Community Organizer Better Suited @ Shoveling Feces?

Sent to me by another 'dumb' friend that also does not get it. Ain't it great to be unloved, dumb and among the unwashed, 'overweight,' gun toting, bible thumping majority of Conservative Americans who are too stupid to appreciate the pleasures of Far left Liberalism? We only know who and what is wrecking our nation!

How could someone like Hanson, with a doctorate degree, write such insightful trash? He too must be blind to the the logic of Liberalism.

As for Carter, I suspect he got his stomach infection after reading his own nonsense. Most everything he writes is enough to turn one's stomach. (See 1 below.)
---
A meaty article but Democrats are either too frightened or stupid to understand the enormity of rage and disgust among us unwashed.

Come November, after the tornado has spoken, Pelosi and her shrinking majority might try, during the interim lame duck session, to ram more poisonous legislation down the nation's throat like carding union members etc.

If she does, Democrats will simply put one more nail in their coffin.

Then the question will be whether Republicans can govern like sensible pall bearers or go back to their mistaken ways and revive the dying Far Left.(See 2 below.)
---
Perhaps our great community organizer president would be better suited had he run for mayor of San Fran.

He seems more adept at shoveling feces than running the nation. (See 3 below.)
---
Imminent attack in Europe? (See 4 below.)
---
Did anyone ever doubt it? Mitchell remains hopeful! (See 5 and 5a below.)
---
Democrats like Napoleon might be ready to meet their Waterloo. (See 6 below.)
---
Caroline Glick believes the Stuxnet worm may make Iran squirm but they will eventually overcome it and thus, has not changed the strategic vulnerabilities that Israel faces: "The first is Israel’s geographic minuteness, which attracts invaders. The second vulnerability is Israel’s political weakness both at home and abroad, which make it impossible to fight long wars." See 7 below.)
---

Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)Clinging to Arrogance
By Victor Davis Hanson


The bookish, twice-unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once sighed that if most thinking people supported him, it still wouldn't be enough in America because "I need a majority."

For some reason, Democrats have chosen to follow the disastrous model of Stevenson and not that of feisty man-of-the-people Missourian Harry Truman -- though the former nearly wrecked the party and the latter got elected.

Former President Jimmy Carter likewise seems to feel that he's still too smart for us. Carter, who turns 86 on Friday, is hitting the news shows to explain why he remains America's "superior" ex-president -- and why more than 30 years ago he was so successful yet so underappreciated as our chief executive.

Most Americans instead remember a very different President Carter who finished his single term with 18 percent inflation, 18 percent interest rates, 11 percent unemployment, long gas lines, and a world in chaos from hostage-taking in Teheran and Soviet communist aggression in Afghanistan and Central America.

Now, John Kerry -- who failed to win the presidency in 2004 and recently tried to avoid state sales taxes on his new $7 million yacht -- is voicing similar frustrations about Americans' inability to fathom what their betters are trying to do for them. He is furious that an unsophisticated electorate might not return congressional Democratic majorities in 2010. Kerry laments that, "We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on." Instead it falls for "a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening."

In 2006, Kerry warned students that if they did poorly in school, they could "get stuck in Iraq." He apparently had forgotten that soldiers volunteer for military service, and are overwhelmingly high school graduates.

In the 2008 campaign, Michelle Obama at one point said of her husband's burden, "Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics."

That sense of intellectual superiority was channeled by Barack Obama himself when he later tried to explain why his message was not resonating with less astute rural Pennsylvanians: "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

During the recent Ground Zero mosque controversy, Obama returned to that Carter-Kerry-Obama sort of condescension. When asked about the overwhelming opposition to the mosque, the president felt again that the unthinking hoi polloi had given into their unfounded fears: "I think that at a time when the country is anxious generally and going through a tough time, then fears can surface, suspicions, divisions can surface in a society."

The president often clears his throat with "Let me be perfectly clear" and "Make no mistake about it" -- as if we, his schoolchildren, have to be warned to pay attention to the all-knowing teacher at the front of the class.

Disappointed progressive pundits also resonate this angst over having to deal with childlike Americans. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently psychoanalyzed the falling support for the president by claiming that "The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats."

Thomas Frank's best-selling 2004 book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" lamented that uninformed voters were easily tricked into voting against their "real" economic interests.
When America votes for a liberal candidate, it is redeemed by the left as intelligent -- and derided as dense when it does not. We were told not to worry that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner did not pay all his income taxes since we were lucky to have someone so well educated and experienced in high finance.

Note that few Democratic candidates are running on the health-care bill they passed, promising at the time that it would be appreciated by a suspicious American public. More federal borrowing and amnesty are still pushed under the euphemisms "stimulus" and "comprehensive immigration reform." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that the tea party movement was merely a synthetic Astroturf movement. Professors and preachers may like such sermonizing, but for politicians it's a lousy way to get elected. Again, compare the relative fates of the patronizing Adlai Stevenson and the plain-speaking Harry Truman.

But current polls suggest that these clueless and unappreciative Americans apparently believe that an elite education does not ensure their officials can balance a budget, pay their own taxes or speak candidly.

What an outrageous "How dare they!" thought.


Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)The Twister of 2010 America's political landscape will never be the same.
By PEGGY NOONAN


On a recent trip to Omaha, Neb., I found a note prominently displayed in my hotel room warning of the possibility of "extreme weather" including "tornadic activity." The clunky euphemism was no doubt meant to soften or obscure what they were obliged to communicate: There may be a tornado, look out.

That's what's going on nationally. Tornadoes are tearing up the political landscape.

Everyone talks about the tensions between the Republican establishment, such as it is, and the tea-party-leaning parts of its base. But are you looking at what's happening with the Democrats?

Tensions between President Obama and his supporters tore into the open this week as never before, signifying a real and developing fracturing of his party. Mr. Obama, in an interview in Rolling Stone, aimed fire at those abandoning him: "It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election." The Democratic base "sitting on their hands complaining" is "just irresponsible. . . . We have to get folks off the sidelines. People need to shake off this lethargy, people need to buck up. Bringing about change is hard—that's what I said during the campaign. . . . But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place."

At first I thought this was another example of the president's now-habitual political ineptness, his off-key-ness. You don't diss people into voting for you, you can't lecture them into love. The response from the left was fierce, unapologetic—and accusatory. Mr. Obama had let them down, he'd taken half measures. "Stop living in that bubble," shot back an activist on cable. But Jane Hamsher of the leftist blog Firedoglake saw method, not madness. She described the president's remarks as "hippie punching" and laid them to cynical strategy: "It's about setting up a narrative for who will take the blame for a disastrous election." She said Mr. Obama's comments themselves could "depress turnout."

Take the blame? Disastrous? Setting up a narrative?

This isn't the language of disagreement, the classic to-and-fro between a restive base and politicians who make compromises. This is the language of estrangement. It is the language of alienation.

There is a war beginning in the Democratic Party, and the president has lost control of his base.

The Democratic leadership in the House appears to have lost another kind of control, fleeing Washington without passing a federal budget or extending even part of the Bush-era tax cuts, which are due to expire on Jan. 1. Democrats hold a solid majority in the House. They have a hitherto-powerful speaker. And the decision to adjourn passed by only a single vote—that of Nancy Pelosi, who saw 39 Democrats join the Republicans in dissenting.

The Democratic Party right now is showing signs of coming apart under the pressure of the election and two years of an unpopular presidency. But it's not a split in two, with the left versus the establishment. It's more like a splintering, with left-leaning activists distancing themselves from the party's politicians, and moderate politicians distancing themselves from Mr. Obama.

And part of what's driving it is what is driving the evolution of the Republican Party. The Internet changed everything. Everyone has facts now, knows who voted how and why. New thought leaders spring up and lead in new directions. Total transparency leads to party fracturing. Information dings unity. We are in new territory.

Another tornado: The president's influential counselor, David Axelrod, attempted this week to insinuate into the election what Democrats used to deride as "wedge issues." In an interview he said abortion will "certainly be an issue," for Democrats. It will be raised "across the country."

This suggests a certain desperation. Whatever stand you take on the social issues, you have to be blind to think they will make a big difference this year. The issue this year is the size, role, weight and demands of government, and the public sense that its members selfishly look to their own needs and not those of the country. A GOP congressman told me this week that he very much disagrees with the characterization of tea party and Republican voters as enraged or livid. They are scared, he said. He has never, in two decades in politics, heard so many people tell him they are "scared," frightened for their own futures and for the future of their country.

No one will get revved in the way Mr. Axelrod hopes who isn't already a reliable Democratic vote. His raising of a wedge issue speaks not only of a certain cynicism but of what appears to be an endemic White House cluelessness.

Yet another tornado: The Democrats have begun what Grover Norquist predicted a month ago. They saved their money for the end of the campaign and have begun running negative ads. They are not speaking in support of their own votes on health care and other issues. They are avoiding the subject of their own votes on health care and other issues. They are focusing instead on accusations of personal scandal. Both parties have done this in the past, to their mutual shame. But this year, with some exceptions and for obvious reasons, it appears to be largely a Democratic game. At this point in history, with America teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, negative advertising is even more destructive, more actually wicked, than it was in the past.

Negative advertising tears everything down. It contributes to the cynicism of the populace, especially the young. It undermines the faith in government Democrats are always asking us to have, by undermining respect for those who govern, or who seek to. It wears everyone down. And in the long term, though this can never be quantified, it keeps from electoral politics untold numbers of citizens who could bring their gifts and guts to helping solve our problems. I will never forget the visionary real-world entrepreneur who sighed, when I once urged him to enter politics, "I've lived an imperfect life. They'd kill me."


But let's go to what is traditionally the only way journalists and political professionals judge such ads: Do they work? In the past they have. But here's a hunch: This year they will not be so effective.

