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What rumors.
Go to the American thinker blog- the article quotes form articles he's written- it;s his own words
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/01/barack_obamas_middle_east_expe.html
PS
Not sure what point that list is supposed to prove- as usual with most of your posts- they seem to make sense to no one but you
It's not worth trying to explain it to you again, as it's apparent now that the Congresspeople just want to keep feeding at the trough. ANy rep claim of favoring small govt is a farce
The earmakrs aren't a part of the bill when it's voted on. they are added on as committee recs. later on- giving the President the option to ignore them
" Have you any idea what the respective body counts are?
Does that tell us about who is more cold blooded??
The Pals continue to fight tanks with rocks. It's more an indication of their inability to face reality. They were offered land for peace and turned it down.
Israel has given land back and the net result has been more rockets rained down.
You and they keep harping back to the unfairness of the establishment of the state of Israel- like they are right and justified for their stance of wanting Israel eliminated.
What you don't get is that that past in not relevant. The point is dealing with Israel in a way that gets them what they want. Their arab "brothers", using them as tools for their own political purpose , have kept them on the same suicidal path. Whether you or they think they are justified, their present course is suicidal
It's you and other's blinded by their hate for Israel, that encourage their counter productive behavior
Barack Obama's Middle East Expert
By Ed Lasky
Barack Obama's real thinking about Israel and the Middle East continues to be an enigma. The words he chose in an address to AIPAC create a different impression than the composition of his foreign policy advisory team. Several advisors have evidenced a history of suspicion and worse toward Israel. One of his advisors in particular, Robert Malley, clearly warrants attention, as does the reasoning that led him to being chosen by Barack Obama.
A little family history may be in order to understand the genesis of Robert Malley's views. Normally, one should be reluctant in exploring a person's family background -- after all, who would want to be held responsible for the sins of one's father? However, when close relatives share a strong current of ideological affinity, and when a father has a commanding persona, it behooves a researcher to inquire a bit into the role of family in forming views. That said, Robert Malley has a very interesting father.
His father Simon Malley was born to a Syrian family in Cairo and at an early age found his métier in political journalism. He participated in the wave of anti-imperialist and nationalist ideology that was sweeping the Third World. He wrote thousands of words in support of struggle against Western nations. In Paris, he founded the journal Afrique Asie; he and his magazine became advocates for "liberation" struggles throughout the world, particularly for the Palestinians.
Simon Malley loathed Israel and anti-Israel activism became a crusade for him-as an internet search would easily show. He spent countless hours with Yasser Arafat and became a close friend of Arafat. He was, according to Daniel Pipes, a sympathizer of the Palestinian Liberation Organization --- and this was when it was at the height of its terrorism wave against the West . His efforts were so damaging to France that President Valerie d'Estaing expelled him from the country.
Malley has seemingly followed in his father's footsteps: he represents the next generation of anti-Israel activism. Through his writings he has served as a willing propagandist, bending the truth (and more) to serve an agenda that is marked by anti-Israel bias; he heads a group of Middle East policy advisers for a think-tank funded (in part) by anti-Israel billionaire activist George Soros; and now is on the foreign policy staff of a leading Presidential contender. Each step up the ladder seems to be a step closer towards his goal of empowering radicals and weakening the ties between American and our ally Israel.
Robert Malley's writings strike me as being akin to propaganda. One notable example is an op-ed that was published in the New York Times (Fictions About the Failure at Camp David). The column indicted Israel for not being generous enough at Camp David and blamed the failure of the talks on the Israelis.
Malley has repeated this line of attack in numerous op-eds over the years, often co-writing with Hussein Agha, a former adviser to Yasser Arafat (see, for example, Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors ). He was also believed to be the chief source for an article by Deborah Sontag that whitewashed Arafat's role in the collapse of the peace process, an article that has been widely criticized as riddled with errors and bias.
Malley is a revisionist and his views are sharply at odds with the views of others who participated at Camp David, including Ambassador Dennis Ross and President Bill Clinton. Malley's myth-making has been peddled in the notably anti-Israel magazine, Counterpunch and by Norman Finkelstein, the failed academic recently denied tenure at DePaul University . Malley's Camp David propaganda has also become fodder for Palestinians, Arab rejectionists, and anti-Israel activists across the world.
His story of the talks is also plain wrong.
Dennis Ross had this to say regarding the failure of Camp David when he laid the blame on Yasser Arafat and Palestinian leadership:
....Fundamentally I do not believe he can end the conflict. We had one critical clause in this agreement, and that clause was, this is the end of the conflict. Arafat's whole life has been governed by struggle and a cause... for him to end the conflict is to end himself.
...Barak was able to reposition Israel internationally. Israel was seen as having demonstrated unmistakably it wanted peace, and the reason it wasn't ... achievable was because Arafat wouldn't accept it.http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,50830,00.html
President Clinton echoed these remarks, elsewhere:
So a couple of days before I leave office, Arafat says, calls to tell me what a great man I am. And I just said, "No, I'm not. On this I'm a failure, and you made me a failure."
At the conclusion of Camp David, Clinton made these points, stressing that Israeli leader Ehud Barak had gone the extra mile to reach peace with the Palestinians:
-Prime Minister Barak showed particular courage, vision, and an understanding of the historical importance of this moment. Chairman Arafat made it clear that he too remains committed to the path of peace.
-Prime Minister Barak took some very bold decisions...
-I will say again, we made progress on all the core issues; we made really significant progress on many of them. The Palestinian teams worked hard on a lot of these areas. But I think it is fair to say that at this moment in time, maybe because they had been preparing for it longer, maybe because they had thought through it more, that the prime minister moved forward more from his initial position than Chairman Arafat on -- particularly surrounding the questions of Jerusalem...
-... not so much as a criticism of Chairman Arafat, because this is really hard and had never been done before, but in praise of Barak. He came in knowing that he was going to have to take bold steps and he did it, and I think you should look at it more as a positive toward him than as a condemnation of the Palestinian side...
- I would be making a mistake not to praise Barak, because I think he took a big risk, and I think it's sparked already in Israel a real debate, which is moving Israeli public opinion toward the conditions that will make peace. And so I thought that was important, and I think it deserves to be acknowledged. (Clinton press conference, July 25, 2000)
Was Malley so central to the peace process that he knew something that escaped the attention of our Middle East Envoy and our President? When one reads Dennis Ross's account of his years of trying to bring peace to the region, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, one can question just how central Malley was to the Camp David negotiations.*
Malley has written a range of pieces over the years that reveal an agenda at work that should give pause to those Obama supporters who truly care about peace in the Middle Peace and the fate of our ally Israel.
Playing Into Sharon's Hands: which absolves Arafat of the responsibility to restrain terrorists and blames Israel for terrorism. He defends Arafat and hails him as
..the first Palestinian leader to recognize Israel, relinquish the objective of regaining all of historic Palestine and negotiate for a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 boundaries. And he remains for now the only Palestinian with the legitimacy to sell future concessions to his people.
Rebuilding a Damaged Palestine: which blames Israel's security operations for weakening Palestinian security forces (absurd on its face: terrorists filled the ranks of so-called Palestinian security forces-which, in any case, never tried to prevent terrorism) and calls for international forces to restrain the Israelis
Making the Best of Hamas's Victory: which called for international aid to be showered upon a Hamas-led government and for international engagement with Hamas (a group that makes clear in its Charter, its schools, and its violence its intent to destroy Israel). Malley also makes an absurd assertion: that Hamas' policies and Israeli policies are mirror images of each other.
Avoiding Failure with Hamas: which again calls for aid to flow to a Hamas-led government and even goes so far as to suggest that failure to extend aid could cause an environmental or health catastrophe-such as a human strain of the avian flu virus!
How to Curb the Tension in Gaza: which criticizes Israel's for its actions to recover Gilad Shalit who was kidnapped and is being held hostage in the Gaza Strip. He and co-writer Gareth Evans call Israel's actions ‘collective punishment" in "violation of international law".
Forget Pelosi: What About Syria?: where Malley calls for outreach to Syria, despite its ties to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the terrorists committing murder in Iraq; believes it is unreasonable to call for Syria to cut ties with Hezbollah, break with Hamas, or alienate Iran before negotiations; he believes a return of the Golan Heights and engagement with the West will somehow miraculously lead the Syrian regime to take these steps -- after they get all they want.
Containing a Shiite Symbol of Hope: that advocated engagement with the fiercely anti-American Iraqi Moqtada al-Sadr, who has been responsible for the murder of many Americans and Iraqis as the leader of the terrorist group, the Mahdi Army. He also has very close ties to Iran.
Middle East Triangle: (co-written with former Arafat advisor Hussein Agha) calls for Hamas and Fatah to reconcile, join forces, and to frustrate, in their words, Israel's attempts to "perpetuate Palestinian geographic and political division". Then Hamas will grant Abbas power to make a political deal with Israel that will bring peace. Noah Pollack of Commentary Magazine noting, as Malley habitually fails to do, Hamas intends to destroy Israel, eviscerated this op-ed.
The U.S. Must Look to its Own Mideast Interests: (co-written with Aaron David Miller) which advocates a radically different approach towards the Middle East which, in their words, does not "follow Israel's lead" and encompasses engagement with Syria (despite problems with Lebanon and their support for Hezbollah) and Hamas (regardless of its failure to recognize Israel or renounce violence).
A New Middle East: which asserted Hezbollah's attacks on Israel and the kidnapping of Israelis, which sparked the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006, were motivated by Hezbollah's desire to retrieve Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails and were a response to pressure being exerted on its allies-Syria and Iran.
Robert Malley also testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February, 2004. In that appearance he called for the Road Map to be cast aside because incremental measures intended to build trust were unworkable. He advocated that a comprehensive settlement plan be imposed on the parties with the backing of the international community, including Arab and Moslem states. He anticipated that Israel would object with "cries of unfair treatment" but counseled the plan be put in place regardless of such objections; he also suggested that waiting for a "reliable Palestinian partner' was unnecessary.
This is merely a sample of Malley's views -- which are focused on disengaging from our ally Israel (whose lead America should not "follow") and engaging with and, in some cases financially supporting, the likes of Syria, Moqtada al-Sadr, Hezbollah and Hamas. His ideology is radically at odds with American foreign policy as it has been practiced by two generations of Presidents -- both Democrats and Republicans -- over the years. This is the type of advocacy Robert Malley has been pursuing in the years since the end of the Clinton Administration and from his perch at the International Crisis Group -- an organization that may share his agenda.
