On “global warming,” Obama becomes Bush 44

Remember the preening the Democrats did (including the current president) when George W. Bush “unsigned” the Kyoto Agreement on “greenhouse gases”? Recall how Barack Obama insisted “climate change” as akin to terrorism as a threat?

Well, never mind (Agence France Presse via Syndey Morning Herald; h/ts to WUWT and SDA):

At last Thursday’s G8 dinner the US President, Barack Obama, confirmed Washington would not join an updated Kyoto Protocol . . .

What was the president’s full name again? Barack Who’s-same Obama, yes?

Cross-posted to Bearing Drift

Jeff Frederick for State Senate

I have added a badge to the hallowed right-hand column: Jeff Frederick for the 36th State Senate District. I added his name to the list for several reasons.

First, Frederick represented much of the Prince William piece of the 36th for six years as the 52nd District Delegate from 2004 to 2009. During those years he showed himself an able legislator – opposing the HB3202 fiasco and any other tax increases that came down the pike. As he was doing so, he was also getting elected and re-elected in a district very friendly to Democrats (in 2005, he was the only Republican on the ballot to carry his district – yes, even Leslie Byrne won the 52nd). It is that kind of cross-over appeal and history that is desperately needed in the 36th this fall.

Secondly, and I know this will start the critics flooding my comment section in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . but as Party Chairman, Jeff Frederick made it clear in that all-important summer of 2008 that any attempt to bring back the tax-hikes of HB3202 would not be acceptable in the party. Without Frederick’s stand, the GOP doesn’t begin its recovery from its tax-addicted days, and it most certainly doesn’t have the sweep of 2009. Whatever Frederick’s mistakes as Party Chairman, it was he that established the party once again as the place for opponents of tax increases in this spendthrift time.

I would ask all looking at this race to remember what it is: an election for the 36th State Senate District. Jeff Frederick’s record as a Delegate – and his policy stand as Party Chair – make clear he is the Republican with the best chance to win over independents and Democrats in November, and more importantly, he is the best candidate period to represent the 36th.

I am a witness (again)

Whatever Lebron James may have said about taking his talents to South Beach, it was on the shores of Lake Michigan where said talents will be most remembered – for now.

After stinking up the joint for nearly 45 game minutes (with a lot of help from Dwyane Wade), James led to the team to wipe out a 12-point gap in the final 3:14.  Wade himself indirectly credited James with getting him off the schnide (ESPN) just before the four-point play which reshaped the game. From there, James added a three, a jumper, and suffocating defense to send the Bulls golfing.

I saw James carry the Cavs’ to the NBA Finals in 2007 by himself, but that was just an offensive show. This was a dominating performance on both sides of the ball.

Back in ’07, I picked the Cavs to beat the Spurs, which was a laughable thing to say, looking back. I won’t be so tempted this time. I will say this: the Mavs-Heat Finals could (and probably will) be one for the ages . . .

. . . and people wonder why I follow the NBA.

Cross-posted to Bearing Drift

Chris Christie on cap-and-trade: “It’s a failure”

New Jersey was the state where regional cap-and-trade was born, and thanks to Chris Christie, it may be the state where it dies.

Christie “announced his support for repealing the state’s cap-and-trade law and withdrawing from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a 10-state regional compact in the Northeast that implements a cap-and-trade energy tax scheme from Maine to Maryland” (WUWT).

Christie minced no words about the Rube Goldberg scheme: “It’s a failure.”

What gives this more political impact is the fact that Lisa Jackson – currently Obama’s EPA chief – was the principal author of this fiasco when she worked for John Corzine – whom Christie bounced in 2009.

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon

About last night . . .

No bones about it, last night’s New York result was a defeat for the Republicans - period. Had Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-gadfly  Jack Davis won 20% of the vote – or even 15% – perhaps some solace could have been taken for the GOP. Instead, he only won 9%, meaning just about every would-be Republican voters was gleaned from him. Tellingly, he did worst in the home county of the Democrat who won – Kathy Hochul. Hochul took 48% of the vote as it is; the idea that over 80% of Davis’ votes would have gone to Republican Jane Corwin is nonsense. The Republicans lost. Full stop.

That said, Hochul and the Democrats revealed their strategy – scare everyone over 50 to death on entitlements – with more than a year to go until Election Day 2012. That gives the GOP time to make adjustments, and as any NBA or NFL fan will tell you, adjustments decide the game. Whether the Republicans will make the correct adjustments is another issue. We shall see.

Moreover, we’ve already been down this road with upstate New York. Lest we forget, the Democrats took New York’s 23rd from the GOP in 2009. In fact, the Dems kept NY-20 in 2010, and we saw what that meant to the rest of the country.

