The illusive constant - peace and tranquility!

There have been many takes on Obama. This one by Christopher Hitchens, is blunt and to the point as is his style. In the article, he advises we "unhitch" ourselves from accepting the press' characterization of Rev. Wright's remarks and think of them more as wicked and stupid and Obama's explanation as less than "soothing" but rather a cynically "oozing" calculation. (See 1 below.)

On the front page of the Wall Street Journal today is an article entitled: "Violence Roils Black Funeral Parlors" by Gary Fields. The author writes about an increase in assaults, murders and crime occurring at black funeral homes. The funeral scene is changing from one of reverence and respect for the deceased to confrontation and gun battles. Police are baffled to explain the cause. Some assume it is drug related, others because possibly more ex-felons are re-entering society, others because of poor education. They have no real answer.

Criminal behaviour has many roots and causality.

Barak is making concessions in order to pacify Sec. Rice and the pressure she receives from Abbas. In the final analysis, I doubt these concessions will lead to less terrorism because Hamas and Fatah are not on the same page and are not likely to any time soon. Most Israeli concessions have led to more terror as the weapons used by Palestinian police to bring order eventually are used against Israel.

I find it ironic that we learned the hard way in Iraq concessions did not work yet we believe Israel must continue this failed practice. Arabs in general and terrorists for certain interpret concessions as a sign of weakness and a signal to extract more.(See 2 below.)

More and more articles suggest the current financial meltdown will take a long time to recover from and based on today's market indices we have erased almost a decade of value. The reasoning goes as follow, as I have written before:

a) Housing values represent a large personal asset and their rise was used to finance a host of consumerism.

b) Financial institutions have suffered serious damage to their capital ratios and therefore, are not likely to be as generous in making future loans.

c) Our economy's expansion, as with any, is, in part, dependent upon capital availability and in or particular case a heavy dose of consumption.

d) Inflation in food and energy costs is siphoning away some of the consumer's ability to fund other purchases.

e) Both housing and car manufacturing are big employers and home and cars require a lot of various materials which has a ripple effect on employment among a host of other supply industries, ie steel, chemicals, appliances, glass, wood, roofing material etc.

f) Federal Reserve actions to date have diminished its own future ability to stave over the possibility of more serious hits or other shoes that have yet to fall.

g) Mortgage resets and the continued defaults are reinforcing cautious behaviour among financial institutions and I would suspect more bankruptcies and consolidations to occur as we move forward.

It may well be that we will avert a serious recession but it also seems logical to expect any recovery will be muted and take longer to achieve.

At this juncture I see nothing evident from an historical precedent to suggest Congress will respond rationally. In fact the Congressional response to Enron brought about Sarbanes-Oxley which drove many listings to foreign exchanges, raised the cost of legal and accounting bills and caused many enterprises to go private or be bought out in leveraged deals to avoid its onerous legislation. Whether "SOX" has become a hammer in pursuit of a cockroach remains debatable.

Former Chairman Greenspan publicly stated more than once, the Fed could not stave off "exuberance" but could only respond after the fact. I believe that is an excuse for his own failures and not a rational explanation of the Fed's inadequacy. There are many things Greenspan and the Fed could and should have done to make leveraging more expensive and unattractive beyond mere talk.

Beyond our own problems the Chinese response to dissidents is beginning to reflect itself in ways that Chinese rulers may not have anticipated. A simple unwillingness on the part of a proud and tired black women in Montgomery, to sit where she chose, shook this nation in ways that were not anticipated and ultimately caused a reversal of immoral laws and, lamentably over time, many responses which have proven counterproductive.

The Chinese would be wise to study and better comprehend the support those in pursuit of freedom can command from others who are free.

The more concerted response to free Iraqis should have applied to GW's efforts but that would have entailed greater unity, courage and guts than our allies could muster and/or GW was capable of orchestrating. So words are likely to become the basic weapon of choice in defending Tibetans but should the rebellion gather momentum more significant responses might be initiated.

In recent weeks we have been exposed to an enormous variety of hubris, duplicity, vituperation, outright lies and questionable "audacity" ranging from the pulpit, gushing forth from the lips of prominent candidates, politicians, media darlings and rulers of nations. Yes, even from Islamic terrorists.

We are indeed a troubled world in search of that one constant that always seem elusive - peace and tranquility.

First positive comment from Abbas regarding talk progress. (See 3 below.)

