Up Yours And Bubble Bath!

A different read on education reform. The child is left behind because there is no personal responsibility to learn nor does the student have skin in the game. (See 1 below.)

Chantrill believes Obama has it all wrong because he does not have a clue. Perhaps Chantrill is wrong and is clueless because Obamna is getting everything he wants from the Demwits in Congress. Whatever he serves up they lap up and the debt just keeps piling up so from Obama to the voters and Chantrill 'up yours!' (See 2 below.)

Are we in for a 'bubble bath?' (See 3 below.)

Netanyahu and Barak strike a deal? Where is Livni - out looking in? (See 4 below.)

One editorial writer believes Barak's deal will be Labor Party's death knell. That may turn out to be a premature prediction but it does highlight the fact that Barak lusts to stay in power. (See 5 below.)

Wes Pruden does not believe we elected a 'prudent prez!' (See 6 below.)

Dennis Prager wonders why Communism is not equated with Nazism.

I am still reading "The Forgotten Man" and I am at the point where the author tells the story about how many of Roosevelt's 'Brain Trust" were enamored with Communism, traveled there to meet with Stalin and returned clueless about Russia's human rights record or economic failure. They bought the philosophical argument hook line and sinker about the downtrodden masses. Conseqently, their thinking had a tremendous influence on Roosevelt and most particularly Eleanor.

God save us from the academics and intellectuals! (See 7 below.)

According to George Will we elected toxicity. (See 8 below.)

Gerald Seib seems to like Obama's 'Iranian Overture' because it takes a line from Rodney Dangerfield and offers Iran what GW did not give them "Respect." (See 9 below.)

However, Mort Zuckerman sees 'danger' in Obama's overtures and Iran's ability to make fools of us.

Seib and Zuckerman both can't both be right - you decide. (See 10 below.)

Bret Stephens questions whether Obama has forgotten about human rights which Carter introduced into our foreign policy approach. (See 11 below)

I receive a lot of e mails and hear from those who are enamored with Obama, voted for him and believe in him. Their theme is not about defending his actions, policies etc. but rather how brilliant he is. Liberals tend to embrace intelligence as proof their anointed are doing the right thing whether, empirically speaking, they are or not. If a person is brilliant, went to Harvard etc. they can't possibly be doing something stupid.

Defending Obama, however, is getting more difficult because continuing to do means they must explain and or defend their constant attacks on GW for spending too much. So I guess they have to resort to talking about the man and how brilliant he is. I don't know whether Obama is brilliant but he certainly is clever and possesses plenty of guile and arrogance. But then so do charlatans.

Obama is a gifted speaker but I suspect he is beginning to wear thin as more and more, who were taken in by him and their discontent with GW and confused machinations of McCain, are having second thoughts.

The press and media were also able to detract attention by attacking Palin as their side issue. Palin became their pinata - the hick from Alaska. Palin became the equivalent of Clinton's trailer park trash and trashing Palin the press, media and Liberals did with gusto.

Palin went to the wrong college, did not understand much about geography and though her record as governor was admirable and her accomplishments quite remarkable she also had these two appendages called children - one mentally afflicted and the other pregnant. The fact that she birthed the former and stood by the latter convinced a lot of voters Palin lacked brilliance when compared with the likes of Biden and Clinton - two of our most accomplished and brilliant politicians in decades to hear the press and media tell it.

Perhaps I less enamored with Obama's brilliance because I am more focused on what he is doing to our nation and it seems to me, as that comedian says, you can't fix stupid. The money being thrown at the economy will bring about a recovery but the prescription he and his Liberal friends are writing will have consequences which, I suspect, will mute the recovery and cause severe reactions down the road in the guise of inflation and a further devalued dollar. Certainly China thinks so.

Finally, today's front page of the Wall Street Journal had an article about how Obama and The White House have come to the realization they need the very financial types they have been attacking just a few weeks ago. Consequently, they are now employing damage control and backing away from their populist attacks. It dawned on the White House, the people who structured the derivatives that created many of the problems are probably best suited to unwind them. Beating up on these executives makes for good politics and plays to the angry crowds in the Colosseum but it comes with a backlash.

Barney, Dodd, Schumer et al. got their licks in and were gaily in the forefront of the public rancor but their intemperateness is not a sign of intelligent statemanship just dastardly political gamesmanship. Obama also happily and willingly made his own contribution to stirring the pot but apparently now realizes any continuance of his own vocal displeasure can flashback and singe.

Populist politics, pitting segments of society against others is good theatre, makes the evening news and plays to the anti-Capitalist sentiment among the intellectuals but it does more harm than good. Capitalism got us to the top of the economic mountain. Socialism will simply lead us back down because it fails wherever it has been tried. Socialism is successful at one thing - distributing the misery it causes equally. While capitalism floats more ships it does so unequally and that is politically unacceptable for Liberals and Obama who believe government should determine outcomes.

Obama's love affair with government will eventually be both our undoing as well as his own. It will take time but it is inevitable unless history is no longer a useful guide. This is why I do not trust his leadership. This is why I am not impressed with those who claim he is brilliant.

Roosevelt's Brain Trust were brilliant men, Kennedy's Best and Brightest were brilliant men. I prefer plain speaking, common sense Mid-Westerners cut from the mold of Harry Truman.


Dick

1) The Futility of American Educational Reform
By Robert Weissberg


As anticipated, President Obama recently unveiled his proposed solution to America's educational tribulations, namely greater early childhood intervention, merit pay for teachers, more charters and national standards. Though this smorgasbord differs in details from his predecessor's No Child Left Behind, it is actually a quite similar restaurant-like order from the identical menu. And just as eateries typically have a common theme, e.g., Italian, so does this education carte du jour: Regardless of what is selected, learning is never the student's responsibility.


Like a patient undergoing brain surgery, today's student lies passively while experts labor to insert knowledge, and to continue this metaphor, surgeons only disagree on how to put it in. For some, knowledge is best inserted by hiring superior teachers; or the route might be holding school administrators accountable; or curriculum experts should concocting exciting new ways to stimulate appetites; or social service professions must be commanded to assist youngsters overcome their personal and home-life crises impeding learning, to mention only a few possibilities to fix the patient's brain.


Regardless of ideology, every contemporary putative solution has this "somebody else will do it" element. While this is predictable for liberals with their "don't blame the victim" flavored solutions, so-called conservatives differ not one iota. "Personal responsibility," the supposed touchstone of conservative thinking is nowhere to be found in these vouchers, charters or accountability mantra; someone, anyone, other than the student is to be responsible for learning.