The primary reason is the severity of the moment. But another is that negative ads worked so well in the past. For a generation, the American people have been told their politicians are lowlifes. You know what they now think of them? They think they're lowlifes! People don't really expect high character from their political figures anymore. "Congressman Smith cheated on his wife." That's her problem. Cut my taxes.

Good practical advice on all this comes from Indiana's Gov. Mitch Daniels, who met this week in New York with conservative activists, journalists and historians. Our country is in real peril, he said, we have a short time to do big things to get it right. Republicans "need to campaign to govern, not merely to win." If Democrats are "the worst, the most malevolent" in their campaigning, "don't match 'em, let 'em." Be better. Be serious about the issues at a serious time.

What appears to be coming is a Republican rout. The main reason is the growing connection between public desire on various issues and Republican stands on those issues. But another is what is happening among Democrats—the rise of a spirit of destruction, and the increasing fact of fractured unity.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)San Franciscans Try to Take Back Their Streets
Even the liberal mayor is backing an initiative that would make public spaces safe again from the homeless industry and young thuggish vagrants
By HEATHER MACDONALD


Stroll down Haight Street these days, and chances are you'll be accosted by aggressive young vagrants. "Can you spare some change?" asks Cory, a slender dark-haired young man from Ventura, Calif. "Dude, do you have any food?" His two female companions, Zombie and Eeyore, swig from a bottle of pricey Tejava tea and pass a smoke while lying on a blanket surrounded by a fortress of backpacks, bedrolls and scrawled signs asking for money. Vincent, a fourth "traveler," as the Haight Street gutter punks call themselves, stares dully into space.

Asked why people should give them money, Cory replies: "They got a dollar and I don't." Why don't you work? "We do work," retorts Eeyore. "I carry around this heavy backpack. We wake up at 7 a.m. and work all day. It's hard work." She's referring to begging and boozing. Asked if they're embarrassed to be begging, Cory says: "I'm not begging, I'm just asking for money."

Such strapping young hobos see themselves as on a "mission," though they're hard-pressed to define it. In fact, they are defined by an oversized sense of entitlement.

Of all the destinations on the West Coast "traveler" circuit, the Haight carries a particular attraction to these panhandlers, thanks to the 1960s Summer of Love. Over the last several years, however, the vagrant population has grown more territorial and violent. "I don't care if they ask for change," says Arthur Evans, a self-described former hippie who has lived in the neighborhood for 35 years. "It's okay if they loiter and make a bit of noise. But I don't feel safe walking down the Haight at night any more."

In July, two pit bulls bred by the residents of an encampment in nearby Golden Gate Park tore into pedestrians, biting a 71-year-old woman to the bone and wounding her two companions. Last October, one of three punks sitting on a blanket with dogs spat on a 14-month-old baby when its mother rejected their demand for change. These days vagrants carry knives and Mace; people who ask them to move risk getting jumped. Merchants trying to clean up feces and urine left by drunken youth are sometimes harassed and attacked.

By late 2009, community frustration with the aggressive behavior led the police captain in the Haight district to propose a "sit-lie" ordinance to ban sitting or lying on city sidewalks from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Police would first ask someone blocking a sidewalk to move along, warning him he was violating the law. Only if he refused could they cite him.

The city's politically potent homeless advocates instantly mobilized against the proposed ordinance, as they have in every battle over public space in San Francisco over the last two decades. The real problem in the Haight, advocates claimed, is inadequate government housing and stingy welfare spending. Rather than "criminalizing poverty," the city needs to spend more money on social services and housing subsidies, they say. But the gutter punks are not looking for housing and have no intention of settling down in San Francisco or anywhere else. They are in the Haight to party, en route to their next way station.

The charge that San Francisco has been stiffing social-welfare spending in favor of what homeless advocates sneer at as the "sacred cows" of police and fire protection is absurd. In fiscal year 2009, the city spent $175 million on homelessness—that's $26,865 on each of the city's 6,514 "homeless" persons, the majority of whom are housed in city-subsidized lodgings. Its police budget was $442 million, or $52 per San Franciscan. The gargantuan outlay for the homeless has done little to dent the vagrancy problem.

Seventy-one percent of voters backed the sit-lie ordinance in a poll conducted by David Binder Research in February, compared to 24% who opposed it. Nevertheless, San Francisco's left-wing Board of Supervisors (the equivalent of a city council) voted it down, eight to three, in June. The law's supporters, who include Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief George Gascón, have put the law on the November ballot as a voter initiative.

Perhaps the lock of the homeless advocates on San Francisco's politics will finally be broken. It is auspicious that the current push for civil sidewalks is coming from the Haight, long viewed as the epicenter of San Francisco's "progressive" movement. Two other ballot initiatives next month are aimed at reforming the city's bloated pensions and dysfunctional transit union. If these pass, it might signal a sea change in the political culture, especially since the pension reform measure is sponsored by Jeff Adachi, the city's impeccably progressive public defender.

San Francisco's magical topography has allowed it to indulge in antiurban policies for decades. Even as its economic base peeled off under the pressure of high taxes, ignorant regulations and government-inflated housing costs, tourists have kept pumping billions into the city's coffers. The homeless industry could champion policies that preserved street disorder and squalor, confident that the city's Bay and architecture would keep the tourist tax dollars pouring in.

Such self-indulgence is particularly foolish in a recession. But the sit-lie law is about more than business viability, however important such viability is to a city's lifeblood and energy. It is also about the basic rules of a civilized society, which include the idea that public spaces should be shared by the public, not monopolized by the disorderly few.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)US: Imminent terror attack anywhere in Europe


US intelligence Saturday night, Oct. 2, as using the term "imminent" for a possible Mumbai-style multiple terrorist attack following a high alert declared this week in four European countries, the UK, Germany, France and Sweden said to be planned in Pakistan.

In the coming hours, the State Department plans to publish an advisory to American travelers to avoid public places in Europe. The terror threat is described as credible but not specific and appears to draw on intercepted phone calls and the interrogation of at least one European witness of dual Pakistani nationality.

According to a US intelligence source, the two audiotapes released by Osama bin Laden in the last 24 hours, calling on Muslim countries to do more to help Pakistan's flood victims may have acted as a coded trigger for an al Qaeda team to go into action.

Osama bin leader has never released two audiotapes in such quick succession; neither has he ever focused his published messages on human disasters such as floods.
The Washington advisory will warn American travelers to avoid using public transport, town centers, tourist sites and shopping malls in European countries. It too is unusual for not specifying endangered countries in Europe - just the continent at large.

The attack on Mumbai in November 2008 broke new ground for al Qaeda in that it was carried out by five teams of gunmen trained in urban guerrilla warfare who landed by sea before heading for separate simultaneous targets, 3 big hotels, the local station and the Jewish Habad center in the Indian port city. At least 174 people, including six Israelis, died in the rampage. London and Paris, where the Eiffel Tower was this week evacuated for the second time, are situated on large rivers and may also therefore be easily accessed by water.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)Peace talks 'going nowhere', diplomats say

Netanyahu refused to hold a serious discussion on any of the core issues apart from security, Abbas reportedly told diplomats he met at the UN General Assembly.

By Barak Ravid

The three meetings held so far between Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the current round of peace talks have addressed nothing of substance, diplomatic sources say.


American mediators are still trying to save the talks from collapsing in the crisis following the resumption of construction in settlements.

Netanyahu refused to hold a serious discussion on any of the core issues apart from security, Abbas reportedly told diplomats he met at the UN General Assembly. Israeli and foreign sources say the main problem is that Netanyahu refuses to present fundamental positions or discuss the borders of the Palestinian state.

"I heard nothing from Netanyahu but niceties," Abbas reportedly told foreign diplomats.

U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell presented the talks as very successful, saying they were moving more rapidly than those in Northern Ireland, where he also served as mediator. He said Abbas and Netanyahu were dealing with all the tough issues and not leaving them to the end of the discussions.

But both Israeli and Palestinian sources said Mitchell's statement was "inaccurate" at best. A European diplomat who met the Palestinian negotiating team in New York about a week ago told Haaretz the Palestinians were furious with Mitchell. "He gave a false presentation of progress," the diplomat said a Palestinian official had told him.

Five Israeli and foreign diplomats, who were briefed about the Netanyahu-Abbas meetings by one of the parties or by senior American officials, said prospects for progress in the talks remained gloomy, even if the construction crisis were solved.

The two first meetings, held during the talks' launch in Washington on September 2 and at the Sharm el-Sheikh summit on September 14, mainly dealt with technical matters like the order of the topics to be discussed and the future of the construction freeze in the settlements.

The first meeting dealt with setting a date for the next meeting and with formulating a "conduct code" for the talks, mainly to prevent leaks. They also discussed the construction freeze and what to discuss first - security or borders.

After the second meeting, Mitchell said the parties had discussed seriously and in detail core issues of the final status arrangement. But officials briefed about that meeting said it dealt with an attempt to define the "core issues" rather than presenting positions on them.

The sources said this discussion was strange as at least two Israeli governments had reached an agreement with the Palestinians on this issue.

The sources said the sterile discussion about whether to discuss borders or security first, or both issues simultaneously, continued.

Mitchell described the third meeting, held on September 15 in Jerusalem, as very positive and said it made considerable progress. Here too officials familiar with the talks said the opposite is true.

Abbas presented Netanyahu with all the details of his talks with former prime minister Ehud Olmert and the current Palestinian stands on borders, security, the refugees, Jerusalem and the settlements. Netanyahu refused to comment on the Palestinian positions, especially on the borders, and would only present his position on the security arrangements.

Abbas was "alarmed" to hear at that meeting that Netanyahu was interested in reaching a framework agreement within a year, but in implementing it over a period of at least 20 years, a European diplomat said.

The American brokers were reportedly extremely frustrated after the meeting in Jerusalem and some of them wondered if the talks hadn't in fact gone backward.

