that would be set for a major release.

TDW: I hope to see you in one soon! And I’d really like to see Port City.

Shipp: You know, it’s funny. I was kind of worried about it because it’s sort of a screwball comedy and my character’s really a jerk, a goofy filthy jerk and that’s not necessarily been my trademark but all the feedback I’ve gotten is “Wow! What a great departure! You should do more comedy!,” which my brother has been telling me for years because he knows how innately ridiculous I am. But I’ve managed to shield the rest of the world from that.

TDW: Hopefully not for long!

Shipp: I’ve actually taken off the last year, for all intents and purposes. Those projects that I mentioned came to me of their own volition. I’ve not been interviewing. I’ve not been auditioning. My dad came up to San Jose to pastor a new liberal church out here that’s been facing some difficulty and then he had heart surgery. Well, I came up to San Jose and they ended up losing their music director and my background is music. I was an opera major at Indiana University in Bloomington before switching my major to theater and I’ve studied keyboards since the age of 5 so I grew up with music of the church and for the last year, that’s been my primary occupation–rediscovering my love of music and my spirituality in a very inclusive and liberal atmosphere. It’s been great for me being of service to my parents, who are now back in Atlanta. My dad’s doing fine. And I agreed to stay on at the church through Christmas, the Christmas Eve service. So I have two more Sundays to plan musically and then I’ll be flying to Atlanta to be with my family and probably re-engage my career full-time beginning in February.

TDW: Mary-Beth Peil was an opera major as well.

Shipp: Yep. She has a glorious voice. A wonderful woman. People who only knew who her from Dawson’s Creek have no idea who that woman is.

TDW: I interviewed her, via e-mail actually, last month and I would’ve loved to hear her real voice because I know her Grams voice isn’t actually hers.

Shipp: No, she’s young and sexy and funny. You just wouldn’t know her with her hair down and all that. And she tends to be play those severe, more matronly parts because she’s good at it. She’s on a series now, isn’t she?

TDW: Yes, The Good Wife with Julianna Margulies.

Shipp: Right.

TDW: Alright, well, I’m glad we were finally able to connect.

Shipp: My pleasure, Shari. It’s been great talking to you.

Come back next week for another exclusive interview!

TDW Interview Index

 JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri (Press Release) – Matt J. Whitworth, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced that a Columbia, Missouri, man pleaded guilty in federal court Wednesday to illegally transferring funds to Iraq in violation of federal sanctions.

Ahmad Mustafa, 55, of Columbia, a citizen of Iraq and a lawful permanent resident alien of the United States, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Nanette K. Laughrey Wednesday afternoon to the charge contained in a Jan. 16, 2008, federal indictment. That indictment charges a charitable organization and six individuals, including a former member of the United States House of Representatives, with violating various laws, including federal economic sanctions, money laundering, theft of public money, impairing and impeding the Internal Revenue Service, prohibited transactions with a specially designated global terrorist, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice.

 “Today’s conviction underscores the commitment by the Department of Justice to uphold economic sanctions imposed in accordance with the President’s emergency powers,” Whitworth said. “As a matter of national security, we take seriously any violation of these federal sanctions and will prosecute those who engage in this illegal conduct.”

Mustafa worked as a fund-raiser for Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA), an Islamic charitable organization that was headquartered in Columbia, Mo. (formerly known as the Islamic African Relief Agency-USA). IARA was officially formed in 1985 and closed in October 2004, after being identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as a specially designated global terrorist organization.

On behalf of IARA, Mustafa traveled throughout the United States soliciting charitable contributions. Mustafa concentrated his efforts in raising funds for use in Iraq. Co-defendants then transferred funds to Iraq, the plea agreement says, with the assistance of a Jordanian identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as a specially designated global terrorist.

Further, in 1999, 2000 and 2001, Mustafa traveled to Iraq on IARA business. In early 2001, he visited cities throughout Northern Iraq for several weeks and met with numerous officials to discuss the process of opening an IARA office in Iraq. Among the officials with whom Mustafa met was Hushyar Zibari, who was at the time a leader in the Patriotic Democratic Party of Kurdistan and is currently the foreign minister of Iraq. Mustafa also looked to find a building suitable for an IARA office in the Kurdish provinces of Iraq.

Under the authority granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, President George H.W. Bush issued an executive order on Aug. 2, 1990, which declared a national emergency with respect to Iraq. The Secretary of Treasury issued the Iraqi Sanctions Regulations, which prohibited unauthorized travel to Iraq and unauthorized transfer of money or goods to Iraq by U.S. persons, including lawful permanent resident aliens. Neither IARA nor Mustafa ever received authority from the United States government to travel to Iraq for any purpose, nor to transfer money to Iraq for any purpose.

By pleading guilty today, Mustafa acknowledges that his actions raising funds for Iraq and traveling to Iraq as a representative of IARA, violated the federal sanctions that were then in place, and that IARA had no permission to engage in such activities. Further, on several occasions beginning in 1998, Mustafa arranged to have money sent to his family in Iraq. Mustafa knew that he did not have permission from the United States government to send funds to Iraq for personal reasons, and that his doing so would violate the law.

The factual basis in the plea agreement states that Mustafa did not know IARA had no permission to do business in Iraq. Mustafa learned of this when, after being interviewed by federal agents, he confronted a co-defendant who for the first time admitted to him that IARA had no license to do business in Iraq. Under the terms of Wednesday’s plea agreement, the United States agrees that Mustafa’s criminal offense is limited to making arrangements with others to deliver money to his family in Iraq without a license or permission, rather than his fund-raising activities and participation in IARA business in the United States and Iraq.

 Under federal statutes, Mustafa is subject to a sentence of up to five years in federal prison without parole, plus a fine up to $250,000. A sentencing hearing will be scheduled after the completion of a presentence investigation by the United States Probation Office.

This case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Anthony P. Gonzalez and Steven M. Mohlhenrich from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri, in conjunction with Trial Attorneys Corey J. Smith from the Tax Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and Joseph Moreno from the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, IRS-Criminal Investigation, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. AID-Office of Inspector General.

*
Preceding provided by the U.S. Justice Department

George H. W. Bush who introduced a massive increase of legal immigration in 1990 to dispossess whites of their land is offended that Joe Wilson was disrespectul to a non-white president who was voted into office by non-whites votes George H. W. Bush brought here.

http://rawstory.com/2009/12/bush-offended-wilsons-outburst/

==Excerpt Raw quoting Parade

Don’t fall into ‘trap’ of being anti-Muslim, president warns

George H. W. Bush was “deeply offended” by Republican congressman Joe Wilson’s shout of “You lie!” to President Barack Obama during Obama’s address to Congress in September, and the former one-term president is calling on US politicians to rise to “a certain decorum and civility.”

During an interview with Parade magazine, Bush expressed disappointment with what he sees as a degrading American political debate.

“There has to be a certain decorum and civility,” Bush said, adding that Rep. Wilson’s shout of “You lie!” during the president’s address on health care to a joint session of Congress “smashed” the decorum of Congress. “I thought, ‘How have we gotten here?’”

==

My comment at Raw:

“Don’t fall into ‘trap’ of being anti-Muslim, president warns”  At least he recognizes Obama is a Muslim.  Keep going Joe Wilson and singing the Tea Bagger March of Truth.

==

http://oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/joe-wilson-townhall-moment-obama-you-lie/

http://www.numbersusa.com/text?ID=210

==Excerpt from NumbersUSA

The Immigration Act of 1990 increased the overall ceiling on family-based immigration to 480,000 from 216,000 and, for the first time, included the spouses, minor children and parents of citizens under that ceiling. However, because admissions of spouses, minor children and parents of citizens remained unlimited under the 1990 Act, the act required that a minimum of 226,000 visas be reserved for the family-preference categories. This meant that the ceiling of 480,000 would be breached as soon as admissions of spouses, minor children and parents of citizens surpassed 254,000, which happened in 1993. Both the pre-1990 Act preference system and the 1990 Act system for family-based immigration included “trickle-down” provisions, so that any visas not used by one category of relatives are passed down to the next category and added to that category’s ceiling. The act raised the ceiling on employment-based immigration from 54,000 annually to 140,000. It created a new, permanent lottery program under which immigrant visas are distributed randomly among applicants from countries with low immigrant-admission rates. This lottery program accounts for more than one-third of the 10-year cumulative increase in permanent immigration caused by the Immigration Act of 1990. Finally, the act established a short-term amnesty program to grant legal residence to up to 165,000 spouses and minor children of immigrants who were amnestied under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA).

==

http://oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/population-genetics-island-model-one-way-migration/

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1213928&blobtype=pdf

We investigated various cases of the island model with stochastic migration. If the population is infinite, the immigrants have a fixed gene frequency and the alleles are neutral, the gene frequency on the island converges to that of the immigrants.

==[Brenda Walker]  Excerpt follows

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2009/12/14/in-somalia-stoner-has-a-different-meaning/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+vdareblog+%28VDARE.com%3A+Blog+Articles%29

Bear in mind that Somalis are welcomed to America like few other groups. The State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somalis as refugees in the last 25 years (as calculated by Refugee Resettlement Watch). Somalis are also included in the Diversity Visa lottery; they received 229 slots in 2010, although in 2002, Washington offered a more generous 1,328 visas in that category. (In 2007, a GAO report found that the program had admitted nearly 10,000 from terrorist states.) The 2000 Census counted 35,760 Somali-born persons; however, a CBS news report from this year (FBI Watching Somali Muslims In Minneapolis) put the number in Minneapolis alone at 70,000.