So, for example, a charter school will be shuttered if it fails to boost achievement but the students themselves, regardless of culpability in their failure, will just painlessly enroll elsewhere where the profit motive will, hopefully, push knowledge into brains a bit harder.


Recall how New York City's Mayor Bloomberg was cheered when he said the he would take personal responsibility for New York public school performance (or how President Bush was personally castigated when his much heralded Reading First program showed lackluster results). Education parents now give way to Education Mayors and Education Presidents. If one needed an example of how liberal don't-blame-the-victim thinking currently dominates education, today's educational tinkering is the perfect illustration.


Why do we refuse to hold students responsible if they fail tests? Why has no one stood up and said, "Test scores will improve when students become diligent, pay attention to teachers, and put as much effort into learning as they put into sports and socializing?" What politician will propose requiring tough high-school exit tests with no second chances as the first step to push today's lazy student off their butts?"


Note well, this personal responsibility message hardly excludes anything on today's menu. You can order it and also ask for a side order of vouchers or multi-culturalism, so its embrace need not anger, let alone economically hurt, any of today's educators. One might even guess that expressing these Apple Pie and Motherhood thoughts would bring cheers from teachers tired of being bashed for not working miracles. Similar applause would come from all those employers exasperated by their hires who think that work is just like a boring class in American history where merely showing up earned a "B."


Multiple explanations exist for this unspeakable truth, but three stand out. First, contemporary American pedagogues are clueless about being a hard ass, and those gray beards who do remember yesterday's sure-fire recipe of humiliation, ridicule, dunce caps and other self-esteem undermining tactics, recognize that they are totally impermissible in today's help-students feel-good-about-themselves environment. Cracking the whip on Mr. Lazybones (in the classroom though not in sports) invites trouble from parents, even litigation. Today's expert-certified motivation approach can best be depicted as "Spare the Rod, Help the Child."

In America's perverse education world, punishing sloth supposedly destroys the inner passion to learn. Yet one more time, the passion to promote unearned self-esteem subverts genuine accomplishment.


Second, little concrete is to be gained politically by pointing the finger at students themselves. Finger-pointing may elicit cheers and hundreds of congratulatory e-mails, but it lacks a ready-made political constituency, and politics is about votes, not scoring rhetorical points. By contrast, criticizing chronic laggards will almost certainly energize quick-to-anger grievance groups whose leaders profit from alleged insults to group members.


Keep in mind that President Obama's educational reform was part of an economic stimulus package, and far, far less a proven recipe for higher academic achievement. Even if it fails, many will gain economically, and this was undoubtedly understood by those who crafted it. Ditto for President Bush's ill-fated NCLB -- hardly surprising, since it brought massive federal spending increases, so even doubters quickly lined up at the public trough for a piece of the action.


President Lyndon Johnson aptly noted that political success requires first identifying a ready-made political constituency, and this is especially true in education, and while kicking butt will win some kudos, mobilizing and organizing fans of butt kicking is impossible, at least in the short run, i.e., the interlude until the next election. Money talks, cost-free solutions sans voters walk.


Lastly, a re-invigorated focus on personal culpability entails a painful look in the mirror. Pogo's wisdom sadly applies to contemporary education: We have met the enemy and he is us. Every item on the reform menu, regardless of ideology, facilitates massive denial, and educators labor to keep it that way. Bush and Obama are enablers on a grand scale. A parent who refuses to prod junior or even discipline him for disrupting classes enjoys a professionally supplied carte d'excuses that surely outshines even the most extensive Greek diner menu: the school is rotten, teachers don't care, textbooks are dull, school boards are skinflints, more schooling options are needed, principals impose too much (or too little) discipline, the curriculum is irrelevant, there is no Internet, and on and on.


When educational reformers cater to our irresponsibility, this insisting that somebody else will fix junior's refusal to buckle down, dependency becomes a drug-like addiction. Within a few years these deus ex machina solutions become the very definition of "educational reform." Policy-making now lurches from one repackaged failed nostrum (e.g., merit pay, Head Start) to more creative panaceas, e.g., close bad schools as if schools themselves fail tests. If there is a glimmer of hope in this, it is the burgeoning popularity of homeschooling. After all, it is embarrassing to round up the usual educational disaster culprits when Mom and Pop run the school.

2) The Instinct of the Clueless
By Christopher Chantrill


President Obama has got it all wrong. The problem with the economy is not greedy bankers trousering their multi-million dollar bonuses. So his plan to fix the banks and tighten up on financial regulation misses the point.


The problem with this economy, with this nation, is greedy politicians and political activists. We are not talking about money greed either, although politicians have always insisted on their share of the loot. We are talking about a deeper, darker greed: the greed for power, for adulation, for ordering people about.


The president's new bank plan gives the government vast new powers. Well of course it does. Governments always think that the solution to a problem is an increase in government power.


It is surely time to update Dr. Johnson's famous saying: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."


I think we need to change the old saying into something we can believe in, something like this:


Compulsion is the first instinct of the clueless.


What do you think of that, Mr. President?


I'd say that, after the experience of the week of the AIG outrages and the shock, shock, that bonuses were being paid to wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Dodd political empire, the most clueless thing that a politician could suggest is an ex-post-facto law on executive bonuses, vast new powers and a new regime of tightened financial regulation. But there's one thing to be grateful for, according to the AP:


Under the new powers being sought by the administration, the treasury secretary could only seize a firm with the agreement of the president and the Federal Reserve.


That's a relief.


The president is at least consistent. His bank bailout program, like the rest of his program, is all about compulsion: more compulsion in health care, more compulsion in education, a whole new area of compulsion in climate control, and "new powers" in financial regulation.


John Taylor Gatto, who is a bit of a wild man, reckons in his Underground History of American Education that the whole compulsion culture was always a corrupt bargain between the political elite and the business elite. For instance, the father of compulsory education, Horace Mann, was a Boston political insider who married a Mary Tyler Peabody -- as in Peabody coal. Mary wrote a whole-word reading primer. Then Mann visited Prussia in 1843 and came back "satisfied that our greatest error in teaching children to read lies in beginning with the alphabet," using the traditional method we now call "phonics." Education has never been the same.


By the end of the nineteenth century government compulsion and regimentation seemed to be the wave of the future. Everyone agreed that centralized bureaucratic structure was beneficial and inevitable in everything from central banking to manufacturing and health care.


It certainly represents the animating principle in the Obama vision of America.