A source close to the prime minister confirmed that Netanyahu refused to go into core issues such as the borders in detail. As long as the construction crisis was not over and the talks' continuation was not assured, Netanyahu did not want to present a position that could endanger him politically, the source explained.

5a)Mitchell: Peace still within reach
By Attila Somfalvi

Israel, US' efforts to stop PA from walking out on peace negotiations continue. Palestinians insist only extension of settlement freeze can save talks; Special US envoy says not all is lost

The direct Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations are practically deadlocked, but Israel and the US are refusing to give up hope, maintaining cautious optimism as to the future of the peace talks instead.


Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Saturday that despite the Palestinian announcement, "the door isn't closed, and efforts continue." Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, alongside the US, are attempting to reach a formula that will keep the talks on track, while Jerusalem sources said some international pressure was already being felt.


Prime minister stresses only way to strike peace between Israel, Palestinians is to 'seriously sit down and negotiate, not walk away.' Defense Minister Barak confident solution to deadlocked negotiations can be found within a week
Full story


The pressure on Israel, they said, is likely to increase in the coming days, should the threat of a breakdown in talks loom over the coming Arab League summit.


Government sources said senior international figures are expected to arrive in Israel soon to personally pressure Netanyahu, but the Prime Minister's Office denied such visits are known to them.


As for the continued freeze, the sources said the Americans would not be suggesting a two-month freeze extension for the sake of time alone. The time, they ventured, may be used to try and work out the issue of borders.


'Peace can be achieved'
Special US envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell, who arrived in Cairo on Saturday night, confirmed that both Israel and the Palestinians have asked the US to continue its efforts to overcome obstacles and further negotiations.


"The two parties, Israelis and Palestinians have asked us to continue our discussions with them and with other governments on how best to achieve the objective of the negotiations," Mitchell told the media after meeting with Arab League Secretary General of Amr Moussa.


"Peace in the region and a viable independent (Palestinian) state can be achieved, realistically, through direct negotiations between the parties," he added.

Mitchell arrived in Cairo from Qatar where he met with Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassem Bin Jabr al-Khalifa, and briefed him on the current situation of the peace talks.


Mitchell is set to meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Sunday, before heading to Jordan.

Meanwhile, sources at the Palestinian Authority said Saturday that while the Americans will undoubtedly continue their efforts to formulate a solution that would prevent a deadlock in the peace talks, "We have made it clear that settlement construction like the one that went on prior to the freeze will not allow any resumption in talks."

According to a senior Palestinian source, that US is trying to convince the PA that Netanyahu is seriously perusing a peace agreement, "But even so, we expect a series of gestures on his part, and first and foremost the halting settlement construction."

The direct talks have been suspended, added the source, but refused to confirm whether a partial settlement freeze will satisfy the PA at this time. Nevertheless, the Palestinians are being pressure by Arab elements, as well as by the United States, to refrain from abandoning the talks.

Also Saturday, senior Likud figures, who had previously expressed their opposition to continuing the freeze, told Ynet that under certain conditions, and with "significant" US assurances, they would be willing to support a continuation of the freeze for a limited time.


At the same time, rumors spread through the political system about contacts between Likud and Kadima, or between Netanyahu and Kadima Chairperson Tzipi Livni, perhaps in an attempt to create an axis that would enable Livni to join the government if developments lead to the collapse of the current coalition.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6) Dems face day of reckoning
By: Donald T. Critchlow


Americans, in large numbers, cast their ballots in 2008 for a noble dream of post-partisan, post-racial politics. Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time since 1994. They picked up 21 seats in the House and eight in the Senate in addition to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

The Democrats were giddy with victory. They had arrived in the Promised Land! This, as their new president declared, was a moment of transformative change.

Convinced of its mandate, the Democratic Congress undertook a legislative agenda that has left the nation as polarized as ever, burdened with budgetary deficits and a national debt that threatens to transform America into a second-class country. Congressional Democrats profoundly misread the 2008 election results and have been left with a reputation as a party of grandiose ideas — with little financial sense or ability to govern sensibly.

The Democrats went shopping without looking at their checkbook balance or caring how to pay for their purchases. Whether the purchases were necessary may be debated — but everyone can agree that a buyer needs to figure out how to pay the bill.

Closer observers might have been more circumspect about the meaning of the 2008 mandate. While sick of the Bush administration, congressional corruption and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and frightened by the financial meltdown on Wall Street, Americans had not turned to the left in 2008. Exit polls showed that 22 percent of voters called themselves liberals; 34 percent described themselves as conservatives; the remaining 44 percent were moderates. These numbers were not that different from every presidential election in the past 20 years. The United States remained a center-right country.

With the sheer power of majority control, Democrats pushed through historic legislation: a massive economic stimulus program, health care reform, financial regulation, a takeover of General Motors and American International Group, and an array of other measures. Such a legislative record should have left them triumphant.

Instead, as the economy limped along with unemployment at nearly 10 percent, Democrats experienced a grass-roots backlash not seen by their party since 1854, when they passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and reopened the slavery question. So severe was the reaction that President Franklin Pierce is still the only sitting elected president to lose his party’s renomination.

As legislative successes multiplied, political polarization intensified. Conservatives accused Democrats of leading the nation to socialism. Democrats countered that their opponents were extremists. They labeled Republicans “the party of no” — though congressional leaders such as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had issued “A Road Map for America’s Future,” in 2007. That plan offered detailed legislative alternatives in health care, Social Security reform and debt reduction, with many proposals scored by the Congressional Budget Office.

Instead of rehashing these ideological debates, let’s look at the Democrats’ crowning achievement: health care reform.


Aware that President Bill Clinton’s health care plan had crashed and burned, congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama crafted a plan to win over the health care industry. They assured physicians that the new plan would reimburse them, just as current private or government plans do. They told hospitals that they would no longer have to overcharge patients to cover the uninsured. Big Pharma would be allowed to charge high prices for patented drugs so the United States could maintain global drug leadership. The key to cost control was to be the public option — which would provide cheap insurance.

But once the public option ran into opposition, out of fear it would lead to nationalized health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) dropped it. With that, the Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 became seriously underfunded.

The plan included no effective taxation to support the new health care costs, for fear it would be attacked as a tax-raising proposal. Claims that savings would be achieved by cutting Medicare funding down the road had no political credibility. No one believed that fees on health care equipment and testing could make up the costs. Even tort reform was rejected, so as not to alienate one of the Democratic Party’s largest contributors trial lawyers.

Instead, Democrats accepted a plan that seemed to assume that funding would magically appear. Democrats said the cost was $60 billion per year, but subsequent Medicare actuarial estimates placed the costs at $180 billion per year. Spending on health care in America is expected to rise to 24 percent of gross domestic product from 16 percent — already the world’s highest level of health expenditure, because most industrialized nations pay 9 percent to 12 percent.

The Democratic Congress’s fiscal irresponsibility was apparent in other measures as well. Take the pork-laden stimulus act. Reid’s plan to build a railroad to nowhere in Nevada might win him votes among Vegas’s big contractors and unions, but it is a waste of $8 billion.

Incredibly, Obama’s deficits after less than two years have already exceeded President George W. Bush’s deficits after eight years. To make matters worse, the Democratic Congress, for the first time in modern budget history, will not have passed out of committee any part of the proposed budget by October, when the fiscal year begins.

In the end, Americans are still searching for political leaders willing to confront this impending disaster. Polling in advance of the November elections indicates that voters think Democrats, with their visions of transformative change, are committing fiscal malpractice.

A new kind of transformative change appears to be in the air.

Donald T. Critchlow, who holds the Goldwater Chair of American Institutions at Arizona State University, is the author of “The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History.” He is completing a book about the radicalization of liberalism in the past 50 years.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7)Column one: The lessons of Stuxnet
By CAROLINE B. GLICK



A war ends when one side permanently breaks its enemy’s ability and will to fight it. This has clearly not happened in Iran.

There’s a new cyber-weapon on the block. And it’s a doozy. Stuxnet, a malicious software, or malware, program was apparently first discovered in June.

Although it has appeared in India, Pakistan and Indonesia, Iran’s industrial complexes – including its nuclear installations – are its main victims.

Stuxnet operates as a computer worm. It is inserted into a computer system through a USB port rather than over the Internet, and is therefore capable of infiltrating networks that are not connected to the Internet.

Hamid Alipour, deputy head of Iran’s Information Technology Company, told reporters Monday that the malware operated undetected in the country’s computer systems for about a year.

After it enters a network, this super-intelligent program figures out what it has penetrated and then decides whether or not to attack. The sorts of computer systems it enters are those that control critical infrastructures like power plants, refineries and other industrial targets.

Ralph Langner, a German computer security researcher who was among the first people to study Stuxnet, told various media outlets that after Stuxnet recognizes its specific target, it does something no other malware program has ever done. It takes control of the facility’s SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition system) and through it, is able to destroy the facility.

No other malware program has ever managed to move from cyberspace to the real world. And this is what makes Stuxnet so revolutionary. It is not a tool of industrial espionage. It is a weapon of war.

From what researchers have exposed so far, Stuxnet was designed to control computer systems produced by the German engineering giant Siemens. Over the past generation, Siemens engineering tools, including its industrial software, have been the backbone of Iran’s industrial and military infrastructure. Siemens computer software products are widely used in Iranian electricity plants, communication systems and military bases, and in the country’s Russian-built nuclear power plant at Bushehr.

The Iranian government has acknowledged a breach of the computer system at Bushehr. The plant was set to begin operating next month, but Iranian officials announced the opening would be pushed back several months due to the damage wrought by Stuxnet. On Monday, Channel 2 reported that Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility was also infected by Stuxnet.

On Tuesday, Alipour acknowledged that Stuxnet’s discovery has not mitigated its destructive power.

As he put it, “We had anticipated that we could root out the virus within one to two months. But the virus is not stable and since we started the cleanup process, three new versions of it have been spreading.”

