Obama Aimed at America and Awakened The Wee People?

Peter Heck writes: 'We owe Obama a debt of gratitude for saving our Republic' but not the way you might think. Heck argues, Obama aimed his guns at America but wound up shooting himself and his progressives in the foot while awakening a sleeping giant - the wee people!

Maybe he awoke the wee people but in the process an inept Obama/Clinton team are busily engaged in losing the entire Middle East to Iran, allowing the N Korean's to thumb their nose at us while producing nuclear material for the world's renegade terrorists. But at least our president has curtailed building in Jerusalem.

More importantly he has allowed Wikileaks to make us the laughing stock of the entire globe.

The job of president is probably an impossible one for any mortal. Consequently, this is every more reason while a smaller less bureaucratized government would be one that would function better and in which the public would have more confidence.

But Obama is an ideologue and self-destruction seems his ultimate goal.

I listened to Obama's pissy fanny press conference today until I got sick to my stomach. He simply cannot be gracious and munificent. He plays the divide and conquer card and obviously does not understand American exceptionalism because he throws cold water on those who might have aspirations of excelling. He makes a mockery of success and tells those who do succeed they will be taxed as unequals.

He also made constant reference to how he is ready to do battle with Republicans and is the saviour of the little guy.

He is the most inept, contentious and radical president this nation has ever elected and the sooner he is gone the better off our nation will be. He is a divider par excellence. (See 1 below.)
---
Obama and his blind spot. (See 2 below.)
---
A novel and old idea -Put Uncle Sam on an allowance. (See 3 below.)
---
According to Bret Stephens, China is the culprit but not so with the Liberal Guardian and Simon Tisdall. They come across as China apologists. (See 4 and 4a below.)
---
Are we back to business as usual before the horse even leaves the gate? (See 5 below.)
---
Off to Florida for ten days.
---
Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)The presidency that saved America
By Peter Heck

In 50 years I have little doubt that we will regard the administration of Barack Obama as the presidency that saved America. No, not in the sense that Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and all the other media John the Baptists foretold as they proclaimed the coming of our political messiah just over two years ago. Rather, the history of our time will show that it was the radical nature of Obama's dogged devotion to a liberal progressive philosophy far out of the American mainstream that jolted awake a generation of apathetic and passive citizens just in time to save the republic.


Though that apathy has always been inexcusable, it was at least understandable. Our politics had become more theater than substance. In fact, voters reasonably began to view their choices at the ballot box as something akin to picking between airline food and hospital food: bland, insipid, uninspiring.

For all their posturing and crowing, the two parties had largely become mere reflections of one another. Seriously, how different was Bill Clinton's "triangulation" and George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism?" Candidates of either party who showed convictions contrary to the Washington establishment and challenged that establishment's control were labeled radical, and every attempt was made to marginalize them.

But Barack Obama changed all of that. For the last two years, the president has unleashed the most aggressively left-wing agenda he could muster. When the electorate began a backlash against his revolutionary designs at town halls and tea parties, he ignored them. And when they rejected his ideology by throwing his party out of power by historic proportions in the midterm elections, he pretended not to notice.

All this makes little sense to those attempting to view Obama's presidency through the conventional prism of political leadership. But Obama is not a conventional politician. He is a radical ideologue. Obama is not a leader. He is a bitter partisan. And as odd as it sounds, that is exactly what this country needed.

It has been generations since Americans have been exposed to a more vivid depiction of the significant differences between the left's and the right's views of this country and its future. The delineation between conservative and liberal had grown hopelessly blurred to a majority of citizens. But Obama and his leftist cabal have been successful not only in demonstrating the frightening vision progressive liberals have of making America into a European-style socialist state, but they have also managed to animate a vast conservative majority that has laid painfully dormant since the mid 1980s.

The distinction is glaring, and even for those who normally avoid politics, impossible to miss.

While Americans watch conservative Republicans like Eric Cantor explain that raising taxes on any citizens in the midst of a recession (particularly those who are being relied upon to invest and expand businesses to create jobs) is foolish, they see President Obama proclaim that "we can't afford" not to raise taxes on a group of citizens he determines are too wealthy.