Finally, it should be noted that this district in western New York had been electing pro-life Republicans to Congress for over 40 years (Jack Kemp, Bill Paxon, Tom Reynolds, and Chris Lee). Corwin, by contrast, was not a pro-lifer. In this district, that almost certainly hurt her.

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon

Why the 1967 borders are not safe for Israel (Part 2)

This post in the series dealing with recent Israeli history (here’s the Intro and Part 1) details the events of the 1960s, a critical – and perhaps the critical – decade for examining the region. It was in this decade that the Israeli-American alliance was forged and the “occupied territories” became occupied.

The decade began with a new American President: John F. Kennedy, and a sea-change in American attitude toward Israel. One of the great ironies of history: the president who first exposed the Nazi concentration camps to America (Eisenhower) became the most anti-Israel president in the 20th century, while his successor – the son of an Irish pol who ruined his career as an isolationist in the 1930s (Kennedy) – made Israel an American ally and arms recipient. In the view of the Kennedy Administration, Israel was in peril and had to be defended from its Arab enemies.

Fortunately for Washington and Tel Aviv, said enemies were in complete turmoil. Gamal Abdel Nasser, tried to expand his United Arab Republic beyond Egypt and Syria to include all Arabs. In 1961, a military coup in Syria ripped it out of the UAR and left Nasser with just Egypt. While Nasser contined to pine for Arab unity, Syria suffered a series of weak regimes and violent turmoil until the Ba’ath Party took over in 1963. A similar Ba’athist putsch in Iraq led to a three-way effort at Arab unity in Cairo . . . which fell apart. Iraq’s Ba’athists were bounced from power by the end of the year. More instability plagued both countries.

Nasser, meanwhile, grew ever closer to the Soviets, as did the various Syrian and Iraqi regimes. Only Jordan and Lebanon remained close to the West and less than beligerent towards Israel.

Then came 1967. By this point, Syria’s Ba’athists were in radical Marxist mode; Jordan’s King Hussein was under internal pressure for not being anti-Israeli enough; Iraq was now firmly in Nasser’s corner again; the Egyptian/UAR leader decided to make his move.

First, he tossed out UN peacekeepers who had been in Sinai since Israel withdrew from it in 1956. Then he blocked Israeli shipping from the Tiran Straits – the only way Israel could avoid the Suez Canal. Israel had repeatedly stated such a move was an act of war. That didn’t seem to bother Nasser, who on May 27 announced his plans for “the destruction of Israel” (BBC). Three days later, King Hussein solved his internal problems by signing a defense treaty with Nasser, one in which Nasser would control both Egyptian and Jordanian forces in case of war. On June 1, Israel’s ruling Alignment Party invited its opponents into a national unity government. The only question left was who would hit first.

As it turned out, it was Israel, and less than a week later (hence the term Six Day War), Nasser had lost the Sinai again, but Jordan also lost the West Bank and Syria – having come into the war on Egypt’s side, lost the Golan Heights. It was yet another dramatic military victory for Israel, except that unline 1956, the U.S. would not pressure them to give the gains back. Israel’s smashing victory with American arms over the Soviet-armed Egypt and Syria was considered a huge embarrassment to Moscow and a feather in Washington’s cap.

The Arab regimes went back into turmoil. Nasser resigned his post at the end of the war, only to reverse course the next day. Hussein dealt with more internal unrest, including the Palestinian Liberation Organization led by one Yassir Arafat. Syria’s Ba’athist dictatorship continued to rule, but not in a very stable manner.

Meanwhile, America held an election in 1968. While voters here focused on the Vietnam War and civil rights, the Middle East noted the leading figures were John Kennedy’s younger brother and Dwight Esienhower’s Vice President. Robert Kennedy was taken by a Palestinian assassin on the one-year-anniversary of the beginning of the Six Day war, while Richard Nixon was narrowly elected in November, leading everyone to wonder if he would follow in Ike’s footsteps.

Nasser would never be able to find out, he died in 1970 while trying to mediate a bloody civil war in Jordan between Hussein and Arafat’s group. That same year, Syria – who had intervened in Jordan on Arafat’s behalf – had another coup, this one led by Hafez al-Assad, who had apparently opposed the intervention in the first place.

So, much like in 1960, the Arab nations that would have wanted to eliminate Israel were felled by military defeats and internal turmoil. Unlike 1960, Israel now had large buffer zones and an American ally. It would take less than five years for both to become far less than met the eye, but that’s for Part 3.

Cross-posted to Bearing Drift

Bonds markets take aim at . . . Belgium?

The European currency debt crisis was supposedly limited to the outer nations of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain (hence the term PIIGS). The rest of the EU has been scrambling to fund three of them (Portugal, Ireland, and Greece) with bailout money to prevent defaults. It doesn’t appear to be working as far as Greece is concerned (Reuters via Financial Post).

