Who's got the better plan for Syria?

One could argue, Russia has the more realistic one:

Who Is a Better Strategist: Obama or Putin?

[...] And yet, it is hard to escape the impression that Putin has been playing his weak hand better than Obama has played his strong one. These perceptions arise in part because Obama inherited several foreign-policy debacles, and it’s hard to abandon a bunch of failed projects without being accused of retreating. Obama’s main mistake was not going far enough to liquidate the unsound positions bequeathed by his predecessor: He should have gotten out of Afghanistan faster and never done regime change in Libya at all. By contrast, Putin looks successful at first glance because Russia is playing a more active role than it did back when it was largely prostrate. Given where Russia was in 1995 or even 2000, there was nowhere to go but up.

But Putin has also done one thing right: He has pursued simple objectives that were fairly easy to achieve and that played to Russia’s modest strengths. In Ukraine, he had one overriding goal: to prevent that country from moving closer to the EU, eventually becoming a full member, and then joining NATO. He wasn’t interested in trying to reincorporate all of Ukraine or turn it into a clone of Russia, and the “frozen conflict” that now exists there is sufficient to achieve his core goal. This essentially negative objective was not that hard to accomplish because Ukraine was corrupt, internally divided, and right next door to Russia. These features made it easy for Putin to use a modest degree of force and hard for anyone else to respond without starting a cycle of escalation they could not win.

Putin’s goals in Syria are equally simple, realistic, and aligned with Russia’s limited means. He wants to preserve the Assad regime as a meaningful political entity so that it remains an avenue of Russian influence and a part of any future political settlement. He’s not trying to conquer Syria, restore the Alawites to full control over the entire country, defeat the Islamic State, or eliminate all Iranian influence. And he’s certainly not pursuing some sort of quixotic dream of building democracy there. A limited deployment of Russian airpower and a handful of “volunteers” may suffice to keep Assad from being defeated, especially if the United States and others eventually adopt a more realistic approach to the conflict as well.

By contrast, U.S. goals toward both of these conflicts have been a combination of wishful thinking and strategic contradictions. In Ukraine, a familiar alliance of neocon fantasists (e.g., Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland) and liberal internationalists convinced themselves that the EU Accession Agreement was a purely benign act whose virtues and alleged neutrality no one could possibly misconstrue. As a result, they were completely blindsided when Moscow kept using the realpolitik playbook and saw the whole matter very differently. (There was an element of hypocrisy and blindness here, too; Russia was simply acting the same way the United States has long acted when dealing with the Western Hemisphere, but somehow U.S. officials managed to ignore the clear warnings that Moscow had given.) Moreover, the core Western objective — creating a well-functioning democratic Ukrainian state — was a laudable but hugely demanding task from the very beginning, whereas Putin’s far more limited goal — keeping Ukraine out of NATO — was comparatively easy.

Needless to say, U.S. policy in Syria has been even more muddled. Since the uprising first began, Washington has been vainly trying to achieve a series of difficult and incompatible goals. It says, “Assad must go,” but it doesn’t want any jihadi groups (i.e., the only people who are really fighting Assad) to replace him. It wants to “degrade and destroy ISIS,” but it also wants to make sure anti-Islamic State groups like al-Nusra Front don’t succeed. It is relying on Kurdish fighters to help deal with the Islamic State, but it wants Turkey to help, too, and Turkey opposes any steps that might stoke the fires of Kurdish nationalism. So the United States has been searching in vain for “politically correct” Syrian rebels — those ever-elusive “moderates” — and it has yet to find more than a handful. And apart from wanting Assad gone, the long-term U.S. vision for Syria’s future was never clear. Given all this muddled direction, is it any wonder Putin’s actions look bold and decisive while Obama’s seem confused?

This difference is partly structural: Because Russia is much weaker than the United States (and destined to grow even weaker over time), it has to play its remaining cards carefully and pursue only vital objectives that are achievable at modest cost. The United States has vastly more resources to throw at global problems, and its favorable geopolitical position allows it to avoid most of the repercussions of its mistakes. Add to that the tendency of both neoconservatives and liberal internationalists to believe that spreading the gospel of “freedom” around the world is necessary, easy to do, and won’t generate unintended consequences or serious resistance, and you have a recipe for an overly ambitious yet under-resourced set of policy initiatives. Needless to say, this is the perfect recipe for recurring failure. [...]

Having a strong hand is not perhaps as important as playing well the hand you have.
*

     

Did Obama miss an important opportunity when he met with Putin in NY?

This article from Salon says yes, indeed:

Thomas Friedman, read your Chomsky: The New York Times gets Putin/Obama all wrong, again

[...] It is now several weeks since Russia let it be known that it would reinforce its long-standing support of Bashar al-Assad with new military commitments. First came the materiél. Bombing runs began a week ago. On Monday, a senior military official in Moscow announced that Russian troops are to join the fight against the Islamic State.

We are always encouraged to find anything Putin does devious and the outcome of hidden motives and some obscure agenda having to do with his pouting ambition to be seen as a first-rank world leader. From the government-supervised New York Times on down, this is what you read in the newspapers and hear on the radio and television broadcasts. I urge readers to pay no attention to this stuff. It is all about Washington’s agenda to obscure.

Russia’s favored strategy in Syria has long been very clear. It is a question of distinguishing the primary and secondary contradictions, as the Marxists say. The Assad regime is to be kept in place so as to preserve those political institutions still functioning as the basis of a reconstructed national government. Once the threat of Islamic terror is defeated, a political transition into a post-Assad reconstruction can be negotiated.

For a time it appeared that Washington was prepared to buy into this set of expedients. This impression derived from the very frequent contacts between John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, with whom the American secretary of state has often worked closely.