But while political elitists like Barack Obama have been drinking the Kool-Aid of compulsion the business elite has been turning away from regimentation. Even the Prussians, inventors of ferocious army discipline and compulsory schools, were among the first to give up on it. General von Seeckt wrote in 1921 of the need for an individual


soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility[.]


There's even a German word for that: verantwortungsfreudig. As we know, this principle is now the dominant culture in business. It was demonstrated most recently during Hurricane Katrina when bureaucratic government failed utterly but Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott sent the word down to his people that they'd be making decisions "above their level" but to do the best they could with the information available at the time and "above all, do the right thing."


Now we have another Wal-Mart story. Writer Charles Platt thought he'd try a stint at Wal-Mart and see how it compared with Barabara Ehrenreich's experience in Nickeled and Dimed. Pretty soon he had his own


handheld bar-code scanner which revealed the in-store stock and nearest warehouse stock of every item on the shelves, and its profit margin. At the branch where I worked, all the lowest-level employees were allowed this information and were encouraged to make individual decisions about inventory. One of the secrets to Wal-Mart's success is that it delegates many judgment calls to the sales-floor level, where employees know first-hand what sells, what doesn't, and (most important) what customers are asking for.


Somehow this doesn't sound like President Obama's new banking plan for America. From what we've heard so far, in President Obama's America you'd better do what you are told. You'd better not be caught taking initiative in health care, in education, or in finance. President Obama in the White House, his courtiers in the agencies, and his barons in Congress will get to call the big shots in today's America. And don't you forget it.


Why even the president himself, last fall, was hesitant to get above his pay grade when the subject of abortion came up.


Back in the nineteenth century the business elite and the political elite agreed that the workers were best kept subservient and dependent. Today things are different. The business elite thinks that many judgments can be made at the lowest level. But the political elite thinks that everyone from the lower-level people on the line to the banking Masters of the Universe are clueless and can't be expected to make day-to-day decisions about their work and their lives.


But who are the really clueless ones in America? If you ask me it was the politicians filling up the gas tank at Fannie and Freddie during the 1990s and flooring the monetary accelerator at the Fed in the early 2000s


Now President Obama believes that the politicians should be given more power to run the financial system in th 2010s. It seems clueless to me.

3) Obama Creating a BC Bubble?
By Paul Shlichta

France...rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. -A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens


On Wednesday he [Bernanke] announced the Fed will print money to buy U.S. Treasuries in unheard-of amounts - nearly $1.2 trillion. -Investor's Business Daily, March 19, 2009


Governments can provoke chaos by overextending themselves, in what is in effect a bursting of a bubble. A month ago, we discussed the ramifications of an article by Dagny D'Anconia on the possibility of governments becoming bubbles. Of the three causes of bubble formation--external enthusiasm (A), internal overconfidence (B), and internal looting or watering (C)--governments are particularly susceptible to the last two, as attested by numerous historical examples.


In type B collapses, the government extends its activities (e.g. warfare or welfare) beyond its expectable revenues. This tactic is feasible for periods of several years or even decades but will sooner or later cause collapse. In type C bubbles, the government "waters its stock" by creating money and causing inflation.


Many of us feared that the recent bailout and stimulus packages would cause a type B bubble. Now, to make matters worse, our government is generating a type C bubble by printing money without backing by anything except additional Treasury bonds. Cumulative deficit estmiates from the Congressional Budget Office, bad as they may be at 9.3 trillion over 10 years, are premised on optimistic economic growth estimates. Many trillions of dollars in new debt instruments will have to be purchased by the Fed, vastlly inflating the money supply. Hyperinflation looms. As one of our readers, Fearless Bear, commented,


If the security of last resort is an iffy one, we are in deeper muck than anyone wants to admit."


Nowadays, the success of our Treasury bond sales depends on the good will of China's Gao Xiqing, who controls over $700,000,000,000 of outstanding US treasury notes and who reportedly is a hard core Chinese Communist who regards America as China's enemy.


Why, then, is Obama pursuing this risky maneuver? We can imagine at least four possibilities, in order of increasing infamy:


He is too naïve or ignorant to understand what he is risking.
He knows but doesn't care, being interested only in what looks good for the moment.
He wants to cause inflation, because inflation favors debtors and the biggest debtor in the United States is the United States. Moreover, inflation leads to devaluation of the dollar, which, as James Lewis recently pointed out, is one of the key objectives of puppet master George Soros.
He wants to provoke a crisis of capitalism, as James Simpson has already suggested.
Whatever the reason, the effects could be devastating.


These fears are substantiatable by the tracking of bubble indicators. Dagny D'Anconia has recently developed a quantitative detector of type A bubbles. The "D/G" value---the ratio of the Dow Jones average to the price of gold---appears to provide an inflation-corrected index of public enthusiasm vs. fear about our financial future. A D/G plot of the past century clearly shows three major bubble peaks, centered at 1929, 1964, and 2009--the onsets of the great depression, the Carter stagflation, and the Bush-Obama downturn. Other eras of prosperity or depression, due to other causes, are not indicated; for example, the prosperity during the last years of the Reagan administration took place in a D/G trough. For more details, consult her article.


It is possible that similar indicators can be formulated for governmental B and C bubbles. A plot the ratio of federal budget deficit to GDP, a parameter that has already been proposed as an index of instability, may predict type B bubbles. Similarly, rises in the ratio of outstanding national debt (or the total money in circulation) to GDP may indicate the formation of type C bubbles.


Bubbles can be of mixed structure, wherein the different types of driving force reinforce each other in an evil synergy. It could be argued that our present situation is the result of a mixed AB bubble, caused by a combination of investor euphoria and the Clinton-engendered overextension of mortgages to subprime applicants. Rather than counteracting these causes, Obama is exacerbating the problem by forcing through an overblown federal program deficit and printing additional money, thereby creating a monstrous new BC bubble.


However, such analyses are academic; the present case is so obvious that financial commentators here and abroad have already expressed their alarm. We must mobilize immediately to arrest this folly.


Comments on "Is Obama Creating a BC Bubble?"

4) Netanyahu, Barak strike coalition deal
By Attila Somfalvi

Ahead of Labor's Central Committee meeting on joining Likud-led government, parties' leaders meet to try and bridge differences. Prime minister-designate says will be committed to all peace deals signed by Israeli governments, vows Labor chairman will be involved in all significant diplomatic and economic processes


Will Labor be part of Netanyahu's government? The party's decisive moment is only a few hours away, and the parties' leaders are close to an agreement.


The Labor Party's Central Committee will convene at Tel Aviv's Exhibition Grounds on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the matter. Chairman Ehud Barak met early Tuesday with Likud leader and Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu and signed a coalition agreement which would be presented to the convention.