Besides the glaring proof this offers of the left's obsession with using divisive class warfare to gain power, it also reveals a notable difference in philosophy. While conservatives like Cantor believe money belongs first to the citizen and is confiscated by government, leftists like Obama believe money belongs first to the government. That government then lets select citizens keep some of it...if and only if government "can afford" to be so generous.

Further, when Americans open their newspapers, they are greeted with the wise counsel of Obamabots like Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman. Friedman's recent piece in The New York Times called the tea party movement "narrow and uninspired" while touting that, "We need to raise gasoline and carbon taxes to discourage their use and drive the creation of a new clean energy industry." Krugman, meanwhile, laments that the waste of nearly one trillion taxpayer dollars on a government spending bill meant to stimulate a still stagnant economy wasn't enough, and should be followed up with an even bigger second stimulus.

Everywhere they turn, Americans see that the left is offering higher taxes, less freedom, more debt and regulation. They simultaneously see the right offering lower taxes, freer markets and fiscal sanity.

Voters' first opportunity to choose between those two visions occurred in the 2010 midterms. Their preference was unmistakable – to everyone, that is, except Barack Obama. His recent pronouncement that, "It would be unwise to assume [the voters] prefer one way of thinking over another," reconfirmed that the president and his cohorts have no desire whatsoever to alter course, and instead will spend the next two years butting heads with the newly elected conservative majority. This conflict is sure to make the distinction between the left and the right all the more clear to an engaged American public.

And with a 2012 election cycle that already sees Democrats poised to face even more devastating Congressional losses (they are defending far more Senate seats than Republicans, and could lose upward of 30 House seats due to redistricting), Obama's persistent, unapologetic left-wing crusade is shaping up to be the political equivalent to Pickett's Charge.

In the end, the era of Obama will do more damage to the progressive left than any Republican presidency could have ever done. For that, posterity will owe him a debt of gratitude.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Obama's Blind Spot
By Janice Shaw Crouse

Despite the Democratic Party's 2010 election "shellacking," President Obama recently asserted that the election had nothing to do with ideology. He said, "It would be unwise to assume [that American voters] prefer one way of thinking over another." This attitude is consistent with the president's previous actions and statements. He still doesn't understand that the public is outraged at what Victor Davis Hanson, in National Review, called his "EU-socialist agenda." The people's anger stems from Obama's so-called solutions, radical political appointees, and his health care reform program that threatens to bankrupt the nation, not -- as he famously contends -- from him not delivering "change" as fast as he promised. In fact, Obama views the election primarily as a message to Republicans to be more bipartisan and cooperative; to date, he has never acknowledged that voters repudiated his policies and the direction in which he wants to take the country.


However, John Podhoretz points out in his Commentary article, "The Liberal Crisis," that "[m]ore than 750 elected Democrats (or positions held by elected Democrats) from the House to the Senate to governors' mansions to state legislatures were ousted from office in the largest and deepest partisan rout in American history." He adds, "You have to go back 37 national elections to find a larger number of Republicans in the House. You have to go back 82 years to find as many Republicans in state legislatures."


The president pretends not to notice the harsh realities of election 2010; he chooses, instead, to interpret the colossal rebuke of his administration's policies as a communication problem that produced a "misunderstanding" of what he has "accomplished" in his first two years in office. The bottom line is that the president's blind spot keeps him from seeing what those outside his administration find obvious: The majority of the American public views his liberal progressive agenda, radical presidential appointments, and newly minted czars as far out of the nation's political mainstream. People are especially angry at the health care reform package that only Obama and his sycophants in the media wanted and that nobody read or fully understood. A large segment of the public also blames the president for the devastating effects that his policies -- the stimulus plan and the bailouts -- have had on the nation's economy. In short, the Tea Party movement and town hall meetings reflect and embody a groundswell of grassroots opposition to the "wrong direction" that the president, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have taken the nation.


Clearly, most people got the message: The public objects to having an ideology so far removed from middle-American thinking and policy proposals -- which attendees at town hall meeting after town hall meeting expressly rejected -- jammed down its throat, and the people fear for the future of America. Peter Heck, in American Thinker, argues that there is an electoral divide in the nation that clearly delineates the left from the right in terms of political philosophy and positions on contemporary issues. That electoral divide was exacerbated by Obama's policies and what the media called his "rhetorical brilliance" -- which the public saw as condescension and elitism. The angle of Obama's head as he read the ever-present teleprompter and his patronizing tone have contributed to the public's perception of him as someone who is very much out of touch with America. It didn't help that the president lamely continued to "blame Bush" a whole two years into his presidency.