Then came the fateful encounter between Obama and Putin at the U.N. Obama spoke first, Putin afterward. Then the two met privately.

A few days ago a source in Moscow with good lines into Kremlin thinking wrote a long note on the Obama-Putin encounter in New York. Here is some of what this source said:

The meeting with Obama in New York did not go well. It was extremely contentious, and Obama did not engage. Putin made the case that the important first priority had to be to eliminate Daesh [the Islamic State], and that after more than a year of the U.S. campaign there has been no significant success. Indeed, the contrary is the case.

Putin’s point was that air power alone will not succeed, and that now the only real boots on the ground are the Kurds and the armies of Syria and its supporters—Hezbollah and some Iranians, but the Iranians troops involved in the struggle with Daesh are operating mostly in Iraq.

Putin proposed creating a coalition, the equivalent of the anti-Hitler alliance, to focus on Daesh, and then focusing in Round 2 on the transition of Syria into a form of decentralized federation of highly autonomous regions—Kurdish, Sunni, Alawite-Christian and a few others—which all work together now.

Putin had been led to believe through the Lavrov /Kerry channel… that there would be a broader agreement to work together. So he was surprised that Obama did not seize the opportunity to engage the battle in a coordinated way…. In the end they agreed only on coordination between the two militaries to avoid running into each other.

Putin left New York with the view that it is now much more important to support the government in Syria than he had thought before he went, because he came convinced that the U.S., left to its present course, is going to create another Libya, this time in Syria. Israel has a similar view, as does Egypt, Iran, and, increasingly, countries in Europe. With Daesh already so deeply implanted, this would lead to vast crisis—military, political, economic, humanitarian—that would spread across all of the Middle East, into the Caucasus and across North Africa, with millions of refugees….

There are four things to say about this account straight off the top. One, the subtext is that Putin reached the point in New York when he effectively threw up his hands and said, “I’m fed up.” Two, Obama went into that meeting more or less befuddled as to what to say. In a word, he was outclassed.

Three, the strategy Putin presented to Obama is clear, logical, lawful and has a good chance of working. In other words, it is everything the Obama administration’s is not, Kerry’s efforts to work with Lavrov notwithstanding.

Four and most important, the history books may well conclude that the U.N. on Sept. 27 was the very place and the very day the U.S. ceded the initiative to Russia on the Syria crisis. This is my read as of now, although in circumstances this kinetic it is too perilous to anticipate what may come next.

The American press has been slightly berserk subsequent to the U.N. encounter, putting more spin on the new Russian policy than a gyroscope has in space. Putin is weak and desperate, he is making Syria more violent, Russian jets are bombing CIA-backed “moderates” and not ISIS, this is Russia’s second Afghanistan, nothing can work so long as Assad remains in power.

“Putin stupidly went into Syria looking for a cheap sugar high to show his people that Russia is still a world power,” Tom Friedman, a standout in this line, wrote in the Times last week. “Watch him become public enemy No. 1 in the Sunni Muslim world. ‘Yo, Vladimir, how’s that working for you?’”

I read all this with a mirror: It is nothing more than a reflection of how far below its knees the Obama administration’s pants have just fallen. Who went stupidly into Syria, Tom? Yo, Tom, your lump-them-together prejudices are showing: Most of “the Sunni Muslim world” is as appalled by the Islamic State as the non-Sunni Muslim world.

*

What a weird sensation it is to agree with Charles Krauthammer, one of the Washington’s Post’s too-numerous right-wing opinion-page writers. It is like traveling in a strange, badly run country where something always seems about to go wrong.

“If it had the wit, the Obama administration would be not angered, but appropriately humiliated,” Krauthammer wrote in last Thursday’s paper. “President Obama has, once again, been totally outmaneuvered by Vladimir Putin.”

It is a lot better than Tom Friedman’s driveling defense of the president. Somewhere, at least, a spade is still a spade. But with this observation the common ground with Krauthammer begins and ends. Obama has got it radically wrong in Syria—and indeed across the Middle East—but not in the ways we are encouraged to think. Where lie the errors, then? [...]

The author of the article has a great deal more to say. He clearly isn't on the side of American Foreign Policy regarding Syria (or much else). But many of the questions posited are worth asking. What are we doing in Syria?

IF indeed the above plan was proposed to Obama by Putin, I have to say, it makes more sense to me than supporting small Sunni groups against Assad. The sooner the war there ends, the better. If then Syria transitions "into a form of decentralized federation of highly autonomous regions", that might well stem the flow of refugees, and stabilize the region.

It sounds like a plan. Have we anything better to offer? I'm just askin'.

It sounds more realistic and plausible than what's being said by our Bagdad Bob President. The only thing I can say in defense of Obama is, I wasn't at the meeting with Putin, and I don't know what was said. But if it was as described as above, I would have to wonder if it indeed was a missed opportunity.


Also see: 'This is victory as far as they're concerned': Obama could be wrong about Putin's big moves in Syria
     

"Constructive. Business-like. Surprisingly frank."

Kerry says US may offer Russia 'something' to keep Assad from dropping barrel bombs: UN debate live

[...] Constructive. Business-like. Surprisingly frank.

Those are the diplomatic euphemisms Vladimir Putin used to describe his meeting with Barack Obama on Monday night, and it says a lot about the dire state of US-Russian relations that they sounded positive.

But it also says a lot about the awkward personal dynamic between Mr Putin and Mr Obama. For no matter what their spin doctors say, there can rarely have been two world leaders so obviously physically uncomfortable in one another’s presence.

It is not even like the geopolitical relationship between their two countries, a previously perfectly workable if strained partnership until it fell apart with the Ukraine crisis. To put it diplomatically, Mr Obama and Mr Putin have just never quite "gelled"....