The International Crisis Group
Robert Malley is the Director of the Middle East/North Africa Program at the International Crisis Group (ICG). Given the impressive title of the group, one might expect it to have along and impressive pedigree -- say long the lines of the well-regarded Council of Foreign Relations. In fact, the group is rather small and it has a short pedigree. More importantly, it has ties to George Soros. Soros is a man who has supported a wide variety of groups that have shown a propensity to criticize America and Israel; a man who has made clear his goal is to break the close bonds between America and Israel ; supported the views of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer whose work on the issue of the "Israel Lobby" has been widely criticized for factual inaccuracies, shoddy research, and has been called "anti-Semitic" in the Washington Post; a man who has taken steps to counter the supposed political influence of the pro-Israel community in America; a man who has also been a key financial backer of Senator Obama's; and a man who can activate a wide variety of 527 (c) and other activist groups for any politician he supports.
Soros is a funder of the ICG through his Open Society Institute ; he serves on its Board and on its Executive Committee. Other members of the Board include Zbigniew Brzezinski (whose anti-Israel credentials are impeccable) and Wesley Clark (who called US support for Israel during the Hezbollah War a "serious mistake"; who has flirted with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; and who has been the direct beneficiary of donations made by Soros ; Wesley Clark has defended the actions of George Soros.
But let's return to George Soros.
While it is true that the ICG receives funding from other sources, none of these donors are on the board; and a billionaire on the Executive Committee of the Board can wield a great deal of influence. Soros is a man who is legendary for his investment prowess. In this case, he again seems to have invested well -- as he is proud to trumpet. When the ICG gave him a Founders Award, he spoke of how pleased he was with the work the group does ("my money is very well spent"), and he took particular pride in the work done "on the Palestinian question".
As he should be, given his goals. Malley, as the Director of the Middle East/ North African program at the ICG, has assembled a group of "analysts" who reflect his (and Soros's) views and who share their goals: a radical reshaping of decades of American foreign policy and a shredding of the role of morality in the formulation of American policy. These policies would strengthen our enemies, empower dictatorships, and harm our allies.
This small cast of characters at the ICG:
Issandr el Amrani has accused the Bush Administration of fanning the flames of sectarian strife by rallying support against Iran. He absurdly claims that the goal of this alliance is to create,
"a new regional security arrangement with the Jewish state firmly as its center-the holy grail of the neo-conservatives who, despite reports to the contrary, continue to craft U.S. Middle East policy. (Otherwise, why would Elliott Abrams still have his job?"
Peter Harling: who has co-written numerous op-eds with Malley that advocate outreach toward Iraqi extremist leader Moqtada al-Sadr; talks with Iran and Syria ; and numerous op-eds critical of American actions in Iraq.
Nicholas Pelham who advocates outreach toward Hamas.
Other analysts and their opinions can be found here.
They are uniformly passive on dealing with terrorism and terrorists; critical of US efforts in Iraq and American-led efforts to constrain Iran; advocate aid be given to Hamas despite its record of terrorism; endorse engagement with Syria despite its links with Hezbollah, its role in oppressing Lebanon and its involvement in the assassinations that have helped to destroy Lebanon. They also seemingly have no qualms about advocating outreach to Iran, regardless of its role in the killing of American and Iraqis in Iraq and its proclaimed goal of destroying Israel.
No wonder Soros is happy with his investment in the International Crisis Group and in Robert Malley.
Question remain
Why would Barack Obama have on his foreign policy staff a man who has been widely criticized for a revisionist history of the Middle East peace process sharply at odds with all other accounts of the proceedings?
Why would Barack Obama give credibility to a man who seems to have an agenda that includes empowering our enemies and weakening our friends and allies?
How did Robert Malley, with a record of writing that reveals a willingness to twist facts to serve a political agenda, come to be appointed by Obama to his foreign staff?
Was it a recommendation of Zbigniew Brzezinski to bring on board another anti-Israel foreign policy expert?
What role did the left-wing anti-Israel activist George Soros play in placing Robert Malley (or for that matter, Brzezinski himself) in a position to influence the future foreign policy of America?
What does it say about Senator Obama's judgment that he appointed a man like Malley to be a top foreign policy advisor?
Or does it speak more to his true beliefs?
A digression, if I may, regarding Malley and impressive sounding titles. A Washington Post article on Senator Obama's foreign policy advisors described him as having been President Clinton's Middle East envoy. Now this would come as a surprise to Ambassador Dennis Ross who actually was Clinton's Middle East envoy. Indeed, there is a paucity of mentions of Malley in Ross's exhaustive history of the Middle East peace process during the Clinton years, The Missing Peace, where more often than not he is described as a note-taker-once serving as Yasser Arafat's stenographer.
Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.
Deja Vu all over again: Here comes the big collapse by Bush, Hill GOP on earmarks
January 22, 12:48 PM
Andrew Moylan of the National Taxpayers Union reports lots of buzz on Capitol Hill about President Bush's apparent decision to not sign an Executive Order that could kill the majority of earmarks from the $515 billion omnibus spending bill approved last year.
Such an Executive Order would direct executive branch agencies to ignore all earmarks air-dropped into the bill via committee reports. A recent opinion from the Congressional Research Service noted that such earmarks would not be binding because they weren't voted on by both houses of Congress and included in the actual legislative text signed by the president, as required by the Constitution.
Adding to the buzz is a New York Times story today in which House Minority Whip Roy Blunt is reported cautioning Bush against signing the Executive Order because "a furor over earmarks could upend Mr. Bush’s hopes for cooperation with Congress on other issues, including efforts to revive the economy."
The Times added this even more telling statement: "Moreover, Republicans shudder at the possibility that a Democratic president might reject all their earmarks. In effect, the White House is avoiding a clash with Congress over specific projects while preserving the president’s ability to demand a further reduction in earmarks generally."
Allow me, please, to translate those last two sentences:
With the exception of a tiny band of GOP senators led by Tom Coburn, R-OK, and Jim DeMint, R-SC, and House Minority Leader John Boehner, Republican Study Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling and the small caucus of anti-earmark conservatives, the congressional GOP is every bit as addicted to pork-barrel politics as the Democrats, if not even more so.
That's why since before Christmas, the White House has dawdled on what ought to be a no-brainer decision and has thus been hearing from a steady procession of congressional GOPers pleading with Bush not to sign the Executive Order, like drug addicts begging the judge not to force them into rehab.
From that perspective, Blunt's actions, the deafening silence of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the Executive Order, and the determined effort of National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Tom Cole of Oklahoma to get a seat on the House Appropriations Committee instead of supporting efforts to put anti-earmarker Rep. Jeff Flake, R-AZ on the panel are all par for the course.
The problem is the congressional wing of the GOP is all but the second caucus of the Government Party in Washington. Bush wimping out on what could be a milestone in the fight to restore limited government and a tremendous boost for Republican prospects in the 2008 campaign simply reflects the general lack of political courage in the GOP at the national level on spending and entitlements. These people love Big Government and won't take serious actions to reduce its size and scope of power.
Pay particular attention to how the Times phrased the last two sentences quoted above. Assuming Blunt's statements are accurately reflected in the Times paraphrase, what the Missouri GOPer is saying to Bush is this: "Don't do anything concrete to take away our earmarks or we will punish you, but go along with us and we can all keep talking as if we will do something concrete if the voters will give us another chance."
It's a variation on the same old song the Republican establishment has been singing for decades - Talk a good case to get elected, but always put off taking real action till after the next election. Because the conservatives - the people who do most of the work and contribute most of the money - "have no place else to go."
At least the Democrats make no bones about their love of Big Government.
UPDATE: Bush legacy loses
The Club for Growth's Andy Roth notes the damage that will be done to Bush's legacy on economic issues if he fails to sign the Executive Order. The tax cuts were great, but "he will get bad grades unless he does something bold in his last year in office" if he ignores this opportunity.
We’re Fighting the Wrong War
'What remains is a negative objective, stopping the war from spilling over, within Iraq but also outside it.'
Jan 28, 2008 Issue
Pity the U.S. presidential candidates. They had their positions on Iraq all worked out by last summer and have repeated them consistently ever since. But events on the ground have changed dramatically, and their rhetoric feels increasingly stale. They're fighting the Iraq War all right, but it's the wrong one.
The Democrats are having the hardest time with the new reality. Every candidate is committed to "ending the war" and bringing our troops back home. The trouble is, the war has largely ended, and precisely because our troops are in the middle of it.
From 2003 to 2005 the war in Iraq was defined by an insurgency. After the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February 2006, it became largely a sectarian conflict. Now the dominant feature of the war is the proliferation of local ceasefires across the country. The real questions that candidates need to answer are these: How do they interpret this new reality? What would they do to maintain the new stability? What does all this mean for U.S. foreign and military policy in the next few years?
Click Here
American forces in Iraq have done superbly but the violence has not ended because they won great military victories. Instead, the adversary —the Sunnis—switched sides. Instead of shooting Americans they are now allied with them. This has happened for many reasons—changes in U.S. policy, Al Qaeda's brutality, Sunni defeats and war weariness. But it's a fragile peace. Stephen Biddle, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has made several trips to Iraq to advise Gen. David Petraeus, says, "If you go south of Baghdad you will see Sunni units that are the most impressive Iraqi fighting forces in the country, never defeated, with their command structure, tight discipline, equipment and gear all intact. They have simply made a decision to stop fighting."
This realignment, however, has been directed at the United States and not the Shiite-led government in Baghdad. Petraeus has been trying to integrate these "Concerned Local Citizens"—the military's wonderful euphemism for Sunni militias—within the Iraqi police and security forces, so they can be paid by the central government and develop a new relationship with Shiites. But both sides remain extremely wary. The Shiites suspect the former insurgents' motives; the Sunnis say that jobs and weapons are being withheld by the government. As of now, the United States Army is the organizer, financier, guarantor and enforcer of the peace.
Iraq remains deeply divided. The national reconciliation that Iraqi politicians promised has not occurred. Some movement has taken place on sharing oil revenue but on almost nothing else. The complicated new law on de-Baathification has been, in the words of a senior Iraqi official, "a big mess, perhaps worse than if we had done nothing." The non-Kurdish parts of the country remain utterly dysfunctional, and chaos and warlordism are growing in the south. Of the 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled the country, a trickle—a few thousand—have returned home.
This is why Republican rhetoric about Iraq is also somewhat unhinged. John McCain deserves credit for supporting the surge. But the notion, articulated by many Republicans, that if we just stay the course a bit longer we will achieve "victory" is loopy. Iraq is seen—and will be for years—by the rest of the Middle East as a cautionary tale and not a model.