The man who repeatedly called for bipartisanship and a post-racial society presided over an administration that excluded the GOP from health care negotiations, viewed members of the other party as the enemy, and flat-out told Republicans that their place was at the back of the bus. No wonder the nation is divided. But the division is not equal; the maps showing the divide are stunning in pinpointing largely the bi-coastal, big-city areas of the nation that are "blue," in contrast to the vast flyover country that is "red." In other words, mainstream middle-America solidly opposes the leftist takeover of the nation, and these Americans do not "blame Bush." Instead, they blame the two-year runaway train wreck that is Obama's "EU-Socialist agenda."


It is past time for the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate to understand how soundly the American public rejected their vision for "hope and change." The fact that they continue to blindly rush forward is evidence of how clueless they are as to the public's desires and attendant and political realities. What voters had in mind in 2008 was that the first African-American president might profitably go to work on the pitiful performance of public schools, the future-destroying budget deficits, the bloated and inefficient federal bureaucracy, the bloated entitlement programs that are feeding poverty, and the mind-boggling red-tape/regulations that are choking entrepreneurs. But that is not what the top three Democrats see as top priorities, then or now. So they continue plunging ahead, pursuing the same destructive agenda, completely blind to the ramifications of the midterm elections.


Perhaps Peter Heck is right that 2010 shows that the last two years have "jolted awake a generation of apathetic and passive citizens just in time to save the republic." Certainly, he is right in his claim that public apathy has been "inexcusable." With the continuation of the Obama administration's obstructionism and the progressive left (Pelosi and the lame-stream media)'s blind advocacy of radical policies, it is impossible to misconstrue the president's motivating vision and his divisive use of "class warfare" rhetoric. Americans are getting a sharper and sharper focus on the differences between Obama's America and the America they want for their families and their children's children.


There is open talk about Democratic challenges to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential primaries. John Podhoretz said, "The scale of the Democratic Party's defeat and the parlous condition of the country's finances inevitably raise the specter of a challenge to a first-term president from within his own party." Podhoretz notes that four of the eight presidents who faced reelection opponents within their own party were challenged because they were charged with "betraying the party's core principles," and subsequently, the challenged president lost in the general election. He identifies the primary reason for these challenges as simply because the sitting president was "beginning to look like a loser." Ironically, even the left is viewing Obama as a loser for not being leftist enough. The indisputable facts of the 2010 election show the degree to which Obama has lost those in the center, where elections are won or lost. His blind spot about the message of 2010 -- if not corrected, and it is a very big "if" -- will cost him the election in 2012.

Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., author of Children at Risk (Transaction, 2010), is Senior Fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, Concerned Women for America's think-tank.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Put Uncle Sam on an Allowance
By Monty Pelerin

This country is headed for financial disaster. Spendthrift government is insolvent, and its behavior threatens the economy and lifestyle of all citizens.


The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform recently provided recommendations for addressing government deficits. They proposed cuts that fell woefully short of a real solution. Even so, the committee was unable to reach an agreement.


This commission is just another in a long line of warnings and solutions regarding government insolvency. Previous commissions, agencies, and independent think-tanks have offered such advice for decades. Yet the problem only grows more critical. As described by the Wall Street Journal:


Debates over taxes and spending are at root about political philosophy: How big should government be? How much income should it redistribute, and to whom? We mention this to explain why today's report from President Obama's deficit commission is landing with such a predictable political thud.


The Problem


Everyone knows spending must be cut dramatically, except it does not and will not happen. Politicians, regardless of tribe, want to play Santa Claus, never The Grinch. As Thomas Sowell stated, "the first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."


Political behavior is not genetic. It is conditioned by voter-politician quid pro quo: "You give me something, and I will give you my vote." Conversely, austerity is penalized. Is there any surprise that government always grows and never shrinks?