Maybe there is a basis for understanding. Undisguised mutual dislike, frank disagreement on Ukraine, and a business-like recognition that it is much safer to argue about Syria than do anything about it.

And maybe Mr Putin is not wrong. After all, a frank discussion of interests and demands is a decent starting point for a deal, even on a problem as intractable as Syria. Perhaps Monday's meeting was, in some sense, constructive after all. [...]

The US has withdrawn troops from the Middle East, and failed to support Syrian Rebels in any meaningful way. That left a vacuum, and Russia is filling it. Putin knows nobody has the will to help the rebels. Russia is allied with Syria and Iran. Putin is doing this because... he can.

So if we aren't going to fight it, do we work with it? Some say that Russia is not the enemy. Even if that is true, they are not automatically our friends, either. Perhaps they are our "Frenemy". America has lots of those, and we work with them from time to time. Will this be one of those times? Should it be? I couldn't say if it should. I think it may become one of those times by default, simply because no one is willing to do anything else. At any rate, we shall see.
     

I agree with President Obama...

...about this Nike thing:

As Obama Visits Portland, Trade Deal Divides Liberal Community

As President Barack Obama visited Nike's headquarters in Portland — a city known for lush greenery, constant drizzle and liberal politics — the left-leaning enclave has become ground zero Friday for the debate over the administration's push for a sweeping, multinational trade deal.

The president acknowledged that he's faced hurdles in his quest to garner support for an ambitious trade accord between the United States and 11 South American and Pacific Rim nations, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He told workers at the Nike campus that the people opposing this "typically they're my friends and coming from my own party. On this one, they're like, whooping on me."

Obama insisted the trade push is not political for him, since he's run his last election. He said the trade accord is the right thing to do for working families.

"The only reason I do something is because I think it's good for the economy," Obama said.

Still, in Portland, with its normally laid back vibe, the debate over the trade issue is splitting residents into two camps.

On the one side are companies like Nike, one of the city's largest employers. The company employs 8,500 people in Oregon and 26,000 nationwide. Nike says its economic impact on the state of Oregon is $2.5 billion.

And the company promises to add 10,000 jobs and an additional 40,000 indirect and supply chain service jobs if the trade deal is approved.

"We believe agreements that encourage free and fair trade allow Nike to do what we do best: innovate, expand our businesses and drive economic growth," said Mark Parker, Nike's president and CEO.

On the other side are labor unions that argue that the trade accord would repress worker wages and encourage companies — like Nike — to outsource jobs.

Those differences were on display Friday morning as Nike workers, most wearing Nike shoes, lined up to cheer the president. Meanwhile, about a hundred protesters crowded outside and chanted their outrage.

"Nike represents everything about corporate America that stinks," said Andrew Crosby, as he carried a protest sign.

The pact has even split Oregon's senators, both Democrats.

Sen. Ron Wyden is helping lead the charge to pass "fast-track" authority which would grant Obama and future presidents the right to ask for an up-or-down vote in Congress on trade agreements. Obama and supporters say the president needs this authority to better negotiate with other nations.

Opponents worry that such large trade deals deserve vetting by Congress. Sen. Jeff Merkley has said he is "dubious" about the impact of such broad trade accords. [...]

Wyden is a reasonable Democrat. Merkley is a Moron. Oregon desperately needs the jobs and revenue. The unions here are too powerful, and dragging our state down. I have to agree with president Obama on this one.

     

Why the Democrats are holding out

They feel they have little to lose. Here is one explanation:

Obama’s “small deal” could lead to bigger tax increases

[...] The Senate already passed a bill letting the Bush tax cuts lapse for income over $250,000. That bill is very, very popular. The White House expects that if we go over the cliff, the House will have to pass that bill, too, and the president would have little choice but to sign it. That bill raises taxes by a bit more than $700 billion, which is less than the $1.6 trillion the White House wants. But that $700 billion, to the White House, is the baseline: If they get nothing else, they will certainly get that.

And that’s why Boehner’s offer of $800 billion doesn’t impress. The White House already has some $700 billion in the bank, as they see it. The reason to negotiate with Boehner is that an agreement with him could, in theory, push that number well above $1 trillion while stabilizing the debt and avoiding the economic pain of falling off the fiscal cliff. But there’s no reason to cut a deal with Boehner in which the White House gives up spending cuts in order to get a tax increase they can have anyway.

The talk in Washington now is about a “small deal.” That would likely include the Senate tax bill, some policy to turn off at least the defense side of the sequester and a handful of other policies to blunt or delay various parts of the fiscal cliff.

That’s not a very good deal for the short-term health of the economy. Depending on how much of the fiscal cliff gets delayed, we could tip into recession anyway. But it could lead, in the end, to much more revenue than a “big deal” now.

Here’s how it would go. Some time in the next month or so, the small deal would pass and the White House would pocket that $700-plus billion in tax revenue. They really would get that for free, just as the president told Boehner.

But pressure would quickly mount to strike a larger deal, both because there would be another fiscal cliff coming and because the debt ceiling would need to be raised. (The White House swears they won’t negotiate over the debt ceiling, but it’s not exactly clear what that will mean in practice.)

The White House would insist that the next deal includes a 1:1 ratio of tax increases — all of which could come through Republican-friendly tax reform — to spending cuts. So a subsequent deal that included $600 billion or $700 billion in spending cuts would also include $600 billion or $700 billion in tax increases, leading to total new revenue in the range of $1.2 trillion to $1.4 trillion.

[...]

All of which is to say, if Boehner had taken the White House’s deal in 2011, he could’ve stopped the tax increase at $800 billion. If he took their most recent deal, he could stop it at $1.2 trillion. But if he insists on adding another round to the negotiations — one that will likely come after the White House pockets $700 billion in tax increases — then any deal in which gets the entitlement cuts he wants is going to mean a deal in which he accepts even more tax increases than the White House is currently demanding. [...]

