Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Either Walt, Mearsheimer, Lynch, Chas Freeman, and their ilk don’t know much about the Middle East, or they’re ignoring what they do know in order to push their own foreign policy wishful thinking as objective analysis. Which is fine – everyone gets to have an agenda – but now can we at least dispense with the aggravating hagiographies to their vaunted neutrality and expertise? Because apparently their wrongheaded assumptions are influencing policymakers, and – predictably – that’s not going well.
Go back and read thewhole thing for the background context. I just love how we've got all these "expert" Israel bashers who've been shown the door with the release of these diplomatic cables. In the years following the Iraq deployment, radical leftists routinely decried the continued prominence of war hawks such as William Kristol, et al., who they demonized as clowns or a killers alternatively. Of course these same antiwar/anti-Jew critics will be working overtime to rewrite one of the key findings of this latest doc dump. This time, though, even some of the dead tree press corps are getting the story right.
PICTURED: Israel-bashing Professor Stephen Walt, at right, signs a book, while Professor John Mearsheimer mugs for the camera.
Unlike Elvis Costello, Roger Waters toured Israel, although he couldn't resist the opportunity to use his appearances "to criticize the government's treatment of Palestinians and to spray-paint the words 'Tear Down the Wall' on Israel's security barrier." Perhaps such talk comfortably numbs the soft-on-jihad Israelis at the shows, but tearing down the wall is the last thing Israel wants to do at this point. There's little evidence Palestinians want peace, and lots of evidence of the kind of terror Hamas wants to impose on the whole of Israel. All of this is beside the point, I guess. I was mostly thinking about Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" since lately I'm hearing it all the time on the radio. Waters is playing Los Angeles this week, tonight, tomorrow, and Friday. And I had no interest in going, frankly, although Larry Morgan's been talkin' it up like crazy. I do have an automatic recollection whenever the song comes on. In 1980 I was really getting into punk. But Scott, one of my skating buddies, was still into the arena rocks bands and he sat me down at his house one afternoon, saying "you gotta listen to 'Comfortably Numb'." It was quite a change from the Johnny Rotten I'd been listening to, but obviously it's a moment I haven't forgotten. Weird. That said, the Roger Waters tour, seen at the clip below, looks exactly like the big stadium concerts that punkers railed against in the 1970s. Corporate and the opposite of intimacy. I like everything nowadays, so I shouldn't complain, but I doubt this would have been cool back in the day. Good reviews, in any case: "Roger Waters at US Airways Center Last Night."
I don't write about this stuff, since I'm actually working with my lender (I'll update on New Year's Day). But this story at LAT is interesting, and no doubt resonates with a lot of folks. "Her House Was Saved But Now What?"
In the midst of a divorce and unable to afford her Torrance home, Nicole Rasmussen phoned her lender to ask for a mortgage modification.
She phoned every week for more than a year.
She also called her congressman and a senator to seek their help. Then, in desperation, she and her ex-husband — who still jointly owned the home — stopped making the payments on their $475,000 mortgage.
It was the only way, she felt, that the bank would seriously consider her pleas for a modification.
"I didn't know what was going to happen," said Rasmussen, who was frightened that she and her 7-year-old daughter would be forced out of the home. "We were living in limbo."
The risk paid off. Several weeks ago Rasmussen finalized the loan modification on the three-bedroom, 1950s ranch-style house.
Grateful to be at home for the holidays, she now looks forward to trimming the three artificial Christmas trees in the house and baking snickerdoodle cookies with her daughter.
But the mortgage mess and divorce have rocked her finances.
Like millions of other Americans, Rasmussen, 38, is facing an uncertain financial future, even with the loan modification. The only thing that's certain this holiday season is that she will have to change her financial life.
She has already started. To make the mortgage payments more manageable Rasmussen took in a roommate. She also succeeded in getting the property reassessed, resulting in a lower tax bill.
And there were smaller steps — raising the deductible on her auto insurance and canceling her Costco membership.
But there are often reminders that, though she makes a very good salary, her financial picture has changed. For example, not only was she refused when she applied for a new credit card, but a card she already had was frozen.
On her own for the first time in more than a decade, Rasmussen has to navi-
gate her finances while balancing a tenuous mixture of income, debt and assets that could all too easily unravel.
"I have a general idea of what to do, but I don't know for sure what to do," Rasmussen said.
She wants to save for emergencies and retirement and pay down her debt, but she also wants to have enough money to splurge occasionally on theater tickets and attend out-of-town artist workshops to indulge her passion for mixed-media collages.
And she wants to be able to pay a portion of college costs for her daughter, who is so academically minded that she does multiplication problems at home for fun.
Certified financial planner Dirk Huybrechts reviewed Rasmussen's financial details and drew up a plan for her ...