"Our initial goals in Iraq—WMD, democratic transformation—are impossible," says Biddle. "What remains is a negative objective, stopping the war from spilling over, within Iraq but also outside it." It's similar to the challenge the Clinton administration confronted in the Balkans in the 1990s—where the mission was to end a civil war and keep the peace.
The problem with such a mission is that it requires lots of troops. By most estimates, peacekeeping in Iraq would take more foreign troops than are there right now. While it is all well and good to say that the United States should not be policing a civil war, the fact is that we are, and were we to leave, it would likely start up again. This is not the war that we signed up for and it is not really about fighting Al Qaeda, but it is the reality.
Click Here
The most intelligent strategy for the United States now is a combined political and military one. If we are to engage in peacekeeping, the operation needs to be internationally recognized, sanctioned and supported—as it was in Bosnia. We should call an international conference on Iraq and get the support of other countries—crucially Iraq's neighbors—for this new mission. There should then be a joint international push to get the Iraqis to make the kinds of political deals that will turn the ceasefires into lasting peace. Over the next year if the violence continues to decline, countries like India, Poland and South Africa could be persuaded to relieve American troops. With sustained and focused efforts, over time, American forces could draw down substantially. The mission could then become what it was always billed as, a genuinely international effort to assist the Iraqi people in founding a new nation.
© 2008 Newsweek, Inc.
Europe's abortion rules
AUSTRIA
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: First three months - in practice often before 12 weeks
Conditions: Must have medical consultation. May be performed after 12 weeks if necessary to avoid serious danger to the woman's physical or mental health; if the child is at risk of being born with a serious physical or mental defect; or if the woman is under 14 years of age.
In practice, the ability of a woman to pay for an abortion is an important factor. It is difficult for women to get an abortion outside Vienna and other big cities. Few doctors perform abortions in private practice in rural areas.
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BELGIUM
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: Woman must say she is in a "state of distress". Abortions allowed at any stage later in pregnancy if two physicians agree there is a serious risk to the health of the mother or that the child has an "extremely serious and incurable disease".
The woman must receive counselling at least six days prior to procedure, which must be performed by a physician under good medical conditions in a healthcare establishment with the proper information resources.
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BULGARIA
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: Between 12 and 20 weeks, abortion is permitted only if the woman is suffering from a proven, documented case of a disease that could endanger the life of mother or child.
After 20 weeks, abortion is permitted only if the woman's life is in danger or evidence is found of severe foetal impairment.
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CYPRUS
Availability: Under certain conditions
Gestational limit: 28 weeks
Conditions: Allowed to save a woman's life, to preserve her mental or physical health or in cases of rape or incest and if the child is likely to be born with serious disabilities. The UN says that although not specified by law, in practice abortion is performed within 28 weeks of gestation.
Certification by two doctors is required for all grounds except rape - when certification by a police authority is necessary. Free of charge for patients eligible for free medical care.
Anyone caught performing an unlawful abortion is liable to seven years' imprisonment. A woman inducing her own abortion is liable to the same punishment. In practice, terminations are often carried out for social and economic reasons.
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CZECH REPUBLIC
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: Requires consent of the woman and authorisation by her gynaecologist. After 12 weeks, pregnancy can be terminated only if the woman's life or health is endangered or in the case of suspected foetal impairment. The procedure must be authorised by a medical commission and performed in a hospital. Therapeutic abortion is permitted up to 26 weeks.
Women who have had an abortion are not allowed another within six months unless they have had two deliveries, are at least 35 years of age or the pregnancy was the result of a rape.
The number of abortions in the Czech Republic dropped by about two-thirds in the 1990s mainly due to the increasing availability of the birth-control pill and other types of contraception.
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DENMARK
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: After 12 weeks, if the pregnancy does not pose a risk to the woman's life or of serious deterioration to her physical or mental health, the abortion must be approved by a committee of four people.
The procedure must be performed by a physician in a state or communal hospital or in a clinic attached to a hospital. No cost, part of the public health system.
Abortion for non-residents is not allowed unless they have some special relationship with Denmark.
FAROE ISLANDS:
Availability: Under certain conditions
Gestational limit: 16 weeks
Conditions: If there is a risk to life of woman, in cases of rape and severe risk of foetal malformation. If married, consent is required from the husband.
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ESTONIA
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: After 12 weeks, a woman must undergo a consultation with doctors and the reason for the abortion has to be stated in writing.
Abortions are permitted until 22 weeks for health reasons and certain other reasons, including pregnancy at a very young age (under 16) or over 45 years of age. A woman choosing to have an abortion must pay a larger cost of the abortion than she would if it should be performed on medical grounds.
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FINLAND
Availability: Under certain conditions
Gestational limit: 24 weeks
Conditions: Abortions permitted up to 12 weeks to save the woman's life, to preserve her mental health, for economic or social reasons or in the cases of rape or incest.
Available up to 20 weeks if there is a risk to the physical health of woman or if she is younger than 17. The procedure can be performed up to 24 weeks if the woman's life is at risk or there is a risk of foetal malformation.
An abortion must be authorised by one or two doctors up to 12 weeks, or by the State Medical Board up to 20 weeks. Abortion is free of charge under national health insurance but women must pay hospital fees.
The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) says that in practice a woman can get an abortion on demand, but illegal abortion is rare.
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FRANCE
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: The woman must claim to be in a "state of distress" because of her pregnancy. After 12 weeks, abortions are allowed only if the pregnancy poses a grave danger to the woman's health or there is a risk the child will suffer from a severe illness recognised as incurable. If this is the case, two doctors must confirm the risk to the health of the woman or foetus.
A pregnant girl under the age of 16 may ask for an abortion without consulting her parents first. But she has to be accompanied by an adult of her choice.
Conscientious objection allows professionals to decline involvement in procedures, but they must inform the patient without delay.
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GERMANY
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: The woman must receive proper counselling three days before the procedure. The state-regulated counselling is required to inform the woman that the unborn have a right to life and to try to convince her to continue her pregnancy.
The procedure is not covered by public health insurance except for women with low income. The law includes penalties for people who force a pregnant woman to obtain an abortion or who induce a pregnant woman to have an abortion by maliciously withholding support payments.
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GREECE
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: Abortions are allowed up to 19 weeks in the case of rape or incest and 24 weeks in cases of foetal abnormality.
Abortions must be performed by a practising physician in a private clinic or hospital. A minor must obtain the written consent of her parents or guardian.
The United Nations says the public is still not fully aware of the new laws and illegal abortions are still common.
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HUNGARY
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: The woman must obtain counselling. A consultation with a nurse is compulsory to inform the pregnant woman on issues of contraception, as well as to provide assistance if the pregnancy is carried to term.
Before 1953 abortions were illegal except for health reasons. The 1992 law stressed respect for the foetus, but it allowed abortions.
If the pregnancy endangers the life of the woman, or the foetus shows malformation that renders any form of postnatal life impossible, the abortion can be performed at any time during pregnancy.
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IRELAND
Availability: Strict conditions
Gestational limit: No set limit
Conditions: Allowed only allowed if woman's life is at risk (including the risk of suicide).
Ireland has voted five times in the past 20 years on its abortion laws, most recently deciding to continue to allow women to have an abortion if they say they are suicidal - a loophole the government and Catholic Church wanted closed.
Women can have counselling and advice on options, and can leave the country to have the procedure elsewhere - more than 6,000 a year go to the UK for a termination.
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ITALY
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: A one-week reflection period is imposed unless the situation is one of urgency. A certificate confirming the pregnancy and the request for termination must be issued by a doctor and signed by the woman and the doctor.
Parental authorisation is required if the woman is under 18. After 12 weeks, abortion is allowed only if the foetus has a genetic deficiency or to preserve the physical and mental health of the mother. An abortion must be performed in a public hospital or authorised private facility - if there are staff willing to perform the procedure.
The influence of the Roman Catholic Church - and the threat of excommunication for anyone performing an abortion and any woman obtaining an abortion - means the majority of physicians and other healthcare professionals invoke a conscience clause allowing them to be exempted on moral or religious grounds.
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LATVIA
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: After the first three months, special authorisation is required but non-medical reasons can include the death of the husband during pregnancy; imprisonment of the pregnant woman or her husband; divorce during pregnancy; pregnancy following rape; and history of child disability in the family.
The laws were liberalised during the Soviet era. Procedures must be performed in a hospital or other authorised health-care facility.
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LITHUANIA
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: After 12 weeks, special authorisation is required. The laws are similar to Latvia, the countries having been a part of the former Soviet Union. Abortion laws have changed little since independence.
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LUXEMBOURG
Availability: Under certain conditions
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: Allowed during first 12 weeks to save a woman's life, to preserve her mental or physical health, for economic or social reasons in the cases of rape or incest or foetal impairment. A one-week reflection period is required and the pregnant woman must be given an information booklet in which options other than abortion are explained.
After 12 weeks, the law allows abortion only if there is a very serious threat to the health of the woman or the unborn child. Two qualified doctors must confirm in writing that a serious threat exists. A doctor is not required to perform an abortion except when the life of the pregnant woman is in imminent danger.
The UN says there remains a reluctance among doctors to perform abortions, partly because of the country's religious conservatism.
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MALTA
Availability: None
Conditions: Abortion is prohibited in all circumstances. Anyone performing an abortion - or a woman who performs one on herself or consents to the procedure - can be jailed for between 18 months and three years. A physician, surgeon, obstetrician, or pharmacist who performs an abortion faces a jail term of 18 months to four years and a lifelong ban from exercising his or her profession.
The government and bishops on the island objected strongly to moves in 2000 to perform abortions on a ship in international waters off Malta.
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THE NETHERLANDS
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 13 weeks
Conditions: A five-day waiting period is required between the initial consultation and the performance of an induced abortion. The procedure must be performed in a licensed hospital or clinic. Abortion is allowed after 13 weeks (up to 24 weeks) if she claims to be in a state of distress.
Since November 1984, women in the Netherlands have been able to obtain abortions free of charge under the government-sponsored national health insurance system. Foreigners may have abortions in the Netherlands, but they have to pay.
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POLAND
Availability: Under certain conditions
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: Allowed to save a woman's life, to preserve her mental or physical health or in the cases of rape or incest or foetal impairment. The procedure must be performed by an obstetrician or gynaecologist who has passed the national proficiency tests.
After 12 weeks, abortions are allowed only if continued pregnancy would endanger the life or health of the pregnant woman. It must be performed in a hospital or clinic with the consent of the pregnant woman or her parents or guardian if she is a minor.