Dick



1)Blind Faith The statements of clergymen like Jeremiah Wright aren't controversial and incendiary; they're wicked and stupid.
By Christopher Hitchens

It's been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest. But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it's at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. "If Barack gets past the primary," said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, "he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen." Pause just for a moment, if only to admire the sheer calculating self-confidence of this. Sen. Obama has long known perfectly well, in other words, that he'd one day have to put some daylight between himself and a bigmouth Farrakhan fan. But he felt he needed his South Side Chicago "base" in the meantime. So he coldly decided to double-cross that bridge when he came to it. And now we are all supposed to marvel at the silky success of the maneuver.

You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily. (Yet why do I say I am surprised? He still gets away with absolutely everything.)

Looking for a moral equivalent to a professional demagogue who thinks that AIDS and drugs are the result of a conspiracy by the white man, Obama settled on an 85-year-old lady named Madelyn Dunham, who spent a good deal of her youth helping to raise him and who now lives alone and unwell in a condo in Honolulu. It would be interesting to know whether her charismatic grandson made her aware that he was about to touch her with his grace and make her famous in this way. By sheer good fortune, she, too, could be a part of it all and serve her turn in the great enhancement.

This flabbergasting process, made up of glibness and ruthlessness in equal proportions, rolls on unstoppably with a phalanx of reporters and men of the cloth as its accomplices. Look at the accepted choice of words for the ravings of Jeremiah Wright: controversial, incendiary, inflammatory. These are adjectives that might have been—and were—applied to many eloquent speakers of the early civil rights movement. (In the Washington Post, for Good Friday last, the liberal Catholic apologist E.J. Dionne lamely attempted to stretch this very comparison.) But is it "inflammatory" to say that AIDS and drugs are wrecking the black community because the white power structure wishes it? No. Nor is it "controversial." It is wicked and stupid and false to say such a thing. And it not unimportantly negates everything that Obama says he stands for by way of advocating dignity and responsibility over the sick cults of paranoia and victimhood.

That same supposed message of his is also contradicted in a different way by trying to put Geraldine Ferraro on all fours with a thug like Obama's family "pastor." Ferraro may have sounded sour when she asserted that there can be political advantages to being black in the United States—and she said the selfsame thing about Jesse Jackson in 1984—but it's perfectly arguable that what she said is, in fact, true, and even if it isn't true, it's absurd to try and classify it as a racist remark. No doubt Obama's slick people were looking for a revenge for Samantha Power (who, incidentally, ought never to have been let go for the useful and indeed audacious truths that she uttered in Britain), but their news-cycle solution was to cover their own queasy cowardice in that case by feigning outrage in the Ferraro matter. The consequence, which you can already feel, is an inchoate resentment among many white voters who are damned if they will be called bigots by a man who associates with Jeremiah Wright. So here we go with all that again. And this is the fresh, clean, new post-racial politics?

Now, by way of which vent or orifice is this venom creeping back into our national bloodstream? Where is hatred and tribalism and ignorance most commonly incubated, and from which platform is it most commonly yelled? If you answered "the churches" and "the pulpits," you got both answers right. The Ku Klux Klan (originally a Protestant identity movement, as many people prefer to forget) and the Nation of Islam (a black sectarian mutation of Quranic teaching) may be weak these days, but bigotry of all sorts is freely available, and openly inculcated into children, by any otherwise unemployable dirtbag who can perform the easy feat of putting Reverend in front of his name. And this clerical vileness has now reached the point of disfiguring the campaigns of both leading candidates for our presidency. If you think Jeremiah Wright is gruesome, wait until you get a load of the next Chicago "Reverend," one James Meeks, another South Side horror show with a special sideline in the baiting of homosexuals. He, too, has been an Obama supporter, and his church has been an occasional recipient of Obama's patronage. And perhaps he, too, can hope to be called "controversial" for his use of the term house nigger to describe those he doesn't like and for his view that it was "the Hollywood Jews" who brought us Brokeback Mountain . Meanwhile, the Republican nominee adorns himself with two further reverends: one named John Hagee, who thinks that the pope is the Antichrist, and another named Rod Parsley, who has declared that the United States has a mission to obliterate Islam. Is it conceivable that such repellent dolts would be allowed into public life if they were not in tax-free clerical garb? How true it is that religion poisons everything.