This calculus is perverse because what is good for the politician is not good for the country. Politicians, like everyone else, are motivated by self-interest. As H.L. Mencken colorfully described them, "if a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."


Political survival matters. Modern-day "statesmanship" provides no reward for political suicide. It is irrational for politicians to cut spending, and that is what ensures sovereign bankruptcy. Politicians will feign concern right up to the collapse of the economy. What then happens to our political system and country is unknowable, but likely ugly and dangerous.


The Founding Fathers established government as an agent of the people. They limited government's role to the protection of private property, allowing for internal and external defense and a court system to adjudicate disputes. The Constitution reflected their fears and codified their boundaries.


Two centuries later, government has escaped the cage that the Constitution represented. Today, the political class believe themselves masters, with the people as agents serving them.


The Solution


The reversed agency-principal relationship between the people and the government is the root cause of massive financial and social problems. Any "solution" that does not clearly reduce government to servant rather than master is merely a political charade. The Bowles-Simpson commission recommendations, while well-intentioned, are not a solution. They enable more can-kicking when we are out of time. If adopted, they will assure the eventual collapse of the country.


The Constitution, while emasculated, still provides the best means to regain control of the country. It offers a way to change the incentive structure for politicians, a means certainly preferable to the alternative -- revolution and anarchy.


Any plan must remove the incentive to ever increase spending. In effect, it must put the servant, government, on an allowance. Designed properly, such an amendment would alter the behavioral incentives of politicians without restricting their ability to govern the nation. It would ensure that their motivations were better-aligned with the country's.


There are multiple forms such an effort could take. At a minimum, any effective amendment should meet a set of requirements. It should:
1.be designed outside of Washington.
2.be definite, leaving no room for interpretation or compromise.
3.contain automatic and substantial consequences.
One Possible Plan


The following is an outline of a plan that meets these general requirements. It is not presented as the best, but merely an illustration. Constitutional scholars or Tea Partiers can deal with the strategy and feasibility of obtaining such an amendment. To overcome the inevitable congressional resistance, two-thirds of the states could call a constitutional convention for the purpose of passing such an amendment.


Government spending would be capped as a percentage of GDP. Historically, federal spending has averaged between 18 and 19 percent of GDP for most years prior to the last two. While I would prefer something in the low teens or even single digits, any reasonable level would suffice. The target presumably would be phased in over a few years, allowing orderly adjustment to a lower spending level.


The following provisions seem appropriate:
1.The spending target would be defined as percentage of GDP.
2.An annual review by an independent public accounting firm would certify results. This accounting firm would be chosen randomly each year.
3.The audit would certify both the validity of accounting standards and that the target was met.
4.In the event that proper certification were obtained, government would operate as it always has.
5.In the event that proper certification were not met, the following would occur:
a. First year violation -- salaries for all elected congressional representatives would be halved until the next year's audit.
b. Second year violation -- If the next year's audit also did not comply (i.e., two consecutive failures), all members of Congress whose salaries were reduced would be dismissed, and special elections would be held for their seats. Dismissed members would not be eligible to run until the next regular election.
6.In the event that certification and target was met after a violation (one year failure and then remedy), all congressmen would be returned to their normal salary levels.
7.No exception to this amendment would be allowed for any reason, including war, natural disaster, or depression.
These suggestions are not meant to be the answer. They are an answer!


The political class will howl at any such proposal (didn't the California pols when confronted with Prop 13?). However, they have proven their untrustworthiness and inability to manage spending. They must be put on an allowance like the rest of us. The alternative of continuing to believe their empty promises is too horrible to contemplate. The time to stop Lucy and her football trick is now, Charlie Brown. The stakes are too high to continue on this certain road to sovereign insolvency and economic collapse.


Politicians will have all of the discretion they have always had (although the states might want to stop the imposition of unfunded mandates and other trickery). Politicians would have to do their jobs within budgetary constraints like every employee, department, and family outside Washington, D.C. Exceeding budget would have consequences. Meeting budget would not guarantee reelection.


The important point is that the political motivation to always increase spending would be gone. Vote-buying could still occur, but within narrow limits.