Is this a bit simplistic? It's not up to Boehner alone to accept or not accept a deal. He has the rest of the Republican Party to contend with.

But if this turns out to be mostly true, then it doesn't look like it will got to well for the Republicans.
     

USA, the world's largest oil producer?

Yep. That's where we are heading:

U.S. to become world's largest oil producer before 2020, IEA says

The U.S. will become the world’s top producer of oil within five years, a net exporter of the fuel around 2030 and nearly self-sufficient in energy by 2035, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.

It’s a bold set of predictions for a nation that currently imports some 20% of its energy needs.

Recently, however, an “energy renaissance” in the U.S. has caused a boost in oil, shale gas and bio-energy production due to new technologies such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Fuel efficiency has improved in the transportation sector. The clean energy industry has seen an influx of solar and wind efforts.

By 2015, U.S. oil production is expected to rise to 10 million barrels per day before increasing to 11.1 million bpd by 2020, overtaking second-place Russia and front-runner Saudi Arabia. The U.S. will export more oil than it brings into the country in 2030.

Around the same time, however, Saudi Arabia will be producing some 11.4 million bpd of oil, outpacing the 10.2 million from the U.S. In 2035, U.S. production will slip to 9.2 million bpd, far behind the Middle Eastern nation’s 12.3 million bpd. Iraq will exceed Russia to become the world’s second largest oil exporter.

At that point, real oil prices will reach $125 a barrel. By then, however, the U.S. won’t be relying much on foreign energy, according to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook.

Globally, the energy economy will undergo a “sea change,” according to the report, with nearly 90% of Middle Eastern oil exports redirecting toward Asia. [...]

This report also confirms the claims made by Porter Stansberry, that I referred to in an earlier post about President Obama capitalizing on an oil boom, like Teddy Roosevelt and FDR did. And with the same corrupting influences.

   

Will Obama become America's Hugo Chavez?

Here is one person's version of "What's Next": The Third Term

On the above link, a video will try to play, showing text with someone narrating it. It's very long. If you prefer to read (as I do), simply try to shut the window. When you do, a pop up will ask you if you really want to leave. Don't do anything for a moment; the page will reload, with the full text from the video. Then from the pop-up box you can choose to stay on the page and read.

It's a long ramble, by Porter Stansberry, who is trying to sell his investment newsletter. In the course of that, he predicts that Obama, in his second term, will consolidate and keep his power from an economic boom caused by shale oil and natural gas.

That may sound far-fetched, but he does explain with extensive sources and data to back his prediction. He also makes two very compelling historical comparisons, with Teddy Roosevelt and FDR, who both used similar circumstances to do what Stansberry believes Obama will also do. FDR managed a third term, and Obama could do the same, either by changing the constitution or by having his wife Michelle run as his proxy.

The data he gives for shale oil and natural gas is also fascinating. He uses his record of past accurate predictions, to bolster his predictions for Obama. The extensive references and data he offers to back up his ideas and predictions seems very plausible; it pieces together a lot of things I've heard from various other sources.

I wanted to print some excerpts here, and discuss some of the ideas, but blogger has changed it's publishing software, and I am now finding it very difficult to work with. The new blogger software requires me to do extensive reformatting of excerpted text, which is very time consuming. And even then, it often won't let me publish it (like it did today, after I did all the work!).

Thus, I predict, that I will not be blogging very much anymore. I have a life, and I'm going to start living it more. I may occasionally post interesting links and small amounts of text, but I'm pretty sure my most active blogging days are behind me.

It was fun, it was a learning experience. But now, seeing as Blogger has made this so unnecessarily arduous and time-consuming, methinks it's time to make better use of my time.

Obama: all style, no substance, no leadership

From Neal Boortz:
OBAMA AND LEADERSHIP .. OR LACK THEREOF

With each passing day, the world begins to realize that ObamaLand is nothing more than a Hollywood movie set .. it looks real with the right camera angles, but in reality it is nothing more than flat pieces of cardboard and some paint. In other words .. Obama is all style and no substance. This is actually pretty fitting for our American Idol generation, which ultimately tipped the scales in favor of Obama. They wanted the hot bod and cool campaign slogans, but couldn't tell you the first thing about his policies or his qualifications to be president. Mort Zuckerman says it best in US News and World Report:

"The reviews of Obama's performance have been disappointing. He has seemed uncomfortable in the role of leading other nations, and often seems to suggest there is nothing special about America's role in the world. The global community was puzzled over the pictures of Obama bowing to some of the world's leaders and surprised by his gratuitous criticisms of and apologies for America's foreign policy under the previous administration of George W. Bush. One Middle East authority, Fouad Ajami, pointed out that Obama seems unaware that it is bad form and even a great moral lapse to speak ill of one's own tribe while in the lands of others.

You really do need to read the entire Zuckerman column. The more you understand about the trouble we're in, the better then chance you may actually try to change things this November. Here's the link again.

   

Obama's "Devastating" Plans for NASA

President to Outline His Vision for NASA

President Obama will seek to promote his vision for the nation’s human space flight program on Thursday, just two days after three storied Apollo astronauts — including Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the Moon — called the new plans “devastating.”

In an announcement to be made at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the president will personally talk for the first time about the sweeping upheaval of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s human spaceflight program outlined in his 2011 budget request: canceling the current program that is to send astronauts back to the Moon, investing in commercial companies to provide transportation to orbit and developing new space technologies.

[...]

Mr. Obama’s budget request called for the cancellation of Orion crew capsule, which was to be used to carry astronauts to the International Space Station and then to the Moon, as well as other components of the current program known as Constellation.

