A picture of the real couple that snuck into the Whitehouse without any credentials!!!!!When Obama became president he entered The Oval Office with a tremendous storehouse of good will and a mountain of problems. Even those who saw him as an empty suit, I was one and still do, wished him well and still do. In his first year he has frittered away a great deal of these positive feelings and confidence in him. He has branded himself as a radical, pushing radical solutions to problems that need addressing but in the process he has lost the support of many voters.
By any objective measure Obama has been a flop though his intentions may have been otherwise and certainly his self-grade of B plus suggests otherwise. (After Copenhagen perhaps Obama will raise his self rating to an A, heading towards an A plus after he negotiates a reduction in our nuclear weapons cache with Russia.).
Then why do Americans approach the New Year apprehensive and uncertain about our direction if all this change is so positive?
I have lived in the country for 76 years and even during troubled times - Pearl Harbor, WW2 and the many ups and downs from the battlefront, previous recessions,The Civil Rights trauma, market collapses, 9-11 etc. , I have never seen our nation as depressed and with as weakened an ability to respond to the many challenges we face.
Good farmers know not to waste their seed corn.
Apparently I am not alone. (See 1 and 1a below.)
Does the Donkey Party have a death wish? (See 2 and 2a below.)
I recently wrote a memo expressing my thoughts on the three options the civilized world faces vis a vis Iran.
Being hawkish, I realize that an attack on Iran would solve nothing other than deferring them from starting a confrontation of their own and I have no proof that, even if they obtained a nuclear weapon and delivery system, they would start one.
On the other hand, the Kennedy's were ready to duke it out it with Kruschev when Russia began to arm Cuba so my argument is not without precedence.
I have read the many rebuttals and they have some degree of credence. Nevertheless,the question remains: We allowed Hitler to have his way, do we do the same with Iran?
Roger Cohen says do nothing because the public clock is outrunning the nuclear clock.(See 3 and 3a below.)
A scientist lays out his case why his profession and the scientific community have been damaged by the strong arm tactics of rogue scientists with agendas that do not match their evidence. (See 4 and 4a below.)
Changing America is one thing, remaking it is another. Are we witnessing the remaking of our nation by a husband and wife who find little right about our nation and who carry a chip on their shoulder because of past wrongs? (See 5 below.)
Dick
1)U.S. Hurting in Wallet -- and Spirit
By GERALD F.
The lingering economic crisis hasn't just cost America trillions of dollars in lost wealth. It's also taking a heavy toll on the national psyche, leaving scars that may take years to heal.
This psychic damage has serious political implications, to be sure. It helps explain the souring attitudes toward President Barack Obama and the Democratic party now in charge, has produced a kind of national funk that spells trouble for incumbents of all stripes, and is a principal reason for the rising support for the kind of insurrection represented by the "tea party" movement.
But ultimately the impact transcends politics. Look inside the latest Wall Street Journal/ NBC News poll and you will see the damage done to the traditional American spirit of optimism. The findings pose a deeper question: What effect does economic calamity have on a nation's soul?
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll tells that the economic crisis is taking its toll on the national psyche. WSJ's Jerry Seib explains what this declining optimism could mean for Obama and those incumbents running for re-election in 2010.
.At a minimum, the results suggest that, as an exceptionally difficult year draws to a close, the glimmers of recovery that can be seen at a macroeconomic level aren't fully filtering down to the grassroots of American life:
After Americans began expressing more optimism midyear that the country was again headed in the right direction, that sense of optimism now appears to be fading. In the new poll, just 33% of those surveyed said America was headed in the right direction, down from 42% in June. A majority said the country was "off on the wrong track."
Despite the slowing of job losses and a stock-market recovery, just 46% said they thought 2010 would be better for the country than this year has been.
More than four in 10 Americans said they considered it extremely likely that they would lose a job, have wages and bonuses cut, or be forced into a lower-paying job in the next year. (A third said one of those things already has happened.) A quarter of Americans fear a double-whammy, expecting to simultaneously lose income while also having to assume the burden of housing or financially aiding other family members.
A real recovery in 2010 would, of course, produce happier results than these Americans foresee. Yet even that might not be enough to heal what appear to be deeper scars.
Two in three said they weren't confident that life for their children's generation will be better than it has been for theirs. Almost the same share of Americans said the country is in a state of decline.
.A stunning 39% said they expected China would be the world's leading nation in 20 years -- compared with 37% who said the U.S. would be the leader.
Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who conducted the Journal/NBC News survey along with Republican Bill McInturff, asked simply: "Where has all the optimism gone?"
Jay Campbell, a pollster who works for Mr. Hart, gives a partial answer: "It's hard to have optimism when you can't even pay your bills."
One of the striking things about these blows to national optimism is that they aren't hitting just lower-income Americans, who traditionally feel the brunt of pain during a deep economic downturn. The seeds of doubt also are seen among those at the top of the employment ladder.
Professionals and managers were almost exactly as likely as blue-collar workers to say they weren't confident life for the next generation would be better, and they were just as likely to say the country was in a state of decline. Two in 10 professionals said they were dissatisfied with their job security.
And with good reason, for the current economic fall -- driven by declines in financial markets and housing values -- has struck hard precisely at those in the upper middle class who once had reason to think they might be immune to swings in the economy.