There will be many objections to the plan, few of which will likely hold up to voter scrutiny. A few, with my reaction, are presented below:
1.We spent what we budgeted, but GDP fell below expectations. Too bad. Next year, provide some provision in case that happens again. Your personally reduced income presumably will assist you in this matter.
2.We had a natural disaster. Too bad. You didn't have to "rescue" the folks, or you could have cut funds from other areas of the budget to do so.
3.We had a war. Too bad. Don't fund it unless it is so necessary that you are willing to be penalized by half your salary or going out and getting a real job. Good luck.
4.I voted against all spending. Why should I get penalized? Too bad. How is that any different from good workers getting laid off in bad economies or from plant closings?
5.It is not possible to manage a government this way. Too bad. We will find people who can. Businesses don't seem to have this problem.
Obviously there are other objections and ways to improve upon these initial musings. Please feel welcome to suggest some. Also, feel free to forward these ideas to the Tea Party and the state legislatures. Let's create some real excitement and save the country at the same time!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)China Joins the Axis of Evil Pyongyang's nuclear program would have been impossible without Beijing.By BRET STEPHENS..Article Video Comments (136) more in Opinion ».EmailPrintSave This ↓ More.
.Twitter
Digg
+ More
close Yahoo! BuzzMySpacedel.icio.usRedditFacebookLinkedInFarkViadeoOrkut Text Last month, U.S. nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker paid his fourth visit to North Korea, where he was granted a tour of some of the hermit kingdom's nuclear facilities. Think WikiLeaks is bad? Compared to what the former director of the Los Alamos lab saw, it's nothing.

Mr. Hecker was given a tour of a construction site where Pyongyang intends to build a 100-megawatt reactor. Next he was taken to a uranium enrichment facility. "The first look through the windows of the observation deck into the two long high-bay areas was stunning," relates Mr. Hecker. "Instead of seeing a few small cascades of centrifuges, which I believed to exist in North Korea, we saw a modern, clean centrifuge plant of more than a thousand centrifuges all neatly aligned and plumbed below us."

Nor was that all. Mr. Hecker also writes that "The control room was astonishingly modern. Unlike the reprocessing facility and reactor control room, which looked like 1950s U.S. or 1980s Soviet instrumentation, this control room would fit into any modern American processing facility."

The North Koreans told Mr. Hecker they had developed all of this indigenously. I asked Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman, both former nuclear-weapons designers and authors of "The Nuclear Express," an excellent history of nuclear proliferation, what they thought were the chances of that. Answer: "Zero."

What does this mean? For starters, it means that Pyongyang's nuclear efforts are not, or not merely, of the what-else-do-you-expect-from-these-nutcases variety. Some other entity—or regime—has made a considered decision to actively support the North's efforts to field an ambitious nuclear program.

So who is it?

View Full Image

Associated Press

China's Gao Boxiong (left) and North Korea's Kim Jong Il celebrate their 60-year alliance against "imperialism."
.Messrs. Reed and Stillman have their suspicions. Could it be Iran? Tehran, Damascus and Pyongyang have such a flourishing trade in nuclear know-how that it seems a good possibility, Various news outlets have noted the resemblance of the North's enrichment facility to the Iranian one in Natanz. But the authors are doubtful. "Not likely," they say. "[The Iranians] can't even make their own machines work."

What about Pakistan? "A possibility." The nuclear and ballistic missile trade between Pakistan and North Korea dates to the early 1990s, when Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan was perfecting his import-export model. Then, too, the centrifuges Mr. Hecker observed appeared to be of the second-generation, P-2 variety used by Pakistan.

Global View Columnist Bret Stephens explains why Iran's foreign minister doesn't want to talk to the US Secretary of State.
.Yet the Islamabad-Pyongyang express was shut down years ago, while the North Korean facility appears to be brand new. It's unlikely that Pakistan would have been able to supply the large numbers of centrifuges the North has assembled. And then there's that state-of-the-art control room, probably not a Pakistani specialty.

Which leaves China, the "most likely" provider of the North's new toys, according to the authors. "There is no possibility," they say, "of North Korea achieving what nuclear capability it has without Chinese help."