The president will propose that a simpler version of the Orion be used as a lifeboat for the space station. Russian Soyuz capsules currently provide that function. Because the Orion lifeboat would not carry astronauts to the space station, it could be launched on existing rockets.

[...]

“There has not been a well-articulated plan and vision,” said Edward F. Crawley, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served on the blue-ribbon panel that reviewed NASA’s human spaceflight program last year.

Others find the essentials of the plan flawed, not just the presentation. In a letter to Mr. Obama, reported Tuesday by NBC News, Mr. Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11, along with James A. Lovell Jr., the commander of Apollo 13, and Eugene A. Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17, wrote, “For the United States, the leading space-faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second- or even third-rate stature.”

In a letter released Monday, 27 NASA veterans — including Eugene F. Kranz, the flight director who presided over the safe return of the crew aboard the crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft in 1970 — asked Mr. Obama to reconsider the “misguided proposal.”

The reception from Congress has so far been mostly chilly but mostly from representatives in states that are home to the NASA centers that would be most hurt by the changes — the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Johnson Space Center in Texas and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. [...]

A great deal of money has already been spent on developing the Orion spacecraft and the Constellation program. Cancel that now, and all that money is wasted.

The Orion spacecraft is supposed to be our replacement for the space shuttle. Canceling it leaves us with no spacecraft. We will be 100 % dependent on the Russians for transporting astronauts, and we will have to pay them a fortune to do that for us.

What kind of behind-closed-doors deal has Obama struck with the Russians? This seems to benefit them the most.

I'm all for more private enterprise in our space program, but this is so wrong in so many ways. Wasteful, and the shenanigans with the budget, well, read the whole thing.

Killing our space program. More Change You Can Believe In.


Also See:

NASA's Planned Return to the Moon - Canceled?

NASA's Constellation Program
     

Offshore Drilling? When? 7 years? Never?

Don’t Hold Your Breath for More Offshore Drilling

[...] …There may be deal making and an element of diversion as well. First of all the deal making. As you heard, the President wants a climate control bill, cap and trade of some form, this year, so he throws out more nuclear power, yes, you can have more nuclear power and now some more offshore drilling. That will be the nature of a deal. A climate bill in return for more drilling and more nukes. That’s the deal element here. The diversion is this: as early as tomorrow, our people in D.C. are telling us that maybe we will see new co2 emissions rules from the EPA. That would be tough on business. So what you do is you announce an extra off shore drilling today, divert from the negative headlines tomorrow, capture the public’s headlines with extra drilling today. So you’ve got a bit of a diversion here, and you’ve also got some deal making going on. What you do have, you do have a switch here, you’ve got the possibility of a lot more offshore drilling, but it’s way down the road.

The interior department is going to hold several years, that’s a direct quote, several years of environmental studies on those eastern seaboard, outer continental shelf drilling, then they come in with a report after several years, then the environmentalists will challenge it in court and hold it up for more years to come. I’m not going to put a year estimate on it, but I mean, it is way down the road, towards the end of this decade, before, if you ever see a single drop of offshore oil come ashore. [...]

I'm not surprised. Diversion indeed.
     

Finally, a Change I can Believe In

At last, President Obama is about to do something I can approve of:

Obama to announce financing for two nuclear reactors

President Barack Obama will announce on Tuesday plans for the government to help finance the construction of two nuclear reactors -- the first in nearly 30 years, a top US official said.

Obama, who has advocated reducing foreign energy dependency and cutting back on greenhouse gases, will use a 2005 law that authorizes the Energy Department to guarantee loans to projects that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Obama "has long believed that nuclear power should be part of our energy mix," a senior administration told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

[...]

Currently only 20 percent of the country's energy needs are met by nuclear power.

The operation will result in some 3,000 construction jobs, and eventually some 850 permanent jobs, the official said, citing company figures. [...]

Hooray! Nuclear power is safer than it's ever been. 80% of nuclear waste can be recycled and rendered harmless. The rest can be stored safely until technological advances allow us to recycle it as well. It's a genuine "green" answer to the quest for clean energy.

No doubt the Leftist "Watermelons" (green on the outside, red on the inside) will fight this. They may yet sandbag Obama's plans, but on this issue, I'll be firmly rooting for the President.

It was once said that only Nixon could go to China. Well maybe only Obama can build nuclear power plants. We shall see!


Also see:

Small nuclear reactors?

[...] The other day I read (I'm not sure where) that we should build small nuclear reactors instead of big ones. There are real problems with big reactors such earthquakes on the West Coast, the NIMBY syndrome and especially red tape. Whoever wrote that mentioned how we had the Army Corps of Engineers building dams and wondered why we couldn't use the Navy's atomic engineers to run small civilian nuclear reactors such as those which power some of our submarines and other warships. [...]

Read the whole thing. For a variety of reasons, small reactors may be the best answer to the worlds energy needs.
     

NASA's Planned Return to the Moon - Cancelled?

There's been talk about this since Obama won the election, and now it looks like it's about to happen:

Orion Spacecraft; to launch in 2013 2014? Or... Never?

Obama budget would cut NASA moon plan
Companies to take over space taxi flights
NASA to focus on future technologies for Mars, beyond

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Feb 1 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's proposed budget gives NASA a $6 billion 5-year boost but aborts early attempts to return to the moon and turns over space transportation to commercial companies.

The space agency's budget would grow to $19 billion in 2011 under the proposed budget released on Monday, with an emphasis on science and less spent on space exploration.

It "adds $6 billion to NASA's budget over five years and draws upon American ingenuity to enable us to embark on an ambitious 21st Century program of human space exploration," the budget proposal reads.

But the plan ends the Constellation program "which was planning to use an approach similar to the Apollo program to return astronauts back to the Moon 50 years after that program's triumphs."