Most of the report here is a partial rehash of previous Greek melodrama – largely because Greece remains unable to depreciate its currency (it’s stuck with the euro). Waaaaaaay back when I was in graduate school, one of the discussions regarding monetary and fiscal policy was the question of which one called the tune. Could the central bank force the government to cut spending? Or could deficits and debt force the central bank to print money de facto? FWIW, I have always believed the latter, and I further extended that to believe that in the case of multinational currencies, the central bank would be forced to devalue to appease the country most in needed of it (or, as I put it: “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link”).

Of course, Germany wants no part of a euro devaluation. Hence the hijinx that have ensued for the last few years. Trouble is, one of their traditional “hard money” allies just caught the eye of worried bond raters (same link. emphasis added):

EU leaders declared they had adopted a comprehensive package to resolve the euro zone debt crisis in March, but that has not prevented contagion spreading, with Portugal requiring a bailout and markets piling pressure on Greece, Spain, Italy and Belgium.

Contagion spread in bond markets on Monday after S&P lowered Italy’s outlook to negative over concerns about its deficit and Fitch threatened Belgium with a rating cut, saying the lack of a government was undermining its budget consolidation efforts.

Belgium, due to a populace badly divided by language and cultural issues, hasn’t had a Cabinet in over thirteen months (its last parliamentary election was in June of 2010). This is the first time has been included in the wobbly list.

That Belgium’s capital (Brussels) is both the EU headquarters and the short hand for the EU bureaucracy makes this a hilarious irony for euroskeptics (such as yours truly) everywhere. More importantly, though, it makes clear that bondholders and raters will grow less confident about the entire eurozone until the European Central Bank admits to reality, prints a bunch of euros, and tells the Germans that inflation is back.

Good luck with that.

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon

Tim Pawlenty shrinks as a candidate (in a good way)

We all have our ideal presidential candidates; I’m no different. For most of us, it’s someone who won’t run or doesn’t exist, leaving us to watch in sorrow as the fellows who do run move further and further from the ideal.

Tim Pawlenty, by contrast, is moving towards my ideal; never saw that coming (NR – The Corner):

The truth about federal energy subsidies, including federal subsidies for ethanol, is that they have to be phased out. We need to do it gradually. We need to do it fairly. But we need to do it.

One of the chief euphemisms MSM uses for a politician moving leftward is “growth.”How may times, dear redaer, have you heard about a conservative who “grows” in office by moving left?

By that standard, Pawlenty – an official candidate for less than a day, is “shrinking” – and that’s a very good thing.

Cross-posted to VV

Vladimir Putin wants his old job back. Will Medvedev give it to him?

The latest whispers are that Vladimir Putin wants to be president of Russia again, and will run for the job next year (The Australian). That could theoretically pit him against his chosen successor, current President Dmitri Medvedev.

Most assume Medvedev will stand aside for Putin in 2012, despite apparent recent conflicts bewteen the two. I’m not so sure.

Putin’s political vehicle is the United Russia Party – whose entire platform is essentially devotion to him and his wishes. Putin steered the UR nomination Medvedev’s way in 2008, all but ensuring his election. However, Medvedev himself was not a UR member, but an independent (think NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg – who was an independent but ran as the Republican nominee in 2009). Moreover, UR was only one of several parties that backed Medvedev – although it was clearly the most important given Putin’s popularity among the Russian people (how much of this is genuine and how much is generated by Putin’s shenanigans with press freedom and opposition politicians depends largely upon whom one asks).

Looking ahead to 2012, Medvedev has already been nominated for re-election by Right Cause, one of the three leading “liberal” parties in Russia. Now, I should have probably put “leading” in quotes, too, because neither RC nor their rivals (Yabloko and United Civil Front) are mired in single-digits in popular support.

What makes RC different from its rivals is the fellow being groomed to be its leader – multi-billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov. Prokhorov is already talking about cutting taxes and trying to replace the Communists as the lead opposition to UR (Moscow Times). Given that elections for Russia’s Parliament are in less than six months, that’s a tall order, but if Prokhorov can even come close, RC would be a serious player in the 2012 elections.

So, it is conceivable that Medvedev could run for re-election, against Putin, next year. That said, we won’t know whether it’s possible until December.

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon

Why the 1967 borders are not safe for Israel (Part 1)

Israel in its current form was born in 1948; her first war with her Arab neighbors began almost immediately; myths about that war came soon after.

Most Americans know that the United States was the first nation to grant diplomatic recognition to Israel. From there, the myth goes that Israel, all on its own with little but American cheerleading, smacked around their Arab enemies and humiliated them.

That’s not quite how it happened. For starters, there was the role of the other superpower of the time – the Soviet Union. Joe Stalin saw Harry Truman grant recognition to the Israelis . . . and followed suit two days later. In fact, his minions in Czechoslovakia actually contributed arms to the Zionist cause.