Mr. Stillman in particular knows whereof he speaks: He was among the first foreigners ever to visit China's nuclear-test base at Malan. In "The Nuclear Express," he and Mr. Reed note that beginning in 1982, the Chinese "decided to actively support nuclear proliferation in the Third World, specifically the Muslim and Marxist worlds. In the decade that followed, Deng's government then trained scientists, transferred technology, sold delivery systems, and built infrastructure in furtherance of that policy."

Why the government of Deng Xiaoping embarked on that very Maoist course remains a bit of a mystery. Yet embark it did: A.Q. Khan almost certainly obtained his first bomb blueprint from China, and China may also have been the site of Pakistan's first nuclear test in May 1990. In 1997, the CIA testified that "China was the most significant supplier of WMD-related technology to foreign countries."

In 2002 came news that Chinese experts had worked on Iran's nuclear facility in Isfahan. That same year, the Washington Times reported that a Chinese company had sold North Korea 20 tons of tributyl phosphate, a key ingredient for extracting plutonium from spent fuel rods. And thanks to WikiLeaks, we know that China facilitates North Korean weapons exports—over insistent U.S. protests—to sundry foreign destinations.

It's time the U.S. drew appropriate conclusions from this. Every effort to negotiate with the North has failed. Yesterday, President Obama called Hu Jintao to ask for help with Pyongyang. But as proliferation expert Henry Sokolski notes, what's the point of urging Beijing to be part of the solution when it's so willfully part of the problem? China has signed on to nearly every nonproliferation agreement around. Yet it continues to flout all of them.

This is not the behavior of a status quo power, but of a revolutionary one supporting activities and regimes that represent the most acute threat to global security. If it continues unchecked, it is China that should be sanctioned—and the North's facilities destroyed.

4a)Obama should stop blaming China over North Korea and start talkingTensions on the peninsula have reached a dangerous pitch – and China's leverage with the North's leadership is limited
By Simon Tisdall

North Korea's aggressive behaviour has sent tensions soaring on the Korean peninsula. But it is also placing serious new strains on already fraught relations between China and the US. This development is neither sensible nor rational, since both superpowers stand to lose much more than they could possibly gain from intensifying confrontation. Perversely, it may suit North Korea very well.


The dangerous ramifications of the standoff that followed the shelling of a South Korean island two weeks ago were dramatised by an anonymous briefing given today to the Washington Post by a "senior administration official". Given the urgency of the issue and the proximity of next month's US-China summit, it will be assumed the official is Barack Obama's national security adviser – or someone of similar authority.


Reflecting anger and alarm in the White House about the sudden, unwelcome crisis, the official was blunt in apportioning blame. "The Chinese embrace of North Korea in the last eight months has served to convince North Korea that China has its back and has encouraged it to behave with impunity," the senior official said. "We think the Chinese have been enabling North Korea."


The US case against Beijing includes China's refusal to condemn the artillery attack on Yeonpyeong island; and what Obama has called its "wilful blindness" over the sinking in March of a South Korean naval vessel, blamed by international investigators on a North Korean torpedo (China maintains it is an unexplained incident). Beijing is also accused by the US of dragging its feet on punitive UN action against Pyongyang's nuclear proliferation.


Washington – meaning the presidency, Congress and the media – is well-practised at working itself up into a righteous rage on international security issues, whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge. It's happening again now.


Thus today, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, hosted fellow foreign ministers from Japan and South Korea – but not China – in a discussion of additional measures to contain or punish North Korea. There is even loose talk of creating an "anti-China bloc" in north-east Asia, an idea that would delight American and Japanese hawks and North Korean hardliners but which could be disastrous for almost everyone else.


At the same time Washington has done nothing to curb increasingly hostile rhetoric from South Korea, prompted by public criticism that the government initially reacted weakly to the artillery attack. President Lee Myung-bak has promised not to make the same "mistake" again. And his new defence minister, Kim Kwan-jin (his predecessor resigned in a show of contrition) says South Korea will hit back hard and disproportionately, with bombs and air strikes, should the North transgress again.


Just to drive home the point, South Korea today began week-long nationwide live fire naval drills in 29 locations around the periphery of the peninsula. It was one such drill that sparked last month's bombardment. And although Yeonpyeong is not included this time, a location in the series of drills is Daecheong island, scene of a deadly naval clash last year.