Furthermore, Somalis residing in this country have traveled back to their home country to pursue jihad to kill infidels and purify Islam (e.g. by punishing miscreants). Perhaps some are included among the masked stoners.

==End Excerpt Brenda Walker Vdare

Vdare has a funding drive going on.  They desperately need money.

http://vdare.com/

George H. W. Bush is deeply offended by whites as the majority of this country.  So is George W. Bush.  They have done all they could to erase us.  Show you are offended by their disloyalty by supporting Vdare.

http://oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/generalized-genocide/

“Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor’s own nationals.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Lemkin

Fighting genocide also has at least two phases.

1. Giving money to Vdare.http://vdare.com/
2. Free faxing Congress from your computer at NumbersUSA or Fairus and also supporting them as well. http://www.numbersusa.com/content/action.html.

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The new issue of Parade features some cozy photos of the former President George H.W. Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush at Walker’s Point, their home in Kennebunkport, Maine, shot by Doug Menuez.

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Photos by Doug Menuez.

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Click here to read the accompanying story by David Baldacci, who first met the Bushes a decade ago. An excerpt:

…Our families have spent some memorable times together. Once, my son accidentally locked himself into one of their powder rooms at Walker’s Point, and Mrs. Bush had to ask someone to break a century-old window to get him out. Another time, the former President took me for a ride on his boat, Fidelity III. He said he only had one rule onboard: If he was driving too fast, I should raise my hand. After the seventh time that I was levitated out of my seat by the boat coming fully out of the water, I swallowed my pride and raised my hand. Bush looked at me mischievously, said “Faster?”—and then sped up.

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UPDATE: Doug just emailed me these terrific outtakes from the shoot:

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Thanks, Doug!

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Lindsay Weir boards a bus to hide from her parents that she's really goin' truckin'; image courtesy of jeffzittrain.com

I was talking with my friend and neighbor Rosa-María during Glee’s fall finale about Freaks and Geeks. We were specifically talking about the final episode, “Discos and Dragons,” which she just rewatched. In it, Michiganian teen protagonist Lindsay Weir is loaned a copy of The Grateful Dead’s American Beauty by her hippie high school guidance counselor Jeff Rosso and steps into a larger world.

An album that blew Lindsay's mind; image courtesy of esquire.com

I’m not a Deadhead. For those of you watching Community, main character Jeff Winger’s religion/Paul Rudd analogy in this week’s episode is pretty much exactly how I feel about the band (i.e., we understand the appeal and don’t begrudge it, but also don’t share it). To me, I’ve long wondered why anyone would listen to the Dead when there’s Santana, a peer jam band that was more rhythmically intesting with a better lead guitarist. And before anyone starts mailing me bootlegs, I have also heard American Beauty. My first listen even took place around some pretty optimal conditions. It didn’t take. 

That isn’t to say that I’m not fanatical about other things. For one, I’m a huge Animal Collective fan, who are themselves a bunch of hippies with a rabid fan base. And while I don’t think the two bands sound that much alike, both espouse feel-good truisms like “What do you want me to do, to do for you to see you through?” and “You have your fits I have my fits, but feeling’s good.”

I’m fanatical about this show too. It’s one of my favorite television programs, perhaps of all time, and unlike some of the critically-acclaimed fare of the decade (ex: The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, 30 Rock, The Office, season two of Friday Night Lights, season three of Arrested Development), I don’t think I know anyone who has seen Freaks and Geeks and doesn’t like it. I’m especially fanatical about how much music factors into both the characters’ lives and the tone of the show. For a show set in pre-MTV suburban Michigan, it nails the radio domination of classic rock, the percolation of punk and post-punk, and the general antipathy toward disco. Thus, it makes sense that Lindsay and many of her peers would be into the Dead, as they’re also into The Who, Led Zeppelin, and Rush.

Though a lover of Neil Peart and a skilled disco dancer, Nick Andopolis never got over the death of John Bonham; image courtesy of 2112.net

As an aside, one of Lindsay Weir’s clearest televisual counterpart is not a Deadhead, even though the band was fashionable at the time of her show’s season-long run. Angela Chase, the angsty protagonist of ABC’s ultra-90s’ drama My So-Called Life was given her father’s tickets to a Dead concert in “Father Figures” because he couldn’t make the show. She scalped them out of anger toward her father, who she caught talking to an attractive woman who was not her mother outside their house. She also did it for the chance to talk to her crush Jordan Catalano, who was willing to buy the tickets from her. But it’s also clear that Angela doesn’t get what all the fuss over the band is about, much to the ire and bewilderment of her Deadhead friend Rayanne Graff.

Guess which one of these girls listens to the Dead; image courtesy of galateageorge.com

I think Lindsay becoming a Deadhead is really interesting. Throughout Freaks and Geeks‘ 18-episode run on NBC and the Fox Family Channel, Lindsay worked toward defying expectations. Sometimes, these expectations were put upon her by her peers, whether they be her kid brother Sam and his nerdy friends, the Mathletes she used to be close with as a geeky good girl, or the burnouts she hangs out with throughout the series’ run. Other times, they were put upon her by authority figures, whether they be the concerned faculty and staff at William McKinley High School or her parents, who feared this bright girl was now running with a bad crowd.

But the best moments for me of this very special show were when she defied her own expectations, which were already considerable. She does it when dumping freak Nick Andopolis, an otherwise nice boy who was completely wrong for her, and afterwards when she tries to be his friend. She does it when she rejoins the Mathletes only to quit again after realizing that she didn’t get any joy out of it. She does it when she tries pot for the first time, only to discover that she really doesn’t like it. She does it when she sticks up for her friend Kim Kelly in English class when they both dismiss Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, to the disdain of their pretentious teacher. She does it to dazzling effect when promoting her family’s sporting goods shop while sticking it to Vice President George H.W. Bush and his lackeys for throwing out the original question she was going to ask him during his visit to her school.

She does it here too. Originally skeptical of the Dead’s profundity, she gets a gentle nudge from a stoner couple at her school (one of whom is played by Samaire Armstrong, who I enjoyed on The O.C. as Seth Cohen’s music geek girlfriend Anna and who had an enviable platinum blonde pixie cut with hot pink roots in the Lindsay Lohan vehicle Just My Luck). When Lindsay gets the record home, she slowly absorbs the music and ends up “getting it,” whirling around exhuberantly in her room.

The guides on Lindsay's quest; image courtesy of sepinwall.blogspot.com (if interested in Alan Sepinwall's appraisal of the finale, click on the image)

As an aside, kudos to actress Linda Cardellini for being able to make what could be an otherwise cheesy scene believeable.

Discovering the Dead couldn’t come at a better time for Lindsay. As her junior year winds to a close, she finds out that she’s been selected to participate at a state-wide academic summit at the University of Michigan. The idea of spending two weeks of summer vacation participating in competitive seminars and hobnobbing with her supposed intellectual peers sounds like a flattering offer but a pointless exercise to her (it sounds like little more than résumé padding to me, though I probably would’ve gone if offered it at that age).

However, the idea of following the Dead from Texas to Colorado with her Deadhead friends and Kim sounds like an ideal way to spend part of her summer vacation. So she decides to skip out on the symposium, opting instead to go truckin’.

These girls have other summer plans; image courtesy of thelipster.com

And while I have no doubt that Lindsay ends up going to a good college anyway, I’d imagine that those two weeks did more to shape her as a young woman than battling wits with a bunch of eggheads about great literary and philosophic work ever could. She’s probably the kind of person UC-Santa Cruz are looking for to manage their Grateful Dead collection. At the very least, I’m sure she’s got some items to donate.

During the de-colonization period of the post-WWII era and the subsequent blame game that characterized the cultures of victimhood to which we routinely have the luxury or torture of hearing, it became common parlance for the British and the Roman Catholic Church to be fingered as culpable for each and every act of colonial evil that had ever taken place in the modern history of mankind.  Academics within Western intelligentisia such as Noam Chomsky have backed the theories of exploitation to the hilt such that Venezuela’s Chavez was inspired enough to give Obama a copy of Chomsky’s published work. Diplomats customarily have to show an attentive ear of empathy (or occasionally something much more accomodative than that) as seen in Hillary Clinton’s reminding an audience in Botswana that they were at least fortunate enough to discover diamonds after the departure of the Brits. Still, the Brits are lambasted continuously throughout various Continents and sub-Continents for such actions as using MI-6 as well as the CIA to overthrow an elected Iranian leader in the early 1950s and re-drawing the boundary lines of today’s Middle East according to their own colonial preferences.

It nevertheless at times becomes tiresome, exhausting, and draining for Western leaders as they listen to windbaggery going on ad nauseam about how all the ills for the developing world stem from exploitative actions taken by the West during imperial wars of prior centuries. This became extremely apparent when POTUS had to field a question in Mexico from a reporter regarding this year’s military coup d’etat in Honduras. The journalist asked the President what is the responsibility of the US to re-install the deposed Honduran President because the US is in fact to blame in her mind that is in whole and not in part for both the former minister’s accession to and then removal from office as well as being responsible for Central American misery and under-development at large.

Stateside observers thus feel compelled to decry the lambasting from the world ex-US as a combination of what some regard as European envy, anti-Americanism, and an overall trans-Atlantic clash of superiority complexes exemplified by the statement from Europe during WWII that Americans are “overpaid,  overworked, over-sexed, and over here.” Going through London and various pockets of Western Europe from 2003 to 2008 was not an exercise in torture due to slowness or inefficiencies; it is a painful exercise resultant from the verbal assaults and discrimination that an American undergoes as a direct consequence of Republican Neorealism policies causing increases rather than decreases in anti-Americanism.   