This shouldn’t really surprise. Israel’s leader were of a heavily socialist bent, and whether the Isreali people were native Jews to the Palestinian mandate, those who had reached it before World War II, or those who came after the war, few of them witnessed the painful experience of Soviet occupation of eastern Europe. As for Stalin, this was when he was still hoping all of Europe would thank the Red Army for defeating the Nazis and choose the Communist way.

The point is this: the Arab states (Jordan, Egpyt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia and North Yemen) were going up against a state backed by both superpowers, with one providing weapons. One other factor to keep in mind: two of the Arab states in question were just decolonized (Syria and Lebanon), while three (Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq) were moving away from satellite states of Britain. This was as new to them as it was to Israel.

Finally, we all know that Israel won the war, not only because it survived, but also because it expanded into what are now the “1967″ borders. Since Israel won, the Arab lost, right?

Well, that depends on which Arabs you mean. See, not a single Arab state lost any territory in the 1948-49 war. In fact, Jordan and Egypt actually gained territory in the war’s aftermath: Egypt took the Gaza Strip, and Jordan took the West Bank. Arab “Palestine” ceased to exist, and Israel now had two hostile neighbors inside the old British mandate.

So while Israel certainly won, it would be hard to call Egypt and Jordan losers. Nor could Israel call itself secure with the 1949 armistice. It had the unusual support of both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., something that just about everyone in the region knew wouldn’t last.

It didn’t. When Egypt’s monarchy fell in 1952, the nationalist president Gamal Abder Nasser quickly sought to play the superpowers against each other. Meanwhile, the concern about the Communists getting footholds in the Middle East led American and British diplomats to build alliances with Jordan, Iraq, and the Saudis (among others), three of the nations that had put men into battle against Israel, whose position began to look increasingly problematic from a geopolitical perspective.

In time, though, Nasser ensured that Israel did have friends. Britain was aghast at Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, while France was alarmed at Nasser’s support for the independence movement in Algeria (which France considered part of itself). Both were looking take action against Nasser, while Israel was watching its Suez shipping constantly harrassed by Egypt. In 1951, monarchist Egypt was condemned for this by the United Nations Security Council (Soviets included), but Nasser had ensured that the Soviets take no such position by 1956.

So, for various reasons, Israel, Britain, and France all wanted to take action against Egypt, although the British and French would austensibly intervene as neutrals merely to “protect” the Suez Canal from turmoil. On the ground, it all went as planned: Israel quickly took the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and an Anglo-French force controlled the canal. Meanwhile, the other Arab states largely sat 1956 out militarily, although they raised holy h*ll diplomatically.

It was the reaction of the superpowers that revealed a world changed. Nikita Krushchev all but declared Israel a colonialist throwback and threatened Soviet military intervention if the UK, France, and Israel didn’t withdraw. More quietly, Eisenhower leaned hard on the UK and France (including refusing to back fill a Saudi oil embargo of them until they withdrew from Egypt), and established himself as the only American president to ever oppose Israel in wartime.

The trouble for Israel was this: Ike was only the second American president she had seen, and it was clear he was not fond of her.

In the aftermath of the second war, Israel was very isolated and alone. Forced by the UN in 1957 to go back to the 1949 boundaries, she had no reason to believe that her Arab neighbors would allow her to remain in them for a month, let alone for a decade. as the world had united against her.

As it was, Israel’s would be conquerers were beset with internal turmoil and (in Egypt’s case) intra-Arab ambition. Iraq succumbed to a military coup in 1958; Syria dissolved itself into Egypt under the United Arab Republic, which freaked out Jordan and Lebanon - in part because both had pro-Nasser factions within.

Yet for Israel in 1960, all of this just seemed a temporary argument over who would lead the Arab charge against them – and even worse, Nasser was winning.

At this point, Israel had fought two wars, and while she had militarily won both, none of her enemies suffered actaul losses. Jordan had gained the West Bank; Egypt had first picked up Gaza and then Syria, while Lebanon and Iraq had lost no territory. Meanwhile, internal turmoil meant a more hostile regime in Iraq, while Egypt’s star was rising in the Middle East. Add to this Soviet support for the Arabs and American suspicion of them (to the point where Eisenhower essentially endorsed Nasser’s Arab nationalism as the way of the future in 1958), and Israel looked to be in a very, very precarious position.

If anything, the 1950s should explain why Israelis are so worried today. The decade showed them that allies are fleeting (they lost both superpowers in less than five years), military success can be taken away by political pressure, and that was was in their best interest meant nothing to the rest of the world. The boundaries that now are considered so certain and permanent seemed highly fluid and likely to change – and not to Israel’s favor – just over fifty years ago.

As we’ll see in Part 2, the 1960′s led to dramatic change in the region, and led to the myths that many attach to it today.

Cross-posted to Bearing Drift