The story's at WSJ, and it's sad. This is what you get with the left, and it's undereported:
Above the seething streets of this ancient city, Angeliki Papathanasopoulou—four months pregnant and at work in a downtown bank—tried to soothe her fearful mother on the other end of the phone.
It was noontime on May 5, and the tension was palpable as angry crowds gathered in Athens's main squares, readying to protest deep spending cuts needed to earn an international bailout.
"Don't worry," Ms. Papathanasopoulou told her mother on that May day. "I'm on an upper floor." Besides, the 32-year-old was leaving work early at 3 p.m., for a doctor's appointment to learn whether the child she carried was a girl or a boy.
She never found out. Shortly after 2 o'clock, as the throngs marched past her building on Stadiou Street, hooded men shattered the window, poured gasoline on the floor and hurled in a Molotov cocktail. Toxic smoke filled the three-story bank, sending 24 people who worked there climbing out of windows or clambering onto roofs of adjacent buildings.
Ms. Papathanasopoulou and two colleagues, people who had watched her marry her husband nine months before, succumbed to the thick black fumes before they could make it out.
"She and I did everything together. We were best friends," says her husband, Christos Karapanagiotis. "No one could imagine this."
For decades, Greece had tolerated unruly, sometimes violent protests against the state. Athens's radical anarchist fringe, of which police believe the arsonists were members, even enjoyed moral legitimacy in the eyes of many Greeks. The attitude reflected society's deep mistrust of its rulers and, more recently, anger at a debt crisis that nearly tipped the country into bankruptcy.
May 5 changed all that.
The deaths of three innocent employees shocked Greece, shifting the national mood and the course of this year's crisis. Instead of rising social unrest as many had feared, Greece has seen only fragmented opposition to the euro zone's most drastic austerity measures. An expected backlash against the ruling Socialist government failed to materialize in recent local elections. And last week, when the government announced fresh budget cuts, the streets were mostly quiet.
Some Greeks say it took a tragedy to burst the romantic idea of rebellion rooted in their history of resistance to the state, forcing a sobered society to face the need for radical economic overhaul. It wasn't lost on Greek commentators that the three who died went to work that day instead of protesting.
It's completely oxymoronic to pair anarchic and romanticism, at least nowadays. But until more folks wake up and challenge the anarcho-socialist-enabling media we'll be seeing more unnecessary deaths like these.
Resist these people. They are bad here, bad there, and bad for the world.
One-fifth say that the rise of China is "good for the global balance of power" (along with some even more favorable findings on China). And a whopping 81 percent say that regime change in Iraq "wasn't worth it."
Oooh, surprise!! The world's top thinkers favor the rise of a murderous authoritarian regime in Beijing to balance the international system's leading democratic power.
There's a roster of respondents at Foreign Policy. I'm shaking my head at these people.
"I think it's time we talked about regime change in North Korea, and I do not mean military action, but I do believe that this is a very unstable regime" ...
UNFORTUNATE TRIVIA: Phillip Longman's brother is Martin Longman of Booman Tribune. This minor detail helps put Phillip's conclusion at Foreign Policy in perspective:
The connection between a society's wealth and its demographics is cyclical. At first, with fertility declining and the workforce aging, there are proportionately fewer children to raise and educate. This is good: It frees up female labor to join the formal economy and allows for greater investment in the education of each remaining child. All else being equal, both factors stimulate economic development. Japan went through this phase in the 1960s and 1970s, with the other Asian countries following close behind. China is benefiting from it now.
Then, however, the outlook turns bleak. Over time, low birth rates lead not only to fewer children, but also to fewer working-age people just as the percentage of dependent elders explodes. This means that as population aging runs its course, it might well go from stimulating the economy to depressing it. Fewer young adults means fewer people needing to purchase new homes, new furniture, and the like, as well as fewer people likely to take entrepreneurial risks. Aging workers become more interested in protecting existing jobs than in creating new businesses. Last-ditch efforts to prop up consumption and home values may result in more and more capital flowing into expanded consumer credit, creating financial bubbles that inevitably burst (sound familiar?).
In other words, a planet that grays indefinitely is clearly asking for trouble. But birth rates don't have to plummet forever. One path forward might be characterized as the Swedish road: It involves massive state intervention designed to smooth the tensions between work and family life to enable women to have more children without steep financial setbacks. But so far, countries that have followed this approach have achieved only very modest success. At the other extreme is what might be called the Taliban road: This would mean a return to "traditional values," in which women have few economic and social options beyond the role of motherhood. This mindset may well maintain high birth rates, but with consequences that today are unacceptable to all but the most rigid fundamentalists.
The Taliban road?