The journo’s query had such a pure audacity and intellectual arrogance to it that it prompted a sharp rebuke from POTUS who directly told the interrogator that the developing world simply “cannot have it both ways” in perpetuating an entitlement-oriented state of mind whilst simultaneously demanding not only post-colonial reparations but also apologies for the alleged maleovelence of past Western colonialism. POTUS implied that he was “tired” of hearing the incessant whining every place he visited as the windbaggery  constitutes a veritable ghetto mentality which deifies the politics of grievance. Had the exchange taken place on the internet, one has to wonder whether or not another reply to the reporter may have simply been the acronym of STFU.

His comments in Mexico took place only a short time after he had to endure an almost ninety minute monologue and lecture from Putin who wove a long, long yarn under the identical thesis that the US had singularly been responsible for everything wrong in the world. More recently, the Chinese Premier delivered to POTUS a similar dissertation concerning US fiscal policy which really begs the intuitive follow-on as to why doesn’t the Premier just call in all the US debt obligations right now since their currency would not have to float at the same time thus giving them a double whammy in the Premier’s and PRC’s favor.

Professor Amy Chua of Yale in her book, World on Fire from a few years ago forecast the rise of the indigenous peoples in South America as part of a larger movement that would envelop the Andean natives revolt against the ruling mestiza minority in Bolivia among other places. Arguments have further surfaced on the Continent that the confiscation of haciendas ostensibly on behalf of the populace is not expropriation in the name of the state but rather reclamation of that which was previously taken by European settlers through the forcible use of black powder and the barrel of a gun. Likewise, in the US, some groups such as La Raza have occasionally spoken of la reconquista as the eventual re-conquest of the American Southwest back to geographic boundaries belonging to nation-states south of the US border.

These movements are known in comparative international legalese as irredentism where territories are re-aligned according to their original ethnic and political definitions prior to European colonization. Aside from what would it be like for the League of the South to get together in a friendly meeting with La Raza, is La Raza implicitly suggesting that a Second American Revolution and a Second US Civil War would lead to another Yugoslavia?

Scholars of international relations and political science are intimately familiar with assertions from the school of Realism that there is no plurality or commonality of mutual interests but rather that there is only the primacy and dominance of the national self-interest propagated into competition against other national and unitary interests of a disorganized global arena. By way of example, Neorealists point to the Chinese being the last holdouts as signatories to many multilateral statements as well as the inadequacies or failures of non-binding international agreements when contrasted against the quick efficacy, albeit wholly disagreable to the world at large, of unilateral action.

Disciples of such world views include Cheney who state that POTUS does not believe in the spreading of a Western system of values including democratization otherwise known as American exceptionalism, the origins of which stretch back to the Graeco-Roman and British Empires. Neorealists such as Charles Krauthammer point to a comment made by POTUS in Strasbourg where POTUS replied to a question regarding American exceptionalism that his belief in the doctrine was one which he held probably to the same extent that the Brits and the Greeks also believed in their own forms of exceptionalism.

Krauthammer implies that the response of POTUS was non-commital and what one would ascribe to a doctrine of moral relativism rather than the moral absolutism of Krauthammer’s like-minded thinkers in the thinning camps of American unipolarity. Krauthammer insinuates that only his concept of exceptionalism is acceptable because the answer expressed by POTUS in the mind of Krauthammer must be rebutted with, “if everyone is exceptional, no one is.” Other conditional clauses from Krauthammer include the doctrinal adherence to the contention that “if America wants stability, it will have to create it.” Primary to that conditionality is the necessity of using the military to create that peace through the waging of war whether it be from a just war or through a constant, forward presence in every theater throughout the globe.

Alternatives to Realism include International Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and an overall less Hobbesian view of man. Cheney’s twisted logic of a false choice implies that anything less than his own extraordinary renditions of Realism amount to the appeasement of a Neville Chamberlain a la Munich 1938 and the failed multilateralism of debating chambers with no teeth for enforcement purposes such as the Wilsonian-inspired League of Nations or the Oslo Accords that get violated and then reneged under Dubya and the Kyoto Protocol to which several countries with some of the largest carbon footprints are not signatories. The counter-argument to Cheney is that while the Persians invented the game of chess, Iran is still being afforded all opportunities through all diplomatic back channels to show for the record that everything was tried in earnest before anything more militaristic takes place.  

Realists felt vindicated in the moral supremacy of their methods both at the end of the Carter years and then again in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their reason for doing so was the failure of detente and arms limitation talks to stop the spread of Communism and the Soviets when various treaties proved difficult to enforce and cheating was rampant as a backdrop against the Brezhnev Doctrine’s military interventionism into the crescent of crisis from Afghanistan all the way down into Angola and beyond. Hence the Reagan Doctrine was able to force the bankruptcy of the U.S.S.R at the expense of trebling the US national debt through an arms race and heightened use of covert action whilst these were all approaches eschewed by the moralizing and single-issue human rights orientation of Carter and Pat Darian at the State Department. Republicans are now conveniently arguing through doublespeak that POTUS needs to focus on human rights, the translation of which can only mean that they want a reincarnation of Carter and a strategy that they themselves would never seek.

Earlier this month, I attended a symposium where one of the panel’s moderators, Ileana Gordon representing her “democracy advocate NGO”, complained very loudly that dissident groups throughout the Middle East were “upset” that the same level of “support” was not flowing in their direction as much as it had been over the past seven years. The normal and customary domain of assistance to foreign dissident groups falls under the purview of the State Department and the CIA among other places but the implications of Gordon’s statement are multi-faceted. Aside from the obvious, a lateral takeaway is that in the case of another large scale attack along the lines of 9/11, the Neorealist opposition will seek to use that as justification for their level of interventionism and a replay in their minds of the Carter years when covert action and black ops were bad words.  

Post-9/11, the Bush Doctrine emerged as the means whereby pre-emptive war would serve as mechanisms for supposedly just wars that were waged to stop weapons proliferation and also spread democracy during the process of a civilizational clash foreseen by the late Professor Huntington fifteen years ago between the West and the Islamic World. At present, the alternative to Realism and Neorealism includes “soft power” and smart power as outlined by the chief architect of Neoliberalism, Professor Joseph Nye. Strangely, the rumor mill has abounded with unconfirmed allegations that Hillary Clinton was not permitted by the Administration to bring Nye onto her team although it was thought of by many to be one of her very early pre-conditions for accepting the appointment to Secretary of State.

Sketches and outlines for an Obama Doctrine of renewed multilateral engagement first came to light in the addresses he made in Cairo and elsewhere throughout that region earlier this year. Furthermore, the combinations of hard, soft, and smart power became that much more visible after Obama’s speech this week before the Nobel Committee. The first third of the speech had the sound of something that one would have attributed to a protege of Dubya and Cheney but substantiating the rules for engagement in a so-called just war and then being even-handed in the acknowledgement of Gitmo’s anathema was not something that one can ever expect to see or hear from the Neorealists. As he wrote it himself rather than an internal staff-based speechwriter, greater color on the Obama  Doctrine became clearer in what several have come to suggest as either pragmatic idealism or idealistic Realism.

Objectionable to the purely economic globalizers but still intrinsic with varying degree to the implementation of foreign policy, whether Neorealist or Neoliberal, is power projection where the military of a Great Power has a constant forward presence almost everywhere at all times such as Britain’s Royal Navy patrolling global waters in the last century. Neorealists of a US-centric, unipolar world in their minds such as Krauthammer’s describe the means to project power as “the ability to maintain a large military establishment capable of projecting power to all corners of the earth.” The slightest deviation and dilution of such a strategy is unacceptable to unthinking Neorealist thought leaders and any point of view not uniformly consistent with their version of reality cannot be tolerated. 

For the Neorealists, this translates into not only the most singular, certain, and over-riding component of all policy, foreign and domestic, but also that a permanent US military presence spread throughout the Middle East and everywhere else as part of a new Hundred Year War in civilizational clash between East and West that defines for them more than even globalization the epochal post-Cold War moment. Globalization is a side order but not the main dish for them.

The primacy of conflict rather than cooperation or global trade thus takes precedence in the minds of all Hobbesian Neorealists. A classic example of such interpretation is found even in a generation that preceded the legacy of Dubya with Jed Babbin, a former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense from the George H.W. Bush years. Despite the fact that Bush 41 spent time in China in an ambassadorial capacity, Babbin has published what he believes to be a serious treatise on…. pending armed conflict with China.

Neorealism thereby posits that there is no effective alternative to the primacy of a unilateral and unipolar stance in the strict context of bilateral relations where all matters are negotiated from the dictatorial position of a highly centralized and unitary executive  authority with civilizational clash being their over-arching driver behind all foreign policy and foreign affairs. A bizzare argumentation of  Krauthammer is that investment in energy-related infrastructure is “intervention” and a ”vast expansion of social services” that serves to “take away from defense spending.”

Therein lies the most outrageous double standard for the incongruencies of Republican Neorealist logic; it is acceptable to dispense and increase that dispensation for all expenditures of borrowed capital towards overseas militarism but it is not at all tolerable or admissible for any efforts to go towards a reformation in crony cartels of insurance companies protected by anti-trust exemptions while crumbling bridges and infrastructure derisively qualify under the misleading sloganeering-derived labels of “misguided industrial policy of central planning” and domestic welfare programs. In other words, despite the appalling and monopolistic inadequacies of unadulterated laissez-faire to the express benefit and sellout of the highest bidder, Republican Neorealism does not have the time of day for not only domestic policy of any kind but also anything at all outside the realm of the Pentagon’s adventurism in foreign lands and that truly is the most fantastically shocking and malignant neglect which Neorealism perpetrates and perpetuates at the expense of the bottom 99%.  