One is Susan Streck-Moss, a marketing professional from New Canaan, Conn. She worked in television marketing for years, and then in corporate brand marketing. She suffered a serious back injury a few years ago, and subsequently tried to re-enter her profession in 2007 -- precisely, it's now clear, as the deep recession was beginning.
Journal Community
Vote: What kind of year has 2009 been for you?
."I had great hope," she said. "I've never not gotten a job. I've never been turned down for a job. Suddenly, I thought I was in the acting business. It was constant rejection." She's been unable to find regular work since, and has joined networking groups where she meets others in the same predicament -- professionals who have taken two and three mortgages on their homes waiting in vain for their luck to break.
At age 52, Ms. Streck-Moss said she lost her house and feared losing her apartment. "That's the new America," she said. "It's these people who have always had good jobs and raised their kids and sent them to college and done all the right things. Suddenly we find ourselves overwhelmed." Her summary: "It's a nightmare."
For the economy, the nightmare may well be ending. And perhaps an end to the economic nightmare will change the declining poll numbers for the Democrats who, inevitably, take the brunt of the blame because they're running Washington.
Whether a recovery rekindles the spirit of American optimism is a different question entirely.
1a)America Under Barack Obama: An Interview with Nat Hentoff
By John W. Whitehead
"I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had."—Nat Hentoff
Nat Hentoff has had a life well spent, one chock full of controversy fueled by his passion for the protection of civil liberties and human rights. Hentoff is known as a civil libertarian, free speech activist, anti-death penalty advocate, pro-lifer and not uncommon critic of the ideological left.
At 84, Nat Hentoff is an American classic who has never shied away from an issue. For example, he defended a woman rejected from law school because she was Caucasian; called into a talk show hosted by Oliver North to agree with him on liberal intolerance for free speech; was a friend to the late Malcolm X; and wrote the liner notes for Bob Dylan's second album.
A self-described uncategorizable libertarian, Hentoff adds he is also a “Jewish atheist, civil libertarian, pro-lifer.” Accordingly, he has angered nearly every political faction and remains one of a few who has stuck to his principles through his many years of work, regardless of the trouble it stirred up. For instance, when he announced his opposition to abortion he alienated numerous colleagues, and his outspoken denunciation of President Bill Clinton only increased his isolation in liberal circles (He said that Clinton had "done more harm to the Constitution than any president in American history," and called him "a serial violator of our liberties.").
Born in Boston on June 10, 1925, Hentoff received a B.A. with honors from Northeastern University and did graduate work at Harvard. From 1953 to 1957, he was associate editor of Down Beat magazine. He has written many books on jazz, biographies and novels, including children's books. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Commonwealth, the New Republic, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, where he was a staff writer for more than 25 years. In 1980, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Education and an American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award for his coverage of the law and criminal justice in his columns. In 1985, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by Northeastern University. For 50 years, Hentoff wrote a weekly column for the Village Voice. But that publication announced that he had been terminated on December 31, 2008. In February 2009, Hentoff joined the Cato Institute as a Senior Fellow.
Hentoff's views on the rights of Americans to write, think and speak freely are expressed in his columns. He is also an authority on First Amendment defense, the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court, students' rights and education. Friends and critics alike describe him as the kind of writer, and citizen, that all should aspire to be—"less interested in 'exclusives' than in 'making a difference.'" Critiquing Hentoff's autobiography, Speaking Freely, Nicholas von Hoffman refers to him as "a trusting man, a gentle man, just and undeviatingly consistent."
Hentoff took to heart the words from his mentor, I. F. "Izzy" Stone, the renowned investigative journalist who died in 1989: "If you're in this business because you want to change the world, get another day job. If you are able to make a difference, it will come incrementally, and you might not even know about it. You have to get the story and keep on it because it has to be told."
Nat Hentoff has earned the well-deserved reputation of being one of our nation's most respected, controversial and uncompromising writers. He began his career at the Village Voice because he wanted a place to write freely on anything he cared about. And his departure from the publication has neither dampened his zeal nor tempered his voice.
Hentoff, whose new book, At the Jazz Band Ball—Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene (University of California Press), is due out in 2010, took some time to speak with me about Barack Obama, the danger of his health care plan, the peril of civil liberties, and a host of other issues.
John W. Whitehead: When Barack Obama was a U.S. Senator in 2005, he introduced a bill to limit the Patriot Act. Now that he is president, he has endorsed the Patriot Act as is. What do you think happened with Obama?
Nat Hentoff: I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had. An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system. If the American people have their health care paid for by the government, depending on their age and their condition, they will be subject to a health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives are worth living much longer.
In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other things he has pledged he would do, such as transparency in government, Obama has reneged on his promises. He pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated. Why is Obama doing that if he doesn't want torture anymore? Throughout Obama's career, he promised to limit the state secrets doctrine which the Bush-Cheney administration had abused enormously. The Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued. Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to.
So in answer to your question, I am beginning to think that this guy is a phony. Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to. His only principle is his own aggrandizement. This is a very dangerous mindset for a president to have.
JW: Do you consider Obama to be worse than George W. Bush?
NH: Oh, much worse. Bush essentially came in with very little qualifications for presidency, not only in terms of his background but he lacked a certain amount of curiosity, and he depended entirely too much on people like Rumsfeld, Cheney and others. Bush was led astray and we were led astray. However, I never thought that Bush himself was, in any sense, "evil." I am hesitant to say this about Obama. Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution. The irony is that Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.
