A moment of Algore honesty

On November 23, while speaking in Greece, Al Gore admitted: "First-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake." And whose mistake was it, Mr. Gore? In 1994, it was Gore himself who ended a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of an ethanol tax credit that added almost $5 billion to the federal deficit last year. And that number doesn't include the many ways in which corn-based ethanol mandates drive up the price of food and livestock feed. Whether Gore meant well or not can be debated, but according to Reuters, Gore also said, "One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president." Why should we believe anything this man has to say? He is a joke.

Shaking the world

Pat Buchanan writes: At the G20 gathering in Seoul, South Korea, Barack Obama got an earful from China about the Fed sinking the dollar and learned that Beijing would not be revaluing its currency to help with our chronic trade deficits. As China holds a huge share of U.S. debt, Obama is not about to get sassy with our banker, who might just cut off the credit America, running a budget deficit of 10 percent of gross domestic product, desperately needs.

So the question arises: Who put us in this predicament? Who awakened, fed and nurtured this tiger to where she is growling at all Asia and baring her teeth at the United States? Answer: the free trade uber alles Republicans. Richard Nixon opened China. His 1972 Shanghai communique pointed inexorably to what Jimmy Carter did in 1979: break relations and abrogate our security pact with Taiwan, and recognize the People's Republic as the sole legitimate government of China. In 1982, the Ronald Reagan White House signed on to a communique with Deng Xiaoping's China by which we agreed to reduce and eventually end all arms sales to Taiwan as tensions in the strait diminished. Under George H.W. Bush, Beijing's crushing of the Tiananmen Square protest with tanks was not allowed to interfere with business.

Repeatedly, Republicans voted to extend most-favored-nation status to China. Dissenters were castigated as "isolationists and protectionists." Under Bush II, the GOP made MFN permanent and sponsored Beijing's entry into the World Trade Organization, despite China's downing of a U.S. surveillance plane and incarceration of its American crew on Hainan Island. Colin Powell was forced to apologize.

For decades, corporate America championed investing in China and trade with China, though the massive transfer of U.S. factories, technologies and jobs was clearly empowering China and weakening America.

Now, with U.S. political, military, industrial and strategic decline vis a vis China manifest to the world, we hear the wails of American businessmen that they are not being treated fairly by the Chinese. And the politicians responsible for building up China are now talking tough about confronting and containing China. Sorry, but that cat cannot be walked back.

Review commission chair Dan Slane says his members have concluded that "China is adopting a highly discriminatory policy of favoring domestic producers over foreign manufacturers. Under the guise of fostering 'indigenous innovation' ... the government of China appears determined to exclude foreigners from bidding on government contracts at the central, provincial and local levels."

Imagine that! The Chinese are ignoring WTO rules and putting China first. Don't they understand how the Global Economy works? You're not supposed to tilt the field in favor of the home team.

The policy the Chinese are pursuing, economic nationalism, was virtually invented by the Republican Party. Protectionism was the declared policy of the GOP from the day its first president took office in 1861 to the day Calvin Coolidge left in 1929. Free trade was the policy of a Great Britain whose clocks those generations of Americans cleaned, even as the Chinese are cleaning ours.

Napoleon said of the Middle Kingdom, "Let (China) sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world." The shaking has begun.

My comment: Is it the "shaking" or the "shake down"? Pat may be more right about all this than I've given him credit for in the past.

An example of a "true Muslim."

http://cloudvideos.tangle.com/c41d1763008601510d3e9a679de49839.flv

This is the mind-set we are up against. By "we" I mean the West. Eventually it will move against the East too. But for now, we are the target.

If the link above does not work, cut and paste this one.
http://www.tangle.com/view_video?viewkey=0861ff3eabea1ceb73e4

Wrong rhetoric

Speaking at the Heritage Foundation, Mitch McConnell said: "When the administration agrees with the American people, we will agree with the administration. When it disagrees with the American people, we won’t. This has been our posture from the beginning of this administration. And we intend to stick with it."

I think this is the wrong rhetoric and is potentially quite dangerous. We live in a Constitutional Republic. This means that the public elects men and women to go to Washington to represent their interests. We are supposed to elect wise and experienced people who can thoughtfully focus on the matters at hand and use good judgment in making decisions, considering both the interests of their constituents and the interests of the nation at large. Goodness, there have been times when the majority favored legalized abortion, but that doesn't make it right. It is quite likely, given the fact that nearly half the population pays no federal income tax, that the majority may oppose tax reductions, but that doesn't make it right. If our representatives are only responsible for doing what the majority of their constituents want, then we don't really need representatives. Lackeys will do. I would sure prefer to hear the Republican leader of the Senate affirming his party's commitment to governing according to tried and true Conservative principles, not "the will of the people." That's mob rule, the tyranny of the majority, not Republicanism.