With Cheney, the spouting much less cleverly asserts that there is an obligation to export his own and only his own definition of American exceptionalism but with a Divine Providence-type of special and Godly dispensation to bring said exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny through coercion and force rather than the soft power approaches of the Sunshine Policy and globalization-induced movements where the liberalizing and opening up of markets through the expansion of free trade as first outlined by Adam Smith many centuries ago. It is even moreso out of this world figuratively speaking that a former speechwriter to Walter Mondale such as Krauthammer would take his inspiration to the level of saying that post-Dubya policy of an emerging Obama Doctrine has wilfully “forfeited the mandate from heaven.”

Reflect on that statement for a moment. Krauthammer implies that the singular US policy mandate, non-existent as far as dometic nation-building goes, is the foreign policy imperative and modern day version of the White Man’s Burden from several centuries in the past. Twenty years ago subsequent to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Krauthammer penned a piece entitled somewhere along the lines of, “Universal Dominion: The Path Towards Unipolarity”. It is, however, as a result of all the above that the more recent enunciations of Krauthammer caused his former cohort, Francis Fukuyama, to observe that Charles had become “strangely disconnected from reality.”

Krauthammer goes further to explicate that after saving Europe twice from its own wars and strife, America is “the rarest of geopolitical phenomena, the accidental hegemon, and the reluctant hegemon.” An unwillingness for a continuation of militarism that was so repudiated in the elections of 2006 and 2008 constitutes, in the mind of Krauthammer, constitutes the “demolition of the moral foundation of America.” Chuckie, what are you smokin’? Is it as illegal as the territorial-sovereignty violating aspirations of yesteryear that you wish to revive from a discredited and deceased hinterland of Neorealism unchecked?

In Krauthammer’s hallucinogenic world of American centrality and unipolarity, Asian ascendancy does not count because it is nothing more than a replay of the Japan rising pheonomenon from twenty years ago as Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center were being purchased by the Japanese – - just prior to the popping of the Japanese real estate and stockmarket bubbles culminating in the crash of Japan. Krauthammer opines further that European decline was “inevitable” due to the “civilizational suicide” of self-inflicted world wars that required American rescue whereas American decline is actively “chosen” by the detractors to Krauthammer’s ideology, a legacy of unquantifiable debt bequeathed to the Neoliberal succesors of Neorealist criminality. However, it is Neorealism and the likes of Krauthammer who have accelerated a decline that his philosophy helped to create two times over with statutory conditions satisfied for US federal bankruptcy in 1992 and then again in 2008. 

Meanwhile, the false construct for Cheney is such that anything less than his own dispensation is necessarily declinist by definition and default which he then qualifies as a “post-American” and post-imperial condition that puts the republic at the risk of lowered “readiness” and subject to destruction by imminent threats. Meanwhile, the fallacies of Cheney’s diatribes do remind students of logic to re-examine the definition of a false syllogism. “Socrates is dead. All cats are mortals. Therefore Socrates is a cat.”

The rhetorical technique is used to firstly suppress debate and dissent and didactically leaves the impression that there is no alternative and not even a counter-argument to the one answer by dictat which they proffer through force. At many apparently irreconciliable levels, there can never really be any rapprochement between many econo-globalizers and national security hawks as a body because the former labels the latter as anti-globalizers which leads the hawks to lambast the free marketeers as deliberately weakening defense and counter-terrorist capabilities. Previously, nonetheless, globalizers were happy to accept the dual role of Cold Warrior and free marketeer but now eschew the activism of similarly armed engagement overseas.

What soft power and smart power bring to the table is that while personal piety can be indicative of both the Puritans or the Taliban, the alternative reformation of militancy is the antidote of modernity through exposure to the forces of capitalism and globalization  rather than invasions and occupations. But Krauthammer cannot accept that option because the classical Hobbesian choice, opting between the lesser of two evils or the evil of two lessers, is to select authoritarian absolutism and confrontation over their perceived natural state of complete disorder and utter anarchy in a decidedly unipolar and US-centric world.

Neorealists rebut that newly liberalized export markets are opened up more quickly through force rather than through soft and smart power so the endgame is still the same; the only difference is the methodology deployed to achieve the same outcome. Such an argument is akin to saying that an unwilling rape victim is a more cooperative puta at gunpoint rather than trying to persuade her nicely of the benefits for closer intimacy.      

Neorealism’s warped world of East versus West is where US foreign policy serves as the principled guardian of Western Civilization (although Krauthammer himself is a winner of the “Guardian of Zion” award from a non-US group), whilst contemporaneously spreading democratization through the offense of military tribunals, enemy combatants, invasions, occupations, and the once self-proclaimed but now moribund war on terror. By contrast, the current Administration has removed the phrases of enemy combatant and war on terror from all forms of discourse and policy.

Albeit having partly originated from the British texts of Hobbes and Hedley Bull, Neorealism in an American context more recently found its home in the militant anti-communism of Reaganites converted into neocon Neorealists; and after 1989, with the lack of an enemy, then an enemy must be created and with that, the Long War of James Woolsey. The morphing into militant militarism against the new enemy again seeks to project that forward military presence on a constant basis with an eye towards a permanent footing all across the globe, but most especially the Middle East. With soft power and smart power, however, one doesn’t seek to force feed democratization down someone’s throat; rather, the support for the opposition is first asked and only when requested does it becomes quietly offered through dissident groups who seek changes to their direct overseers in conjunction with the liberalization of previously closed trade markets.   

Vis-a-vis the Arab street, what is the impact of the Long War as both interpreted and persecuted by Neorealists? 

The use of force to coerce change as a means of creating peace through the waging of war also tries to marginalize extremist fringes within the Arab population. However, the strategy shows itself to have backfired in the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as Hamas in the Occupied Territories which includes the world’s biggest concentrations camp of Gaza City. Contrary to the stated objective of pushing out Hezbollah into some area of intellectual purgatory, Neorealism has caused the groups to have widespread, mainstream acceptance throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah refashions itself as a political party with a complex and interdependent structure of elected Members of Parliament, TV stations, media outlets, “charities” alongside groupings of  ”governmental Non Governmental Organizations.”

Likewise in the case of Hamas, they are able to garner more electoral support than Fatah throughout a majority of areas despite its reputational heritage being more militant. Hamas is now the elected government of Palestine despite all the efforts to isolate Hamas as a fringe element. So militancy versus militancy fosters more dischord rather than more of Krauthammer’s version of stability. Thus the extreme which began underground has now integrated itself into the everyday social and institutional fabric of Arab life and the blame game gets more ammunition with all the one-way directional finger pointing from the likes of Putin’s 60 minute monologues concerning Western guilt.  

A Neorealist rebuttal is that an era of asymmetric warfare necessitates a response that is equally or more asymmetric. With Salafi Islam and Wahhabism where the alleged goals are violent jihadism exported globally, Neorealists such as Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes have popularized use of the term, ‘Islamofascism’ as a means to describe the aggressive, combative, hostile. and anti-Western stance taken by devotees of Salafism and separate but similar strains of later Wahhabi interpretations. Using the containment doctrine of preventing the spread of Communism first articulated by George Kennan in the mid to late 1940s, the rehabilitated Cold Warriors of today’s present Neorealists, seek the re-application of Kennan in a Second Cold War.  

Republican Neorealism thereby seeks to supplant all forms of soft and smart power whilst preserving a market that is not free with monopoly-enhancing anti-trust exemptions only granted elsewhere to the sport of American baseball. With a double standard that expands inequities which do not naturally self-correct through leave-it-alone negligence, Neorealism has no problem with off-budget, off-balance sheet appropriations of $3 trillion towards overseas warmongering but domestic nation-building at home is labeled as interventionist and expansionary towards unneeded social services. Neorealists such as Krauthammer will speak oodles of creative destruction and innovation but his addresses are intellectually bereft of the foundational assumptions that drive “innovation economics” which is now an area of focus for Democratic thinkers where Republican thought is nowhere to be found.

In saying that POTUS has assisted in providing comfort to the enemy, former VP Cheney has accused a sitting President of treason, an allegation of which begs the question as to why then Cheney does not therefore seek the prosecution of POTUS in federal court although Cheney himself is perfectly viable as a defendant for the Hague. US Army recruitment is at a thirty-five year high because guys who can’t get an apprenticeship, a living wage or health insurance from a cartel protected by anti-trust exemptions are able to find all of the aforementioned benefits when enlisting in the military. It can only be the incredibly most disturbing inequity of Neorealism that an 18-year old should never become eligible for an apprenticeship and also be denied the mere ability to purchase health insurance from an unregulated cartel no less while unlimited and unfettered misadventurism in global warmongering should be available unconditionally to the whimsical discretion of reticent imperial ambitions.  

Shooter Cheney’s Neorealism brings with it a new Hundred Year War or Long War as so labeled by former DCI James Woolsey while staffed with the fodder of a war machine continuously re-emergent from an American ghetto scene. Furthermore, when various Neorealists respond rhetorically, “What’s wrong with that?” to the question of their New Strategy for Securing the Realm stating that a primary focal point for US foreign policy is to ensure “that Israel is surrounded by democracies” as per the interview that took place between the late Tim Russert and Richard Perle seven years ago, additional inquiries are begged profusely such as earlier this decade when a very well-known former Republican presidential speechwriter asked why is it that the cavalry being sent off into the Middle and Near East are ”kids with names such as Murphy, McAllister, Gonzalez and Leroy Brown” but the war planners are known by the names of Perle, Wolfowitz, Kagan, and Feith?  