The two party leaders arrived at the Kfar Maccabiah Hotel in Ramat Gan in an attempt to bridge the differences and finalize the remaining issues in the coalition negotiations, mainly on the economic level.

At around 9 am, the sides reported of significant progress in the talks. The issues agreed upon and slated to appear in the coalition agreement between the two parties include the following:


Israel will work to reach a comprehensive regional agreement for peace and cooperation in the Middle East.
Israel is committed to all diplomatic and international agreements signed by the Israeli governments.
The government will work to obtain peace agreements with each of its neighbors.
The defense minister (Barak) will be a full partner in the diplomatic process and will be a partner in any limited forum aimed at making decisions in the diplomatic, security and economic field.
The government will work to enforce the law in terms of the illegal outposts, as well as illegal Palestinian construction.



In his agreement to "all diplomatic deals" Netanyahu is essentially ratifying his old commitment to former US President George W. Bush's Road Map, which was adopted at the time by the Ariel Sharon government, alongside its reservations.




The map included the two-state for two people solution. In his coalition talks with Kadima Chairwoman Tzipi Livni, the prime minister-designate had refused to commit to the establishment of a Palestinian state.



As for the economic issue, the sides agreed not to make significant decisions without bringing them to the approval of a "round table forum" comprised by representatives of the Treasury, the Histadrut labor federation, the Manufacturers Association of Israel and the social organizations.



"We have reached unprecedented achievements," said Histadrut Chairman Ofer Eini, a member of Labor's negotiation team. According to the agreement, the party will receive five ministers and two deputy ministers, as well as the chairmanship of a Knesset committee.



Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon said, "This agreement talks about a significant diplomatic process, as well as maintaining the rule of law in Israel. This is a dramatic agreement. I have sat in three governments and have not seen such a great achievement. Anyone who views themselves as part of a social-democratic party will find it difficult to support it."




The negotiations between Labor and the Likud were only launched on Monday, with Barak instructing his team to strike a deal quickly and bring it to the Central Committee's approval.




The team declared Monday that "there are fundamental difficulties and differences," and Likud officials said that the Labor representatives asked to re-discuss clauses included in the coalition deals signed with the Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas parties.



The Knesset members opposing Barak expressed their anger over the early negotiations, which are being held before being green-lighted by the party's institutions.




In a letter sent to Netanyahu on Monday, the MKs referred to Labor's negotiating team as the "Barak faction" and clarified that they would not be committed to the understandings reached in the talks.



'Using Lieberman's methods'

Another clause which is making the opposing MKs' blood boil is Barak's plan to get the Central Committee's approval to appoint all of the party's ministers himself, as part of the decision to join the government.



"He is a dictator, using (Yisrael Beiteinu Chairman Avigdor) Lieberman's methods," one of the chairman's rivals stated Monday.




The two clauses will be voted on at the Central Committee, and the race appears to be close.




This is the resolution the 1,476 committee members will be voting on: "The party's Central Committee approves the Labor Party's entry to a government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu according to the coalition agreement presented to the committee by Labor Chairman MK Ehud Barak, and authorized Ehud Barak to sign the aforementioned coalition agreement on behalf of the Labor Party; and in a temporary order, in addition to clause 136 of the party's constitution, to appoint the ministers and deputy ministers on behalf of the Labor Party in the government, and inform the party bureau."




But even if the committee does make Barak and Netanyahu's dream come true, the prime minister-designate's troubles are not over yet. It is still unclear how the seven Labor MKs opposing Barak will act in the Knesset. In addition, the Likud's coalition talks with haredi party United Torah Judaism are in the midst of a difficult crisis over the conversion issue.

5) Analysis: Mutiny and machinations in Israel's 4th largest party
By AMIR MIZROCH


This is how Labor dies. Not with a whimper. Not with a bang. More like assisted suicide.


World Mark the day, Tuesday 24 March 2009. It is on this day that Israel's founding party 'finishes its historical role'. Regardless of which way the vote in the convention goes on Tuesday, Labor is finished. If Barak wins, Labor will serve as the fig leaf for Netanyahu's 'orange and black' administration, gradually withering away under international diplomatic isolation and economic stress. If Barak loses, he could jump ship and join Bibi, alone or with a few others, while leaving the rest of Labor [what will they call themselves, the Real Labor, True Labor, Provisional Labor, Continuity Labor?] to rot under the long shadow cast by the much bigger Kadima. Seven constantly-bickering opposition MKs won't take Labor over the next electoral threshold.

Israel's fourth largest political party, a party of 13 MKs could on Tuesday split in two: one part to die a slow death in the coalition, and the other slowly asphyxiating in the opposition. The real question is which one will die first, and who will suffer the most pain?

The social democratic party is tearing itself apart over who is more democratic and who is more social. The bad blood on both sides is boiling, with the rebel camp accusing Barak of undemocratic behavior by appointing a negotiating team without first asking for permission. Barak's camp shot back by accusing Amir Peretz and Ofir Pines-Paz of hypocrisy, saying they held secret talks years ago to merge Peretz's Am Ehad to Labor. What's more democratic than taking a crucial decision to the party's central committee, Barak's camp argues?


Analysis: Condemned to repeat history?
Two months ago, Ehud Barak appointed Isaac Herzog to rehabilitate the Labor party after its crash to 13 mandates in the last elections. How, portentous, how ironic an appointment that turned out to be! Herzog's decision, whether to join Barak or the rebels, will be the sign that seals Labor's final dismemberment.

Labor is beyond rehabilitation. According to a Knesset Channel poll, 61% of Labor members think the party needs to serve in the opposition to rehabilitate itself. Only 39% of Israelis believe that Labor needs to serve in the opposition. So 61% of Israelis think Labor should enter the government for the good of the country. Simply put, the majority of Labor members are completely out of touch with what the general population wants.



Even if Barak wins today it will be a pyrrhic victory - he will take a divided Labor into a Netanyahu government [if the 'rebels' agree to come] and only then will his, and Bibi's, real headaches begin. At least 6 Labor MKs will threaten to vote with the opposition on each no-confidence vote in the Knesset. Does Bibi really want all 13 Labor MKs to come over, or does he really only want Barak plus 5? With Likud, Israel Beitenu, Shas, and UTJ, Netanyahu has 58 seats; he needs only 3 more to form a government, if he gets 6 from Labor and 3 from the Jewish Home he'll be happy with 67. If all of Labor's 13 MKs join Bibi will have 71, [and if he adds the Jewish Home] he'll have 74, but that seems unlikely.