While so far no one has either taken responsibility for Stuxnet or been exposed as its developer, experts who have studied the program agree that its sophistication is so vast that it is highly unlikely a group of privately financed hackers developed it. Only a nation-state would have the financial, manpower and other resources necessary to develop and deploy Stuxnet, the experts argue.

Iran has pointed an accusatory finger at the US, Israel and India. So far, most analysts are pointing their fingers at Israel. Israeli officials, like their US counterparts, are remaining silent on the subject.

While news of a debilitating attack on Iran’s nuclear installations is a cause for celebration, at this point, we simply do not know enough about what has happened and what is continuing to happen at Iran’s nuclear installations to make any reasoned evaluation about Stuxnet’s success or failure. Indeed, The New York Times has argued that since Stuxnet worms were found in Siemens software in India, Pakistan and Indonesia as well as Iran, reporting, “The most striking aspect of the fast-spreading malicious computer program... may not have been how sophisticated it was, but rather how sloppy its creators were in letting a specifically aimed attack scatter randomly around the globe.”

ALL THAT we know for certain is that Stuxnet is a weapon and it is currently being used to wage a battle. We don’t know if Israel is involved in the battle or not. And if Israel is a side in the battle, we don’t know if we’re winning or not.

But still, even in our ignorance about the details of this battle, we still know enough to draw a number of lessons from what is happening.

Stuxnet’s first lesson is that it is essential to be a leader rather than a follower in technology development. The first to deploy new technologies on a battlefield has an enormous advantage over his rivals. Indeed, that advantage may be enough to win a war.

But from the first lesson, a second immediately follows. A monopoly in a new weapon system is always fleeting. The US nuclear monopoly at the end of World War II allowed it to defeat Imperial Japan and bring the war to an end in allied victory.

Once the US exposed its nuclear arsenal, however, the Soviet Union’s race to acquire nuclear weapons of its own began. Just four years after the US used its nuclear weapons, it found itself in a nuclear arms race with the Soviets. America’s possession of nuclear weapons did not shield it from the threat of their destructive power.

The risks of proliferation are the flipside to the advantage of deploying new technology. Warning of the new risks presented by Stuxnet, Melissa Hathaway, a former US national cybersecurity coordinator, told the Times, “Proliferation is a real problem, and no country is prepared to deal with it. All of these [computer security] guys are scared to death. We have about 90 days to fix this [new vulnerability] before some hacker begins using it.”

Then there is the asymmetry of vulnerability to cyberweapons. A cyberweapon like Stuxnet threatens nation-states much more than it threatens a non-state actor that could deploy it in the future. For instance, a cyber-attack of the level of Stuxnet against the likes of Hizbullah or al-Qaida by a state like Israel or the US would cause these groups far less damage than a Hizbullah or al-Qaida cyber-attack of the quality of Stuxnet launched against a developed country like Israel or the US.

In short, like every other major new weapons system introduced since the slingshot, Stuxnet creates new strengths as well as new vulnerabilities for the states that may wield it.

As to the battle raging today in Iran’s nuclear facilities, even if the most optimistic scenario is true, and Stuxnet has crippled Iran’s nuclear installations, we must recognize that while a critical battle was won, the war is far from over.

A war ends when one side permanently breaks its enemy’s ability and will to fight it. This has clearly not happened in Iran.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made it manifestly clear during his visit to the US last week that he is intensifying, not moderating, his offensive stance towards the US, Israel and the rest of the free world. Indeed, as IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Maj.-Gen. Benny Ganz noted last week, “Iran is involved up to its neck in every terrorist activity in the Middle East.”

So even in the rosiest scenario, Israel or some other government has just neutralized one threat – albeit an enormous threat – among a panoply of threats that Iran poses. And we can be absolutely certain that Iran will take whatever steps are necessary to develop new ways to threaten Israel and its other foes as quickly as possible.

What this tells us is that if Stuxnet is an Israeli weapon, while a great achievement, it is not a revolutionary weapon. While the tendency to believe that we have found a silver bullet is great, the fact is that fielding a weapon like Stuxnet does not fundamentally change Israel’s strategic position. And consequently, it should have no impact on Israel’s strategic doctrine.

In all likelihood, assuming that Stuxnet has significantly debilitated Iran’s nuclear installations, this achievement will be a one-off. Just as the Arabs learned the lessons of their defeat in 1967 and implemented those lessons to great effect in the war in 1973, so the Iranians – and the rest of Israel’s enemies – will learn the lessons of Stuxnet.

SO IF we assume that Stuxnet is an Israeli weapon, what does it show us about Israel’s position vis-à-vis its enemies? What Stuxnet shows is that Israel has managed to maintain its technological advantage over its enemies. And this is a great relief. Israel has survived since 1948 despite our enemies’ unmitigated desire to destroy us because we have continuously adapted our tactical advantages to stay one step ahead of them. It is this adaptive capability that has allowed Israel to win a series of one-off battles that have allowed it to survive.

But again, none of these one-off battles were strategic game-changers. None of them have fundamentally changed the strategic realities of the region. This is the case because they have neither impacted our enemies’ strategic aspiration to destroy us, nor have they mitigated Israel’s strategic vulnerabilities. It is the unchanging nature of these vulnerabilities since the dawn of modern Zionism that gives hope to our foes that they may one day win and should therefore keep fighting.

Israel has two basic strategic vulnerabilities.

The first is Israel’s geographic minuteness, which attracts invaders. The second vulnerability is Israel’s political weakness both at home and abroad, which make it impossible to fight long wars.

Attentive to these vulnerabilities, David Ben- Gurion asserted that Israel’s military doctrine is the twofold goal to fight wars on our enemies’ territory and to end them as swiftly and as decisively as possible. This doctrine remains the only realistic option today, even if Stuxnet is in our arsenal.

It is important to point this plain truth out today as the excitement builds about Stuxnet, because Israel’s leaders have a history of mistaking tactical innovation and advantage with strategic transformation. It was our leaders’ failure to properly recognize what happened in 1967 for the momentary tactical advantage it was that led us to near disaster in 1973.

Since 1993, our leaders have consistently mistaken their adoption of the West’s land-forpeace paradigm as a strategic response to Israel’s political vulnerability. The fact that the international assault on Israel’s right to exist has only escalated since Israel embraced the landfor- peace paradigm is proof that our leaders were wrong. Adopting the political narrative of our enemies did not increase Israel’s political fortunes in Europe, the US or the UN.

So, too, our leaders have mistaken Israel’s air superiority for a strategic answer to its geographical vulnerability. The missile campaigns the Palestinians and Lebanese have waged against the home front in the aftermath of Israel’s withdrawals from Gaza and south Lebanon show clearly that air supremacy does not make up for geographic vulnerability. It certainly does not support a view that strategic depth is less important than it once was.

We may never know if Stuxnet was successful or if Stuxnet is Israeli. But what we do know is that we cannot afford to learn the wrong lessons from its achievements.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Israel,Stuxnet and Myrtus! Where is Truman?

While Obama restrains deep well off shore oil production China keeps pressing forward.

John Mauldin reports on an Houston energy meeting he attended and the picture continues bleak for U.S. energy dependency.

This report describes the various agencies, Congressional oversight committees the energy industry must cope with and it appears we are producing more red tape and bureaucrats than BTU's. That is what big government is all about.

Want to achieve energy independency - shut down the Energy Department.

Get ready as it wrecks our health care system next. (See 1 and 1a Below.)
---
Can't allow those who cannot afford homes to be left in that position.

Hold that thought... November's getting closer! (See 2 below.)
---
The weakest of our three pillars yet also the strongest is The Supreme Court.

The Court must depend upon Congress for its salaries, it has no army to enforce its rulings yet, as long as Americans wish to remain law abiding, it therefore, is the strongest body and that is why I believe it will have the last word on Obama. (See 3and 3a below.)
---
Iran is not likely to take the cyber attack laying down.

Was Israel behind Stuxnet?

America is stuck with a president who abhors taking a tough stance. Obama's soft wimpy Carter like approach simply hardens the opposition and will probably result in greater tragedy. Where is Truman when we need him?(See 4 and 4a below.)
---
PLO would like Abbas to quit the negotiations.

Obama made the settlement issue a a front and center big deal and it has now boomeranged in his face.

The word settlements is Arab propaganda which our friends in the media use but, in actuality, it relates to building in a city of 250,000 plus. No matter where Israelis expand as long as the Palestinians will not recognize the State of Israel as legitimate Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims can argue, claim and protest any building is illegal. Thus, their own intransigence has boomeranged on them as well.

Israel will keep building, Palestinians will keep their head in the sand and Obama will continue to press Netanyahu for concessions he cannot lightly make. (See 5 below.)
---
Eleanor Clift believes Obama somehow lost his magic and his leadership has thus, misfired. Clift places the real blame for Obama's failures on Republicans because they positioned themselves to make him fail.

It is not the student who failed the exam it is the pencil.

The elites in the media and TV, who are losing their reader and listener ship in droves just cannot get it. They cannot understand why the unwashed masses find extreme liberalism repugnant to the smell and touch.

But then Rick Sanchez probably cannot understand why CNN fired him. (See 6 and 6a below.)

I play tennis with a former Chair of the County's Democrat party, a lawyer who portrays himself as an avowed 'Che' lover and a few other assorted liberals.

They have been very silent of late. I have respected their bewilderment of why ideas of Far Left Progressives are being abandoned and consigned to where they belong - the dung hill of history.

Kim Strassel and I have a bet with one of them and I pledge to remain silent when, hopefully, I accept his check.
---
Dick
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)Repsol Sells Brazil Oil Stake to Sinopec
By SANTIAGO PEREZ, SIMON HALL And BERND RADOWITZ

In one of the largest Chinese oil acquisitions to date, Repsol SA of Spain announced the sale of 40% of its Brazilian assets to China Petrochemical Corp. for $7.1 billion.