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PORTUGAL
Availability: Under certain conditions
Gestational limit: 16 weeks
Conditions: Allowed within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy to save a woman's life or to preserve her mental or physical health.
Abortions are allowed within 16 weeks in the cases of rape or another sexual crime and up to 24 weeks if there is a risk that the child will be born with an incurable disease or malformation - which must be certified by a doctor other than the one performing the procedure.
Portugal's laws will now be liberalised to allow abortions on request within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, after a referendum which saw almost 60% of voters back the move.
It was not legally binding, because less than half the electorate voted, but Prime Minister Jose Socrates said "the people spoke with a clear voice" and the law would be changed.
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ROMANIA
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 14 weeks
Conditions: Must be carried out with the woman's consent in an approved medical institution or surgery. Abortions may be performed later in pregnancy if absolutely necessary for therapeutic reasons, according to legal provisions.
A doctor who performs an illegal abortion faces suspension.
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SLOVAKIA
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 12 weeks
Conditions: Woman must request procedure in writing. It is allowed only if at least six months have elapsed since a previous abortion, except in the case of a woman who has had two other births or is 35 years of age or older, or in the case of rape.
A woman must receive counselling before an abortion is performed. Parental consent is required for women under 16 years of age; for minors between 16 and 18 years of age, the physician must inform the parents following the abortion. Abortions after 12 weeks are only allowed for medical and genetic reasons and in cases of rape or other sexual crimes.
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SLOVENIA
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 10 weeks
Conditions: After the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, special authorisation by a commission composed of a gynaecologist/obstetrician, a general physician or a specialist in internal medicine and a social worker or a psychologist is required.
If the woman is a minor, approval of her parents or guardian is required, unless she has been recognised as fully competent to earn her own living.
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SPAIN
Availability: Under certain conditions
Gestational limit: 22 weeks
Conditions: Abortions are allowed to avoid serious risk to physical or mental health of the woman within the first 12 weeks. If the pregnancy is a result of rape, the rape must first be reported to the police and the procedure carried out within 12 weeks of pregnancy.
In case of foetal impairment, two specialists, other than the doctor performing the abortion, must certify that the child would suffer from severe physical or mental defects. The procedure must be performed within the first 22 weeks.
All abortions must be reported to the national health authorities.
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SWEDEN
Availability: On request
Gestational limit: 18 weeks
Conditions: Between 12 and 18 weeks of gestation, the women must discuss the procedure with a social worker. After 18 weeks, permission must be obtained from the National Board of Health and Welfare.
Abortions must be performed by a licensed medical practitioner and, except in cases of emergency, in a general hospital or other approved healthcare establishment. Abortion is subsidised by the government. The country says illegal abortions have been eradicated.
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UNITED KINGDOM
Availability: Under certain conditions
Gestational limit: 24 weeks
Conditions: Abortion is allowed in England, Wales and Scotland to save a woman's life, for health, economic or social reasons. Two registered medical practitioners must certify that the required medical grounds have been met.
The procedure must be carried out, except in emergency, in a National Health Service hospital or in a nursing home, private hospital or other approved place. The consent of the spouse is not a prerequisite of the medical termination.
In Northern Ireland, the woman's health must be at risk. The difference between the British mainland and Northern Ireland occurred in 1967 when the Westminster parliament let the then Ulster authority decide not to adopt the new laws. Hundreds of women each year cross the Irish Sea to get abortions in England.
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Sources: United Nations and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Energy Disaster Looming [Iain Murray]
There are strong suggestions circulating that the Administration is being firmly lobbied to announce a cap-and-trade scheme for electricity utilities in the State of the Union address as a 'legacy' item and in a futile attempt to bind the hands of an incoming President. This would be a disaster.
At a time when the Fed and the rest of the Administration is doing its best to avoid recession, what Mike Huckabee might call the "Wall Street Lobby" within the White House is doing its best to counteract all that effort. Given that the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that household energy prices rose by a staggering 17.4 percent in 2007, but electricity prices rose only 3.4 percent. Cap and trade will push up those electricity prices too. It is the last thing we need at present.
Moreover, cap and trade just doesn't work. The Europeans have had a system in place for a couple of years now and it has worked so badly that the EU President – supposedly a friend of America – is threatening a carbon trade war because, he claims, "There is no point these industries cutting emissions in Europe if they lose business to countries with more lax rules on carbon emissions." In other words, an American cap and trade scheme will be the perfect economic stimulus package – for China and India.
It appears that the people who are pushing this within the White House are exactly the same people who, together with Enron's Ken Lay and Environmental Defense's Fred Krupp, snuck a cap and trade promise into the Bush campaign's August 2000 energy plan without the knowledge of the campaign's energy advisory committee. They're all very well connected with the rent-seeking companies and the Wall Street banks that will make a fortune selling the permits to each other.
There are some very highly-compensated law firms out there currently lobbying for this at rates that pro-free-market groups simply (and ironically) can't afford and they are hiring Bush advisers by the troughload. Yesterday's Greenwire (subscription required), for instance, identified 2004 campaign head and former RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, as "a Washington attorney working for corporate clients who back mandatory climate controls."
The American consumer, however, gets the shaft. If you don't want higher electric bills, it really is time to get angry.
01/22 04:07 PM
Pre-emptive nuclear strike NATO Option
Posted by: McQ
At least it should be an option according to 5 former senior NATO generals:
The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the "imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists.
Calling for root-and-branch reform of Nato and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a "grand strategy" to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world".
I come from the school, that when confronted with avowed enemies who will use anything to include nuclear weaponry (even if they don't yet have them) to advance their agenda, you don't take anything off the table to include the possibility of first use.
Note the word. "Possibility". I think we have to at least lead our enemies to believe that we're capable of the same level of ruthlessness as they are - after all the enemy's entire premise of attack is to strike first by whatever means available and, of course, to try to get the biggest bang for the buck.
Some would argue that NATO nukes have no real future in the war we're most likely to fight over the coming decades. They will argue it is a low intensity conflict by NGOs. I disagree citing the role of Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria as sponsors of those NGOs at some level or another. At some point, a nuclear threat against the state sponsor of an NGO attempting nuclear terrorism may be the only way to stop such an act.
Ron Asmus, head of the German Marshall Fund thinktank in Brussels and a former senior US state department official, described the manifesto as "a wake-up call". "This report means that the core of the Nato establishment is saying we're in trouble, that the west is adrift and not facing up to the challenges."
Naumann conceded that the plan's retention of the nuclear first strike option was "controversial" even among the five authors. Inge argued that "to tie our hands on first use or no first use removes a huge plank of deterrence".
Reserving the right to initiate nuclear attack was a central element of the west's cold war strategy in defeating the Soviet Union.
What they're arguing, of course, is that the preservation of that option may still will have a deterrent effect, at least in terms of the use of nuclear weapons. And while it can be argued it may not, what can be argued with certainty is that without that option, no deterrent effect is possible.
And the critics?
Critics argue that what was a productive instrument to face down a nuclear superpower is no longer appropriate.
Robert Cooper, an influential shaper of European foreign and security policy in Brussels, said he was "puzzled".
"Maybe we are going to use nuclear weapons before anyone else, but I'd be wary of saying it out loud."
Another senior EU official said Nato needed to "rethink its nuclear posture because the nuclear non-proliferation regime is under enormous pressure".
Of course much of the deterrent effect comes from "saying it out loud". The threat is the point. And frankly, I see nothing in the posture which effects nuclear non-proliferation. In fact, it makes the stakes of ignoring those treaty obligations a little higher.
There's more to the paper by the 5 generals than just the nuclear piece. They talk about the state of NATO and its future, and they're not particularly pleased with what they see.
I never said there was no need for regulation. The source post was re the mortgage crisis assigning all the blame to lax regulation which is nonsense.
The buyers knew the terms of their loans ( due to regulations ) yet went ahead and chose adjustable terms anyway
If you want Hillary to micro manage the economy, more power to ya
Try taking off the clown costume and actually read the article I posted that outlines the issues or involved
Or, just do your typical ignorant ankle biting
Yeah, but it's only evil when Bush does it
The Gov't has been borrowing money from the Chinese ( as Peg puts it ) or anyone else willing to but treasuries for decades.
I guess she doens't realize that w/o that money, we'd be shut down and bankrupt in seconds
It's hypocritical to the max to complain about irresponsible spending and then trumpet plans to put us further in debt. Like Murtha's pork is really kosher because he's a dem
To trumpet class warfare w/o realizing that doing so will kill the economy
And waht happens when the dems tax the "rich" entrepeneurs and corporations and they have to start laying people off??
Where in the COnstitution does it mandate that everyone should be middle class??
YOu're assuming that the stats you cite are caused by Bush policy and that he controls the economy totally
No President does
Fkn idiot
Yeah, and Hillary is gonna spend 110 billion to pump the economy and reduce the deficit, right?
Hillary and Hayek, redux
So we have a worrisome stock sell-off yesterday, likely—so the financial pundits say—to be followed by further losses today. What does a seasoned politician and contender for the White House do? If you are Hillary Clinton, you propose that “the government,” that is, the bureaucracy she proposes to lead, meddle even more than it has done hitherto. Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds cited this news report about what Hillary had promised (or should I say “threatened”?) yesterday:
“Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said that if she became president, the federal government would take a more active role in the economy to address what she called the excesses of the market and of the Bush administration.”
(The title of that piece, by the way, was “For Clinton, Government as Economic Prod,” as in “cattle prod,” presumably.)
Reynolds juxtaposed Hillary’s expression of interventionist longing with the fact that London’s stock market lost, according to some estimate, some £60 billion yesterday. “Coincidence, I’m sure,” he comments, a sterling deployment of rhetorical irony.
Lest readers go away thinking that this was a temporary aberration on Hillary’s part—that, really, she is a firm believer in free markets and the individual liberty they depend upon—let me re-post a comment I made early last month when HRC assured the press that “as president she would be happy to intervene in the management of the economy if she thought the free market was failing middle-class Americans.” I called the piece (which first appeared on December 3, 2007) “Hillary Clinton and Friedrich Hayek.”
“Those who cannot remember the past,” Santayana famously wrote, “are condemned to repeat it.” What he didn’t say, but what often seems to be the case, is that we can remember the past just fine and then go on to repeat it anyway. A variation, perhaps, of Ovid’s observation that “video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor”—“I see and approve the better path, but follow the worse.”