Only a radical progressive would even raise that notion with respect to cultural conservatives in the United States. Who knows if Phillip is close to Martin? But the Daily Kosification of putatively scholarly writing is a disaster. The Eberstadt piece at Foreign Affairs is far superior, a welcomed corrective to such idiotic leftist blather. A shame too. Phillip Longman's done some impressive research, but he's blinkered by ideology.
Ruth Tinsley made two momentous changes to her life in the last year. In December she had identical twin girls. A few weeks later she signed up for Amazon.com's free shipping service, Amazon Prime, which guarantees delivery of products within two days for an annual fee of $79. The combination of those two events turned the graphic designer from Birmingham, Ala., into an Amazon loyalist who now buys software, jewelry, and birthday gifts on the site. Her 2010 Amazon total heading into the holidays: 150 individual items, up from 82 in all of 2009. "Now if I see or hear about a product somewhere else, I'll always check first to see if Amazon has it," Tinsley says.
Amazon Prime may be the most ingenious and effective customer loyalty program in all of e-commerce, if not retail in general. It converts casual shoppers like Tinsley, who gorge on the gratification of having purchases reliably appear two days after they order, into Amazon addicts. Analysts describe Prime as one of the main factors driving Amazon's stock price—up 296 percent in the last two years—and the main reason Amazon's sales grew 30 percent during the recession while other retailers flailed. At the same time, Prime has proven exceedingly difficult for rivals to copy: It allows Amazon to exploit its wide selection, low prices, network of third-party merchants, and finely tuned distribution system, while also keying off that faintly irrational human need to maximize the benefits of a club you have already paid to join.
Now six years after the program's creation, rivals, both online and off, have sensed the increasing threat posed by Prime and are rushing to try to respond. Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), Best Buy (BBY), Target (TGT), and J.C. Penney (JCP) have recently unveiled free shipping promotions for the holidays, turning the fall shopping season into a race to see who can go furthest in lowering shipping costs. In August, eBay announced its first rewards program, eBay Bucks, which gives shoppers 2 percent back on items purchased on the auction site using PayPal. Last month a consortium of more than 20 retailers, including Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority, and Toys 'R' Us, banded together with their own copycat $79, two-day shipping program, ShopRunner, which applies to products across their Web sites. "As Amazon added more merchandising categories to Prime, retailers started feeling the pain," says Fiona Dias, executive vice-president at GSI Commerce (GSIC), which administers the ShopRunner service. "They have finally come to understand that Amazon is an existential threat and that Prime is the fuel of the engine."
On the biggest shopping day of the year, fights broke out in the food court at Los Cerritos Center and at a Best Buy in Burbank. At the Torrance Toys R Us the night before, latecomers tried in vain to bribe early-bird shoppers into letting them cut in line outside the store. At the Glendale Galleria and Westfield Century City, frustrated drivers reported circling the parking structures for an hour Friday looking for a spot.
It was a strong start for the crucial holiday season, with retailers and industry watchers reporting longer lines than last year and brisk business at the cash registers.
More mall madness is on the way this weekend as bargain-hungry shoppers scour the shelves for fresh discounts.
"The good news is that the retailers got a lot of traffic, and those that did come out came out to buy," said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at market research firm NPD Group. "If you're going to venture into those crowds and take those hours out of your normal sleeping, you're going to spend money. You'd have to be crazy to go out there and not buy."
For Aliso Viejo resident Eric Walsh, 28, shopping hell is lugging around women's clothing from Banana Republic.
Taking a break with his son tucked in a stroller, Walsh tried to calculate the amount of time each stuffed bag of pink and beige apparel cost him.
"About 21/2 hours," he said, smirking. The journey started at 8 a.m., fighting the crowds and doing the holiday shuffle to the cash register.
"It's like standing in line for an hour at Disneyland for a 2-minute ride," said Walsh, who added that his wife stood in line at the Gap to save 50% on clothes. "Was it worth it? I don't know, maybe to her."
When it comes to Black Friday, A.J. Castro, 27, knows what he's doing.
At 11 p.m. on Thanksgiving, the Burbank actor and several warmly bundled friends grabbed spots near the front of the line at the Target at the Burbank Empire Center, having mapped out the store's layout and thoroughly studied its circular.
One member was angling for an X-box console, the rest were going for cheap televisions.
"Women, children, it doesn't matter," Castro joked. "No one is standing in my way."
Said his friend, actress Jenna Nickerson, 23, of Sherman Oaks: "You've got to attack it; you have to have a plan. We're helping out the economy."
It was a record day for spending, with consumers buying $10.69 billion worth of merchandise at brick-and-mortar stores, a 0.3% rise over last year, according to ShopperTrak RCT Corp., a research firm that monitors spending at more than 50,000 retail stores. Foot traffic was up 2.2%.