The joint venture, valued at $17.8 billion overall, guarantees Repsol the funding to explore the vast and coveted oil fields off Brazil, South America's biggest economy, Repsol said in a statement. Officials at China Petrochemical, or Sinopec Group, couldn't be reached for comment Friday, when most corporate and government offices were closed for China's National Day holiday.

China's Oil Explorers Look to Africa. Access thousands of business sources not available on the free web. Learn More .The transaction gives China a piece of one of Latin America's largest foreign-controlled energy ventures. It is the latest sign of the country's growing prominence in the international energy sector as it expands both access to and ownership of raw materials needed to fuel the country's economic expansion.

The Repsol deal is only slightly smaller than the biggest oil takeover by a Chinese firm to date, Sinopec Group's $7.2 billion acquisition in 2009 of Addax Petroleum Corp., based in Switzerland.

At the center of the deal are Repsol's holdings in the coveted subsalt area off Brazil, which had been anticipated to constitute a long-term cash cow for the Spanish oil giant. The subsalt play is exceptionally expensive because the oil is found in water depths of more than 2,000 meters and several thousand meters further under the sea bed, below layers of sand, rocks and salt.

Repsol had said that bringing its Brazilian subsalt oil finds into production could cost between $10 billion and $18 billion. Friday's deal eliminates the need for the initial public offering of its Brazilian stake that the company had contemplated, Repsol said.

Meanwhile, analysts at Banco BPI in Portugal said the sale to Sinopec gives a "surprisingly high valuation" to Repsol's Brazilian assets, pricing them at 19% above the bank's valuation.

Repsol was Brazil's third-biggest hydrocarbons producer in 2009, and it has a leading position in exploration activities in Brazil's offshore Santos basin, where the Guara and Carioca fields are located. Repsol produces oil at the Albacora Leste field in the Campos basin, and it has a total of eight discoveries and other exploration blocks in the Santos, Campos and Espirito Santo basins.

Repsol and Sinopec will continue their respective expansion plans in Brazil and will participate, jointly or individually, in future bidding rounds in the area, Repsol added.

Sinopec's Brazil entry frees up Repsol to allocate more exploration resources elsewhere in the world, such as in Western Africa which the company identified as one of its expansion areas.

In June, the International Energy Agency said that overseas investments by China's national oil companies in 2010 looked as though they would outpace by far the $18.2 billion spent in 2009. From January 2009 to April 2010, the country's three state-owned oil majors—China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC, Sinopec, and China National Offshore Oil Corp.—spent around $29 billion world-wide to acquire oil and gas assets, the IEA said.

In addition to those direct investments, CNPC and Sinopec were involved in 11 loan-for-oil deals with eight countries valued at $77 billion, and the companies entered contracts committing them to invest at least $18 billion in future exploration and development, mostly in Iraq and Iran, the IEA noted.

Brazil is an increasingly important target for Chinese investment, with resources deals valued at $4.3 billion agreed upon so far this year, compared with $362 million in 2009, according to data from Dealogic.

The Brazilian state oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras, also agreed to a $10 billion loan from China Development Bank last May in exchange for crude-oil supply to Sinopec Group over 10 years. Petrobras also gave Sinopec, the parent of listed unit China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., rights to explore two deep-water blocks in Brazil for oil and natural gas.

Sinopec Group General Manager Su Shulin in August confirmed that his state-owned company was in talks with Brazil's OGX Petroleo e Gas Participacoes SA over a bid for offshore assets in Brazil.

Under the deal announced Friday, Repsol will retain 60% of the Brazilian venture, which is valued at $17.8 billion following the stake sale agreement. The joint Brazilian operation will develop some of the world's most important exploratory discoveries in recent years, Repsol said in a filing with the stock market regulator.

Sinopec's junior role in Repsol Brasil, as the joint venture is called, marks the continuation of a strategy by China's resource companies to make their overseas investments more palatable by taking minority stakes with partners that have better long-term relations with the host country.

China's biggest oil refiner and fuel marketer, Sinopec Group, has been going overseas aggressively because it currently buys some 70% of the product it refines. For Repsol, with oil demand flat or declining in Europe, teaming up with Sinopec provides access to the biggest energy market in the world, where oil demand is expected to continue to soar.

The deal means Repsol Brasil is "fully capitalized to develop all of its current projects in Brazil, including world-class discoveries in the Guara and Carioca pre-salt basins," Repsol said in a news release.

Repsol and Sinopec Group will continue their respective expansion plans in Brazil and will participate, jointly or individually, in future bidding rounds in the area, Repsol added.

Repsol shares rose 4.95% to close at €19.83 in Spain. Shares in construction company Sacyr Vallehermoso SA, which owns 20% of Repsol, gained 13%, rising to €4.96.


1a) The Morality of Chinese Growth
by John Mauldin

Oil at $125 a Barrel, Gasoline at $5


This week I am at a conference in Houston. I must confess that I don't attend many of the sessions at most conferences where I speak. But today, the guys at Streettalk Advisors have such a great lineup that I am there for every session. But it's Friday and I need to write. The solution? This week you get a "best of" letter. The best ideas I've heard and the best charts I've seen at this conference. Then we close with two short but very thoughtful essays from Charles Gave and Arthur Kroeber of GaveKal on "The Morality of Chinese Growth." Lots of charts and something to make you think. Should be a good letter.

Oil at $125 a Barrel, Gasoline at $5
John Hofmeister is the former president of Shell Oil and now CEO of the public-policy group Citizens for Affordable Energy. He paints a very stark (even bleak, as he gets further into the speech) picture of the future of energy production in the US unless we change our current policies. First, because of the aftereffects of the moratorium. It is his belief that the drilling moratorium will effectively still be in place until at least the middle of 2012. There won't even be new rules until the end of 2011, and then the lawsuits start.

Gulf oil production will be down by up to 1 million barrels a day. Imported oil is now 67% of oil usage but will go to 75% by 2012. He thinks crude oil will be up to $125 and gasoline between $4-$5 at the pump. And it will only get worse.

He describes the problem with the electricity from coal production. The average coal plant is 38 years old, with a planned-for life of 50 years. Our energy production capability is rapidly aging, and we are not updating it fast enough.

He argues that the fight between the right and the left has given us 37 years without a realistic energy policy, as policy gets driven by two-year political cycles but good energy planning takes decades. There are 13 government agencies that regulate the energy industry, with conflicting mandates that change very two years. There are 22 congressional committees that have some level of involvement and oversight of the energy industry.

The following table is from data provided by Triple Double Advisors LLC, an energy specialty investment firm in Houston, Texas. John White was sitting next to me and showed me this table, pointing out the poor performance in terms of investor returns from renewable energy sources and the larger returns from Master Limited Partnerships where investors are seeking yield. It seems the market is voting that it doesn't have much confidence in the renewable energy world. Hofmeister suggests that government subsidies for renewable energy will go away under the pressure to get the fiscal deficit under control. Maybe the market senses that. He says we need to create a 50-year plan for our energy policy that transcends the political cycle. (I am going to get this speech transcribed and will post it so you can read it. This guy talks sense.)
























David Rosenberg and Capacity Utilization
I am a big fan of David Rosenberg (former chief economist at Merrill and now with Gluskin Sheff in Toronto), and have really enjoyed getting to know him the last few years. He is a fun guy, even if his data is not exactly bullish. It was hard to pull out the best of his charts for this letter, because he had so many.

The first chart shows that real final sales are the lowest, four quarters after the end of a recession, that they have ever been. Average growth is 4%, but we're up less than 1% in the current recovery. The second chart (side by side with the first, below) shows the contribution of various sectors to real GDP growth. You find that of the 3% average growth over the last four quarters, 1.8% was inventory rebuilding. His point (and one I have made as well) is that this is not sustainable. At some point rebuilding will no longer be as big a factor, as inventories will get closer to equilibrium. And the consumer does not look like he is going to ride to the rescue.

Rosie thinks we could slip into negative growth by the end of the year.


















This next chart shows U-6 unemployment compared to manufacturing capacity utilization rates. Unemployment will have difficulty getting better as long as capacity utilization rates are at what is typically thought of as recession levels.


















The next and last chart from Rosie is on housing, showing us the large number of vacant homes and the vacancy rate. Home values are not likely to rise nationwide (there will be some good local pockets) until the vacancy rates come down. Ditto for new home construction and the jobs from that sector. Gary Shilling (see next section) says he thinks home prices could drop another 20%.


















Gary Shilling: Commercial Real Estate and Employment
The next two charts are from good friend Gary Shilling (selected out of about 50 he had). The first shows us that the commercial real estate price index is down almost 40% from its peak. Judging from the graph, it looks like the freefall may be over for now, assuming we do not get into another recession too soon. Is it any wonder that bank lending is down, since so much lending was in commercial real estate and CRE construction?




















The last chart shows us the trend line for the relationship between employment growth and GDP. It turns out that you need at least 3% GDP growth to get meaningful employment growth. If growth is slowing down to less than 2%, it is going to be very difficult to really address the unemployment problems.



















And now, let's turn to GaveKal and China.

The Morality of Chinese Growth
We (GaveKal) spend quite a bit of time trying to understand the drivers and fundamentals of Chinese growth. And while we have seen some recent signs of a policy-driven cyclical slowdown (see The Wen Jiabao Put and our latest Quarterly Strategy Chart Book), we remain very optimistic about the Mainland's structural potential. But up until know, we have not really touched on the more philosophical implications of the Chinese growth story. In that respect, a recent client comment triggered a couple responses we modestly believe could interest the broader readership.

Client Comment: GaveKal's writings on economics are unmistakably filled with fundamental beliefs regarding human potential, advancement, creativity and the pursuit of knowledge. And even if I did not know your backgrounds, these views appear decidedly French in nature: deeply held beliefs on the rights and dignity of man.