I entertained some such melancholy thoughts this morning when I saw the news that Senator Clinton had gone to Wall Street to inform the assembled multitudes that, were she President, the world could expect plenty of government intervention in the U.S. economy. As a front-page story in The New York Sun put it, “Clinton Gives Wall Street a Warning”:
Senator Clinton gave a clear indication yesterday that as president she would be happy to intervene in the management of the economy if she thought the free market was failing middle-class Americans.
Who would doubt it? “Mrs. Clinton demanded,” the story went on, “an immediate injection of $5 billion into the economy to help those facing foreclosure on their homes. And she proposed another $2 billion to be spent to help poor families in cold-weather states afford heating fuel.”
“Mrs. Clinton demanded,” indeed. We’ll be hearing that phrase a lot in the months to come. And don’t ask where that $5 billion, that $2 billion are coming from—you know the answer: your pocket. (“What’s a paltry $5 billion in an economy of $12.5 trillion?” you ask. Remember Senator Dirksen: “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.”)
Mrs. Clinton had a few words of criticism for irresponsible borrowers, but she laid the the lion’s share of the blame for what she called “the subprime crisis” at the feet of those in Wall Street whom she accused (as The Sun put it) of “deliberately engineering a mortgage system that abandoned traditional notions of lending responsibility.” (The best, or at least the most entertaining explanation of the subprime crisis I’ve seen is available on YouTube here.)
Well, government intervention into the economy (and just about everything else, come to that: tobacco, transfats, you name it, they want to control it) seems to be back in season. Even President Bush is talking about a five-year freeze on raising the rates on all those adjustable-rate mortgages bankers were passing out a few years ago.
This is not, of course, a new idea. “We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.” So thought Benito Mussolini, who did what he could to restrict the freedom of the individual.
Admittedly, Mussolini was a rank amateur compared, say, to V.I. Lenin, but when it came to curtailing individual freedom by expanding the coercive power of the state, they worked from the same songbook. Back in the heady days of 1917, Lenin boasted that when he finished building his workers’ paradise “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of work and equality of pay.” A single jail cell was more like it, but who thought that at the time?
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith noted the paradox, or seeming paradox, of capitalism: that the more individuals were left free to follow their own ends, the more their activities were “led by an invisible hand to promote” ends that aided the common good. Private pursuits conduced to public goods: that is the beneficient alchemy of capitalism. In The Road to Serfdom and other works, Friedrich Hayek expanded on Smith’s fundamental insight, pointing out that the spontaneous order created and maintained by competitive market forces leads to greater prosperity than a planned economy.
The sentimentalist cannot wrap his mind, or his heart, around that datum. He (or she) cannot understand why “society” shouldn’t favor “cooperation” (a pleasing-sounding arrangement) over “competition” (much harsher), since in any competition there are losers, which is bad, and winners, which may be even worse.
Socialism is a version of sentimentality. Even so hard-headed an observer as George Orwell was susceptible. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Orwell argued that since the world “potentially at least, is immensely rich,” if we developed it “as it might be developed … we could all live like princes, supposing that we wanted to.” Never mind that part of what it means to be a prince is that others, most others, are not royalty. (Or, as that admirable logician W. S. Gilbert put it: “When every one is somebodee, / Then no one’s anybody!”)
As Hayek observed, the socialist, the sentimentalist, cannot understand why, if people have been able to “generate some system of rules coordinating their efforts,” they cannot also consciously “design an even better and more gratifying system.” Central to Hayek’s teaching is the unyielding fact that human ingenuity is limited, that the elasticity of freedom requires the agency of forces beyond our supervision, that, finally, the ambitions of socialism are an expression of rationalistic hubris. A spontaneous order generated by market forces may be as beneficial to humanity as you like; it may have greatly extended life and produced wealth so staggering that, only a few generations ago, it was unimaginable. Still, it is not perfect. The poor are still with us. Not every social problem has been solved. In the end, though, the really galling thing about the spontaneous order that free markets produce is not its imperfection but its spontaneity: the fact that it is a creation not our own. It transcends the conscious direction of human will and is therefore an affront to human pride.
The urgency with which Hayek condemns socialism is a function of the importance of the stakes involved. As he puts it in his last book The Fatal Conceit , the “dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival” because “to follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.” We get a foretaste of what Hayek means whenever the forces of socialism triumph. There follows, as the night the day, an increase in poverty and a diminution of individual freedom.
The curious thing is that this fact has had so little effect on the attitudes of intellectuals and the politicians who appeal to them. No merely empirical development, it seems—let it be repeated innumerable times—can spoil the pleasures of socialist sentimentality. This unworldliness is tied to another common trait of intellectuals: their contempt for money and the world of commerce. The socialist intellectual eschews the “profit motive” and recommends increased government control of the economy. He feels, Hayek notes, that “to employ a hundred people is … exploitation but to command the same number [is] honorable.”
Not that intellectuals, as a class, do not like possessing money as much as the rest of us. But they look upon the whole machinery of commerce as something separate from, something indescribably less worthy than, their innermost hearts’ desires. Of course, there is a sense in which this is true. But many intellectuals fail to appreciate two things. First, the extent to which money, as Hayek put it, is “one of the great instruments of freedom ever invented,” opening “an astounding range of choice to the poor man—a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy.”
Second, intellectuals tend to ignore the extent to which the organization of commerce affects the organization of our aspirations. As Hilaire Belloc put it in The Servile State, “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.” The really frightening question wholesale economic planning raises is not whether we are free to pursue our most important ends but who determines what those “most important ends” are to be. “Whoever,” Hayek notes, “has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower—in short, what men should believe and strive for.”
There has been a great deal of agitation over the sub-prime so-called crisis in the last few months. Probably, there is more agitation to follow. More fiscal pain is on the way as banks make further write downs and (nota bene) the market corrects itself. But let’s keep a little perspective on the matter. Yesterday, the market closed at over 13,400. In 1982, the market plunged to about 700—that’s seven hundred—thanks in large part to Jimmy Carter’s brilliant handling—and “handling” is le mot juste—of the economy and America’s political fortunes.
On economic matters, Mrs. Clinton is at heart a socialist of Keynesian disposition. We’ve been there, done that. Do we have to go through it again? There is some irony in the fact the Keynes provided a most penetrating criticism of the top-down rationalism that he himself propounded in economic matters. Writing about Bertrand Russell and his Bloomsbury friends, Keynes tartly observed that
Bertie in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously
incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on rationally.
What prodigies of existential legerdemain lay compacted in that phrase “all we had to do”! To my ears, anyway, it is redolent of one of the most nauseating epithets in recent memory: “It takes a village.” We all know that more government intervention and control means high taxes, greater inefficiency, and economic stagnation. We’ve seen it happen dozens of times. We remember the past. Are we still condemned to repeat it?
It will be interesting to see what sorts of “all-we-have-to-do” proposals Hillary and the other aspirants to the job of running your life for you will propose as we muddle our way through this latest financial contretemps. Don’t say she didn’t warn you
Now say something intelligent or go back to your sandbox
OK, you're a fkn idiot
DO you really want the govt to redistribute income and micro manage the economy?? They're so good at everything else they do, right??
How in the world is the mortgage lending business unregulated??
Didn't the people signing those mortgages know what the terms were????
Didn't they have the choice between fixed or adjustable rates??????
Yeah, we need to get Hillary elected and have her in charge of the economy- everything would be just peachy
If you actually believe in capitalism, you would have more faith in the market to regulate itself, rather than having the government trying to redistribute income because the Constitution mandates that everybody in the country should be middle class
i cant for the life of me think why 12 people would be interested in what i say...
true that
Hamas Whines About Suicide Bomb Plot
Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 9:33:06 am PST
You know you’re starting to get a bit cynical when you read a story like this one and it makes you break out laughing: Hamas claims to have foiled Fatah plot to kill Haniya.
It’s a many-layered baklava of deceitful irony.
GAZA CITY (AFP) - A senior Hamas leader on Saturday said the Islamist group had foiled a plot by Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah party to assassinate dismissed Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya.
Hamas-run police had arrested a would-be suicide bomber, who was a member of Fatah, former interior minister Said Siam told a press conference in Gaza City.
Siam said the Fatah plotters had planned to kill Haniya at Friday prayers.
Fatah spokesman Fahmi Zaarir rejected the accusation as “ridiculous” in a statement from the party’s headquarters in Ramallah.
During a raid on the house of an explosives expert involved in the plot, Hamas-run police had found “plans to assassinate prime minister Ismail Haniya during Friday prayers with a suicide bomber wearing an explosives belt,” Siam said.
LGF
California Tree-Fruit
I receive a lot of questions concerning why California tree-fruit, such as plums, nectarines, and peaches, continues to be in depression, when row crops and things like almonds and fresh grapes are not. Speaking as someone who grew up with the tree-fruit industry (my grandfather began farming our place in trees in 1910), I think there are three reasons.
All fresh fruit that is not storable is not so easily exported, and so misses out somewhat on the new appetites of an increasingly affluent middle class in China, India, and Korea, who are beginning to put California almonds in their rice, or use more of our walnuts or processed fruits as condiments. Second, 10-15% of all fresh fruit in the United States in the summer months is now consumed in farmers’ markets, and bypasses the old packer, shipper, broker nexus (Thank God), which leads us to the third relevant point: the new varieties that came on the scene in the 1960s were disastrous: big, shiny, watery, hard, bouncy—and tasteless, they shipped as well as they tasted awful.
Oh, to Eat an Elberta Peach!
In the old days, farming tree-fruit was an art: one had 24 hours to pick a delicious and ripe Santa Rosa plum or an Elberta peach before it went bad. Pickers used gloves; we used small padded boxes; and the fruit was on the truck within the day—or else. I can remember 20-hour days of madness as we rushed with my grandfather into the orchards to spread boxes and get them out, and hear his lectures to the picker to be sure to wear gloves and not drop the fruit from the bucket.
The result was that a consumer ate a delicious, ripe (and sometime messy overripe) tree-fresh plum or peach. It was hard to farm a 30 acre block of one single variety, since the skills involved took years to master. A single bad decision about irrigation timing, or soil fertilizaton, or thinning, or picking time, or a suddenly hot or cool day could spoil tons of fruit. The corporations, family or not, hated the hassles, and much preferred to have large tracts of ‘pick and forget’ varieties that were off the tree half green in one or two (rather than four or five) pickings. Almost anyone could manage such an orchard, and many with almost no skills did.