Although the sales increase -- which does not include online spending -- was not as strong as many industry watchers had expected, ShopperTrak noted that earlier-than-ever deals this year drove many shoppers to the malls well before Black Friday.
That meant some unexpected strength in early November that may have thinned business on the day after Thanksgiving: Sales and traffic for the first two weeks of the month through Nov. 13 increased 6.1% and 6.2%, respectively, versus the same two weeks in 2009, ShopperTrak said.
"The early weeks in November were really strong, so the fact we still had an increase on Black Friday, I think that sets us up for a pretty good holiday season," said Bill Martin, ShopperTrak founder.
SEOUL - South Korea and the United States on Sunday began joint naval exercises that will include live fire and bombing drills as hermetic North Korea deployed missiles close to the Yellow Sea and warned that it will turn the region into "a merciless shower of fire" if its territory is violated.
With tensions high in the region, China on Sunday called for an emergency session in December of the long-suspended six-way talks over North Korea's nuclear program. The call for new talks, announced at an unusual Sunday afternoon foreign ministry briefing in Beijing, came from Wu Dawei, China's top nuclear negotiator.
China has been under intense pressure to rein in its often erratic ally, North Korea, and Beijing this weekend was engaged in an intense round of diplomacy to try to prevent the recent crisis -- the most serious in months -- from escalating into a full-scale conflict. The six party talks include China, Japan, Russia, the two Koreas and the United States.
DUBLIN — After a week that brought Ireland a pledge of a $114 billion international rescue package and the toughest austerity program of any country in Europe, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to Dublin’s streets on Saturday to protest wide cuts in the country’s welfare programs and in public-sector jobs.
The protests centered on a milelong march along the banks of the River Liffey in central Dublin to the General Post Office building on O’Connell Street, the site of the battle between Irish republican rebels and British troops in the Easter Uprising in 1916 — an iconic event that many in Ireland regard as the tipping point in Ireland’s long struggle for independence.
The choice of venue for the protests by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, coordinating the march through the city, reflected the mood of anger, dismay and recrimination in the wake of the economic shocks of the past 10 days. Those shocks have been the culmination of two years in which the economy has shrunk by about 15 percent, faster than any other European economy.
Before that, Ireland enjoyed more than a decade of unprecedented prosperity, so the rescue package being worked out by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union and the austerity program the Dublin government has been forced to adopt to secure the bailout loans have come as a deep jolt.
Among other things, the austerity package will involve the loss of about 25,000 public-sector jobs, equivalent to 10 percent of the government work force, as well as a four-year, $20 billion program of tax increases and spending cuts like sharp reductions in state pensions and minimum wage. One Dublin newspaper, the Irish Independent, estimated that the cost of the measures for a typical middle-class family earning $67,000 a year would be about $5,800 a year.
The ensuing political turmoil has raised questions about the ability of the government of Prime Minister Brian Cowen to secure backing for the austerity package when it is presented to Parliament on Dec. 7. The coalition government was weakened last week by a split between the Fianna Fail party, which Mr. Cowen leads, and its main coalition partner, the Green Party, and a stunning loss by Fianna Fail in an election on Friday for a parliamentary seat that reduced the government majority to two.
The mostly peaceful and restrained nature of the protests on Saturday was one indication that the unrest may not lead to confrontations in the streets, as some have feared. On a bitterly cold day, organizers put the turnout at 100,000. The police estimated 50,000, still one of the largest protest gatherings in years.
What’s really needed is for working Americans to form alliances and try, in a spirit of good will, to work out equitable solutions to the myriad problems facing so many ordinary individuals and families. Strong leaders are needed to develop such alliances and fight back against the forces that nearly destroyed the economy and have left working Americans in the lurch.
RTWT.
It'a big long whiny rant against wealth and Wall Street. Herbert begrudges the market's exuberant comeback I mentioned previously, citing the same article: "Signs of Swagger, Wallets Out, Wall St. Dares to Indulge." And of course Herbert, ensconced at the cushy offices of the Old Grey Lady, doesn't speak truth to what he's really pushing: the anti-capitalist revolution. And further it's not as if we aren't seeing the development of "such alliances" fighting back "against the forces that nearly destroyed the economy." They're all around, actually. Most people don't like them, regular people, because in the end those bitter clingers understand that the proletarian left wants them dead:RELATED: "Did Someone Say ‘Desperation’?"
In the UK, the politicians cut education funding, the high school kids saw their future slipping away and took to the streets. Meanwhile, in the United States, people sit and wait quietly for crumbs to fall from the banquet table of the bankers. What is wrong with this picture
Great idea. We'll just burn everything down like the freak anarchists in London. That'll make everything better. It's not the bankers who're killing education in the states. It's the unions. Get a clue.
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