The budget notes that an independent panel found the moon program was years behind schedule.

"Instead, we are launching a bold new effort that invests in American ingenuity for developing more capable and innovative technologies for future space exploration," it reads.

The new budget, which is subject to change by Congress, also extends operations at the International Space Station past its planned retirement date of 2016, suggesting such potential additions as inflatable space habitats.

Obama's proposal hands over more space operations to the commercial sector, saying it will create thousands of new jobs and hold costs down.

NASA already has spent $9 billion on Constellation and likely would owe millions more to cancel existing contracts. Prime contractors on the Ares rocket program include ATK Launch Systems, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and Boeing Co. [...]

The Constellation program fell behind, because George Bush failed to deliver the funding that he promised for it.

I actually like the idea that they are talking about involving the private sector more in the space program, to create more jobs. They should have done it long ago. But talking about skipping the moon and going on to Mars in nonsense.

Any astronauts sent to Mars would best be trained on lunar missions first, where they would gain experience. Also, the moon is much closer, useful, and doable; Mars is very far away, and I believe manned missions to Mars are even farther away still. Pie in the Sky, at this point. And if we can't even make it back to the moon, then we have no business even trying to go to Mars. The moon is the stepping stone to the rest of the solar system. It would be foolish to skip it.

Besides, if the Constellation program is canceled now, the billions that have already been spent will be wasted. Why not revise the program to include more private sector involvement and investment?

I know some people think manned space exploration is wasteful, yet look at how small NASA's budget is, compared to other government spending:



Unlike entitlement spending, the space program creates jobs, and new technologies that can be adapted to other uses to improve our lives here on Earth.

Opening up our space program to more private sector involvement IS change I could believe in. I just want to see the Constellation program continue, under those changes. Let the seed money the government has already spent on it be invested, not wasted. Let it be used instead to jump start a new partnership with NASA and private sector companies, to streamline the Constellation program and keep it on track, on time, and within it's budget.


Also see:

Will Obama cancel NASA's Moon Mission?

     

Permanantly Marginalize the GOP?

Is it working? If the Dems have their way, it will:

Obama strategy: Marginalize most powerful critics

This is the first of a two-part look at the marginalization of the GOP. Tomorrow: GOP officials fear that the party's image is being defined increasingly by boisterous conservative commentators.

President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying worlds.

With a series of private meetings and public taunts, the White House has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most-listened-to conservative commentator; and now, with a new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News.

Obama aides are using their powerful White House platform, combined with techniques honed in the 2008 campaign, to cast some of the most powerful adversaries as out of the mainstream and their criticism as unworthy of serious discussion.

[...]

The campaign underscores how deeply political the Obama White House is in its daily operations — with a strong focus on redrawing the electoral map and discrediting the personalities and ideas that have powered the conservative movement over the past 20 years.

This determination has manifested itself in small ways: This president has done three times as many fundraisers as President George W. Bush had at this point in his term. And in large ones: Beginning with their contretemps with Limbaugh last winter, Obama’s most important advisers miss few opportunities for public and highly partisan shots at his most influential critics.

It’s too early to tell if the campaign is working, but it’s clearly exacerbating partisan tensions in Washington.

“They won — why don’t they act like it?” said Dana Perino, former White House press secretary to Bush. “The more they fight, the more defensive they look. It’s only been 10 months, and they’re burning bridges in a lot of different places.”

White House officials see things differently. They see an opportunity to corner critics of the president’s policies, especially on health care and financial regulations, and, in the process, further marginalize the Republican Party.

Privately, officials have talked with relish for months of the potential to isolate the GOP as a narrow party of white, Southern conservatives with little appeal to independent-minded voters.

This won’t happen overnight, but a combination of demographics — especially the explosion of a Hispanic population that has been voting for Democrats — the near-extinction of Republicans in the Northeast and the steady rightward drift of the GOP’s grass-roots activists at least makes it a plausible goal.

By design or not, nearly every Republican whom Obama has nominated for a White House job — Ray LaHood for Transportation, Judd Gregg for Commerce and John McHugh for the Army — represents an area Democrats can take back if the sitting Republican is gone. None is from the South.

So is the strategy working? White House officials point to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll to argue the answer is emphatically yes. Only 20 percent of those surveyed identified themselves as Republicans, the lowest in 26 years of asking the question. [...]

Of course, the "Uber" conservatives who want to kick all the "RINOs" out of the party are playing right into the hands of this strategy. I've heard Leftists talk about this during the many years I lived in San Francisco.

They would say that the best way to destroy the Republican party is to first marginalize them. The best way to do that, is to encourage the most shrill and intolerant among the GOP to take the lead, and make them as visible and publicized as possible; make them the "face" of the GOP, to drive away moderate and independent voters.

It's a strategy they've been using for a long time, with the help of the MSM, most of whom are Democrats. And it looks to me like it's definitely working.
     

Is Obama about to sign away our Sovereignty?

It sure sounds like it, if Monckton is right:



Lord Monckton’s warning to America

Lord Christopher Monckton, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, spoke at Bethel University in St. Paul, MN last week on the UN Climate Change treaty scheduled to be signed in Copenhagen in December 2009. He was hosted by the Minnesota Free Market Institute.

Minnesota Majority posted the video of his speech, entitled “Is Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty?” [...]

Obama will sign it. Pretty much any of the Democrat leadership would. Monckton maintains that it will not be reversible, and that we must stop it now. How can we stop it, with a Democrat majority running everything?
     

"Czars" have no place in American politics

This is another bad idea that the Obama Administration has taken from the Bush Administration, and expanded and strengthened. It was bad when Bush did it and it's even worse now:

Obama’s Unconstitutional ‘Czars’

Here’s a question that has been nagging me for months. Are Obama’s ever-growing number of “czars” constitutional? I am not a constitutional scholar, but I have read the document.