So how does a group of economists focused on the mind and the soul as well as the pocketbook reconcile the sociological challenges presented by modern China? It is undeniable that a country that pulls half a billion people out of subsistence farming in two decades is doing a lot for human decency, no matter how they accomplish it. So maybe I need to throw away my Western lenses when thinking about this. But I really wonder sometimes how you view the authoritarian qualities of 21st century China as it relates to treatment of political rivals, the autonomy of the courts, religious freedoms, control of all forms of media, etc. Should we bend with the breeze and accept that this is the new world?

Charles answers: As I have tried to highlight in a couple of recent documents (see The Way the World Works and Ricardo, Schumpeter & the Cost of Capital), I firmly believe that an overly powerful and extended government is very dangerous. Having said that, I also believe that a total absence of the State is even worse. And since you mention my intrinsic Gallicness, I will turn to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, who happened to often be French, and who showed quite conclusively that human freedom can be exercised in three areas:

1. Political freedom (voting the incompetents out, separation of powers)

2. Social freedom (freedom of worship, sending one's children to the school of one's choice, creating a union, etc.)

3. Economic freedom (the ability to create a business, hire or fire employees, etc., regulated by contract law between acting parties).

What the philosophers of the 18th century argued was that the Church had to move out of the political sphere, and the State out of the other two. In Hong Kong, which GaveKal calls home, we enjoy one of the freest societies in the World: we have total social freedom, total economic freedom but yet very little political freedom. Still, I believe this compares extremely well with what we have in France, where the church of Marxism has invaded the State and the educational system, destroying both, while the obese State has invaded the social and economic sphere, leaving entrepreneurs without oxygen. As Tocqueville expected, we have moved towards a strange and benign "molle dictature".

This brings us to China and your questions. Today, the Chinese government is prepared to increase the population's economic freedom (far from complete), as well as the social freedom (courts of justice gaining grounds on political cronies, some social rights). But as for political freedom - see you in 20 years. In essence, this is the same deal offered to Singaporeans 30 years ago by Lee Kwan Yew, who now effectively vote for Lee Kwan Yew & sons every time they get a chance!

As a result, and to use Hanna Arendt's terminology, China is gradually moving from a totalitarian state to an authoritarian state, with a technocratic bias (à la Singapore). To a certain extent, the Chinese government discharges some of its responsibilities pretty well, with some gaping and horrible holes. So while the immediate picture may look ugly, the movement is in the right direction.

Arthur Kroeber answers: Basically I think you need to clarify your questions. Are you surprised that China has been able to deliver high-speed growth while remaining an authoritarian state? If so, there is nothing odd about this. South Korea and Taiwan both achieved their highest sustained growth under brutal dictatorships; Japan achieved its first growth spurt (in the Meiji era) under a benign despotism and its second (post-war) under a one-party state. And of course, most of the modern Western democracies were not really democracies in any modern sense (only landowners could vote, women did not vote…) while they were industrializing. The idea that countries must be liberal democracies in order to achieve high-speed early-stage economic growth is a strange fantasy with no empirical support.

Or is the question that you are worried that China's path to success means that other countries will follow the same route? Again, the evidence at hand shows that each successful economy, like Tolstoy's unhappy family, is successful in its own way and that outside models are of limited use (see Dani Rodrik's One Economics, Many Recipes).

The China model could work in China because of a specific set of historical and institutional factors that are not replicable elsewhere.

These include a 1,500-year history of centralized bureaucratic rule, which set the template for the current governance system of bureaucratic authoritarianism; an almost equally long history of active commerce and preindustrial capitalism which set the template for private sector activity once the state decided to get out of the way; and the presence of Hong Kong, which meant that China could make full use of modern Western institutions (such as a reliable legal system, property rights, efficient services, etc) without having to go through the cumbersome decades-long political hassle of building these at home. (On this latter very important point see the opening chapter of Yasheng Huang's Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics).

Or is your concern that China has been able to have a dynamic economy while doing nothing to reform its political system, and will continue to be able to do so ad infinitum? Here the perception that China has made no political reform is specious. There is a gigantic difference between China in the 1970s and China today in terms of freedom of expression, breadth of political discourse, personal liberty and property rights.

Through the end of Mao's rule, China was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by individual caprice, with generally disastrous results (30-40mn deaths in the 59-62 famine, 10s of millions more in the Cultural Revolution, etc.). Since then it has transformed itself into a bureaucratic authoritarian state with very imperfect but generally increasing accountability of government. This is a massive political transformation. (And Huang, cited above, makes the important point that this "directional liberalism" -- this confidence that things were getting durably better -- was very important in encouraging China's entrepreneurs to start work in the 1980s, despite the absence of what we would consider clear property rights).

If we judge China not by how far it has to go but by how far it has come, the change has been dramatic, and we can reasonably expect the political system to continue to evolve in the coming decades, though not necessarily in linear or predictable ways.

Or is your concern that we in the West somehow have to render moral judgment on China, which requires some calculus along the lines of X amount of economic progress is worth Y amount of political repression, so if repression = y-1 then China is "good" and if y+1 then China is "bad"? Here I will wax philosophical and distinguish myself from Charles somewhat. Unlike him (and strangely, since I am generally considered the house Communist), I am not a Marxist, as I strongly believe that it is a society's underlying political bargains that tend to shape economic activity, not the other way round.

As Isaiah Berlin pointed out, societies grapple with the problem that there are lots of good things - justice, wealth, individual liberty, social stability, security, equity - and we cannot maximize all of them at once. Trade-offs among these ultimate values must be made and that is what politics is about. Societies create a set of trade-offs by negotiation (and by the way democratic elections are not in themselves a mechanism for making these trade-offs; they are simply a mechanism for transmitting information to the agents who are negotiating the trade-offs; so it is a fallacy to presume as many do that only via democratic elections can a society achieve a "true" bargain) and the ultimate bargain configures the playing field on which economic actors operate.

Among the societies we describe as democratic capitalist there are vast differences in the bargains and hence in the nature of economic activity. America tolerates levels of instability, crime, inequality and pernicious religious zealotry that Europeans and Japanese consider absurd, but it gets in return a much more dynamic entrepreneurial system of wealth creation. Japanese willingly accept levels of social conformity that Westerners consider bizarre, but achieves a high level of social stability and tremendous success in economic areas (such as high precision manufacturing), where self-disciplined social cohesion is a plus.

China, like all societies, is working out its bargain. It is still very much a work in progress but the process is dynamic, not static.

We Americans have a strange utopian tendency to assume that among all possible social bargains there is one perfect bargain out there (probably ours) and that it is our job to judge how well other people are keeping on the path to that bargain, any straying from which necessitates perdition for them and gnashing of teeth for us. But maybe we should just stop worrying about it. China will become what it will become and hopefully whatever it becomes will produce good results both materially and spiritually for most Chinese. As long as our society continues to do the same for us, it does not much matter whether the two societies wind up looking a lot or a little like each other. Chacun son gout!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Democrats Vote Down 5 Percent Rule.

In a bid to stem taxpayer losses for bad loans guaranteed by federal housing agencies Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn) proposed that borrowers be required to make a minimum 5% down payment in order to qualify. His proposal was rejected 57-42 on a party-line vote because, as Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn) explained, "passage of such a requirement would restrict home ownership to only those who can afford it."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)A Clear Danger: Obama, a 'Living Constitution,' and 'Positive Rights'
By Monte Kuligowski

I think it's safe to say that President Obama is not exactly fond of the United States Constitution as written. That statement is based on Mr. Obama's own words and his choice of nominees to the federal bench.


Mr. Obama the activist-turned-politician has always been shrewd about hiding his far-left philosophy from the general public, whether by voting "present" or by speaking in abstract language. Of course, Obama, like most people, cannot completely hide his worldview. Thankfully, we have record of a few of his unguarded moments from which his radical views have escaped.


On January 18, 2001, then-state senator Barack Obama appeared on WBEZ-FM out of Chicago to discuss the federal courts and civil rights. During the interview, Mr. Obama found himself engaged in a subject that stirs up his leftwing passions. Below are some of his bombshell comments (emphasis added):


The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it's been interpreted, and [sic] Warren Court interpreted in the same way that, generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.


That straightforward excerpt provides a clear window into the constitutional philosophy of Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. As radical as "people tried to characterize" the Warren Court, Mr. Obama hints that the Constitution may be interpreted even more radically: in a way which would give the federal government power to tell the people what the feds (and states) must do on their behalf.


We're not talking about the Constitution's enumerated functions of the federal government; we're talking about reading into the Constitution a list of positive rights which satisfy leftist notions of "political and economic justice."


Mr. Obama correctly (and painfully) refers to the Constitution as a "charter of negative liberties," as "interpreted."


Lost on the left, however, is the fact that the Bill of Rights was enacted to protect the states from central control. In spite of history and context, the U.S. Supreme Court has long since turned the amendments passed to protect the states against the states. The Warren Court ran wild in that abuse, telling the states and their localities what they couldn't do -- by overturning timeless speech and religious traditions of the people and effectively nationalizing political correctness.


The only "negative liberties" in the Constitution which legally apply to the states are the "Civil War Amendments" (the 13th, 14th, and 15th). Yet we will see below that the dream of the left is for the 14th Amendment to be interpreted in a way to allow for "positive Constitutional rights" that the feds must provide across the board. Once that door is opened, the "Constitution" would essentially render the entire country one big welfare state (see South Africa's Constitution, e.g., which mandates that the central government provide "adequate housing" and "sufficient food and water" for its dependents).


The federal judiciary has already robbed the individual localities across the country of their Judeo-Christian heritage, but that isn't enough for the president. Mr. Obama believes he can "break free" from the additional "constraints" placed in the Constitution by the founders. Toward that end, Mr. Obama's nominees to the federal judiciary share his leftist worldview. From his "wise Latina" and "gay rumor" appointments to the Supreme Court, to his legion of federal appellate and district court nominees, the common denominator is the idea of appointing high-ranking judges who see the Constitution as a "living document."