In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now. The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency. The NSA has the capacity to keep track of everything we do on the phone and on the internet. Obama has done nothing about that. In fact, he has perpetuated it. He has absolutely no judicial supervision of all of this. So all in all, Obama is a disaster.
JW: Obama is not reversing the Bush policies as he promised. But even in light of this, many on the Left are very, very quiet about Obama. Why is that?
NH: I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced by many traditionally religious people. I say this because the Left has taken what passes for their principles as an absolute religion. They don't think anymore. They just react. When they have somebody like Obama whom they put into office, they believed in the religious sense and, of course, that is a large part of the reason for their silence on these issues. They are very hesitant to criticize Obama, but that is beginning to change. Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of Obama are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their "deity."
JW: Is the so-called health commission that you referred to earlier what some people are referring to as death panels? Is that too strong a word?
NH: That term was used with hyperbole about the parts of the health care bill where doctors are mandated, if people are on Medicare and of a certain age or in serious physical condition, to counsel them on their end-of-life alternatives. I don't believe that was a death panel. It was done to get the Medicare doctors to not spend too much money on them. The death panel issue arose with Tom Daschle, who was originally going to be the Health Czar. Daschle became enamored with the British system and wrote a book about health care, which influenced President Obama.
In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia. Under the British healthcare system, there is a commission that decides whether or not, based on your age and physical condition, the government should continue to pay for your health. That leads to the government not doing it and you gradually or suddenly die. The present Stimulus Bill sets up the equivalent commission in the United States similar to that which is in England. The tipoff was months ago on the ABC network. President Obama was given a full hour to describe and endorse his health plan. A woman in the audience asked Obama about her mother. Her mother was, I believe, 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn't want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of the United States.
JW: Do you think Obama is shallow?
NH: It's much worse than that. Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important. You see that in his foreign policy. Obama lacks a backbone—both a constitutional backbone and a personal backbone. This is a man who is causing us and will cause us a great deal of harm constitutionally and personally. I say personally because I am 84 years old, and this is the first administration that has scared me in terms of my lifespan.
JW: But he is praised for his charisma and great smile. He can make people believe things just by his personality.
NH: That was a positive factor in his election. A good many people voted for Obama, and I'm not only talking about the black vote. A lot of people voted for Obama because of our history of racial discrimination in this country. They felt good even though they didn't really know much about him and may have had some doubts. But at least they showed the world we could elect a black president. And that is still part of what he is riding on. Except that, too, is diminishing. In the recent Virginia election, the black vote diminished. Now why was that? I think a lot of black folks are wondering what this guy is really going to do, not only for them but for the country. If the country is injured, they will be injured. That may be sinking in.
JW: One of the highest unemployment rates in the country is among African-Americans.
NH: Not only that, the general unemployment rate is going to continue for a long time and for all of us. I have never heard so many heart-wrenching stories of all kinds of people all across the economic spectrum. As usual, the people who are poorest—the blacks, Hispanics and disabled people—are going to suffer more than anyone else under the Obama administration. This is a dishonest administration, because it is becoming clear that the unemployment statistics of the Obama administration are not believable. I can't think of a single area where Obama is not destructive.
JW: A lot of people we represent and I talk to feel that their government does not hear them, that their representatives do not listen to them anymore. As a result, you have these Tea Party protests which the Left has criticized. What do you think of the Tea Party protests?
NH: I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them. That is what is happening with the Tea Parties. I wrote a column called "The Second American Revolution" about the fact that people are acting for themselves as it happened with the Sons of Liberty which spread throughout the colonies. That was a very important awakening in this country. A lot of people in the adult population have a very limited idea as to why they are Americans, why we have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights.
JW: Less than 3% of high school students can pass the immigration test while over 90% of people from foreign countries can pass it. The questions are simple—such as, "What is the supreme law of the land?" or "Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?" Civic education in the United States is basically dead.
NH: I have been in schools around the country, and I have written on education for years. Once, I was once doing a profile on Justice William Brennan and I was in his chambers, and Brennan asked, "How do we get the words of the Bill of Rights into the lives of the students?" Well, it is not difficult. You tell them stories. When I speak to students, I tell them why we have a First Amendment. I tell them about the Committees of Correspondence. I tell them how in a secret meeting of the Raleigh Tavern in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who did not agree with each other, started a Committee of Correspondence.
Young people get very excited when they hear why they are Americans. It is not hard to do. We hear talk now about reforming public education. There are billions of dollars at stake for such a reform. But I have not heard Arne Duncan, who is the U.S. Education Secretary, mention once the civic illiteracy in the country.
JW: Adults are constitutionally illiterate as well.
NH: A few years ago, I was lecturing at the Columbia Journalism School of Education. I asked them about what was happening to the Fourth Amendment. I said, "By the way, do you know what is in the Fourth Amendment?" One student responded, "Is that the right to bear arms?" It's hard to believe these are bright students.
JW: I ask law students who attend our Summer Internship Program to name the five freedoms in the First Amendment. I have yet to find one who can.
NH: That is a stunner.
JW: You lived through the McCarthy era in the 1950s. Is it worse now than it was then?