Shooter had so many deferments during the Vietnam Conflict that he has never had to serve at all in the armed forces. For the Neorealists to fully appreciate the world as they see it, it can only be done by bringing back the draft and employing a military of conscripts comprised with the privileged sons of syndicated columnists and think tank academics who write of the need for widespread multi-front foreign conflagrations from the air-conditioned comfort of their plush city offices. No deferments, no draft dodgers, and no exceptions would be available for even the most well-to-do with diabetes and other chronic diseases as even they would be sent into the bloodied Hobbesian fields of Republican Neorealism’s chosen wars of a multi-generational, civilizational clash and outright social de-evolution.

Just yesterday we posed the question: Can [Fat] Americans even remember what they had for breakfast? Today we complement that with: Christ, Fat Americans are the most petty, annoying, childish douchebaggery-lovin’ scoundrels on the planet. More than dirty Muslims!

Now, if I were President, I’m guessing lots of people would think I’m an ass for saying such dreadful things about my constituents. Know what people would think if I passed a stimulus bill, escalated troop levels in Afghanistan (like I said I would!) and bowed to emperor of Japan? They’d goddamn want me impeached!

Public Policy Polling has another mind-bending partisan number from its national survey. Right now, 20 percent of Americans “support the impeachment of President Obama for his actions so far.” That number includes 35 percent of Republicans, to only 15 percent of independents and 10 percent of Democrats.

“I’m not clear exactly what ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ they are using to justify that position,” said PPP’s Tom Jensen, “but there may be a certain segment of voters on both the right and the left these days that simply think the President doing things they don’t agree with is grounds for removal from office.”

Oh, you know. High crimes such as apologizing for America’s actions; for suggesting that — perhaps — Americans don’t deserve to die because they can’t afford health insurance; for spending money while we’re in debt. Ack! What a turd!

Seriously, Republicans. Let’s be honest. I know it’s not very sporting to suggest that Obama’s dealing with a shit sandwich because his predecessor was a lying, incompetent puppet-President, or that George W. Bush grew the government by the largest number of people in history, or that Obama’s trying to dig Fat America out of the fucking mess that was eight years of George W. Bush. (Hey, scumbags: You DO realize that we could pay for universal health if we hadn’t gone to war in Iraq, right?) And you pricks want him to deal with all of that in 11 months? And tell heads of foreign states to fuck off?

The reason you can’t impeach Obama — stay with me — is because Article II, Section 4 of the United States Constitution says the following: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Hey, we know Obama’s Cairo speech was no blowjob in the Oval Office — a notoriously high crime! — but let’s not impeach the guy over it. How about we impeach over Iran-Contra? (Except that your Christ figure, Reagan is dead.)

In fact, if you want to impeach any recent President for stupid shit, you should have gone after Bush Sr. when he nominated David Souter to the Supreme Court. That kind of bit you in the ass in the end, didn’t it?

Anyway, the rest of the article reads as such:

Without probing further it’s hard to say, but like the post-Iraq War opposition to George W. Bush, the first-year opposition to President Obama has included a lot of rhetoric about the president’s supposed violations of the Constitution. With Bush, it was war-related; with Obama, it’s Glenn Beck critiques like “where in the Constitution does the president have the right to take over a car company?”

Oh, Glenn Beck: Where in the Constitution does it say the President doesn’t have the right to take over a car company? Which, by the way, is a simpleton’s view of how the deal went down. But that makes sense because Glenn Beck is a simpleton.

And just so we’re clear: $700 billion in bailout money to banks, good. Taking 60 percent of an American institution into government ownership: bad. How long will GM remain a part of the government? Hard to say. But they have more than enough money to pay off the $6.7 billion they owe the U.S. government, and we’re also pretty sure Obama doesn’t want to be an auto manufacturer.

No, no. We know what’s really going on Republicans. And yes, it’s a “liberal idea” that I’m going to spout, but that doesn’t make it any less true. You just don’t like Obama because he’s black! Don’t believe us? Just look at the purity test.

That’s right! Being black is a high-crime! Being a white, God-fearing, hate-spewing, rich, racist, cry-baby piece of shit? That’s the Fat American way!

By Donald H. Harrison
San Diego Jewish World, November 6, 2008

JERUSALEM—Israel’s President Shimon Peres says that when U.S. President-elect Barack Obama visited him in Israel recently, the Democratic candidate asked if there was anything that he could do for Israel.  Peres said he responded, “just be a great president for the United States.  This is the best that you can do, because we live in a world where the world’s problems are our problems, the world’s hopes are our hopes.”

While some have worried whether Obama may reorient America’s policy in the Middle East, Peres said he personally was not concerned.  He explained that a large segment of the American population supports Israel because of their belief in the Bible, which “no president is going to uproot.”  Nor, he said, is any President likely to “close his eyes to the variety of the American society or to the democratic system.”

The president was asked to comment on the bitterness with which some Jews attacked Obama on a variety of grounds, including the false contentions that he was a Muslim, that he swore on the Koran, and even that his election could lead to a nuclear holocaust.

Peres responded that Israelis “want to live in peace with the blacks and the Muslims, with the Buddhists, any color of the skin or shape of the religion.”

He said that through Republican and Democratic administrations, America’s friendship for Israel has been consistent. “If there is no difference between presidents of different parties, why should there be a difference between presidents with different colors of skin?” he asked.

He also commented that he recently attended the Olympic Games in Beijing, and remembered the Olympic Games that were held in 1936 in nazi Berlin “when a black runner (Jesse Owens) who won the gold medal needed to run away from the stadium. What is the difference between the two worlds, then and today?  Who is looking at the color of the legs?  They look at the speed of your running.”

“I think modern democracy is not just the right to be equal but the equal right to be different either in color or religion or anything you want,” he added.

Peres said that he had felt comfortable with either possible choice Americans might make for U.S president.  “John McCain is my friend, I know him and respect him from the past because I know him longer, but I also have respect and trust in Obama.”

In a lifetime of public service which has included two terms as Israel’s prime minister, and a variety of ministerial offices, including the foreign ministry, Peres has met numerous American presidents.  During the interview at his official residence in Jerusalem, he shared with us some favorite anecdotes from his encounters with U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush,  Bill Clinton and George W. Bush .

The first he mentioned was Reagan, whom he said he “liked very much…because he had an air of modesty.  The first time he came, I didn’t know he was the president.   He stood like anyone else.  He didn’t say things that he didn’t know or that he didn’t understand; there was a modesty in his behavior.”

Whenever he subsequently got together with Reagan, Peres said, they traded jokes poking fun at the Soviets.  Peres said one of the jokes in that category dealt with the American who visited a zoo in Moscow and saw that the communists had figured out a way to have a wolf living in the same cage as a lamb.  “He asked the manager ‘how did you arrange it?’  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘no problem.  Every morning we change the lamb.’”

Another story they enjoyed was the one “about the Jewish person who met members of the Politburo and they exchanged their views and information.”  The Politburo members asked about his three sons.  The first, living in Hungary, was “building up socialism,” he said.  The second, living in Poland, also was ‘building up socialism.”  “And what about your third son, the one living in Israel?” they asked.  “Is he also building up socialism?”    The man responded: “Are you crazy?  In his own country?”

On another occasion, Peres said, Reagan was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Weizmann Institute of Science, whose representatives traveled to Washington D.C. to make the presentation.  “In response, he told the following story: When I was a young man I didn’t like schooling, I didn’t attend school, I didn’t prepare my lessons, and my parents and my friends said ‘Ron, Ron, what will be with you?’”  And then, said Peres, Reagan had this expressive look and asked, “if I had listened to them, would you still offer me the prize?”

Peres described Clinton as a “real, real friend” and disclosed that when he and King Hussein of Jordan signed a formal peace agreement between Israel and Jordan, Clinton took Peres aside and inquired about his feelings and motivation.  Peres said he told Clinton (kiddingly) that he had signed the agreement because the United States had made a mistake.  An incentive for Jordan to sign the peace agreement was forgiveness by the United States of approximately a half billion dollars of Jordan’s debts.  “You did what you told others not to do,” Peres said he informed Clinton. “It is your mistake.”  Clinton promptly responded that if Peres knew of similar “mistakes” he could make, “please call me up!”  Peres added that he considered Clinton “warm and intellectual.”

He said that Johnson was physically a “big man” and “I came there with Mr. (Levi) Eshkol (a prime minister of Israel), who had a real good sense of humor.  Johnson was drinking a huge glass of milk and then Johnson started to make the declaration.  I was sitting next to Eshkol and when he (Johnson) started with saying the United States of America is foursquare behind Israel, Eshkol says to me, ‘you heard? Four squares! Not three squares!”

Peres recalled that Barbara Bush once wrote a book about Millie, her springer spaniel, which he described as My Dog.  One time when he was with Barbara and President George H.W. Bush, Peres said he asked if she planned to write another book.  “Yes,” he quoted her as replying, “My Husband.”

He recalled an occasion when at the invitation of the Young Presidents Organization he took a cruise which both President George H.W. Bush, and the current President, George W. Bush, and their wives Barbara and Laura were invited guests, along with Peres and his wife Sonia.

Both he and President George W. Bush were asked to give lectures. “He talked about baseball and I talked about the Middle East, and we didn’t have to change our lectures!” Peres quipped.