So with the advent in the late 1960s of varieties like Red Beaut plums (that destroyed its rival (both were picked in late May) delicious, soft old Burmosa early plum), May Grand nectarine, or Red Top peaches, the shipper had a fruit that could be picked half green and still colored much better, had a window of a week to be picked, did not bruise, had a good shelf life, and thus attracted the shoppers’ eye—until they got home and tried to eat it.
After forty years, the consumer said “no mas” and simply assumed that California plums, nectarines, and peaches were de facto unripe, hard and taste badly, if not saturated with chemicals to make them ship and look like plastic fruit. True, some have gone back to the old varieties for local consumption, but the notion that a family farmer of 100-200 acres could grow blocks of five-acre varieties, and from May to September pick and pack each day at a profit is apparently over.
They are going broke or long gone. Instead we have micro-farmers, mostly organic who do their own labor on 10-acre suburban farms for farmers’ markets, with tasty old varieties, OR mega-corporations, who own 5,000-10,000 acres of tasteless hard fruit and through sheer economy of scale still survive, though are in deep trouble since they have a product few anymore like.
(Tree-fruit farming is far more risky than Vegas gambling, as I can attest. It is not unusual to net $50,000 one year on a five-acre plum orchard, and lose $20,000 annually on it for the next seven years—due to hail, rain during bloom, shortage of bees, poor set, market collapse, changing taste for varieties, tree or soil diseases, strikes, etc.)
In the end, one would be safer playing the stock market or going to the Casino.
I note in passing that to a degree the fresh grape industry was similar, but the new shiny hard varieties like Flame Seedless tasted almost as good at Thompson Seedless (itself making an unfortunate devolution from a small, golden color sweet grape to a pumped up, girdled, gibbed-up, and water soaked monstrous, thumb-sized tasteless berry.)
The end of the Santa Rosa Plum and the Elberta Peach is emblematic of our age.
VDH
Blue On Blue, No Heartache For GOP
There are a few moments where pure schadenfreude can honestly be enjoyed without guilt. Besides Geraldo getting assaulted by neo-Nazis he wanted to exploit for ratings, the second-best example is watching Democrats beat each other up by accusing each other of the voter fraud they insist doesn't exist in general elections. This time, Bill Clinton provides the blue-on-blue action in Nevada:
Today when my daughter and I were wandering through the hotel, and all these culinary workers were mobbing us telling us they didn’t care what the union told them to do, they were gonna caucus for Hillary.
There was a representative of the organization following along behind us going up to everybody who said that, saying 'if you’re not gonna vote for our guy were gonna give you a schedule tomorrow so you can’t be there.' So, is this the new politics? I haven’t seen anything like that in America in 35 years. So I will say it again – they think they're better than you.
Wow -- who would have thought that unions try to organize voters? Isn't that why people like Bill Clinton have sucked up to them for decades? Having a leading Democrat complain about union pressure on members for political action has to be one of the most clarifying and completely hilarious moments in politics since .... well, since Howard Dean flamed out in Iowa and the Democrats picked John Kerry as the nominee.
If Hillary wins the nomination, it will be even more hilarious to see Bill come back to Nevada to get this union endorsement in the general election. Will he keep an eye on these organizers to ensure that they don't engage in "voter suppression" if Hillary runs as the Democratic nominee? Even in Vegas, I wouldn't bet on it.
For his belated discovery of how the unions he and his party have assiduously and at times corruptly courted actually operate, Bill Clinton wins the Captain Louis Renault award. It seems somehow fitting that he finds himself shocked, shocked! at the bare-knuckled "gambling" that will go on in the casinos of Vegas.
Stereotypes are promoted by people who don't ahce the capability to think for themselves
BTW, how are those skin head groups doing in Portland and Washington state- not to mention Idaho
World War IV: A Military Perspective
By Christopher D. Geisel
World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, by Norman Podhoretz, New York: Doubleday, 2007. 240 pp.
Not once during my six months serving in Iraq did I ever hear anyone refer to our conflict there as “World War IV.” In fact, to an airman like me on the ground in Baghdad and Camp Taji—with the day-to-day work of equipping the Iraqi Security Forces and training Iraqi soldiers to manage their own logistics system—the idea that anything I was doing was part of a global conflict was an abstract concept at best.
And of course, the notion that the war in Iraq is part of what is widely called the “War on Terror” is a point of contention among not only the military men and women serving in that combat zone, but also the public at large. This idea, in fact, lies at the hot core of the fiery post-9/11 foreign policy debate.
For years, Americans have grappled with a controversial question: was the U.S.-led coalition’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and present occupation of that country the next logical step (after first toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan) in our military response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, or was it simply a foolish distraction from the “real War on Terror?” We have also heard the fervent challenges to the very concept of a “War on Terror,” with some describing the phrase as a political slogan and a “bumper sticker,” and many preferring to view international terrorism as a matter better suited for law enforcement.
Enter Norman Podhoretz, the former editor in chief and current editor at large of the neoconservative Commentary magazine, who makes a persuasive case not only that the Iraq War is part of the global war against the Islamist terrorist forces that attacked the U.S. on 9/11, but also—more importantly—that this global war is better seen as the fourth world war, following the Cold War which, he argues, was really World War III. Furthermore, he abandons the phrase “Global War on Terror,” calling it an “ungainly euphemism,” in favor of identifying the enemy as the “Islamofascists.”
In World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, Podhoretz details the history of failed U.S. policy before 9/11—during both Republican and Democratic administrations—to counter the threat posed by Islamist terrorism. He presents a bloody three-decades-long history of terrorist bombings, murders, kidnappings, hijackings, and hostage-takings, where our mostly weak responses to these acts served to embolden our enemies. Podhoretz issues a vigorous defense of the post-9/11 Bush Doctrine at a time now when, as he documents, even some of its original advocates have jumped ship.
The Islamofascist enemy, as described by Podhoretz, is a monster with two heads: a religious head—exemplified by the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban—and a secular head—of which Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical regime was a prime example. This combined totalitarian threat—the threat to human freedom in World War IV—is cast as the progeny of the fascist and communist threats in the world wars of the twentieth century.
That is the major accomplishment of this book, placing the current war against the Islamist terrorists in a convincing historical context. Podhoretz writes:
In World War II, the totalitarian challenge to the liberal democratic world of which we were a leading part came from the Right; in World War III, it came from the Left. Now in World War IV, it comes from a religious force that was born in the seventh century, that was schooled politically at the feet of the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth, that went on to equip itself with the technologies of the twenty-first, and that is now striving mightily to arm itself with the weaponry of the twenty-first as well.
But Podhoretz also presents a philosophical context for the Bush Doctrine. The phrase “Bush Doctrine” has suffered from nebulous and often epithetical usage, with a focus on the supposed “unilateralism” of the Iraq invasion. Podhoretz provides a rigorous and favorable analysis of the doctrine.
Using excerpts from the speeches of President George W. Bush, beginning with the president’s address to Congress nine days after 9/11, Podhoretz outlines what he regards as the four pillars of the Bush Doctrine: (1) that this new war is a fight for freedom against the forces of evil and a direct successor to World War II and the Cold War, (2) that the Islamist terrorists are not individuals to be dealt with by law enforcement, but rather an organized network waging war with state sponsorship, and that those sponsoring regimes are “asking” to be overthrown, (3) that military preemption is necessary against these looming threats because deterrence and containment are ineffective, and (4) that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is part of a larger conflict of the Muslim world against the Jewish state, with the Palestinian people being used as pawns.
In defense of this doctrine, Podhoretz draws heavily from the writings and speeches of its critics. He navigates through the arguments from various schools of thought—isolationism on both the Right and the Left, liberal internationalism, and realism—to display (and justify) the Bush Doctrine’s clear departure from these schools.
In particular, the Bush administration’s bold post-9/11 departure from the realist school is a central theme. Realist theory rejects the imperatives of global freedom and democracy inherent in Wilsonian idealism and instead values stability among nation-states. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, President George H. W. Bush launched Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait, thus restoring the previous balance of power—without deposing Saddam Hussein. This result embodied the realist approach to Middle East foreign policy that the U.S. (and other free nations) followed for the half-century leading up to 9/11; we allied with dictators throughout the Muslim world in order to contain communism and to preserve a perceived “stability.”
The Bush Doctrine abandoned such realist accommodations in what Podhoretz describes as “a revolutionary change in the rules of the international game.” The new imperative is to “drain the swamps” that breed terrorism. What are these “swamps” exactly? Podhoretz explains:
The “swamps” out of which this murderous plague grew were the outcome not, as the old understanding had held, of poverty and hunger but of political oppression.
Thus, under this new doctrine, the Muslim world’s despotic regimes that deny human freedom are finally acknowledged to be the root cause of Islamist terrorism.
While Podhoretz considers the Bush Doctrine “revolutionary,” he does not at all isolate it from previous doctrine. To the contrary, he argues that the Bush Doctrine, in its fundamental premise that freedom is the rightful destiny of all people, is rooted in “the Reaganite version of Wilsonian idealism.” Interestingly, Podhoretz most frequently uses a comparison between the Bush Doctrine and the Truman Doctrine. Just as President Truman recognized the Soviet Union as “an aggressive totalitarian force that was plunging us into another world war” and committed the U.S. to a policy of containment in the long war against communism, so similarly did President Bush recognize the threat of Islamist terrorism, understanding that it “could be defeated only through a worldwide struggle.”
Podhoretz also weighs in on such hot button issues as the debate over pre-Iraq war intelligence and weapons of mass destruction, perceived post-invasion mistakes in Iraq, the prison at Guantanamo Bay, abuses at Abu Ghraib, terrorist surveillance programs, the Niger uranium yellowcake story, the threat of a nuclear Iran, and negative war coverage in the mainstream media.
In World War IV, no conventional wisdom or supposed truism is safe from scrutiny and counterpoint. Many critics of the policy of spreading democracy in the Middle East have asserted that democratic reform cannot come about by foreign intervention. Podhoretz responds with the cases of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, which were both “transformed” into democracies after World War II. He then cites an analysis indicating that a majority of democracies in the world, as of 1970, had emerged either during or in the immediate wake of foreign rule.
Others argue, more fundamentally, that liberal democracy is not for everyone and that we cannot overturn thousands of years of culture in the Middle East. Podhoretz retorts:
But here again the so-called realist ignored the reality, which was that the Middle East of today was not thousands of years old, and was not created in the seventh century by Allah or the Prophet Muhammad. Nor had the miserable despotisms there evolved through some inexorable historical process powered entirely by internal cultural forces. Instead, the states in question had all been conjured into existence less than one hundred years ago out of the ruins of the defeated Ottoman empire in World War I.