NH: McCarthy's regime was ended by Senators who realized that he had gone too far. What we have now may be more insidious. What we have now in America is a surveillance society. We have no idea how much the government knows and how much the CIA even knows about average citizens. The government is not supposed to be doing this in this country. They listen in on our phone calls. I am not exaggerating because I have studied this a long time. You have to be careful about what you do, about what you say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with McCarthy, but the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious.
JW: You don't sound very optimistic.
NH: If James Madison or Thomas Jefferson were brought back to life and they looked at television and read the papers, they would not recognize the country.
The media has been very bad about informing us about what is going on. They focus on surface things. They do not focus enough on the fact that the Fourth Amendment is on life support and that we need a return to transparency in government. The media ignores what is really going on. But I am optimistic. I have to be optimistic, as I know you are. That is why you keep writing and keep doing what you do. You have to do this because we have been through very dark periods before. There are enough people who are starting to be actively involved that we can turn things around. And we need to encourage others to become involved.
2)Democrats on the Health-Care Precipice:Enacting health-care legislation in the face of overwhelming public disapproval may cost the party its chance of forging a sustainable majority.
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Barack Obama emerged from his meeting with Senate Democrats this week to claim Congress was on the "precipice" of something historic. Believe him. The president is demanding his party unilaterally enact one of the most unpopular and complex pieces of social legislation in history. In the process, he may be sacrificing Democrats' chances at creating a sustainable majority.
Slowly, slowly, the Democratic health agenda is turning into a political suicide pact. Congressional members have been dragged along by momentum, by threat, by bribe, but mostly by the White House's siren song that it would be worse to not pass a bill than it would be to pass one. If that ever were true, it is not today.
Public opinion on ObamaCare is at a low ebb. This week's NBC-WSJ poll: A mere 32% of Americans think it a "good" idea. The Washington Post: Only 35% of independents support it—down 10 points in a month. Resurgent Republic recently queried Americans over the age of 55, aka Those Most Likely to Vote In a Midterm Election. Sixty-one percent believe ObamaCare will increase their health costs; 68% believe it will increase the deficit; 76% believe it will raise their taxes.
Democrats also have managed to alienate the liberal base to which they were catering. The death of the public option and Medicare buy-in this week sent Howard Dean to thundering "kill the bill." A week from now, the current polls might look good.
Yet it is in individual states where the disconnect between the White House's soothing words and the ugly political reality is most stark. While Democrats are under fire for the economy and spending, it is health care that has voters thinking it's time for political change.
Consider North Dakota. A recent Zogby poll showed 28% (you read that right) of state voters support "reform." A full 40% said they'd be less likely to vote for Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan next year if he supports a bill. In a theoretical matchup with Republican Gov. John Hoeven (who has yet to announce), Mr. Hoeven wins 55% to 36%. Mr. Dorgan has been in the Senate 17 years; he won his last election with 68% of the vote. This should not be happening.
In Arkansas, 32% support this health-care legislation. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, also running next year, trails challengers by more than 50 points among the 56% of voters who strongly disapprove of the health plan. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the public face of health reform, can barely break 38% approval in Nevada. In Colorado, where 55% of voters oppose a health bill, appointed Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet told CNN he'd vote for a bill even if it "cost him his job." Give the freshman credit for honesty.
Nor is this a red state/swing state phenomenon. In deep-blue Delaware, 46% oppose the health plan. Democrats pounded Delaware GOP Rep. Mike Castle, running for Senate, for voting against the House bill. That vote has in fact kept Mr. Castle leading his expected opponent, Beau Biden, the vice president's son. Chris Dodd helped author the Senate health bill and is up for re-election next year. He is arguably the Senate's most politically vulnerable Democrat.
Don't trust the polls? In the past weeks, four well known House Democrats announced they will not run for re-election. All are longtime incumbents; one, Tennessee's respected John Tanner, co-founded the Blue Dog coalition. These folks have seen the political handwriting on the wall.
Democrats have also been pulled by another White House promise: That once Americans witness reform, they will turn around. Yet even supporters know this ugly bill will not "fix" health care. The problems will remain—with more in addition—and Democrats will own them. Meanwhile, the backlash against the pending health-care legislation is seeping out to hamper Democrats' broader agenda. Pew this week published a poll in which it marveled (fretted?) over the "extent to which the public has moved in a conservative direction on a range of issues" since President Obama took office.
So why the stubborn insistence on passing health reform? Think big. The liberal wing of the party—the Barney Franks, the David Obeys—are focused beyond November 2010, to the long-term political prize. They want a health-care program that inevitably leads to a value-added tax and a permanent welfare state. Big government then becomes fact, and another Ronald Reagan becomes impossible. See Continental Europe.
The entitlement crazes of the 1930s and 1960s also caused a backlash, but liberal Democrats know the programs of those periods survived. They are more than happy to sacrifice a few Blue Dogs, a Blanche Lincoln, a Michael Bennet, if they can expand government so that in the long run it benefits the party of government.
What's extraordinary is that more Democrats have not wised up to the fact that they are being used as pawns in this larger liberal game. Maybe Mr. Obama will see a bump in the polls if health care passes; maybe not. What is certain is that this vote is becoming one that many
2a)Congress Moving to Increase the National Debt Shows Democrats Are Out of Touch
By Mary Kate Cary
The Senate passed a $447 billion omnibus spending bill over the weekend, one that increases federal spending at government agencies by some $48 billion, a 12 percent increase from 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal, "That increase—when inflation is negligible—is in addition to the $311 billion in stimulus already authorized or out the door for these programs. Adding this new stash means that federal agencies will have received a nearly 70% increase in the last two years."