[...]

The Republican National Committee’s conservative caucus recently passed a resolution expressing their concern noting that “The U.S. Constitution explicitly states government officers with significant authority (called ‘principal officers’) must be nominated by the President and are subject to a vote of the U.S. Senate.”

Obama’s appointments are clearly “principal officers” though it will be argued that they are only advisors to the office of the President. Clearly, Obama’s appointments are not heads of departments, but they appear to have been granted an unknown degree of influence and control as regards their responsibilities. They function “in the dark.”

[...]

...there is an enormous amount of overlap going on and it involves appointees who give the appearance of being doppelgangers to the existing Secretaries and the huge bureaucracies they oversee. They answer directly to the President, but presumably so do the Secretaries whom we occasionally see gathered around a huge table in cabinet meetings.

If these people who have not been approved by the Senate or occupy positions that have not been “established by law” and are not “heads of departments” exist solely at the pleasure of the President, are we not hip deep in some very muddy waters concerning who is answerable to the Senate or House committees?

I am of the belief that Obama has methodically gone about creating a shadow government of men and women with undefined powers, but who likely have even more influence with the Oval Office than those who hold office under the mandates of the Constitution. [...]

It goes on to say there are 30 or more "Czars" right now, and the number is growing.

George Bush opened the door for this with his "drug Czar" nonsense. I was extremely offended at the time, by the term being used to describe anyone holding a position in our government. But at least Bush only had one. Now we have THIRTY?

Read the whole thing, for details about some of them. It's chilling. Isn't this unconstitutional? And where is it going?
     

NASA's Mission to the Moon may be Scrapped

NASA's Trajectory Unrealistic, Panel Says

NASA doesn't have nearly enough money to meet its goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020 -- and it may be the wrong place to go anyway. That's one of the harsh messages emerging from a sweeping review of NASA's human spaceflight program.

Although it is just an advisory panel, the Human Space Flight Plans Committee could turn the entire space program upside down. Appointed by President Obama and headed by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, the 10-person panel has held a series of marathon meetings in recent weeks to try to Velcro together some kind of plausible strategy for NASA. The agency's trajectory over the next two decades, as well as the fate of thousands of civil servants and private contractors, could be affected by the group's report, due at the end of this month.

[...]

The administration's overall attitude toward human spaceflight remains unclear. The president, both as a candidate and in the White House, has explicitly endorsed sending humans back to the moon, but his decision to create the Augustine committee is a sign that the status quo strategy, which carries the imprimatur of his predecessor, is not long for this Earth. [...]

Much blame is put on George Bush, for not supplying promised funding and allowing the Constellation program to fall seriously behind schedule.

Many Democrats would like to see the manned space program canceled, and use those funds for social programs. Yet look at how small NASA's part of the budget is:



NASA actually creates jobs, and technology innovations that find commercial application to improve life here on Earth as well. Compare NASA's portion of the budget to the huge areas of wasteful government spending on other areas of the budget that are completely out of control.

Read the whole thing for more information about the status of our space program, the various scenarios it's facing, and what may ultimately happen to it.


Also see:

Orion Spacecraft Changes; Budget Problems

Will Obama cancel NASA's Moon Mission?
     

Big Business and Democrats unite for a very profitable Socialist Power-Grab

Pat has already beat me to the things I wanted to post about, so I refer you to his links:

Why Big Pharma and Big Insurance want Obama-style health-care reform:
"No one hates capitalism more than capitalists"

How the Democrats have been steering us towards this for decades:
The Plantation Party has been planning socialized healthcare for over 60 years

More "staged" Town Hall events, with pre-arranged questioners planted in the audience:
Obamugabe's Potemkin townhall

I would love to see the revolt of 1816 repeat itself:
Townhall protesters are not "unAmerican"

The protesters are scoring points, because many people agree with their concerns:
Krauthammer is wrong about the townhall protesters
     

Obama Supporters Can't Take a Joke

Or even a joker, apparently:

Obama Joker Poster Stirs Outrage, Bush Joker Poster Not So Much

Not surprisingly, the Obama Joker Poster reported by NewsBusters Saturday is already drawing some outrage.

According to a television station where the posters have been spotted, "Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson is calling the depiction, politically mean spirited and dangerous." [...]

And when the same thing happens to a Republican President, what happens? Why nothing, of course:

[...] Yet, when Vanity Fair's Politics & Power blog published a somewhat similar visual representation of George W. Bush last July, nobody seemed to complain. In fact, throughout the Bush years, demeaning drawings of the President and Vice President Dick Cheney were quite commonplace.

[...]

In reality, if I wanted to, I could likely produce hundreds of disgusting drawings of Bush, Cheney, and others in their Administration plastered at publications across the fruited plain the last eight years.

That was acceptable commentary and political satire back then.

Now that Obama is in the White House, it's called "mean-spirited and dangerous."

Any questions?

Follow the link to see the depiction of Bush as a Vampire feeding of the statue of liberty. Heck, what about all the assassination "jokes" the Left used to do about Bush?

I guess the people who dish it out most heavily, can't take even a little bit of it shoveled back in their own direction. It's always All Their Way, or Nothing.

How long before the White House appoints an "Opinion Czar", to make sure we only express politically correct opinions?

I'd like to think that remark is over the top, but the "Health Czar" is already looking for "Big Brother" snitches to spy for them.

Maybe the Obama Team needs to learn to tolerate criticism, and even listen to it sometimes, like every other American Administration that has gone before them has had to do.