During my service in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, I saw firsthand the validation of Podhoretz’s argument that the oppressed people of the Muslim world do desire and deserve freedom. The Iraqi soldiers who I trained would risk their lives on a daily basis just to travel to work. And in three successful elections in 2005, the Iraqis bravely went to the polls and proudly returned with the purple mark on their fingers.
Notably, in my conversations with Iraqis, their discussion of the external threats to Iraq, such as Iran and Syria, loomed large, with talk of differences between the Sunni and Shia in Iraq often taking a back seat. In fact, in the Iraqi Army logistics unit I helped oversee, Sunni, Shia, and even Christian Iraqis served side by side. This lends great credence to Podhoretz’s assertion that current tensions in the Middle East are much more the product of the oppressive regimes and political divisions of the recent century than the age-old sectarian divisions within Islam.
This is not to say that Iraqis are not suffering from a serious damage to their collective psyche, inflicted by decades of life under a tyrant, as Podhoretz acknowledges. What I saw, in working with Iraqis, was their apparent lack of personal initiative to solve problems, no doubt born out of life under Saddam Hussein, when outspokenness and individuality were all too often punished by death.
Yet those who say that efforts to establish democracy in Iraq cannot succeed miss the lesson offered by the enemies of freedom there. Podhoretz points (perhaps non-intuitively for some) to the intense bloodshed in Iraq as evidence that the terrorist forces obviously believe democratization is possible; otherwise they would not be fighting so vigorously against it.
Lately, there has been even more cynicism regarding democratic reform in the Middle East, in the wake of such apparent setbacks as the 2006 Palestinian electoral victory by the terrorist organization Hamas. However, Podhoretz points optimistically to Amir Taheri’s statement that “the holding of elections, however, is a clear admission that the principle basis for legitimacy is the will of the people as freely expressed through ballot boxes.”
Podhoretz does not entirely avoid pessimism concerning World War IV, though. He admits surprise over the speed at which a vocal and influential anti-war movement has taken hold, noting that it has already reached “the stage of virulence it had taken years for its ancestors of the Vietnam era to reach.” And, in detailing various conservative commentators who have now become critics of the Bush Doctrine, Podhoretz paints himself as somewhat of a lone voice in the wilderness. But he does offer some final optimism in his comparison of the Bush Doctrine to the Truman Doctrine. Podhoretz notes that Truman’s doctrine of containment, which was much maligned during his own presidency, would, notwithstanding that, continue to be U.S. policy in the decades to follow.
One disappointment for me in reading World War IV was the absence of the truly comprehensive argument for the use of the term “Islamofascism.” Podhoretz does justify the two parts of the word in explaining that “Islamo-" describes the religious face of the enemy and “-fascism” signifies its secular face. Also, he references Bernard Lewis’ explanation of how the Nazis themselves influenced what would become the Baath party and the tyrannical regimes of today’s Middle East. However, given that “Islamofascism,” which is arguably more controversial a term than “World War IV,” is in the full title of the book, I expected a more explicit discussion of how the current Islamist terrorist threat is worthy of the fascist moniker, especially since such worthiness has been heavily criticized.
Modern political correctness has resulted in a hesitancy to identify the enemy of Podhoretz’s World War IV as Islamist in nature, even through the 2004 report of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission states this clearly:
But the enemy is not just “terrorism,” some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism—especially the al Qaeda network, its affiliates, and its ideology.
Nevertheless, euphemisms that avoid mentioning the Islamist nature of our enemy persist and often dominate. During my service in Iraq, U.S. and Coalition forces referred to the enemy who fired mortars and rockets into our bases and who targeted our convoys with improvised explosives as “the insurgents.” Last year, I attended a briefing by a U.S. Air Force colonel who instructed that the current terrorist threat has “nothing to do with Islam.” And like other members of today’s military, I wear a medal on my uniform called the “Global War on Terrorism Service Medal,” which, since terrorism is only a military tactic, is no more descriptive than would be a medal from World War II called the “Global War on Torpedo Bombers Medal.”
Today, few are comfortable with the terms “Islamofascism” or “Islamic fascism.” For a thoughtful and rigorous justification of the fascist moniker, readers should reference the articles of Victor Davis Hanson, most importantly “It’s Fascism — and It's Islamic” from September 11, 2006 and “Islamic Fascism 101” from September 29, 2006. In the latter, Hanson writes:
First, the general idea of “fascism”—the creation of a centralized authoritarian state to enforce blanket obedience to a reactionary, all-encompassing ideology—fits well the aims of contemporary Islamism that openly demands implementation of sharia law and the return to a Pan-Islamic and theocratic caliphate. In addition, Islamists, as is true of all fascists, privilege their own particular creed of true believers by harkening back to a lost, pristine past, in which the devout were once uncorrupted by modernism.
Anti-Semitism also pervades this new brand of fascism, just as it did under the Nazi version, as Hanson explains in the former article. And he notes that, in the Muslim world, “‘Mein Kampf’ sells well under its translated title ‘Jihadi.’”
Overall, World War IV is an enlightening read. Its most valuable contribution is that it forces the reader to face the compelling argument that the current war against the Islamist terrorists is part of the historical struggle between good and evil, which there has never been an agreement on how best to fight. Podhoretz’s work stands alongside the report of the 9/11 Commission, as both works accurately cast the current war as part of a long story, rather than just an episode that began on 9/11. The reasonable observer can only conclude that our enemies are waging this war for the long haul, so too must we commit ourselves.
Many of my generation, currently in their twenties, consider the 9/11 attacks to be the most significant event of our lifetime thus far. I, however, have long suspected that the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s, the ending of the Cold War, which Podhoretz considers to be World War III, was an even more important event. This latest work validates my notion. For while the end of the Cold War was the victory of the free world over communist totalitarianism and the official end of World War III, the attacks of 9/11 were not as momentous as that; they were neither a beginning nor and end to World War IV. This current global war, waged against freedom by the Islamist enemy, had been raging for decades before 9/11. What is meaningful about 9/11 is that it was on that day that free people recognized the mortal danger of the threat—and began to fight back.
Christopher D. Geisel is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He serves on active duty in the U.S. Air Force. The opinions expressed here are his alone. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Air Force.
I have no idea
How do you feel about the Taliban/AQ getting hold of their nuclear arsenal?
Another year has now passed in a country that we plunged into an unimaginable charnel-house state.
Yet another lib pining for the good ol days of SH
I guess you missed the analysis that I posted that showed that the actual number of deaths have decreased since the war over the average during SH's reign
Keep denying the facts, we're used to it now from the moonbats. There is a stunning decrease in violence and an increasingly larger role for the Iraqi Army and police force
Of course, it could all dissolve back into sectarian violence if long term political problems aren't resolved, but there has been progress there as well
But, keep wishing for a return to bloody chaos because it suits your political stance
Even many Dem congress people who were dead set against war, have admitted the improved conditions. The stats are undeniable. Even if we are buying peace, is that a bad thing? Up till recently, the tribal leaders sided w/ AQ because they thought it was to their advantage long term. Now, because of a perception that we're not gonna cut and run and because they grew tired of living under Aq's brutal and restrictive rule, they've sided with us. This allows time for political reconciliation and I think that's a good thing
I don't see the contradiction. We went into Afghanistan first. As a result of success there, AQ moved into Pakistan- a move to be expected
No one is talking about extending militarily into Iran in the same fashion as we did in Iraq. We don't have the numbers in the military to do that- or the national will. All talk about Iran is centered on taking out their nuclear potential. IF we don't do that, I guarantee the Israelis will
The last line of the article was just gratuitous Bush bashing
I think it was inevitable that Pakistan would be the end game. It was clear AQ would leave Afghanistan for Pakistan
The recent reports of AQ leaders making power moves is scary considering Pakistan's nuclear arsenal
The lat line of the article is just pointless Bush bashing, however
Spunds yummy
Anti-war: A malevolent righteousness which repels most Americans
Posted by: McQ
I have to admit that if a liberal were to write an article which called for other liberals to acknowledge the surge was working, I wouldn't have expected it to be Tom Teepen.
Teepen used to write for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and I became very familiar with his, shall we say, slant? So seeing his name attached to this came as a bit of a shock. I say that all to point out that if Teepen gets it, why aren't other liberals "getting it"?
Democrats in particular and liberals in general - and, no, the overlap isn't perfect, as rightist blather would have you believe - will make a mistake if they don't acknowledge that the increase in U.S. troop strength in Iraq has made a difference for the better.
There is a streak of opinion within the larger ranks of opponents of the Iraq war that, going far beyond the critique asserted by most, seems actually to covet U.S. failure in Iraq as somehow serving America right for the blunder of having gone there in the first place.
That is a malevolent righteousness that properly repels most Americans.
Teepen has to throw a bone to those out there on the left who are now undergoing defibrillation by assuring them that polls say that a majority of Americans have become permanently disillusioned with the war.
Eh. There's nothing like success to change the permanency of the disillusionment, and despite Teepen's contention, the polls I've seen see support slowly rebuilding with the success of the surge.
But that said, I think one of the other reasons support is slowly building is that last line of his in bold. Such refusal to acknowledge success speaks to a "malevolent righteousness" which does indeed seem to "covet US failure". We see it right here in our comment section every time progress in Iraq is highlighted. And it has become both dishonest and, frankly, unseemly.
Teepen then moves on to the Democratic presidential candidates and notes what I have said in the past - they seem out of touch and disconnected from reality with their pat answers to questions which are no longer valid:
The two leading Democratic contenders for the presidency, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, continue to emphasize troop withdrawal but also say that withdrawal has to be consistent with the goals of leaving a stable polity capable of sustaining itself.
Those goals per se rule out precipitous or complete withdrawal. (John Edwards has made himself hopeless on this by insisting we remove even the U.S. troops who are training the Iraqi military.)
Here I disagree with Teepen's characterization of the Clinton and Obama positions. Their rhetoric doesn't at all seem consistent with a goal of leaving a stable polity capable of sustaining itself. But as Teepen points out, their's is at least better than that of Edwards (who may have John Murtha as a secret advisor).
The fact remains, as I pointed out in today's Iraq update, there have been dramatic changes for the better in Iraq.
Dramatic.
There's no longer any question, nor is it a matter of opinion. The facts speak for themselves. And yes, it could all go bad again. But at the moment it isn't.
So why aren't certain Americans celebrating the fact that although the US may have badly fumbled the early parts of the war, up to and including the first half of last year, we've made a remarkable turnaround and we may actually succeed?