That whopping 70 percent increase in spending on government programs also means that Congress will now have to vote to "raise the federal debt ceiling by at least $1.8 trillion," according to the Washington Post. Note the Post reports they'll raise the debt ceiling "BY" $1.8 trillion, not "TO" $1.8 trillion.
Really, what planet are these Democrats on? When the president unveiled his much-anticipated "jobs" package last week—he's too smart to call it a second stimulus plan—it seemed like he spent a lot more time talking about tax incentives for winterizing our homes than about helping businesses create jobs. In fact, some pundits called it "cash for caulkers." All joking aside, the proposals add even more to the uncertainty facing small business owners right now, whether it's from cap and trade, healthcare, or even the on-again off-again one-year capital gains tax cut he's proposing for new investments in small business stock. It's no wonder with so much unpredictability that businesses can't plan ahead, much less hire new workers.
When you combine this massive spending bill with the trillion-dollar-plus healthcare reform proposals Congress is moving towards, you have to wonder. Earlier this week, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri announced she'd "absolutely" vote against healthcare reform if it added to the deficit. Later she joined Democratic Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin in voting against the omnibus spending bill, and Bayh urged the president to veto the whole thing. Bayh was quoted in Politico saying that Washington politicians "are totally out of touch with the sacrifices middle-class Americans are making ... We have to take the credit card away from the politicians who just want to spend, spend, spend." The Republicans couldn't have said it better.
3)Iranian Score card :The Administration opposes a bipartisan sanctions bill.
In his Inaugural address, President Obama promised the world's dictators—with Iran plainly in mind—that he would "extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." Here's a status report on the mullahs' knuckles:
• Weapons of mass destruction. On Wednesday, Iran tested a new version of its Sajjil-2 medium-range ballistic missile, a sophisticated solid-fuel model with a range of 1,200 miles—enough to target parts of Eastern Europe.
Also this week came news that Western intelligence agencies have an undated Farsi-language document titled "outlook for special neutron-related activities over the next four years." It concerns technical aspects of a neutron initiator, which is used to set off nuclear explosions and has no other practical application. The document remains unauthenticated, and Iran denies working on a nuclear weapon. But it squares with accumulating evidence, from the International Atomic Energy Agency and other sources, that Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons design and uranium enrichment.
• Support for terrorists. Iran also continues to supply Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon with weapons and money, and there's reason to suspect the help extends to Colombia's terrorist FARC. Centcom Commander David Petraeus told ABC News Wednesday that Iran "provides a modest level of equipment, explosives and perhaps some funding to the Taliban in western Afghanistan." As for Iraq, he says, "there are daily attacks with the so-called signature weapons only made by Iran—the explosively formed projectile, forms of improvised explosive devices, etc."
• Political gestures. Isolated regimes sometimes signal their desire for better relations through seemingly small gestures: ping-pong tournaments, for instance. Tehran has taken a different tack.
On Monday, it announced that three American hikers arrested along its border with Iraq in July would be put on trial. The charge? "Suspicious aims." New charges were also brought last month against Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, who was already sentenced to at least 12 years in prison on espionage charges. The regime has been going after other foreign nationals, including French teacher Clotilde Reiss, who is living under house arrest in the French embassy in Tehran. Christopher Dickey notes in Newsweek that "since [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad took over four years ago, some 35 foreign nationals or dual nationals have been imprisoned for use as chump change in one sordid deal or another."
• Diplomacy. In October, the U.S. and its allies offered to enrich Iran's uranium in facilities outside the country, supposedly for the production of medical isotopes. The idea was that doing so would at least reduce Iran's growing stockpile of uranium and thus postpone the day when it would have enough to rapidly build a bomb.
Tehran finally came back with a counterproposal late last week, in which no uranium would leave Iranian soil. Even Hillary Clinton admits it's a nonstarter: "I don't think anyone can doubt that our outreach has produced very little in terms of any kind of positive response from the Iranians," the Secretary of State told reporters.
Given those remarks, we would have imagined that Mrs. Clinton would take it as good news that on Tuesday the House voted 412-12 in favor of a new round of unilateral sanctions on Iran. The Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act would forbid any company that does energy business with Iran from having access to U.S. markets.
Instead, last week Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg wrote to Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry urging that the Senate postpone taking up the House bill. "I am concerned that this legislation, in its current form, might weaken rather than strengthen international unity and support for our efforts," wrote Mr. Steinberg.
So let's see: Iran spurns every overture from the U.S. and continues to develop WMD while abusing its neighbors. In response, the Administration, which had set a December deadline for diplomacy, now says it opposes precisely the kind of sanctions it once promised to impose if Iran didn't come clean, never mind overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress. For an explanation of why Iran's behavior remains unchanged, look no further.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A24
3a)The Inertia Option
By ROGER COHEN
I hope Iran policy makers in Washington and Europe are reading histories of that world-changing year, 1989. I hope so because the time has come to do nothing in Iran.
As Timothy Garton Ash has written of the year Europe was freed, “For the decisive nine months, from the beginning of Poland’s roundtable talks in February to the fall of the Wall in November, the United States’ contribution lay mainly in what it did not do.”