Avishay Braverman won't be Finance Minister. He'd be a good pick, being a former World Bank executive, but Bibi is running out of Cabinet posts and he'll have to give the Treasury to someone in the Likud, even though he really doesn't want to. Braverman, as an economist, sees the world in terms of lines on graphs, and he sees that a party that zig zags constantly over time displays a steady downward line on a graph. Braverman, the optimist, truly believes he can turn Labor's graph around and push that line up. He's thinking of the good of the party. Barak says he's first doing what's best for the country, its citizens, and only then what's best for the Labor party. But since the election Barak has said many things one way and then acted in a completely other way that one would be forgiven for doubting him.

Many in Labor now wish Barak had just never said anything concrete since the elections, wish that he stuck to his famous opaque ambiguity. Why did he have to say "the people have spoken, Labor is going to the opposition?" they ask. Some Labor MKs told Barak to wait a year in the opposition, wait for Bibi to trip over an outpost, and fall face-first onto the White House lawn.

Then Labor can saunter back into power. Others told him to enter the government now because the country needs a wide government to deal with the spinning centrifuges in Natanz and the spiraling stocks on Wall Street. In the meantime, Ehud Barak is still minister of defense, but most of the press statements coming out of his office are political.

Bibi's government so far looks like this: No loyalty oath, no citizenship; no negotiations on Jerusalem; no two-state solution; no talks on withdrawal from the Golan; more homes across the Green Line; less religious freedom; and more welfare money to people who won't join the job sector. He can't go to Washington with this, and Lieberman can't go to Cairo with this.

6)Prez is aware not only that ‘it's the economy, Stupid,’ but that Stupid can't think about two bad things at once
By Wesley Pruden


Barack Obama is one clever dude, operating with the shill and charm of the aluminum-siding salesman from the South Side of Chicago. The difference between the president and the real thing is that the aluminum-siding salesman makes his jokes about handicapped children off-camera.


The president is aware not only that "it's the economy, Stupid," but he understands that Stupid can't think about two bad things at once. Worrying about where groceries come from is only human, and it helps close the sale abroad when Stupid is foolishly spending all his outrage on the AIG bonuses.


The wonderful folks who brought us the AIG fiasco are hard at work now on resolving the works of avarice and mendacity in the Middle East, particularly the threat posed by Iran's nuclear weapon, which is almost ready to be coming soon to a neighborhood near Jerusalem, or at least Tel Aviv. The president's functionaries in Foggy Bottom have told him that there are no other options but supplication and diplomacy, so forget Mr. Tough Guy.


Mr. Obama is eager to get a speech on his teleprompter for a trip to Tehran, to deliver once and for all peace in our time. But the more he grovels, the more Mahmoud Ahmadinejad settles back to scratch the fleas in his beard and enjoy the wiggling and squirming of an American president.


The president's offer in his inaugural address to take any hand that isn't a clenched fist has so far impressed only fearful "allies," still tormented not by enemies of bone and blood, but by apparitions that look like George W. Bush. The Iranian fist is still clenched, and Mr. Ahmadinejad is still boasting that his daddy can lick any daddy in the West.


If that is not persuasive enough, his energy minister says his government will "finish and operate" the nuclear plant the Russians are building for the Iranians by the end of the year. He further said, just in case the intended insult was not clearly understood, that Mr. Obama's pretty words must be followed by "something positive." Mr. Ahmadinejad has helpfully suggested that one positive thing the Americans and maybe even the Israelis could do is convert to Islam.


Mr. Obama would make a pretty convert, all right, but he apparently said at an early age in Indonesia that he didn't want any of that Islamic stuff. He would respect it, but he wouldn't swallow it, and besides, hiding Michelle under a tent would deprive us all of a royal treat.


But the president flies off to Turkey next month to "Respect Islam" by paying tribute to the Islamist government in Istanbul and to participate in the "Alliance of Civilizations," a Blabbonian gabfest sponsored by the United Nations to project the Islamist agenda. It's not at all clear what, exactly, Islam and the West have anything to "ally" about, but Mr. Obama's calling card, after all, advertises "Have Teleprompter, Will Travel." You have to play Peoria before you get to the Palace.


The "Alliance of Civilizations" has been described as a thinly disguised front for the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which is made up of 57 nations with Muslim majorities. The conference seeks to counter "Islamophobia" and "defamation of Islam," which sounds fair enough in Western ears. But the radicals of the Islamic Conference define "defamation of Islam" as "criticism of Islam." Baptists could still mock Methodist baptism, but criticism of Mohammed's child brides would be a no-no.


Mr. Obama's participation in the Blabbonian exercise in Turkey gives him the perfect early opportunity to lay down Western markers, to tell the Islamic nations that he wants to be their buddy, but if they want constructive ties with — and the respect of — the United States, where free speech and freedom of religion are cherished above all, they must housebreak their radicals. He's the right man to say these tough things to the Islamic world. He told us so himself.


The president's itch to take his act to Tehran is well-known, and his Turkish adventure could be the perfect warm-up. But the prospects are not encouraging. He seems to think he can sell aluminum siding to the mullahs with the ease he sold it to the 53 percent who bought it at home. In his Iranian New Year message, he avoided all the words that offend Islamist ears — "freedom" and "democracy" and "liberty" — to assure Mr. Ahmadinejad and the mullahs that if he can't win their respect, well, he has enough respect for everybody.


This might be the way to sell aluminum siding, but it's not likely to impress a culture and a society where cutting off sinners' heads is sometimes merely evangelism.

7) Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?
By Dennis Prager


Why is it that when people want to describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, they use the terms "Nazi" or "Fascist" but almost never "Communist?"


Given the amount the human suffering Communists have caused - 70 million killed in China, 20-30 million in the former Soviet Union, and almost one-third of all Cambodians; the decimation of Tibetan and Chinese culture; totalitarian enslavement of North Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russians; a generation deprived of human rights in Cuba; and much more — why is "Communist" so much less a term of revulsion than "Nazi?"


There are Mao Restaurants in major cities in the Western world. Can one imagine Hitler Restaurants? Che Guevara T-shirts are ubiquitous, yet there are no Heinrich Himmler T-shirts.


This question is of vital significance. First, without moral clarity, humanity has little chance of avoiding a dark future. Second, the reasons for this moral imbalance tell us a great deal about ourselves today. Here, then, are seven reasons.


1. Communists murdered their own people; the Nazis murdered others. Under Mao about 70 million people died - nearly all in peacetime! - virtually all of them Chinese. Likewise, the approximately 30 million people that Stalin had killed were nearly all Russians, and those who were not Russian, Ukrainians for example, were members of other Soviet nationalities.