Seems to me, unless what Teepen is suggesting is true about certain people, that all Americans would be celebrating that turnaround. And that includes the Democratic candidates for president:
We need to begin hearing from Democratic candidates how they would use the resulting opportunities to best serve U.S. interests and, especially, the interests of the Iraqi population, which our invasion has put at our mercy.
And don't start those plans with, "I'll pull the troops out of Iraq the day I take the oath of office". The previously stated reason for doing that is no longer valid.
Baghdad Security Improved Tenfold
Ten times more neighborhoods in Baghdad are secure now than at the start of the surge, according to the US military, and 75% of the Iraqi capital now qualifies for that status. The remarkable improvement comes on the anniversary of the shift in strategy and tactics known as the "surge", and it highlights the dramatic turnaround in Iraq over the past year:
About 75% of Baghdad's neighborhoods are now secure, a dramatic increase from 8% a year ago when President Bush ordered more troops to the capital, U.S. military figures show.
The military classifies 356 of Baghdad's 474 neighborhoods in the "control" or "retain" category of its four-tier security rating system, meaning enemy activity in those areas has been mostly eliminated and normal economic activity is resuming.
The data given by the military to USA TODAY provide one of the clearest snapshots yet of how security has improved in Baghdad since roughly 30,000 additional American troops arrived in Iraq last year.
In February 2007, only 37 neighborhoods out of 474 were considered secure at all. Now only 78 of them fail to meet this standard. The rest of the neighborhoods do not have a significant American presence, so they do not qualify as secure. They are not necessarily violent, but have yet to get addressed by either Iraqi or American security forces. Because of the lack of verified security, these areas also have more problems in infrastructure, services, and economic revival.
Still, the rapid securing of the capital has brought its residents back into the streets and feeling more confident about their future. Although the USA Today report fails to mention it, the recent breakthrough on de-Baathification reform will help integrate the city's Sunnis back into the mainstream of government and society, helping to assuage sectarian conflicts. (Jim Michaels notes a lack of progress on revenue sharing from oil, but somehow skips over the recent benchmark accomplishment on re-engaging Sunnis.) As the capital becomes more secure, infrastructure investment will escalate, helping to keep rivalries from becoming violent.
Momentum continues towards success, so much so that even anti-war groups have stopped pushing for immediate withdrawal. We need to continue our efforts to stabilize Iraq and see that the security and standard of living improves for Iraqis across the nation to keep terrorists from gaining a foothold in this strategic nation.
Posted by Ed Morrissey on January 18, 2008 10:33 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)
The Presidential Election: A Basic Question - Cutting to the Chase
While watching the endless pundit blather on TV tonight after the Republican Michigan Primary and Democratic Nevada Debate and reading the various opinion meisters commentaries online, I had one of those rare zen moments of simplicity. It all comes down to a simple question:
Who would you like to be in the White House if Pakistan fell to al Qaeda and the Islamists gained control of its nuclear arsenal?
Answer that question and you will know your candidate. All the rest, as they say, is commentary.
Posted by Roger L. Simon at 8:25 PM
Do you know of anyy Russian ETF's?
IF you actually trade the market, you'd have realized that that pattern is typical of a bear market.
It's been the same thing the lat 2-3 days
Riiight, like the Dow wasn't down 300 pts, yesterday also
And like he's not aware of the crisis
Again, these aren't "laws" or "bills"
The earmarks are in the committee reports- not the actual language of the bill
the vast majority of these earmarks do not even appear in the legislative text, but rather are buried in the committee reports that accompany the bill, further removing them from proper review and scrutiny
Given both the implied legal and constitutional authority as well as the long-standing accepted process of Presidents, it appears that a President can, if he so chooses, issue an executive order with respect to earmarks contained solely in committee reports and not in any way incorporated into the legislative text."
Get it now. Because they are not a part of the language of the bill ( and it's done that way to avoid scrutiny ) it's not legally a part of the bill
Judicial Watch Releases Records Re: Hillary’s Health Care Reform Plan
Internal Memos Detail Creation of Government “Interest Group Database” to Collect Personal Data on Health Care Debate Activists
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released records obtained from the Clinton Presidential Library related to the National Taskforce on Health Care Reform, a “cabinet-level” task force chaired by former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Clinton administration. Specifically, these documents come from the White House Health Care Interdepartmental Working Group.
Among the highlights of the documents released by Judicial Watch:
• A June 18, 1993 internal Memorandum entitled, “A Critique of Our Plan,” authored by someone with the initials “P.S.,” makes the startling admission that critics of Hillary’s health care reform plan were correct: “I can think of parallels in wartime, but I have trouble coming up with a precedent in our peacetime history for such broad and centralized control over a sector of the economy…Is the public really ready for this?... none of us knows whether we can make it work well or at all…”
• A “Confidential” May 26, 1993 Memorandum from Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to Hillary Clinton entitled, “Health Care Reform Communications,” which criticizes the Task Force as a “secret cabal of Washington policy ‘wonks’” that has engaged in “choking off information” from the public regarding health care reform. The memorandum suggests that Hillary Clinton “use classic opposition research” to attack those who were excluded by the Clinton Administration from Task Force deliberations and to “expose lifestyles, tactics and motives of lobbyists” in order to deflect criticism. Senator Rockefeller also suggested news organizations “are anxious and willing to receive guidance [from the Clinton Administration] on how to time and shape their [news] coverage.”
• A February 5, 1993 Draft Memorandum from Alexis Herman and Mike Lux detailing the Office of Public Liaison’s plan for the health care reform campaign. The memorandum notes the development of an “interest group data base” detailing whether or not organizations “support(ed) us in the election.” The database would also track personal information about interest group leaders, such as their home phone numbers, addresses, “biographies, analysis of credibility in the media, and known relationships with Congresspeople.”
These records released by Judicial Watch were obtained from the approximately 13,000 records made publicly available by the Clinton Library. The National Archives admits there may be an additional 3,022,030 textual records, 2,884 pages of electronic records, 1,021 photographs, 3 videotapes and 3 audiotapes related to the Task Force that are being withheld indefinitely from the public. On November 2, 2007 Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the National Archives to force the release of all the Task Force records.
“These documents paint a disturbing picture of how Hillary Clinton and the Clinton administration approached health care reform – secrecy, smears, and the misuse of government computers to track private and political information on citizens,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “There are millions more documents that the Library has yet to release. The Clintons continue to play games and pretend they have nothing to do with this delay. The Clintons should get out of the way and authorize the release of these records now.”
For other documents regarding JW's pursuit of Hillary's White House records click here.
http://judicialwatch.org/judicial-watch-releases-records-re-hillary-s-health-care-reform-plan-0
Politicizing The Office?
The Bush administration has taken plenty of heat over their alleged politicization of the White House, especially in the roles Karl Rove has played in the past two terms. The release of the memos from the 1993 Health Care Task Force might put that in some perspective. The HCTF anticipated a tough debate over its proposal to nationalize American health care, and it proposed some specific remedies -- including using the DNC to conduct intelligence operations.
A February 1993 memo to Hillary Clinton from Alexis Herman and Mike Lux proposes that the HCTF -- a White House policy group -- enlist the DNC for several purposes, discussed on page 5:
C. The DNC Role
The DNC clearly has a critically important role to play in the campaign. I would suggest the following roles ...
3. The DNC can be instrumental for us in intelligence gathering and opposition research. Their staff will hear talk about things that may never reach us inside these walls
In other words, the White House would basically run their sales pitch through the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The federal government, rather than making its case through the normal legislative process, would instead deputize the DNC to run its publicity campaign, further politicizing the entire process. They would also use the DNC to "help keep the Democratic base groups pumped up and excited", which gives readers an insight into the purpose of the entire program.
All of that falls into the category of "politicizing" the White House, and much more than having Karl Rove as deputy chief of staff. But this goes beyond mere politicization. The HCTF foresaw using the DNC to "gather intelligence" on political opposition -- a way to gain information to intimidate or extort their critics. It's bad enough when electoral campaigns do this, but having the White House use the DNC for these purposes doesn't border on abuse of power but invades it with a vengeance.
And this memo came to Hillary Clinton a mere two weeks after her husband's inauguration. The impetus for this kind of political warfare existed within the Clinton administration within the first hours of its birth.
Hillary Clinton needs to answer for her response to this and to the Rockefeller memo that suggested much the same approach a few months later. She needs to get the rest of the records out in public in order to allow the electorate to see exactly what kind of administration we can expect from a Hillary victory. Just in the records that have been released, we're already seeing a much darker picture than any reported by the media over the past 15 years.
There are no examples as it hasn't happened yet.
His lawyers say it's w/in the constitution
I hope we get to find out.
It has nothing to do with the line item veto
Huckabee: I'm A Divider, Not A Uniter
There was absolutely no reason for Huckabee to bring up the Confederate Flag issue in South Carolina, especially with such a coarse remark destined for a Democrat commercial in the Fall should Huckabee ever get the nod. The issue was resolved at the State level back in 2000. Huckabee is simply trying to pry an element of the white vote away from McCain because of the kerfuffle over the flag before and after he ran against George Bush. This is not the tactic of a man whose primary claim to fame and electability is having once been a man of the cloth. Huckabee's piety seems matched only by his ignorance and imprudence. There's good reason for concern over the type of president that would make. Not even a southern man needs this clown around this primary anymore.
“You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” Mr. Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, told supporters in Myrtle Beach, according to The Associated Press.
“In fact,” he said, “if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do.”
I've tried to explain it 3 times now.
The distinction is that it's not "law" or a bill that Bush will act on- it;s something different
It's that way because the pigs don't want to have their porkfest exposed to the light of day. IF that would go the normal legislative route, you would have a valid point. They chose this backdoor method to get their troughs filled- allowing them to be vulnerable to the action Bush proposes
Again, if it does happen, and I really hope it does, I'm sure there will be howls of protest and legal challenges
IF he does it, and it sticks, both sides will be equally outraged and it will benefit everybody else immensely
Funny how you didn't read quote this part:
Given both the implied legal and constitutional authority as well as the long-standing accepted process of Presidents, it appears that a President can, if he so chooses, issue an executive order with respect to earmarks contained solely in committee reports and not in any way incorporated into the legislative text."
He CAN issue an executive order
Are you a lawyer??
Didn't think so. The people writing that and advising the President are. I'd take them over you in a legal knowledge challenge
IF he does it, it will be incredible for the country
MY original question was a hypothetical- if her were to take this step and wipe out ALL earmarks, would you support it as a good idea?
Hey, he could have returned the money the Nazi's gave him
He also could have not published a newsletter under his name espousing Nazi views