Related Link:

Poking fun at politicians is our third favorite sport after baseball and football
     

President Obama and the European Press

European Anti-Americanism in The Age Of Obama

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama promised that he would “reboot America’s image” around the world. Indeed, many Americans who voted for Obama believed that his global popularity would somehow reverse the tide of anti-Americanism that so vexed his predecessor. Echoing this sentiment of Obama as saviour of America’s image abroad, presidential advisor David Axelrod recently asserted that “anti-Americanism isn’t cool anymore.”

In Europe, where anti-Americanism was elevated to the status of a religion during the presidency of George W Bush, the “chattering classes” have, by and large, toned down their criticism of the United States since Obama was elected. In general, European media coverage of Obama has been quite favourable and the vehemence of the anti-American rhetoric has been notably more muted than in recent years. But now, five months into the age of Obama, the highly vaunted transatlantic honeymoon may be coming to an end. During the past several weeks, European media have started publishing stories that criticize Obama and once again cast the United States in a negative light. Could this be a harbinger of things to come?

What follows is a brief selection of European news stories that typify what seems to be a general trend toward a return to more negative reporting about America, its people and its president. [...]

It's worth reading the news excerpts, there are links to their sources, too. The European press started to change their tune not long after Obama won the election, but that process appears to be accelerating now. It seems that German media in particular like to quote American leftists, as "proof" that America really is as bad at the German media continually claims it is, and that Obama is really just "Bush Lite".

The European Union has set itself up as the "alternative" to American power. Anti-Americanism is needed as one of the primary justifications for creating and advancing the power of the EU. They aren't likely to stop whipping that horse.

One day though, they may find they really need us, and we won't be there for them, because we will have followed their example and become too weak to lend them the support they want. They may find they can't have their cake and eat it too.
     

Has Iran's Theocracy suffered a Fatal Wound?

Fareed Zakaria certainly makes a good case for it. He maintains that while the regime itself may carry on for a while, it's founding ideology has suffered a fatal blow, dividing the ruling mullahs:

Zakaria: 'Fatal wound' inflicted on Iranian regime's ideology

[...] CNN: As you've seen the situation in Iran develop over the last week, what are your thoughts?

Fareed Zakaria: One of the first things that strikes me is we are watching the fall of Islamic theocracy.

CNN: Do you mean you think the regime will fall?

Zakaria: No, I don't mean the Iranian regime will fall soon. It may -- I certainly hope it will -- but repressive regimes can stick around for a long time. I mean that this is the end of the ideology that lay at the basis of the Iranian regime.

The regime's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, laid out his special interpretation of political Islam in a series of lectures in 1970. In this interpretation of Shia Islam, Islamic jurists had divinely ordained powers to rule as guardians of the society, supreme arbiters not only on matters of morality but politics as well. When Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran, this idea was at its heart. Last week, that ideology suffered a fatal wound.

CNN: How so?

Zakaria: When the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a "divine assessment," he was indicating it was divinely sanctioned. But no one bought it. He was forced to accept the need for an inquiry into the election. The Guardian Council, Iran's supreme constitutional body, met with the candidates and promised to investigate and perhaps recount some votes. Khamenei has subsequently hardened his position but that is now irrelevant. Something very important has been laid bare in Iran today --- legitimacy does not flow from divine authority but from popular support.

CNN: There have been protests in Iran before. What makes this different?

Zakaria: In the past the protests were always the street against the state, and the clerics all sided with the state. When the reformist president, Mohammed Khatami, was in power, he entertained the possibility of siding with the street, but eventually stuck with the establishment. The street and state are at odds again but this time the clerics are divided. Khatami has openly sided with the challenger, Mir Hossein Moussavi, as has the reformist Grand Ayatollah Montazeri. So has Ali Larijani, the speaker of the parliament and a man with strong family connections to the highest levels of the religious hierarchy. Behind the scenes, the former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, now head of the Assembly of Experts, another important constitutional body, is waging a campaign against Ahmadinejad and even the supreme leader himself. If senior clerics dispute Khamenei's divine assessment and argue that the Guardian Council is wrong, it is a death blow to the basic premise behind the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is as if a senior Soviet leader had said in 1980 that Karl Marx was not the right guide to economic policy.

CNN: What should the United States do?

Zakaria: I would say continue what we have been doing. By reaching out to Iran, publicly and repeatedly, President Obama has made it extremely difficult for the Iranian regime to claim that they are battling an aggressive America bent on attacking Iran. In his inaugural address, his New Year greetings, and his Cairo speech, there is a consistent effort to convey respect and friendship for Iranians. That is why Khamenei reacted so angrily to the New Year greeting. It undermined the image of the Great Satan that he routinely paints in his sermons. In his Friday sermon, Khamenei said that the United States, Israel, and especially the United Kingdom were behind the street protests, an accusation that will surely sound ridiculous to most Iranians. The fact that Obama has been cautious in his reaction makes it all the harder for Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to wrap themselves in a nationalist flag. [...]

Zakaria goes on to make some comparisons with the fall of the Soviet Union, and America's "correct" response to that, which he also compares to Obama's current response.

I've had a lot of mixed feeling about these events. Some people claim that Moussavi was a worse dictator in the 1980's than Amadinejad is now. But Iran was also at war with Iraq back then; different times, different circumstances. I also had -and still have- hopes that Moussavi might be Iran's equivalent of Gorbachev, bringing a kind of Glasnost to Iran.

Even now, there seems to be an element of that happening, as Iranians rebel against many long standing assumptions about the way things are supposed to work in Iran's Islamic Theocracy. The Iranian people are tired of broken promises, fake elections and votes that don't matter. A door has been opened now, and it may not be possible to close it again. My prayers are that Iran finds it's glasnost.

This interview touches on many good points in a complex situation. Meanwhile, events in Iran continue to escalate:

Iranian police throwing teargas at protesters in Tehran; Update: I’m ready for martyrdom, says Mousavi; Update: Israeli minister predicts revolution