In President Obama's words from The Audacity of Hope, the Constitution "is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world."


So far, the Senate has confirmed 41 of Obama's nominees, leaving 104 federal judgeships open. Presently, a battle over five of Obama's nominees known as the "fringe five" is being fought by Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Connie Hair writes that these "candidates ... have once been returned to the President as unacceptable. Each of these controversial nominees was passed out of committee but are so controversial that President Obama and Democrat leaders have avoided discussing them in public."


Certainly, the "fringe five" symbolize Mr. Obama's judicial philosophy, and yet any one of his high-ranking nominees, if scratched, would bleed a leftist worldview. Of all the president's radicals, let's focus on just one of the fringe nominees, Goodwin Liu, because his writings mirror exactly what Obama was getting to in his WBEZ-FM interview.


Goodwin Liu, a law professor at U.C. Berkeley's Boalt Hall, has no experience as a judge, but is nevertheless up for a seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.


In his article titled, "Education, Equality, and National Citizenship," Liu argues, "the Fourteenth Amendment authorizes and obligates Congress to ensure a meaningful floor of educational opportunity throughout the nation." Liu argues that the guarantee of citizenship in the 14th does more than confer legal status, due process, and equal protection under law to the former slaves -- "it obligates the national government to secure the full membership, effective participation, and equal dignity of all citizens in the national community." That's code for the feds must provide health care, child care, job training, and other "rights."


The key words, of course, are "authorizes" and "obligates Congress." To Mr. Obama, Liu is nothing less than a constitutional genius for having found previously indiscernible meaning in the Constitution. Such a "break" from constitutional "constraints" would take the federal government to the next level, enabling it to pronounce positive rights and wield unlimited power over the states and the people.


In his co-authored book, Keeping Faith with the Constitution, Liu, in Obamian fashion, posits a new method of interpretation: constitutional fidelity. "Fidelity" has a nice ring to it, but unfortunately, "what we mean by fidelity," clarifies Liu, "is that the Constitution should be interpreted in ways that adapt its principles and its text to the challenges and conditions of our society in every succeeding generation."


In other words, Liu is a "living Constitution" theorist who, like Obama, uses conservative-sounding words to support his radical positions. A Constitution that is interpreted by a few robe-wearing elitists "in a way that adapts its principles" is effectively no Constitution at all.


After many decades of "living Constitution" interpretation, the people have already lost much of their Constitution to leftist judges. And now, the elitist establishment is positioning itself for its next break from the constraints.


The various schools of constitutional interpretation break down into one of two groups: the first tries to uphold the original context, meaning, intent, and purpose of the text, while the second group tries to break free from the original constraints placed on the federal government.


In order to find approval from the federal judiciary in extending the federal government's control over people's lives, e.g., in mandating individual health insurance, Mr. Obama anxiously needs judges from the second group.


Mr. Obama is a constitutional deconstructionist on steroids, and the damage he will wreak in four years of judicial appointments should not be underestimated.


Monte Kuligowski is an attorney whose work has been published by several law journals.

3a)A Supreme fetish: Libs leaving too much to court
By Jonah Goldberg

Imagine the Supreme Court was wiped out in an asteroid strike, or maybe ate some
really bad clams. Whatever. With the court temporarily out of the picture, could Congress and the White House ignore the Constitution, locking up Tea Partiers or ACLU members?

Apparently.

"I have been fascinated by [Delaware Senate candidate] Christine O'Donnell's constitutional worldview," Slate magazine's Dahlia Lithwick confessed. O'Donnell had said, "When I go to Washington, DC, the litmus test by which I cast my vote for every piece of legislation that comes across my desk will be whether or not it is constitutional."


O'Donnell: Makes not-so-wacky promise to vote only for constitutional laws.
To which Lithwick, a widely cited expert on the Supreme Court, responded, "How weird is that, I thought. Isn't it a court's job to determine whether or not something is, in fact, constitutional? And isn't that sort of provided for in, well, the Constitution?"

Newsweek's Ben Adler was aghast at the clause in the GOP's Pledge to America that Republicans will provide a "citation of constitutional authority" for every proposed law. "We have a mechanism for assessing the constitutionality of legislation, which is the independent judiciary," Adler wrote. "An extraconstitutional attempt to limit the powers of Congress is dangerous even as a mere suggestion, and it constitutes an encroachment on the judiciary."

And a progressive blogger writes in U.S. News & World Report that such talk of requiring constitutionality is "just plain wacky."

Does anyone, anywhere, think legislators should vote for legislation they think is unconstitutional? Should presidents sign such legislation into law?

According to this creepy logic, there's no reason for congressmen to even consider the supreme law of the land. Re-impose slavery? Sure! Let's see if we can catch the Supreme Court asleep at the switch. Nationalize the TV stations? It ain't unconstitutional until the Supreme Court says so!

Of course, reasonable people understand how absurd all of this is.

Nothing in the Constitution says the Supreme Court is the final or sole arbiter of what is constitutional. Nor does anything in Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court case that famously established judicial review. Nor in Cooper v. Aaron, the 1958 case in which the court ruled that its findings are the law of the land.

George Washington vetoed an apportionment bill in 1792 because it was unconstitutional. What was he thinking? If only he had a Ben Adler around to tell him what a fool he was.

Andrew Jackson vetoed the reauthorization of the national bank in 1832 because he believed it was unconstitutional. He added then that, "It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the president to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision."

"Even the Supreme Court has never claimed that it is the only branch with the power or duty to interpret the Constitution," says Jeff Sikkenga, a constitutional historian at Ashland University's Ashbrook Center. "In fact, it has said that certain constitutional questions like war and peace are left to the political branches to decide."

The debate over whether the courts are the final word on the Constitution is more than 200 years old. The debate over whether they're the sole arbiter of constitutionality is extremely recent and extremely silly.

Too many politicians -- in both parties -- have abdicated their most solemn duty: to support and defend the US Constitution. George W. Bush signed campaign finance reform even though he thought much of it was unconstitutional. Nancy Pelosi thinks the Constitution has as much relevance as a pet rock. Asked if the health-care bill was constitutional, her eyes grew perceptibly wider as she incredulously asked, "Are you serious?"

The real issue is quite simple. If more politicians were faithful to the Constitution, the government would be restrained. And restraining government is "weird," "wacky" and "dangerous" to so many liberals today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)Iran is bent on avenging cyber attack, raising military tensions


Iran is bent on military action to settle scores with Israel and the United States whom it suspects of planting the malignant Stuxnet cyber worm in the computer systems of its nuclear, military and strategic infrastructure, military and US sources report.

The timeline of this attack revolves around the state visit to Lebanon, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has scheduled for Oct. 13-14, during which he will tour the Israeli border. Preying heavily on Iran too are the personal sanctions the United States has just imposed on its top military brass and ministers.

All this will no doubt come up in Syrian President Bashar Assad's talks with Iranian leaders during his visit to Tehran Saturday, Oct. 2.

When Assad and Ahmadinejad last met in Damascus on Sept. 18, three days after the malworm surfaced, the Iranian president warned his country would retaliate for the cyber attack by military means. Its allies, Syria, Hizballah and Hamas were advised to prepare for Israel taking the opportunity to attack them.

A few days later, Syrian sources leaked word that during that first encounter, Assad had urged Ahmadinejad to postpone his trip to Lebanon. They did not explain why.
However, Friday, Oct. 1, Syrian and Lebanese sources disclosed Israel's northern border units had been placed on an elevated level of preparedness. The IDF spokesman did not deny the report, only pointing out that Israeli units on the borders with Lebanon and Syria had been on a high alert for some time and were keeping close watch on developments.

Aware of the incendiary tensions building up in its vicinity, Damascus is clearly taking pains to maintain a safe distance from any impending military conflagrations involving Iran, the United States and Israel.

Washington got involved Wednesday, Sept. 29, when President Barack Obama signed an executive order imposing sanctions on eight top Iranian officials, accusing them of serious human rights abuses, including the killing, torture, beating and rape of Iranian citizens since the country's disputed 2009 presidential election.

This was the first time Washingtonhad singled out top-flight Iranian military and security personages for personal penalties and imposed them without reference to Iran's nuclear program.

Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, was additionally branded a criminal who should stand trial for murder. Also covered by this charges were Heydar Moslehi, Minister of Intelligence, Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, Interior Minister in charge of Iranian security and intelligence services, and Gen. Hossein Taeb, Deputy IRGC commander and head of the corps intelligence.

Obama signed the sanctions order this week, whereas the eight officials' crimes occurred more than a year ago in the wake of their crackdown on political opponents who charged the regime with falsifying the election. It would seem the US president acted with the intention of further dividing Iran's leaders and adding to the perplexity and demoralization besetting them over their powerlessness to bring the destructive cyber worm under control.

The severity of the personal charges Washington brought against these Iranian powerhouses and their timing were certainly not lost on interested parties in the region. Iranian sources do not believe the Islamic regime can afford to let Washington's blunt assault on it’s mainstays of power go unchallenged.

The New York Times, followed by several other Western media and computer security specialists, this week reported a clue they believed they had found pointing to Israel as the source of the cyber attack on Iran: The word "myrtus" -Latin for the myrtle tree was found embedded in the Stuxnet code. They pointed out that the Hebrew for myrtle, Hadas, resembles Hadassah, the birth name of the Jewish Queen Esther of ancient Persia who is depicted in the Book of Esther as persuading the king to pre-empt an attack on the Jewish population.

An alternative interpretation would be: Branches of Hadas or myrtle are one of the Four Species featuring in Jewish ritual for Succoth, the Feast of Tabernacles, which occurred this year on Sept 22-29.

4a)Iran spy chief: We are able to fight off Stuxnet computer worm
Heidar Moshlehi quoted by Iranian state TV as saying authorities have arrested several nuclear spies.