He said he and the elder Bush are “great friends,” and described the current president as “a nice charming man as a person; he is really charming.   He told me—I don’t know if you can publish it, maybe yes—his mother thinks he is the first Jewish President of America… because he is so pro-Israel.”

Peres recalled that he was only a vice minister when he visited Washington during Kennedy’s administration.  Invited by Myer “Mike” Feldman, who served as Kennedy’s liaison for Jewish affairs to meet with the U.S. President, Peres said as soon as he and the Israeli ambassador (Avraham Harman) arrived via a rear door, “he started shooting at me questions” that showed that he was well briefed on Israel, including on why Mossad chief Isser Harel had resigned.  Then, “all of a sudden he asked me ‘are you going to build a nuclear bomb?’”  Peres said the ambassador looked at him as if he were “warning me not to give the wrong answer.  So I answered, ‘Mr. President, we shall not be the first to introduce nuclear bombs to the Middle East.’  I got a cable back from home saying, ‘how dare you say it?’ but in a week’s time it became the official policy of Israel.”

Turning to me, Peres said, “I must tell you a story about San Diego.  The governor of California was Mr. Brown, Jerry…I was invited by the Bonds organization to attend a gathering of the union of meat cutters at the wooden hotel of San Diego, what is it called?  (Hotel del Coronado.).. I came in the afternoon.  The place was filled with empty bottles of whiskey.  I hardly saw anybody, then the dinner started.  The orchestra was nice, the conductor was blind and they played “My Yiddishe Mama.”  And then Brown began his speech.  The speech went something like this: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you know the salary of the governor is not that high, but in spite of it, I bought Israeli Bonds.’  Now he says, ‘Believe me, if you will show me a map and if you ask me where the hell is Israel, I probably wouldn’t find it.  So Israel, I don’t know where it is on the map, but it is in my heart.”

Brown, today California’s attorney general, never was a president, but he did run for that office unsuccessfully in 1976, 1980 and 1992.

*
Here is a link to the original story with photographs

In der Huffington Post argumentiert Trita Parsi, dass die Vereinigten Staaten Israel von einem Angriff auf iranische Nuklearanlagen abhalten können und sollen. Selbst diesen Präzedenzfall führt er an:

Am 2. August 1990, knapp ein Jahr nach dem Fall der Berliner Mauer und dem Ende des Eisernen Vorhangs, fiel der Irak in Kuwait ein. Innerhalb weniger Monate schmiedete die George H. W. Bush-Administration sorgfältig eine Koalition von Staaten unter UN-Flagge, besiegte die irakische Armee und setzte Kuwaits Sabah-Königshaus wieder ein. Die Administration von Bush Senior legte Wert auf die Absicherung, dass sich an der internationalen Koalition etliche arabische Staaten beteiligten. Um aber die Araber zum Mitmachen an der Seite der USA gegen eine andere arabische Großmacht zu bewegen, musste Israel von der Koalition ausgeschlossen bleiben.

Dies sollte sich als heikle Angelegenheit herausstellen, besonders dann, als Saddam Hussein vierunddreißig Scud-Raketen auf Tel Aviv und andere israelische Städte abfeuern ließ, mit dem offensichtlichen Versuch, Israel in den Krieg hineinzuziehen….

Ebenso wie eine israelische Vergeltung gegen den Irak 1991 für die USA verheerende Folgen gehabt hätte, würde ein israelischer Präventivschlag gegen den Iran heute eine Katastrophe für die nationale Sicherheit der USA bedeuten.

Die israelische Debatte „Abschreckung versus Schwächung der Koalitionskräfte“ war so zähflüssig wie Parsis weitere Darstellung. Es gab zusätzlich die Ungewissheit – was Parsi nicht eingesteht -, dass Saddams Scud-Raketen mit chemischen oder biologischen Gefechtsköpfen ausgestattet sein konnten. Zum Glück trieb es Saddam Hussein nicht auf die Spitze und startete unkonventionelle Angriffe.

Parsi zeigt keine Besorgnis angesichts der Gefahr, die von iranischen Atomwaffen für Israels nationale Sicherheit ausgeht (natürlich auch für die Palästinenser, wenn wir schon dabei sind).

Wir haben gesehen, dass die israelische Bevölkerung erstaunlich belastbar ist angesichts irakischer Scuds, palästinensischer Kassams und Hisbollah-Katjuschas. Aber Parsis willkürlicher Vergleich fällt in sich zusammen, weil Luftangriffe auf dem Iran dazu dienen würden, ihn von Erwerb und Einsatz nuklearer Waffen abzuhalten.

Crossposting mit Medien BackSpin

After the poor response to Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, rapper Kanye West made the controversial statement that former president, George W. Bush did not care about black people. Pundits from Fox News were shocked that West had made such a statement. Badly, they wanted him to apologize.

In the end, Kanye West did not. He wound up finding support from within the black community. Most of the people agreed that the president did not care about black people. But, over time, this perception of President Bush may change. As people die and people who were young in his time grow old, they may forget exactly how bad things were.

One of the most popular presidents in American history is Ronald Reagan. He was the president that Bush modeled himself after. Reagan’s vice president also happened to be George H.W. Bush, the father of George W. Bush. Twenty years after his presidency, he is credited for fixing a very rough economy and it is said that black people loved him.

But, watch any documentary about a rapper talking about living in poverty during the Reagan era. He did nothing for the black neighborhoods. The only people that President Ronald Reagan took care of were the rich, white people that funded his campaigns. Kanye West even suspected that Reagan was behind the introduction of crack cocaine to these poverty-ridden neighborhoods in the 1980s.

When he was younger, Ronald Reagan was an avid Democrat. He endorsed such candidates as Franklin D. Roosevelt for president. At the lower level, he also campaigned for many Democrats. During this time, the Democratic Party was home to such leaders as J. Strom Thurmond and George C. Wallace. Both of those leaders were openly racist.

As the 1960s came, the Democratic Party began to distance itself from such racist leaders. At the time, the party was beginning to expand and take over many Republican areas. In 1964, realignment came when President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, endorsed the Civil Rights Movement. It was then that many prominent, racist, Democrats moved to the Republican Party.

Of the many Democrats that switched parties were Ronald Reagan. In 1966, he ran as a Republican for Governor of California. Due to his status as a big political endorser and his profile as an actor, he was quickly elected. During his time in office, the governor voted against many Civil Rights laws. He also said that Confederate President, Jefferson Davis was one of his personal heroes.

Despite this, Ronald Reagan did not consider himself a racist. It just so happens that his political views were that people not rely too much on the government. Because of circumstances, black people were in need of aid from the government, socially and financially. Reagan simply did not believe in helping people this way. He felt that giving opportunities to the wealthy would trickle down to the less fortunate and that was how they would advance.

George W. Bush modeled himself after Ronald Reagan. Almost all of his political policies were Reagan-influenced. Looking at the things that President Reagan supported, it is safe to assume that he did not care about black people. Looking at Bush’s track record, it is safe to assume the same things about him. Reagan did not consider himself a racist, but he did not care about black people.

Former president, Bush, is criticized for his poor response to Hurricane Katrina. Some Republicans who became disgusted with Bush longed for the days of Reagan. They said such things about Ronald Reagan being more willing to tackle such a slipping economy and that Reagan would have taken care of the people displaced by Katrina.

Truth be told, Ronald Reagan probably would have left the people in a worse condition that Bush did. The only people that Reagan made things easier for were the people who already had it easy. Businesses profited during the Reagan era, black America suffered. Under the Reagan regime, there were token blacks placed in political positions, but he still voted against Civil Rights laws.

From The Houston Chronicle:

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s decision to shift the production of Army trucks from Texas to Wisconsin after 17 years caught Texas’ elected officials by surprise, raising questions about overconfidence, a loss of political clout and the impact of economic incentives provided to the winning company by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor.

Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry and the 34-member Senate-House delegation are rallying to salvage a deal for BAE Systems that could be worth $2.6 billion and sustain 10,000 direct and indirect jobs around the sprawling truck manufacturing plant in Sealy.

But as one Democratic operative puts it: “That’s like having a party in the corral after all the horses have run out.”

Original DVD cover

The 92-year-old Oshkosh Corp. undercut BAE Systems’ bid by roughly 10 percent. The Wisconsin company had support by a predominantly Democratic congressional delegation that helped Barack Obama carry the state last November. And the truck builder reaped the benefits of state assistance crafted by Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle.

Elected officials in Texas assumed the contract would remain in their state, relied on networks of support built up during Republican control of the White House and Congress and did not provide BAE Systems any state assistance.

…snip…

“It sounds to me like complacency may be the biggest factor in Texas losing this contract,” says political scientist Paul Light of New York University. “The Army made a decision to give the contract to the lowest bidder. If I were an elected official from Texas, I’d stop whining and start asking questions about why Texas didn’t put up the dollars to help the company keep that contract.”

The congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, expects to decide by mid-December the outcome of BAE Systems’ appeal of the Army decision.

…snip…

“We are hopeful the government will reverse the decision in the interests of the U.S. military and the U.S. taxpayer,” says BAE spokesman Michael Teegardin.

The setback for Texas illustrates just how far the state’s political leverage has plummeted since Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, D-Houston, helped BAE’s predecessor win the initial contract in 1991 under President George H.W. Bush, and Sens. Phil Gramm, R-College Station, and Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Dallas, helped the company retain the contract in 2001 under President George W. Bush.

“We never saw this coming — we were completely blindsided,” says a top aide to Sen. John Cornyn, R-San Antonio, a former member of the Senate Armed Services Committee panel with jurisdiction over military vehicles.

Lawmakers and BAE officials alike felt “sucker punched,” added David Davis, a top Hutchison aide.