The Nazis, on the other hand, killed very few fellow Germans. Their victims were Jews, Slavs and members of other "non-Aryan" and "inferior" groups.

"World opinion" - that vapid amoral concept - deems the murder of members of one's group far less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That is one reason why blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in the Congo right now elicits no attention from "world opinion." But if an Israeli soldier is charged with having killed a Gaza woman and two children, it makes the front page of world newspapers.


2. Communism is based on lovely sounding theories; Nazism is based on heinous sounding theories.


Intellectuals, among whom are the people who write history, are seduced by words — so much so that deeds are deemed considerably less significant. Communism's words are far more intellectually and morally appealing than the moronic and vile racism of Nazism. The monstrous evils of communists have not been focused on nearly as much as the monstrous deeds of the Nazis. The former have been regularly dismissed as perversions of a beautiful doctrine (though Christians who committed evil in the name of Christianity are never regarded by these same people as having perverted a beautiful doctrine), whereas Nazi atrocities have been perceived (correctly) as the logical and inevitable results of Nazi ideology.


This seduction by words while ignoring deeds has been a major factor in the ongoing appeal of the left to intellectuals. How else explain the appeal of a Che Guevara or Fidel Castro to so many left-wing intellectuals, other than that they care more about beautiful words than about vile deeds?


3. Germans have thoroughly exposed the evils of Nazism, have taken responsibility for them, and attempted to atone for them. Russians have not done anything similar regarding Lenin's or Stalin's horrors. Indeed, an ex-KGB man runs Russia, Lenin is still widely revered, and, in the words of University of London Russian historian Donald Rayfield, "people still deny by assertion or implication, Stalin's holocaust."


Nor has China in any way exposed the greatest mass murderer and enslaver of them all, Mao Zedong. Mao remains revered in China.


Until Russia and China acknowledge the evil their states have done under communism, communism's evils will remain less acknowledged by the world than the evils of the German state under Hitler.


4. Communism won, Nazism lost. And the winners write history.


5. Nothing matches the Holocaust. The rounding up of virtually every Jewish man, woman, child, and baby on the European continent and sending them to die is unprecedented and unparalleled. The communists killed far more people than the Nazis did but never matched the Holocaust in the systemization of murder. The uniqueness of the Holocaust and the enormous attention paid to it since then has helped ensure that Nazism has a worse name than communism.


6. There is, simply put, widespread ignorance of communist atrocities compared to those of the Nazis. Whereas, both right and left loathe Nazism and teach its evil history, the left dominates the teaching profession, and therefore almost no one teaches communist atrocities. As much as intellectuals on the left may argue that they loathe Stalin or the North Korean regime, few on the left loathe communism. As the French put it, "pas d'enemis a la gauche," which in English means "no enemies on the left." This is certainly true of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban communism. Check your local university's courses and see how many classes are given on communist totalitarianism or mass murder compared to the number of classes about Nazism's immoral record.


7. Finally, in the view of the left, the last "good war" America fought was World War II, the war against German and Japanese fascism. The left does not regard America's wars against communist regimes as good wars. The war against Vietnamese communism is regarded as immoral and the war against Korean (and Chinese) communism is simply ignored.


Until the left and all the institutions influenced by the left acknowledge how evil communism has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world. Conversely, the day the left does come to grips with communism's legacy of human destruction, it will be a very positive sign that the world's moral compass has begun to correct itself.

8) The Toxic Assets We Elected
By George Will

With the braying of 328 yahoos -- members of the House of Representatives who voted for retroactive and punitive use of the tax code to confiscate legal earnings of a small unpopular group -- still reverberating, the Obama administration Monday invited private-sector investors to become business partners with the capricious and increasingly anti-constitutional government. This latest plan to unfreeze the financial system came almost half a year after Congress shoveled $700 billion into the Troubled Asset Relief Program, $325 billion of which has been spent without purchasing any toxic assets.

TARP funds have, however, semi-purchased, among many other things, two automobile companies (and, last week, some of their parts suppliers), which must amaze Sweden. That unlikely tutor of America regarding capitalist common sense has said, through a Cabinet minister, that the ailing Saab automobile company is on its own: "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories."

Another embarrassing auditor of American misgovernment is China, whose premier has rightly noted the unsustainable trajectory of America's high-consumption, low-savings economy. He has also decorously but clearly expressed sensible fears that his country's $1 trillion-plus of dollar-denominated assets might be devalued by America choosing, as banana republics have done, to use inflation for partial repudiation of improvidently incurred debts.

From Mexico, America is receiving needed instruction about fundamental rights and the rule of law. A leading Democrat trying to abolish the right of workers to secret ballots in unionization elections is California's Rep. George Miller who, with 15 other Democrats, in 2001 admonished Mexico: "The secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose." Last year, Mexico's highest court unanimously affirmed for Mexicans the right that Democrats want to strip from Americans.

Congress, with the approval of a president who has waxed censorious about his predecessor's imperious unilateralism in dealing with other nations, has shredded the North American Free Trade Agreement. Congress used the omnibus spending bill to abolish a program that was created as part of a protracted U.S. stall regarding compliance with its obligation to allow Mexican long-haul trucks on U.S roads. The program, testing the safety of Mexican trucking, became an embarrassment because it found Mexican trucking at least as safe as U.S. trucking. Mexico has resorted to protectionism -- tariffs on many U.S. goods -- in retaliation for Democrats' protection of the Teamsters union.

NAFTA, like all treaties, is the "supreme law of the land." So says the Constitution. It is, however, a cobweb constraint on a Congress that, ignoring the document's unambiguous stipulations that the House shall be composed of members chosen "by the people of the several states," is voting to pretend that the District of Columbia is a state. Hence it supposedly can have a Democratic member of the House and, down the descending road, two Democratic senators. Congress rationalizes this anti-constitutional willfulness by citing the Constitution's language that each house shall be the judge of the "qualifications" of its members and Congress can "exercise exclusive legislation" over the District. What, then, prevents Congress from giving House and Senate seats to Yellowstone National Park, over which Congress exercises exclusive legislation? Only Congress' capacity for embarrassment. So, not much.

The Federal Reserve, by long practice rather than law, has been insulated from politics in performing its fundamental function of preserving the currency as a store of value -- preventing inflation. Now, however, by undertaking hitherto uncontemplated functions, it has become an appendage of the executive branch. The coming costs, in political manipulation of the money supply, of this forfeiture of independence could be steep.