That inaction reflected the first President Bush’s caution and calculations. Its effect was to deprive hardliners in Moscow of an American scapegoat for Eastern European agitation and allow revolutionary events to run their course.
The main difference between Moscow 1989 and Tehran 2009 is that the Islamic Republic is still ready to open fire. The main similarities are obvious: tired ideologies; regimes and societies marching in opposite directions; and spreading dissent both within the power apparatus and among the opposition.
Yes, the Islamic Republic has not arrived at a Gorbachevian renunciation of force. It is not yet open to compromise, despite calls for moderation from prominent clerics and now, it seems, from some senior army officers. It is still, in the words of the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, sending its Revolutionary Guards and Basiji militia to chase “shadows in the street.”
I don’t know how long this situation can endure. Anyone who claims to be able to tell the Iranian future is lying. But it seems clear that the “political clock” has now outpaced the “nuclear clock.”
Iran has been messing around with a nuclear program for some four decades. Pakistan went from zero to a bomb in about a quarter that time. Setting aside the still debatable objective of this Iranian endeavor (nuclear ambiguity or an actual device?), it’s not in the midst of the current political turmoil that Tehran is going to break out of its back-and-forth tinkering. Inertia is always strong in Iran’s many-headed system. Right now it’s stronger than ever — hence the risible, blustery confusion over a possible deal to export Iran’s low-enriched uranium.
All this says — nay, screams — to me: Do nothing. It is President Barack Obama’s outreach that has unsettled a regime that found American axis-of-evil rhetoric easy to exploit. After struggling, Obama has also found his sweet spot in combining that détente with quiet support for universal rights. Note the feminine possessive pronoun in this line from his Nobel speech: “Somewhere today, in this world, a young protester awaits the brutality of her government but has the courage to march on.” I saw those bloodied women marching in Tehran in June and will never forget them.
Their cause would be best upheld by stopping the march toward “crippling” sanctions on Iran. The recent House passage of the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, which would sanction foreign companies that sell refined petroleum to Iran, is ominous. Rep. Howard Berman, who introduced the bill, is dead wrong when he says that it would empower the Obama administration’s Iran policy. It would in fact undermine that policy.
So would sanctions action from the so called “P5+1” — the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany. When I’m asked where the “stick” is in Iran, my response is the stick is Iranian society — the bubbling reformist pressure now rising up from Iran’s highly educated youth and brave women.
It would be a tragedy were Obama to weaken them. Sanctions now would do just that. Nobody would welcome them more than a regime able once more to refer to the “arrogant power” trying to bring proud Iran to its knees. The Revolutionary Guards, who control the sophisticated channels for circumventing existing sanctions, would benefit. China and Russia would pay little more than lip service.
As Elizabeth Shakman Hurd of Northwestern University has written, “the United States is empowering the dissenters with its silence.”
Sanctions represent tired binary thinking on Iran, the old West-versus-barbarism paradigm prevalent since political Islam triumphed in the revolution of 1979 as a religious backlash against Western-imposed modernity. The Iranian reality, as I’ve argued since the start of this year, is more complex. A leading cry today of the protesters in Iran is “God is great” — hardly a secular call to arms. These reformists are looking in their great majority for some elusive middle way combining faith and democracy.
The West must not respond with the sledgehammer of sanctions whose message is “our way or the highway.” Rather it must understand at last the subtle politics of Iran by borrowing an Iranian lesson: inertia.
When the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago, Francis Fukuyama famously predicted “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” In Iran now, many of the forces of 1989 are present, but the reformists’ quest is not for something “Western.” It is more for an idea of 1979, an indigenous non-secular and non-theocratic pluralist polity.
Obama, himself of hybrid identity, must show his understanding of this historic urge by doing nothing. That will allow the Iranian political clock to tick faster still.
4)How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus:The East Anglia emails are just the tip of the iceberg. I should know
By PATRICK J. MICHAELS
Few people understand the real significance of Climategate, the now-famous hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most see the contents as demonstrating some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses (true), or as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the face of potential or actual Freedom of Information requests (also true).
But there's something much, much worse going on—a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."
The bible I'm referring to, of course, is the refereed scientific literature. It's our canon, and it's all we have really had to go on in climate science (until the Internet has so rudely interrupted). When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.
That can no longer be the case. The alliance of scientists at East Anglia, Penn State and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (in Boulder, Colo.) has done its best to bias it.
A refereed journal, Climate Research, published two particular papers that offended Michael Mann of Penn State and Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. One of the papers, published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), was a meta-analysis of dozens of "paleoclimate" studies that extended back 1,000 years. They concluded that 20th-century temperatures could not confidently be considered to be warmer than those indicated at the beginning of the last millennium.
In fact, that period, known as the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP), was generally considered warmer than the 20th century in climate textbooks and climate compendia, including those in the 1990s from the IPCC.
Then, in 1999, Mr. Mann published his famous "hockey stick" article in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), which, through the magic of multivariate statistics and questionable data weighting, wiped out both the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent "Little Ice Age" (a cold period from the late 16th century to the mid-19th century), leaving only the 20th-century warming as an anomaly of note.
Messrs. Mann and Wigley also didn't like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU's own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Mr. Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," he wrote in one of the emails. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."