Iran's intelligence minister said the country has learned how to fight off a complex computer worm that some foreign experts have speculated was designed to target Tehran's nuclear program, state television reported Saturday.

Heidar Moslehi was also quoted as saying authorities have arrested several nuclear spies, but he gave no details and it wasn't clear if the developments were related.

Over recent months, the malicious Stuxnet computer code has also affected industrial systems in India, Indonesia and the U.S. But it has spread the most in Iran, including to several personal computers of workers at Iran's first nuclear power plant, which is to go online later this year.

The destructive Stuxnet worm has surprised experts because it is the first one specifically created to take over industrial control systems, like those at power plants, rather than just steal or manipulate data.

Moslehi did not reveal where or when the suspected spies were arrested, saying only that Iran has "always faced sabotage" by foreign intelligence services.

Iran periodically announces the arrest of nuclear spies without giving details.

The state TV report did not carry any remarks from Moslehi linking the arrests with the investigation into the computer worm.

"Iran's intelligence department has found a solution for confronting (the worm) and it will be applied," he was quoted as saying. "Our domination of virtual networks has thwarted the activities of enemies in this regard."

A week ago, Iran said the stuxnet code was found on several laptops belonging to staff at the Bushehr nuclear power plant but that the plant's main systems were not affected.

The plant has stood outside the current controversy over Iran's nuclear program since Russia will be providing the fuel for the plant and supervising its disposal.


But other aspects of Iran's nuclear work, especially its enrichment of uranium, are of concern to the United States and other world powers. Enrichment can be used to produce weapons as well as make fuel for power plants. Iran says it only has peaceful nuclear aims, such as generating electricity.

Who created the Stuxnet code and what its precise target is, if any, remains a mystery.

The web security firm Symantec Corp. says the computer worm was likely spawned by a government or a well-funded private group. It was apparently constructed by a small team of as many as five to 10 highly educated and well-funded hackers, Symantec says.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)PLO calls on Abbas to halt talks if freeze not extended


PA president meets with dozens of senior Palestinians, briefs them about latest round of talks with Mitchell; Abbas reiterates stance: "No talks under shadow of settlement construction," top aide says.

The PLO excecutive committee decided on Saturday to persuade Palestinian Authority President Mahmood Abbas not to continue with direct negotiations because of Israel's refusal to continue the building freeze.

Nabil abu Radina, a Palestinian presidential spokesperson, said that the talks will not continue as long as Israel continues to build on land that is expected to one day become a Palestinian state.


The comments came after Abbas met with dozens of senior Palestinians in Ramallah and sought their backing for his refusal to keep negotiating with Israel without a slowdown in West Bank settlement construction.

Abbas briefed the group about US envoy George Mitchell's latest unsuccessful attempts to narrow the gaps.

"President Abbas' position is clear: no negotiations under the shadow of settlement construction," a top Abbas aide, Nabil Abu Rdeneh, said before the meeting. However, he said contacts with the US would continue.

Mitchell, who spent four days this week shuttling between Abbas and Netanyahu, is now trying to enlist the help of Arab leaders, and was to meet with Qatari leaders on Saturday.

In remarks published Friday, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit issued surprising criticism of the Palestinian position of making talks contingent on the settlement building restrictions, saying the sides should concentrate on drawing the borders of a Palestinian state.

In the West Bank, PLO and Fatah officials have overwhelmingly spoken out against continued negotiations.

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, said the international community's failure to get Israel to halt settlement expansion does not bode well for the talks, where much more explosive issues will be on the table, such as the partition of Jerusalem. Ashrawi said there's a limit to Palestinian flexibility.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6)Obama’s Failure of Leadership
By Eleanor Clift

The president’s experience as a community organizer may have hampered his abilities to lead and order and direct. His recent fighting stance might be coming too late.


I continue to believe that the passage of universal health care is an historic achievement, and that Glenn Beck’s grandchildren will agree even if he and his followers are blind to it. But getting it through a Congress wary of major social legislation and beholden to special interests was a 14-month horror show that consumed the Obama presidency.

With the proviso that no good deed goes unpunished, Democrats are bracing for significant losses in the midterms, provoked by a backlash over government spending, and by disappointment in President Obama’s performance. After hanging back too long, Obama has finally gotten off the mat and joined the fight, setting aside his bromides to bipartisanship and punching away like a politician who wants to win, not make nice.

The campaign trail is good practice because he’ll have to become more confrontational once the election is over. Tea Party Republicans have no inclination to work with Democrats, and they’re likely to displace the few reasonable Republicans that are left. It’s hard to see where the grand bargain can be made or the deals struck to begin to address deficit spending. With nothing but stalemate and gridlock ahead, things may have to get worse, and then who will we blame?

Obama took office not wanting to fight or blame anyone, and the Republicans played him. They stood up to him and he wasn’t prepared to defy them, revealing a vulnerability that has brought the Democrats to the brink of disaster. Obama ran on the idea that his election was a sign that everybody was going to get along but he also ran on a platform, and he won with 53 percent of the vote, the biggest margin of any Democrat since LBJ. Instead of claiming his rightful mandate, he made getting along his top priority, extending an olive branch to the other side, which Republican leaders rebuffed.

When it became evident during Obama’s first 100 days that the GOP wanted him to fail and would work hard to make that dream come true, he should have stopped chasing after the false gods of bipartisanship. The GOP is destined to win a bunch of seats despite their ongoing low approval ratings, and the unpopularity of their record, and many of their proposals. They are winning because conservatives hate Democrats more than Republicans and liberals are disheartened, and Republicans have done a better job exploiting the anger than Obama has tamping it down.

Obama’s background as a community organizer may be hampering him as president. While his supporters still like him, they’re not so sure he has what it takes to bring about the hope and change he promised and excited the base. A community organizer empowers people to do things for themselves, and in government, you have to lead and order and direct, and that’s not Obama’s style, even though Republicans call him autocratic and Rush Limbaugh calls him “Ayatollah Obama.” Obama has had a lot of success in politics and academia, and on the mean streets of Chicago, by reaching consensus, and he expected to apply that life lesson now that he’s at the pinnacle of power, and it didn’t work.

I’m loath to admit it, but I think there’s been a failure of leadership in this White House. Why else would a party on the verge of extinction less than two years ago be poised to take over one or perhaps both chambers of Congress? Hillary Clinton would have been tougher than Obama as president, but Republicans would have found her vulnerability and exploited it. I don’t think Obama’s supporters have buyer’s remorse, but they’re struggling to understand where Obama lost the magic and became the piñata for all the country’s ills. Republicans and the business community have been so successful in blaming Obama that if the next two years are like the last two years, he won’t get reelected.

After the ’08 election, polls found that a majority of Republicans thought they had lost ground because their party wasn’t conservative enough. Most analysts thought that way off base, and that the GOP needed to spend some time in the political wilderness to come to their senses, and move back to the middle. Instead they’ve tacked so far to the right that Ronald Reagan looks like a moderate and Newt Gingrich, the original bomb thrower, is considered mainstream enough to be taken seriously as a likely presidential candidate.

The ascendancy of the right has put Democrats on the defensive. A Hoover Institution study shows that House Democrats who voted for two out of three of Obama’s signature proposals (health care, the stimulus, and cap-and-trade energy policy) are likely to lose, a formula that would give the Republicans 43 seats, enough to take control of the chamber. There’s so little out there from Democrats on the merits of those proposals, and other core issues that separate them from Republicans, Democrats almost deserve to lose.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6a)As Fla. tea party's Rubio surges, Crist and Meek turn firepower on each other
By Philip Rucker


TAMPA - The high-profile Florida Senate race started out as the first major skirmish between a tea party candidate and the Republican establishment, but with a month until Election Day it has evolved into a battle that is tearing apart Democrats.

At issue in this famously chaotic political state is whether Gov. Charlie Crist, who fled the GOP and is running as an independent, or Rep. Kendrick Meek, who prevailed in a bruising Democratic primary, is the more viable candidate against tea party favorite Marco Rubio.

At the moment, the answer, it increasingly seems, might be neither.

Rubio is surging in recent polls, while Crist and Meek's fight for the Sunshine State's Democrats has escalated and gotten more personal by the day. Last week, Crist staged two large rallies in vote-rich South Florida to accept the endorsement of Robert Wexler, a popular former Democratic congressman, who all but ordered the state's many Jewish voters to back Crist.

Meek, who hopes to become the first African American elected statewide in Florida, countered with a tough new ad that shows clips of Crist defending his conservatism. Meek is also drawing prominent surrogates, including President Obama and former president Bill Clinton, both of whom he said would hold rallies in the campaign's closing weeks. And on Thursday, Meek brought former vice president Al Gore to a boisterous labor union hall here to urge Democrats not to "throw your vote away" on Crist.

"It's an old charge in politics that somebody flip-flops," Gore said, making a rare appearance on the campaign trail. "It's a little unusual to have somebody flip-flop and then flap-flip. Seriously. You know what I'm talking about. As I say, I like the guy, but I do not really know where he stands on lots of these really important issues. . . . We want somebody who's going to stand up for what he believes and stick to it and fight for it and do the right thing."

Vying for diverse voters


Some national Democrats remain unconvinced that Meek can win, but all have lined up behind him. Privately, party strategists say an added benefit might be that his candidacy could drive up turnout among black voters. Blacks make up roughly 10 percent of Florida's electorate, making them a critical voting bloc for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink.

"She is going to get a spillover, Obama effect from Meek, this young African American candidate," said Sharon Wright Austin, a political scientist at the University of Florida.

The Miami congressman has been campaigning with vigor, but Meek's energy has not translated into support in the polls. And with a relatively underfunded campaign, it is unclear how Meek might afford the television advertising barrage necessary to break through in a diverse, costly state of more than 18 million people.

"I'm a fighter, ladies and gentlemen, and you know something? I don't give up. And I don't give in," Meek said at the labor rally, eliciting loud cheers.

Seizing an opening.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------