Jefferson warned that "great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities." But Democrats, who trace their party's pedigree to Jefferson, are contemplating using "reconciliation" -- a legislative maneuver abused by both parties to severely truncate debate and limit the minority's right to resist -- to impose vast and controversial changes on the 17 percent of the economy that is health care. When the Congressional Budget Office announced that the president's budget underestimates by $2.3 trillion the likely deficits over the next decade, his budget director, Peter Orszag, said: All long-range budget forecasts are notoriously unreliable -- so rely on ours.

This is but a partial list of recent lawlessness, situational constitutionalism and institutional derangement. Such political malfeasance is pertinent to the financial meltdown as the administration, desperately seeking confidence, tries to stabilize the economy by vastly enlarging government's role in it.

9) Message to Iran Shows Strategy Shift
By GERALD F. SEIB

When President Barack Obama sent a video message to Iran marking the Persian New Year last week, it ran to just 556 words. But that brief message spoke volumes about the strategy that lies behind his oft-repeated pledge to reach out to Tehran.

The odds of success here may not be great -- the quick dismissal of the overture by Iran's supreme clerical leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, underscored that -- but the overture will be far more than a simple repeat of past American attempts at outreach to Iran. The audience Mr. Obama is seeking to reach, the aim of the outreach, the content of his message and the plans for a follow-up all will be different from past approaches spanning administrations of both parties.

Consider these differences in turn:

Audience. When the Bush administration reached out to Iran, it sought consciously to go around its leaders and speak directly to the Iranian people, hoping to drive a wedge between the two.
Mr. Obama's message, delivered via the Internet, was consciously aimed at government leaders as well as the Iranian people. At the outset he said: "I would like to speak directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Later, he was even more explicit: "So in this season of new beginnings I would like to speak clearly to Iran's leaders. We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community."

Beyond Iran's people and leaders, there was another audience: America's allies. The Obama administration knows that if it wants their help later in cracking down on Iran, it will get more cooperation if it has demonstrated first that it genuinely tried diplomacy.

Aims. Because the president was talking to Iran's leaders, he was effectively saying the U.S. recognizes their legitimacy and isn't overtly seeking a regime change.
In the past, American messages have been fairly obviously designed to say to the Iranian people: "We admire you, but we can't deal with your leaders. Get rid of those guys and we can do business."

This time, the message didn't even overtly try to influence the outcome of Iran's elections in June, when the future of bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be decided. Certainly the administration would be happy if a reasonable message prompted Iranian voters to produce more reasonable leaders. But the long search for Iranian "moderates" has proved so futile that the administration is prepared to deal with what it gets, not what it wishes it had.

Content. The message was designed to give the Iranians what they always complain they don't get: respect. Twice Mr. Obama referred to Iran by the title its leaders use, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In the past, the U.S. has avoided that title, because using it would grant legitimacy to the country's clerical regime. Mr. Obama is turning that approach on its head, saying essentially that legitimacy, now recognized, comes with obligations.

Iran, Mr. Obama said, should "take its rightful place in the community of nations." But that position "comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms."

Follow-up. It isn't definite yet, but the administration is considering following the president's public overture with a private message directed not to Iran's civilian leader, Mr. Ahmadinejad, but to its clerical leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
That would illustrate what figures to be another hallmark of Obama diplomacy toward Iran: recognizing where the real power in Iran lies and going there.

Obviously, the principal goal of any outreach, however structured, is to stop Iran's nuclear program. America's friends in Israel fear time is running out for that, because Iran within a year will have accumulated enough low-enriched uranium to provide the material for a nuclear weapon. American leaders think the difficulty of further enriching that uranium and turning it into a weapon gives diplomacy and pressure more time.

The deeper question is whether outreach has any real chance to make a difference. Privately, senior administration officials harbor real doubts. Ayatollah Khamenei's blustery response to Mr. Obama's message, which demanded actions rather than words from the U.S., may have been a simple rejection, though it also may have been a sign that the bargaining is beginning.

If there is hope, it may lie in an observation offered by former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this month. Mr. Brzezinski noted that there is a significant difference between North Korea, which loudly proclaims its intention and its right to develop nuclear weapons, and Iran, which just as loudly proclaims that it doesn't want or need nuclear weapons, and that its religion actually forbids them. Whether those words are credible or not, Mr. Brzezinski said, they offer the U.S. an opening for negotiation.

That may be what the Obama team calculates. If the very Islamic nature of Iran is supposed to bar it from developing nuclear weapons, acknowledge that Islamic nature -- and then use it to call Iran on its claims. Oh, and meanwhile, seize the moral high ground in case that doesn't work.

10)Talking ourselves to death: Obama must get tough on an increasingly dangerous Iran
Sunday, March 22nd 2009, 4:00 AM


Loeb/Getty

President Barack Obama must get tougher when it comes to dealing with Iran.

Iran is making fools of everyone.

Even as it lies about its closeness to acquiring nuclear missiles, it continues to menace the political order throughout the Middle East, pressing on with rocketry and rearming Hamas and Hezbollah. And that mischief is nothing compared to what it will do if it is allowed to become a nuclear power.

President Obama's tentative video overture to the Iranians on Friday must not become an opportunity to let them buy more time for their nuclear program.

Nuclear Iran will be a threat to U.S. national security, worldwide energy security, the efficacy of multilateralism and the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Having defied the world so brazenly, it will be emboldened to use terrorism to threaten or subvert others in the area. And Iran, through its support for Hezbollah and Hamas and the Ba'ath Party in Iraq, has the capacity to put direct pressure on Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinians and the Iraqis. Tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands would join radical Islamist groups in the belief that Islamism is on the march.

Fundamentally, a nuclear Iran represents a unique threat. The fear of mutually assured destruction has long restrained other nuclear powers. There is a real risk that Iran is not rational, that driven by its mad hatreds it will act in ways that are irrational, even self-destructive. "Death to America!" has provoked the Iranian street for over a quarter of a century and is the venom upon which an entire generation of Iranians has been raised. The dominant Ayatollah Khameini reiterates that Iran's differences with America are more fundamental than political differences.

Every U.S. administration since 1979 - yes, including the last one - has reached out to the Iranians. To adopt President Obama's inaugural metaphor, every open hand has met a clenched fist. It is the same dismal story with five years of efforts to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions.