Islam's war against the West

DUBAI, Oct 27 (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said the kidnapping of five French nationals in Niger last month had been prompted by France's unjust treatment of Muslims, in an audio message aired on Al Jazeera television on Wednesday.


Looks like the new front on Islam's war aginst the West is France. Will they recend their ban on veils? Will they get out of Bush's war in Afghanistan (that's bin Laben's appellation)? I guess we're about see what kind of stuff the French are made of. There are presently 5 million Muslims in France. That's enough to create a lot of havoc.

WH bristles over top Republican's remarks

CNN White House Correspondent Dan Lothian

The White House is firing back at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell after he told the National Journal that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." With his usual sarcastic tone, spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters "maybe Senator McConnell is interested in running for President."

Gibbs said there will be time in two years for a presidential campaign, but that "members of the Senate are elected and hired by the people of the United States to get stuff done for the people of the United States, not posture and play political games, gum up the system."


What hypocrisy! The Senate isn’t even in session. There isn’t any business McConnell is supposed to be doing right now. We’re in the midst of a hot political campaign. And on top of all that, isn’t the President of the United States "elected and hired by the people of the United States to get stuff done for the people of the United States, not posture and play political games"? And isn’t his office in session every day of the year? Yet he gets to run around all over the country politicking as usual, lying about the opposition, and generally doing his best to gum up the system. Gibb's hypocrisy is stunning!

Let the money in...

I'm coming to the conclusion that, with perhaps a few exceptions, as a general principle you really can't buy an election. I say that because Meg Whitman has spent $120 million of her own money yet it looks like she isn't gonna win. Could she win if she spent $200 million or $300 million? I doubt it. People are gonna vote for who they decide to vote for. At some point you have put out as much advertising as you can. Putting out any more just isn't going to change the outcome.

This also leads me to think that the money flows toward whoever is perceived as the likely winner. In other words, the reason so many conservative candidates are likely to win is not because so much money is flowing toward them; the money is flowing in their direction because people think they're going to win. If it's true that as a general rule, the money is the result of success and not the cause, then I say repeal McCain-Feingold (looks like Feingold will be repealed). Why not take all the limits off political contributions? All you really need is exposure of the donor list. My concern all along has been that my rights are being trambled on when the government tells me that I can't give a candidate more than $1000.00. And all it does is impower PACs and big labor. Let's put the money back into politics. With good sunshine laws, the risk of money corruption politicians is greatly limited. And we have done rather well in recent years at discovering the corrupt ones and throwing them out on their ear...sometimes into prison.

This is an embarassment

Ascension of the moderates?

I heard Rush saying the other day that in the next Senate, it will be the so-called moderates who have the power, being neatly situated between the left-wing flaming liberals on the one side and the right-wing Tea Party extremists on the other. Does this mean that John McCain will morph back into a "moderate"? I'm sure we can count on that. Too bad the good people of Arizona didn't dump him when they had the chance. Does this also mean that the real power brokers in the next Senate will be the cooperators and compromisers like Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman, and the Maine girls? Probably. It may be better than having socialists like Reid and Shumer calling the shots, but it certainly isn't much better.

Also, I predict again that by the end of January Hillary will have resigned so she can run for president. The next two years could be very unpleasant for the current occupant of the White House as Bill and Hillary roam the countryside criticizing his every move. I suspect they will make the criticisms from the right look like pablum.

Liberalism at odds with democratic government

Modern liberalism is fundamentally at odds with democratic government because it demands results that ordinary people would not freely choose. Liberals must govern, therefore, through institutions that are largely insulated from the popular will. The most important institutions for liberals’ purposes are the judiciary and the bureaucracies.

In his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln asserted: "The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court...the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal." Lincoln was thinking of Dred Scott. Today, however, his observation is even more pertinent, as we have resigned into the hands of the federal judiciary ever more vital questions affecting the whole people. We have in very significant measure ceased to be our own rulers.

The Supreme Court, without authorization from any law, has changed our policies and our culture. That process continues as the lower federal courts are following the Supreme Court’s example. The courts, without the authorization from law, are taking out of the hands of the American people the most basic moral and cultural decisions. [Robert Bork, 1995]

The most recent example of what Judge Bork describes is a federal judge ordering the military to accept out-of-the-closet homosexuals.