Unsurprisingly the North has reacted menacingly. "Frantic provocations ... are rapidly driving the situation on the Korean peninsula to an uncontrollable extreme phase. No one can predict to what extent the situation will deteriorate in the future," the state news agency said.


Obama's inflexible policy of refusing to talk to the North unless various preconditions are met, and the stepping up of the US military presence in the region, is also driving the situation towards breaking point, at least in the Chinese view. Beijing's stance, based on its very different calculations about how best to handle the North, is almost exactly the opposite of Washington's. This head-on policy collision, if it is allowed to continue and develop, presents the most likely path to escalating armed conflict.


Speaking to Obama by telephone overnight, Chinese president Hu Jintao advised the Americans and their South Korean allies to calm down. "China is extremely worried about the current situation. The Korean peninsula has a very fragile security situation ... If not dealt with properly, tensions could spin out of control, which would not be in anyone's interest," Hu said. "We need an easing [of tensions], not a ratcheting up, dialogue not confrontation, peace not war." For his part, Obama urged Hu "to send a clear message to North Korea that its provocations are unacceptable" and stressed Washington's support for its regional allies.


What Chinese officials repeatedly state, and what the Americans evidently cannot bring themselves to believe, is that Beijing's influence and leverage over North Korea's leadership is limited. That's why some senior Chinese leaders are fed up with their "spoiled child" and would accept reunification under the South's control, as leaked US diplomatic cables have suggested. Such flexibility is undermined by American head-banging. And what the US fails to explain is exactly what it thinks China has to gain from a nuclear-armed rogue state randomly threatening its neighbours and China's own national interests.


Precedents suggest that after a certain point is reached, the North does not behave rationally and does not listen to its Chinese ally. That point may be about to be reached again. Obama should stop blaming China, stop pressurising North Korea militarily, and start talking – which, after all, is what he's good at.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)Oversight for the Spenders
Boehner caves on Appropriations.

House Speaker-designate John Boehner is hoping his decision to give Arizona spending rebel Jeff Flake a seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee will blunt the news yesterday that the panel's GOP chairman will be an Old Bull spender. If Mr. Boehner really wants to make amends, he should ensure that Mr. Flake has real power at the committee, in the form of a new spending oversight panel.

Conservative groups were unhappy at yesterday's news that Mr. Boehner's Steering Committee voted to give the committee that dispenses federal dollars to Kentucky's Hal Rogers, whose spending record rivals that of any free-wheeling Democrat. Mr. Rogers was high on the seniority list, and Mr. Boehner wasn't willing to irk old-timers by reaching down to anoint a reformer.

The GOP leader announced his support for Mr. Flake on Monday. This is no small thing. A budget hawk, Mr. Flake has spent 10 years needling his party over earmarks, a high crime that lost him a prior Appropriations bid. As encouraging was Mr. Boehner's call for "other reform-minded Members" to join Mr. Flake in seeking seats on the panel.

Before those reformers raise their hands, they'll need reassurance they won't be shunned and left with nothing to do. That's one reason Mr. Flake is pushing for Mr. Boehner to let him run a new investigations subcommittee with the power to hold hearings and dig in to wasteful and inefficient federal spending.

Mr. Flake is getting pushback from (who else?) the committee's spending dons, who insist their own 12 subcommittees already do oversight. But this is the old fox-henhouse joke. Appropriations currently has an investigative unit, but it is made up of staff with limited authority.

The Members who join the Appropriations subcommittee on, say, agriculture do so precisely because they are advocates of farm spending. They have no interest in subjecting their own programs to greater public scrutiny. We have no doubt the GOP will investigate the Obama Administration. A Flake watchdog panel would scrutinize spending in which Congress is complicit.

Mr. Flake makes the sensible point that to succeed in cutting government programs, the GOP needs to persuade the public that money has been wasted. A Flake subcommittee could hold hearings and compile evidence even on such simple questions as how much the feds subsidize the AFL-CIO or General Electric. Mr. Flake is circulating a starter list, from stimulus grants to Homeland Security to Head Start.

Mr. Boehner's selection of Mr. Rogers is a major disappointment and makes his promises to control spending suspect. If he really wants to change the spending culture, he should unleash Mr. Flake.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------