It is not that the Iranians don't want to talk - they do. That's all they want to do, play for time. They seek the technical know-how that will give them the breakout capability to produce nuclear weapons in a short period. They are in the midst of producing stockpiles of low enriched uranium. They are adding centrifuges faster than the UN Security Council can step up the pressure and are learning about the art of connecting a large number of centrifuges to a vast amount of pipe work, while maintaining everything in a vacuum.

Simultaneously, they are enhancing their ability to launch long range ballistic missiles, a potential delivery system of nuclear weapons. What madness it is to empower Iran to do what it most likes to do - hold hostages, in this case the entire region.

The clock is ticking inexorably, a race against time that Iran is winning, getting nearer every day presenting the world with an Iranian bomb as a fait accompli.

What can be done? The UN has failed to persuade countries like Russia and China to cooperate in a rigorous sanctions' effort. Far from it, they are actually profiting from the sanctions policy by doing deals in the energy field and selling Iran weapons.

Fortunately, Iran has an economic Achilles' heel - they are dependent on imported gasoline for 40% of their refined fuel. Furthermore, they require new investments in their energy industry to maintain current production. Reduced oil prices have put a great strain on their economy. Discontent is growing among its citizenry suffering from inflation, unemployment and poverty.

We must press harder to coordinate four measures: 1) an arms embargo; 2) a ban on exports to Iran of gas and other refined products to cripple transport; 3) a global boycott of the entire banking system of Iran, instead of helping them as European banks are; and 4) a prohibition on Western countries supplying spare parts to the oil industry.

The object, clearly, is not to punish the Iranian people but to force their leaders to act in the best interests of their people and of regional peace. It is the Iranian people who stand to gain the most from the cultural and economic liberations that would follow a sound agreement. And by that I mean a package deal that includes maximum safeguards and control of their nuclear program, and the complete cessation of enrichment activities inside Iran. But there is no certainty that economic sanctions will work in time, leaving us with two unacceptable options: living with a nuclear Iran or acting militarily to prevent it.

The Iranian leaders' judgment is that the current administration is ready to let diplomacy run on and on and on. Many in Iran believe the U.S. may be reconciling itself to the idea of living with an Iranian nuclear missile - even though it would be in the hands of an expressly genocidal regime.

Who would have imagined that President Obama may well determine his historical legacy and reputation on the basis of the way he deals with Iran?

11) Will Obama Listen to Iran's Bloggers?
By BRET STEPHENS

Barack Obama extended the olive branch to Iran's leaders last Friday in a videotaped message praising a "great civilization" for "accomplishments" that "have earned the respect of the United States and the world." The death of Iranian blogger Omid-Reza Mirsayafi in Tehran's Evin prison two days earlier was, presumably, not among the accomplishments the president had in mind.

Mr. Obama's solicitous message, timed to the Persian New Year's celebration of Nowruz, met a blunt response from the Islamic Republic's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei: "He insulted the Islamic Republic of Iran from the first day," he said. "If you are right that change has come, where is that change?" To this, soi-disant Iran experts and latter-day Walter Durantys explain that it is merely Mr. Khamenei's opening gambit in what promises to be a glorious new chapter in Iranian-U.S. relations.

Maybe the experts never got the message about no meaning no. And maybe Mr. Obama forgot that the late Ayatollah Khomeini tried to ban Nowruz, a pre-Islamic tradition, and that both Mr. Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have sought to curtail and Islamicize the holiday against widespread resistance. But never mind: The most telling indicator of what we can expect from Mr. Obama's overture is Mirsayafi's death, a fitting emblem of everything the Islamic Revolution stands for on its 30th anniversary.

What was a blogger doing in prison in the first place? Ask 26-year-old Kianoosh Sanjari, another Iranian blogger and Evin prison alumnus who fled the country in 2007 and is now in the U.S. seeking asylum.

Mr. Sanjari was first arrested at 17 for joining a procession commemorating the first anniversary of the violently suppressed 1999 student protests at Tehran University. Over the next seven years he was arrested nine times, imprisoned six, flipped between "official" and secret prisons, surveilled and harassed by the secret police, subjected to endless interrogations, held both in overcrowded cells and incommunicado in solitary confinement (for a total of nine months), beaten while blindfolded and subjected to extreme sensory deprivation.

"When you express your dissatisfaction in a civil way and you're faced with physical violence and cruelty, you realize the baseness of the equation," Mr. Sanjari tells me, explaining the impulses that animated his dissent. "The moment you go to prison is when you realize you are in the right. And when you see what nefarious people the regime has to break you is when you feel the need to fight back."

Between prison terms Mr. Sanjari headed the Association of Political Prisoners, which follows more than 500 known cases in Iran. About Mirsayafi, he says that when his fellow blogger "found out that he had been summoned to court and that he may end up with a prison sentence, he wrote an email to friends. He said he felt powerless to withstand what torture he would have to face in prison. He also told a mutual friend that he did not think he would survive the imprisonment. He was well aware of the fact that they wanted to do away with him."

Mirsayafi's forebodings proved well-justified. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that he was taken to the prison hospital shortly before his death with an irregular pulse. "The doctor told [the prison authorities] how to treat him, asked him to send him to a city hospital," Mirsayafi's lawyer told RFE/RL's Radio Farda. "But they ignored the doctor and said [Mirsayafi] was faking his illness. The doctor said, 'his heartbeat is 40 per minute, you can't fake that.' But they sent the doctor out of the room." Prison authorities ruled the death a suicide; Mirsayafi was only 25.

Whether Mirsayafi's death cows or emboldens Iran's dissident bloggers remains to be seen. Not the least of their considerations will be the attitude of Mr. Obama, who in his videotaped address went out of his way to speak of "the Islamic Republic of Iran," thereby giving the mullahs claim to a nation, and a civilization, they have done so much to oppress and degrade. Yes, an American president must look first, second and third to American interests. But a presidency predicated on the view that our values are our strength should not forsake those values for diplomatic expediency, much less betray our friends abroad who live, and have died, by those values.

Shortly after Mr. Obama's inauguration, Mr. Sanjari put his name to an open letter to the new president, signed by several prominent young Iranian dissidents, calling on him "to pay special attention to the repressive, unaccountable nature of the regime" that now threatens and provokes the U.S. and our allies. Its conclusion is as fitting a tribute as any to Mirsayafi's notable and too-brief life:

"Mr. President, you marked your first day in the White House by ordering the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison. But in our country, many Guantanamos exist, only our Guantanamos are home to students, women's rights activists, labor organizers, political activists, and journalists. We, as former student activists who spent time in Iranian prisons under inhumane conditions, call on you and all those who defend human rights, freedom and equality to express solidarity to the people of Iran as they wage their struggle for freedom."