After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn't toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones's line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results.
This happened to me and to the University of Alabama's Roy Spencer, who also hypothesized that global warming is likely to be modest. Others surely stopped trying, tiring of summary rejections of good work by editors scared of the mob. Sallie Baliunas, for example, has disappeared from the scientific scene.
GRL is a very popular refereed journal. Mr. Wigley was concerned that one of the editors was "in the skeptics camp." He emailed Michael Mann to say that "if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official . . . channels to get him ousted."
Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Wigley on Nov. 20, 2005 that "It's one thing to lose 'Climate Research.' We can't afford to lose GRL." In this context, "losing" obviously means the publication of anything that they did not approve of on global warming.
Soon the suspect editor, Yale's James Saiers, was gone. Mr. Mann wrote to the CRU's Phil Jones that "the GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there."
It didn't stop there. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory complained that the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS) was now requiring authors to provide actual copies of the actual data that was used in published papers. He wrote to Phil Jones on March 19, 2009, that "If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available—raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations—I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals."
Messrs. Jones and Santer were Ph.D. students of Mr. Wigley. Mr. Santer is the same fellow who, in an email to Phil Jones on Oct. 9, 2009, wrote that he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap" out of me at a scientific meeting. He was angry that I published "The Dog Ate Global Warming" in National Review, about CRU's claim that it had lost primary warming data.
The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to "skeptics" (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn't publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature—even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.
Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.
Mr. Michaels, formerly professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia (1980-2007), is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
4a)Obama praises a climate flop
By CHARLES HURT Bureau Chief
After a day spent frantically darting around Copenhagen trying to locate world leaders, getting snubbed by China's premier and crashing a meeting where he had initially been kept out, President Obama heralded a last-minute, largely toothless UN global-warming summit deal that drew fast fire from all sides as a sham.
Almost no one was happy with the outcome of the two-week confab and even the president, who was slammed by liberals and Republicans alike, along with other world leaders, admitted that the pact doesn't legally commit any of the nations involved -- the point of the summit in the first place.
Obama may become known as "the man who killed Copenhagen," said Greenpeace US head Phil Radford, one of many activists to rap the president for the flimsy agreement with India, South Africa, Brazil and China, which thwarted the president throughout the conference.
The deal, which would have to be accepted by all nations to be adopted, asks all parties to list how they'll cap emissions by set amounts, among other general goals.
But critics say it pushes any legally binding steps into the future.
It was roundly blasted as a farce from all quarters.
"The president has wrecked the UN and he's wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming," said Bill McKibbon of the progressive group 350.org. "It may get Obama a reputation as a tough American leader, but it's at the expense of everything progressives have held dear."
Friends of the Earth tore into the pact as well. "Climate negotiations in Copenhagen have yielded a sham agreement with no real requirements for any countries," the group said in a statement. "This is not a strong deal or a just one -- it isn't even a real one."
Despite the liberal outrage, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi boosted the president by saying he fostered the "critical" deal, which British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called a "a big step forward."
But some world leaders couldn't swallow the agreement, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said she had hoped all nations would promise deeper cuts in emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuel.
"The decision has been very difficult for me," she said.
And leaders of poorer nations called the deal a "disaster."
In fact, Sudan's Lumumba Stanislaus Di-aping said the plan "is a solution based on the same very values, in our opinion, that channeled six million people in Europe into furnaces."
The conservative Club for Growth offered tongue-in-cheek applause for Obama.
"Like most Americans, I feared President Obama went to Copenhagen to sign a binding, job-killing, economic suicide pact," said the group's president, Chris Chocola.
The deal came after a long day of testy negotiations and surprisingly dire pleadings by Obama.
"I come not to talk, but to act," the visibly irritated president told negotiators on the last day of the two-week conference. "The time for talk is over."
White House aides described an extraordinary scene of desperation and disarray during the final hours of negotiations in Copenhagen.
Obama and his team were prepared to give up hope for a broad deal after hearing that leaders of India, Brazil and other key nations -- along with much of the entire Chinese delegation -- had already left for the airport.
But that wasn't the case.
Instead, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao insultingly skipped a high-level meeting in the morning, leaving Obama and other world leaders negotiating with a lower-level government official.
Wen later attend a meeting with President Lula de Silva of Brazil as well as the leaders of India and South Africa. Obama decided he wanted to go, and was forced to barge into the meeting.
"Mr. Premier, are you ready to see me? Are you ready?" the exasperated Obama inquired loudly from the conference-room door, in front of the press and other world leaders who had already gathered.
"We can't get into the room to look at it," explained one of the advance officials. "They're all having a meeting."
There wasn't even a seat for Obama.
"The president walks in and by the time I finally push through I hear the president say, 'There aren't any seats,' " explained one of the officials. "And the president says, 'No, no, don't worry, I'm going to go sit by my friend Lula,' and says, 'Hey, Lula,' " the advance official said.
Obama walked over, moved a chair beside the Brazilian leader and took a seat.
He later tried to put a positive spin on the meeting, saying a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" had been reached. "We have come a long way, but we have much further to go," the president said.
And although officials called it a "meaningful agreement," UN officials acknowledged it would not do enough to combat the threat they say is posed by global warming.
Others derided the conference as a failure that did little more than provide Third World dictators like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe a platform for again bashing the United States.