I’m not so convinced that KBH (Kay Big Hair) is freaking out over this. Is she going to use this in her campaign against Governor Goodhair? I can imagine her saying, “Hey y’all, I got that durned contract for Texas, and Little Ricky screwed it up for all of us!”

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, whose Austin-to-Houston district includes the plant, learned of the Army’s decision while driving to an appearance in his district in late August. He and press secretary Mike Rosen immediately diverted to visit BAE officials in Sealy.

“In a time of war, terminating a relationship with a proven manufacturer does not seem to be a prudent choice,” McCaul subsequently wrote Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a letter signed by 25 members of Texas’ 32-member House delegation.

One congressional aide said Texas lawmakers should have been more alert to the possibility of losing a contract that Oshkosh had tried to win in 2001.

…snip…

Some Texas Democrats have seized upon the lost contract to criticize GOP officials. “Job protection is really job No. 1 for a member of Congress,” says former Democratic Rep. Chris Bell, a former Houston City Council member who served one term in the House before losing in 2004.

McCaul failed to enlist Democrats in Texas’ congressional delegation such as Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Waco, to help protect the contract in a Democratic administration, says Matt Angle, a longtime Democratic operative who heads the political action committee known as the Lone Star Project.

Some members of Texas’ congressional delegation suspect political interference. There was “a political push that was inappropriate,” said one Senate aide

…snip…

McCaul, a former Justice Department prosecutor and former Texas deputy attorney general, said Pentagon contracts should be awarded “based on quality, realistic cost and how quickly the product can get to our troops on the battlefield.”

But Jay Kimmitt, head of the winning company’s Washington office, says Oshkosh won the contract on the merits without “inappropriate and unnecessary” intervention by the governor; Sens. Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold; or Rep. David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

Ellis Brachman, spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, said the powerful chairman played no role.

…snip…

The $35 million in tax breaks and the economic assistance provided Oshkosh over 12 years signal that “Wisconsin is open for business,” Doyle said. But the truck manufacturer says the assistance “did not make the difference” in the outcome of the bidding.

…snip…

But Light, the political scientist, noted: “It doesn’t sound like Texas has much maneuvering room in the bid protest — a 10 percent difference in price is huge on a multibillion-dollar contract.”

I don’t know why the Rethugs are so up in arms about this. After all, Texas is recession-proof. Right, Little Ricky? And it’s not like those 10,000 workers will have to worry about losing their health insurance or anything.

In lieu of Thanksgiving, President Obama kept with George H.W. Bush’s Precedence of pardoning the Presidential Turkey. However, Obama jokingly attributed his choice to save Courage, the Turkey from North Carolina, to the graciousness of his daughters. “I was planning to eat this sucker,” POTUS proclaimed. Obama’s waffling over the fate of Courage,  ironically, highlighted the need for all Americans to be wary of Obama’s two other turkeys: his health care plan and his disregard for the basis of American exceptionalism, the courage of all Americans to take on tough assignments and produce results that change the world for the better.

Unfortunately, unlike Courage the turkey, Obama does not easily disregard his insistence on universal health care. Universal health care, of course, should be abandoned on two major premises. These being that his health care plan would balloon our deficit beyond the point of no control, and limit the right of the individuals to choose what treatment is best for themselves and their family.

As the national deficit  increases exponentially under the Obama Administration, one should wonder why any rational person  would chose to take on the staggering costs required to subsidize nationalized health care. It is obvious that the government undertaking such a large and complex project would be economically catastrophic. This administration, ignoring economic reality, claims the opposite, that the health care plan currently in Congress would lower the cost for everyone. That is not the case.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts that from 2010 to 2014 the national deficit will drop by $136 billion. But this is because of tax increases and independent of any health care reform, since the health care policy will not go into effect until 2014. In the five years following 2014, when the costs of the health care plan become our reality, it is estimated that the federal deficit will increase by $6 billion. Democrats on the Hill disingenuously fail to admit that the projected deficit decrease is a temporary situation arising from timing differences between the receipt of funds from tax increases before the start of costs arising from their nationalized health care policy. President Obama and the Democrats in the Senate should pardon the American people from further tax hikes and the cost of ill-advised health care reforms, much as Obama pardoned Courage the turkey from his sentence of Thanksgiving dinner. Furthermore, as Americans, we should question and reject unnecessary tax increases and government subsidy.

A more human reason, perhaps, why Obamacare should be abandoned is that it limits our choice as Americans to decide exactly what health care is in our best interest. The Obama administration and all proponents of health care reform claim that a major goal is to lower prices by increasing competition. But what is the result of this? All Americans receive health care, but at what cost? In the end, we further sacrifice our God-given liberty and our right to act in our self-interest to the prison of central planning and big government. Furthermore, this health care policy, not only reduces choice, but also punishes it. If one chooses to keep their private health care, they won’t be allowed to change it. Private health care companies would not be allowed to cover new medical advances for the treatment of diseases when they come on the market. Those who chose to keep their private health care would then be forced to take part in the government exchange. All concerned with the sanctity of the rights of the American people should reject this blatant attack on our inalienable right to pursue what is best for us on an individual basis.

It is of primary import that as, inquisitive and informed American citizens, we realize the basis of our ideological disagreements with Obama on various matters. The core of our discomfort here comes from the fact that many of his policies, in effect, put another nail in the coffin of American exceptionalism. Those in support of health care reform use examples of the alleged successes of universal health care in Europe and Canada. This one-dimensional portrayal of the health care systems in those countries fails to recognize one inescapable fact – the United States has been the world’s unquestioned leader in medical innovation with no other nation even remotely close to this nation’s achievement. President Obama through both his health care policy and his self-serving apologies for America seeks to annihilate the belief that things that would not be possible in other countries are possible in America. The concept of American exceptionalism is so central to our history and lore that the death of American exceptionalism is, in effect, the death of the American dream.

One can only hope that just as President Obama listened to the pleas of Malia and Sasha when he pardoned Courage, that he listen to the pleas of the American people and pardon them from two more turkeys – disastrous health care reform plans and a President who denies the greatness of America and Americans.

Politico has a fun list of some of the allegedly “unprecedented” things that Obama has claimed for his administration.  Fairly amusing…

Samples :

The White House’s announcement of its unprecedented — “a first by an American president visiting China” — town hall meeting with students in Beijing, for instance, drew a collective eye roll in certain circles back home, namely among former aides to President George W. Bush, who had already been grumbling about Obama’s carefree application of “unprecedented.”

“I think I attended a town hall with President Bush in China,” former Bush adviser Karen Hughes quipped with a laugh, recalling a 2002 Bush speech in Beijing at which he took questions from the audience. “I thought: Were they asleep? Or were they dreaming? I remember standing and watching President Bush engage in a town hall that I believe was televised.”

President Bill Clinton also took questions from Chinese students at an event during a trip to the country in 1998, then did a radio call-in show in Shanghai the next day.

The White House’s characterization of Obama’s Beijing town hall mirrored the description staff gave Obama’s address to students on the first day of school, which the Education Department called “historic.” Yet President George H.W. Bush delivered an address to students, as did President Ronald Reagan. Maybe it was the streaming online video of Obama’s speech to students that was unprecedented?

New EU President: 2009 is the “first year of global governance”
Sees Copenhagen as step towards global management

“2009 is also the first year of global governance, with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet.”

Rompuy attended a Bilderberg dinner at Hertoginnendal, Brussels on November 15th, during which he announced a plan to implement EU wide taxes that will be paid directly to Brussels. Recently Mario Borghezio (Italy), member of the European Parliament, spoke openly against the influence of globalist organizations such as the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. “Is it possible that no one has noticed that all 3 (EU Presidential candidates) frequently attend Bilderberg or Trilateral meetings?,” asked Borghezio. Rompuy will undoubtedly serve globalist interests during his reign of the European Union.

The Road to Copenhagen part III: A “Planetary Regime” in the Making

Jurriaan Maessen
Infowars
November 22, 2009

Global strategy. That’s the talking point we hear over and over again from all agencies, UN or otherwise, who have an interest in profiting from the deal they are proposing. Never mind that all nation-states who sign on to the Copenhagen treaty will effectively forfeit their representative systems to this global authority, deciding which taxes will be paid by which nation-state. In the end, all roads seem to lead to a “planetary regime” envisioned by the elite long before “global warming” was even heard of.

~~By InsightAnalytical-GRL

I just watched a BBC America show about the reticent Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, and over the last couple of days on NPR radio, the Stardate segments have been devoted to the anniversary of  the Apollo 12 mission when Pete Conrad (the third man to make that walk) and Alan Bean made a pinpoint landing of the lunar module to test  “precise landing techniques” that would be used in future missions.

"The Surveyor 3 spacecraft sits silently in a small lunar crater, with the Apollo 12 lunar module on the crater's rim in the background. Astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landed just a few hundred feet from Surveyor 3 in November 1969 to test the precise landing techniques that would be needed for future missions."--Stardate.org

We can’t do solar panels here?

***

Early last week I posted this comment by Zachary Karabell, who appeared on CNBC (See: Larry Kudlow Has a Fit as Obama the “Declinist” Opens His Mouth in Japan; Says Obama is “Not His President”):

And he said that if we want China to continue to “hitch” themselves to us more, we’re not supposed to freak out if China wants to buy businesses HERE and not have a “knee-jerk xenophobic response.”