And what a shame. I assume you all have your copies of The Audacity of Hope in paperback breviary form. If you turn to the chapter entitled "Faith," beginning on Page 195, and read as far as Page 208, I think that even if you don't concur with my reading, you may suspect that I am onto something. In these pages, Sen. Obama is telling us that he doesn't really have any profound religious belief, but that in his early Chicago days he felt he needed to acquire some spiritual "street cred." The most excruciatingly embarrassing endorsement of this same viewpoint came last week from Abigail Thernstrom at National Review Online. Overcome by "the speech" that the divine one had given in Philadelphia, she urged us to be understanding. "Obama's description of the parishioners in his church gave white listeners a glimpse of a world of faith (with 'raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor … dancing, clapping, screaming, and shouting') that has been the primary means of black survival and uplift." A glimpse, huh? What the hell next? A tribute to the African-American sense of rhythm?

To have accepted Obama's smooth apologetics is to have lowered one's own pre-existing standards for what might constitute a post-racial or a post-racist future. It is to have put that quite sober and realistic hope, meanwhile, into untrustworthy and unscrupulous hands. And it is to have done this, furthermore, in the service of blind faith. Mark my words: This disappointment is only the first of many that are still to come.

2)Exclusive: Mixed signals from Jerusalem ahead of Rice visit


US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrives in Israel Friday, March 28, the day before the Arab Summit is due to open in Damascus. She will meet Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Amman. Her purpose and that of the concessions she has demanded of Israel is to make it worthwhile for Abbas to stay clear of the radical line espoused by Syria and Iran in Damascus and stick to the US-promoted peace track.

After defense minister Ehud Barak announced concessions to be laid before Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad at their meeting Wednesday, foreign minister Tzipi Livni stated that fighting terror in Gaza is pivotal for progress in peace negotiations. Israel suspended its attacks on Hamas targets in Gaza three weeks ago.

The concessions Barak has announced include permission to deploy in Jenin, a West Bank terror stronghold, 600 Palestinian security men trained in Jordan under a US program. He will also authorize the delivery of 20 APCs from Russia for Abbas’ security forces and may also remove a couple of temporary roadblocks. Easing travel restrictions for Palestinian businessmen, he described as “a calculated risk” to improve the climate of talks with Palestinians. But he stressed that Israel will retain overall responsibility for West Bank security.

Barak is clearly bidding to improve the climate of his own uneasy relations with the Secretary of State and the generals operating on her behalf on the Palestinian-Israel scene.

Israel sees the Palestinian force trained in Jordan as a policing element for upholding law and order and combating anarchy in Palestinian towns - at best. Counter-terror tasks will continue to be carried out by Israel’s military and security forces.

The Washington Post recently reported that doubts in Israel and the US Congress about the loyalties of Abbas’ forces had slowed the arrival of the US training program’s funding. An American “with close knowledge of the program” was quoted as calling it “under-funded, under-equipped, under-everything.”

3) Abbas: Talks with Israel broach all core issues including J'lem


Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Wednesday that talks between chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni are tackling "all the core issues without exception: Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders, and security."

"We hope to achieve a settlement in 2008, there are many obstacles but we hope they will be removed. We are all pressing to reach a settlement by the target date," Abbas said.

He said settlement building in and around Jerusalem, Israel Defense Forces checkpoints and raids were blocking progress towards achieving a deal by the end of this year, a target date set by U.S. President George W. Bush at the Annapolis peace summit last November

A senior Abbas aide said the Palestinian president will visit Washington in April to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace talks with Bush. U.S. officials said they were checking whether this was accurate.

Bush made his first presidential visit to Israel and the West Bank in January and is expected to make another trip in May, to meet with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Abbas.

At Annapolis in November last year, Bush launched Israeli-Palestinian peace talks on sensitive final status issues such as Jerusalem, the fate of refugees, settlements and borders.

Washington has appointed three U.S. Generals to help the two sides narrow the gaps, monitor implementation of a U.S.-sponsored road map for peace and help draft a security plan between Israel and the future Palestinian state.

Palestinian officials and Western diplomats said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are set to visit the region later this month for peace talks with Abbas and Olmert.

Rice is expected to push for the implementation of the road map which calls on Israel to halt settlement construction and on the Palestinians to rein in militants.

"Rice will meet Abbas in Amman on March 30 after the Arab summit in Damascus ends. She will then travel to Israel for talks with Olmert and return to Amman for further talks with President Abbas," a senior Abbas oficial said.

"President Abbas will also visit Moscow on April 20 just before his Washington trip to discuss holding an Annapolis follow-up conference in Moscow in mid-June to push for further progress in Israeli-Palestinian talks," the official said.

Olmert has expressed reluctance to attend the proposed Russian summit, but has not ruled it out.)