5)I don't want to be a Norwegian
By Fernando R. Tesón
I'm sure Norway is a pleasant country, although I've never been there. But I don't want the United States to become Norway; that is, I don't want the United States to turn into a quaint, small, powerless, and socialist country. Yet I suspect the Obama administration is trying to do precisely that.
How could the United States become Norway? The first step is for the government to enact massive government programs, such as Obamacare and cap-and-trade legislation, to increase dramatically the number of people who depend on the government. European socialist governments have used the same method to entrench themselves in power. Once the government forces people to depend on it for their health, livelihood, and welfare, the chances that the voters will reelect those on whose largesse their life prospects depend increase significantly. Thus, contrary to appearances, the government's intrusion in people's lives is not entirely ideological, nor is it motivated by the desire to advance the public good. The aim of these moves is to expand and consolidate domestic political power.
To be sure, this conspiracy does not always succeed (and that gives us a kernel of hope), as the sporadic ascendancy of market-oriented governments in some European countries show. Voters harmed by these bad programs can react and throw the conspirators out. But politicians attempt this maneuver time and again in the hope that even political adversaries can profit from the citizens' now well-established dependence on government.
There are two reasons why anti-socialist governments have not repealed these socialist programs (Germany's Merkel and France's Sarkozy come to mind). First, large programs are to the advantage of all governments, because the programs secure the citizens' dependence on whoever is in power; second, bureaucracies and entitlements are extremely difficult to eliminate once established.
The second path to Norwegianhood is to curtail American global power. The theme is well known and has been addressed in the pages of this journal. For the left that Obama represents, American world power is a source of mischief. Drawing on the ideas of Soviet tyrant Vladimir Lenin and homegrown Marxists such as Noam Chomsky, the left has consistently decried what they consider American imperialism. The recent experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq have deepened the hostility of the left to American hegemony.
While not free of ambiguity, Barack Obama has adopted this theme. Not only has he apologized for the United States. In a break from the past, Obama has rejected human rights and democracy as the touchstone for the legitimacy of foreign governments. At the United Nations, Obama said that he respected the "rights in the community of nations" of the criminal regimes of Iran and North Korea. A far cry, indeed, from Bush's much more accurate "axis of evil" description.
In the same speech Obama expressly renounced American superpower status: "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed." (By the way, this last statement is false: a world order has better chances to succeed if there is a hegemon than if there isn't, because the hegemon supplies crucial public goods such as defense.)
In short, Obama thinks we ought to be more like Norway: democratic, socialist, reasonably prosperous, and non-imperialist. Obama and his supporters dream of America as a nice country to live, where the government takes care of us all and recoils from foreign adventures. The left conveniently omits the fact that countries like Norway can be peaceful and reasonably prosperous because for almost a century those countries have ridden, free of charge, on the defense efforts of the United States.
Domestically the Obamites don't quite want a socialist dictatorship (although we all know that for decades the left made excuses for those[i]). The left wants instead a regime that respects human rights à la Norwegian: broad "socioeconomic" rights coupled with civil rights that are meager compared to the freedoms we enjoy in America. This means a much narrower freedom of speech; virtually no protection of property rights; ample governmental powers to redistribute wealth at will; and political correctness all around. Internationally, the left would like to end American global presence both because it is evil and because it siphons resources away from the domestic socialist structure the left cherishes.
Above all, Obama and the left want to change the ethos in this country -- to make it more Norwegian, as it were. Domestically, the left would like to eradicate the libertarian instincts of the American people, so movingly reflected in our founding documents. Americans have a healthy distrust of government; on this side of the Atlantic, the default rule is that government is a necessary evil. In contrast, most Europeans don't have this instinct: the European default rule is that government is beneficial until proven otherwise. The libertarian instincts of the American people pose a major obstacle to Obamacare and similar laws. Supporters of these bad laws try to convince Americans that there is no reason to distrust Big Brother; on the contrary, Big Brother just wants to help.
In foreign policy, the Obama administration has reversed another admirable American trait: the readiness to call a thug a thug. Americans know a tyrant when they see one. Through history, American Presidents, with important nuances, have recognized dictators for what they are (as opposed to calling them "leaders of a sovereign nation"). Only four years ago George W. Bush expressly refused to legitimize tyrants. Bush was mercilessly ridiculed by the media for his stand -- notwithstanding the fact that his view had a solid pedigree that went back at least to Woodrow Wilson.
Perhaps Obama thinks that one way to break with the hated Bush legacy is to accord respect to thieves and murderers in power. But in so doing, Obama is giving up on a precious, intangible winning card: the moral superiority of the American spirit over the world's despots.
I don't think it's just coincidence that a committee of Norwegian socialists awarded the Noble Peace prize to three American left-wing politicians: to Jimmy Carter in 2002, in a confessed attempt to embarrass Bush; to Al Gore in 2007 in an equally clumsy attempt to criticize the sitting American president by signaling who they would have liked to have won in 2004; and to Barack Obama in 2009 -a ridiculous choice on the merits, but surely a symbol of the kind of society the left would like us to become.
The author is the Tobias Simon Eminent Scholar at Florida State University College of Law.
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[i] For an account of this shameful history, see Guido Pincione & Fernando R. Tesón, Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation: A Theory of Discourse Failure (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 53-64.
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