Well, here’s a story that will not make people happy, even though it may help us ultimately less dependent on foreign oil. Of course, we may become dependent on NEW environmental technology from foreign sources, but…

From Business Week (my bolding):

China Solar Panel Maker Sets First U.S. Plant

Suntech Power aims to boost its share of the U.S. market with a solar-panel manufacturing plant to be built in Arizona

China’s Suntech Power Holdings (STP) is no newcomer to the U.S. Last May, President Barack Obama toured the U.S.’s largest solar panel installation at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. There, row upon row of shiny black Suntech panels account for about a third of the 14-megawatt solar farm.

Suntech landed that project the same way it has raced to the top of the fast-growing global solar market: by focusing on price and scale. Now the world’s largest supplier of solar panels is boosting its stake in the U.S. market.

On Nov. 16 in Beijing, the company announced its first American manufacturing plant. The facility, to be located in the Phoenix area, will begin production by next October. “The U.S. market is on the cusp of greatness,” says Steven Chan, Americas president and chief strategy officer for Suntech. With the announcement, Suntech becomes the first major Chinese cleantech player to bring factory j obs to the U.S.

MMMM...wonder how many MORE major Chinese players will be arriving? And on U.S. military bases? (Of course, wasn’t there a flap over Bill Clinton selling military technology to China way back when?)

Now, there are some in Congress that are afraid our home-grown “green manufacturing jobs” won’t get a chance to get off the ground if this sort of thing happens on a regular basis. Sure, the Chinese are manufacturing here, but the factory jobs are THEIR creation, not jobs created by  a  home-grown company.

Obama’s visit to China focusing on collaboration in green technologies. Suntech’s move may soften criticism from U.S. lawmakers worried that low-cost factories in China will snare new green manufacturing jobs before they even have a chance to take root in the U.S. “[Suntech's] decision to bring manufacturing here to the U.S. is a great sign of the increasingly important collaboration between Chinese and American leaders in the renewable-energy industry,” said Dan Kammen, a professor in the energy and resources group at the University of California at Berkeley, in a statement provided by Suntech.

Gee…that Berkley prof can’t write his own statement??

According to the article, most of the grants the U.S. issues for “cleantech” is winding up overseas:

Suntech’s investment comes as anxieties are rising in Washington over foreign domination of the U.S. cleantech space. In late October the announcement of a Chinese-U.S. consortium planning to build a wind park in Texas using imported Chinese turbines led to calls that federal subsidies should be pulled from the project.The same month, a report from the Investigative Reporting Workshop found that in the wind sector, where foreign manufacturers dominate the market, overseas companies have received 84% of more than $1 billion in federal clean-energy grants released since Sept. 1. The study did not focus on solar energy, but the majority of solar panels are also produced by European and Asian companies.

Texas?  Well, naturally…I’d bet that the George Bushes I & II are involved somehow, what with their long-time ties to China…Between them and their heir Barack Obama, things are proceeding very nicely…

In light of my previous post about growing U.S. unemployment, pardon me if I query: WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON??

(Well, we’re going to build electric cars with the Chinese, for one thing…)

***

Editor’s Note: I loved the space program and now live where Pete Conrad lived…and remember when this irrepressible spirit, who shouted “Whoopee” as he hopped around the moon’s surface, died in a motorcycle crash in California 10 years ago this past July (pictures on this memoria page). (He also rode 2 Gemini missions and Skylab I.)

I will never stop being amazed at the number of idiots in this country who are still so spiteful and so jealous of ‘That One’ that they come up with such ridiculous theories and attacks. I understand they think these attacks actually work, but it’s beginning to get old and frankly embarrassing.

I will also NEVER for the life of me understand what is so awful, so anti-American, so dangerous about our President trying to restore some of the diplomacy lost during the Bush/Cheney years? Nor will I ever understand what the crime is in knowing your audience.

We lost a lot during those eight years and did very little to maintain or create new allies or relationships. Any wonder why we’re falling behind.

Since when do we want a President that offends other world leaders? Since when do we want a President that is embarrassing because he doesn’t know the customs of another country? Since when do we want a President that makes our relationships with other countries tenser and more tenuous?

Do we really want a President that offends the very people he’s attempting to have discussions with?

Has the right become such a jealous and hateful bunch that they’d rather he go around the world kicking butt and taking names?

I for one prefer to see my President not only show respect for their customs, but their people as well. I want a President that is admired by other world leaders and citizens even if his politics may not be. I want a President that leaves a positive and long lasting impression on our fellow citizens of the world. I want a President that other world leaders view as not only intelligent, but respectful, yes I said respectful, which is conducive to progress.

Do we want our President to be a laughing stock in other countries?

Or rather a person who is admired and appreciated if nothing else his understanding of the rest of the world.

I know what the majority of us would like, but the rest just want him out of the way.

This little snippet from The Washington Times editor Wesley Pruden’s column on Nov 17 illustrates just how delusional they still are about Barack Obama winning the White House, their White House.

Obama lacks “blood impulse” for what America “is about” due to “Kenyan father,” “mother attracted to men of the Third World”

A little traveling, like a little learning, can be a dangerous thing. Barack Obama on the loose in a foreign land is enough to frighten protocol officers and embarrass the rest of us.

He went off to Asia to tell the Chinese a thing or two about world trade, to prepare the world for a treaty to make the sun change its spots, and of course to pay his respects to assorted heads of state, with particular attention to any royal head (perhaps even including Miss Universe) who crosses his path.

Courtesy of Life Magazine

So far it’s a memorable trip. He established a new precedent for how American presidents should pay obeisance to kings, emperors, monarchs, sovereigns and assorted other authentic man-made masters of the universe. He stopped just this side of the full grovel to the emperor of Japan, risking a painful genuflection if his forehead had hit the floor with a nasty bump, which it almost did. No president before him so abused custom, traditions, protocol (and the country he represents). Several Internet sites published a rogue’s gallery showing how other national leaders – the prime ministers of Israel, India, Slovenia, South Korea, Russia and Dick Cheney among them – have greeted Emperor Akihito with a friendly handshake and an ever-so-slight but respectful nod (and sometimes not even that).

Now we know why Mr. Obama stunned everyone with an earlier similar bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, only the bow to the Japanese emperor was far more flamboyant, a sign of a really deep sense of inferiority. He was only practicing his bow in Riyadh. Sometimes rituals are learned with difficulty. It took Bill Clinton months to learn how to return a military salute worthy of a commander in chief; like any draft dodger, he kept poking a thumb in his eye until he finally got it. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, seems right at home now giving a wow of a bow. This is not the way an American president impresses evildoers that he’s strong, tough and decisive, that America is not to be trifled with.

Some of the president’s critics are giving him a hard time, and it’s true that this president seems never to have studied much American history. Not bowing to foreign potentates was what 1776 was all about. His predecessors learned with no difficulty that the essence of America is that all men stand equal and are entitled to look even a king, maybe particularly a king, straight in the eye. Can anyone imagine George Washington, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson making a similar gesture of servile submission? Or Harry Truman? Or FDR, who famously served the lowly hot dog, with ballpark mustard, to the king and queen of England? John F. Kennedy, on the eve of a trip to London, sharply warned Jackie not to curtsy to the queen.

Douglas MacArthur, who ranked above mere heads of state in his own mind, once invented his own protocol on greeting Emperor Hirohito. The emperor, the father of Akihito, wanted to meet MacArthur soon after he arrived to become the military regent of Japan in 1945, perhaps to thank him for saving the throne at the end of World War II. When the emperor invited MacArthur to call on him, the general sent word that the emperor should call on him – speaking of breaches of custom – and the two men were photographed together, astonishing the Japanese. The emperor arrived in full formal dress, cutaway coat and all, and MacArthur received him in summer khakis, sans tie, with his hands stuffed casually in his back pockets. Further astonishing the Japanese, he towered over the diminutive emperor.

Courtesy of Life Magazine

But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy ’60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to “hope” for “change.” It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

He no doubt wants to “do the right thing” by his lights, but the lights that illumine the Obama path are not necessarily the lights that illuminate the way for most of the rest of us. This is good news only for Jimmy Carter, who may yet have to give up his distinction as our most ineffective and embarrassing president.

The Washington Times might want to get a new editor since Mr. Pruden seems not only challenged in his history and facts, but also appears not to understand quite how ‘The Google’ works. For that matter maybe he needs a lesson in ‘The Internet’ because he doesn’t seem to realize that it is full of proof that President Obama isn’t the only US Leader to show respect.

Maybe Mr. Pruden would have seen this article in The New York Times about one George H.W. Bush……………………….

Then came the moment: When Mr. Bush approached the emperor’s casket, he bowed deeply.

Those of us who had lived in Japan thought nothing of it. That is how respect is shown in Japan. But the pre-cable pundits were screaming, and soon one of our colleagues, the late Gerald Boyd, asked Mr. Bush about it at a news conference.

Mr. Bush danced around an answer for a moment, mentioning members of his squadron who never came home, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s decision to keep the emperor system, as a way of unifying the Japanese people. Then he said this:

I’m representing the United States of America. And we’re talking about a friend, and we’re talking about an ally. We’re talking about a nation with whom we have constructive relationships. Sure, we got some problems, but that was all overriding — and respect for the Emperor. And remember back in World War II, if you’d have predicted that I would be here, because of the hard feeling and the symbolic nature of the problem back then of the former Emperor’s standing, I would have said, “No way.” But here we are, and time moves on; and there is a very good lesson for civilized countries in all of this.

So did President Obama violate protocol? Well, yes, but not by bowing. He made the mistake of both shaking hands and bowing at the same time, a big breach of etiquette. The truth was that he was supposed to choose one or the other.

Maybe Mr. Pruden needs a refresher course on etiquette AND history?