Links from weblogs of varying viewpoints 4 U. CAUTION: This is only for those who believe reading differing ideas won’t give you brain cancer.
Bad Environmental News: Carbon emissions are rising faster than expected. The Booman Tribune has some thoughts.
So What’s Press Bigwig Rupert Murdoch’s Game? Is he planning to move left in 2008?
Can Democratic Promises To Take A Moderate Position Be Believed? Booker Rising’s Shay doesn’t think so:
We will see whether all of this moderate talk will come to fruition. I predict that it will not happen, just as it didn’t happen with the GOP. Parties love partisanship, and they must play to their base. The Democratic Party’s liberal and leftist wings will chomp at the bit to pass various socialist measures – a category in which most of the initiatives listed above fall under. Count on it.
And, indeed that is the problem: parties love partisanship and partisans like it most of all — which is why they are called partisans. Right now both sides seem to be extending small olive branches. Let’s see how long it takes before they break the branches over the other’s heads…
The GOP Didn’t Fare Well Among Black Voters despite ongoing efforts by RNC Chair Ken Mehlman and Dick Polman predicts (in a post that must be read IN FULL) that it should expect less support in the future. An excerpt:
In the end, the exit polls show that only 11 percent of blacks voted this year for Republican congressional candidates, the usual share. Nor will his successor do any better merely by running black candidates. Nothing short of a fundamental shift in the GOP’s governing credo will really work, but, as the exit polls also demonstrate, the party more than ever is rooted in the Old Confederacy (the only region that voted GOP this year). As the Republicans regroup, the last thing they’ll want to do is risk their base. Black voters can expect nothing more than cosmetics for the foreseeable future.
Another View Of The Election by Citizen Smash, the Indepundit. A bit of it:
The election was an expression of no-confidence in the Bush Administration and the Republicans in Congress. There is no other way to spin it. The slow progress in the war hasn’t helped, but much of the blame can be traced back to the government’s lackluster response after Katrina. Of course, the President doesn’t control the weather, and most of the critical failures happened at the state and local level, but perception is everything in politics.
– On the other hand, voters seem to be weary: of partisanship, of corruption, of the war, and of excuses. Those who remain in power would be wise to keep their hands clean and start working together for solutions, rather than constantly bickering and arguing about who is to blame. In Sacramento, Schwarzenegger appears to have embraced this. Will the same spirit take hold in Washington?
Read the whole post.
Guess What The Third Most Dangerous Job In China Is? It’s this.
And Speaking Of China, Another Crisis Is Brewing: The Government (which helps export a zillion dollars with of Chinese-made goods to the U.S.)is cracking down on foreign companies.
So What Should Donald Rumsfeld Do Now That He Has Been Fired Resigned? Some specific ideas HERE (complete with photos).
A Big Church Related Battle Is Raging In Washington DC — over Christians parking illegally.
Are We About To Experience A “Return Of The Realists” in foreign policy with findings of the Iraq study group chaired by former Secretary of State Jim Baker and Robert Gates’ appointment of Defense Secretary? And is that a good thing? The Glittering Eye looks at this issue:
As I understand it realism in international relations means the understanding that states are self-interested, power-seeking rational actors. Contemporary foreign policy realists point to thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes as their antecedents. It’s considered a pessimistic, some would say cynical, point of view.
Is that the stamp of Mssrs. Baker and Gates? Or are they Hamiltonian “realists� which I’d characterize as a form of optimism whose adherents believe that international relations can be managed to the benefit of U. S. economic interests? I can’t view a return to that sort of realism with unmixed joy. I think it’s at least arguable that sort of realism contributed directly to 9/11 in the form of support for local powers to produce stability (i.e. “support of oppressive regimes�), positioning huge military bases all over the region when that failed (i.e. “occupation of Muslim lands�), and intervening in the Middle Eastern states in the Gulf War (“it’s all about the oil!�). The realist policy that contained Saddam Hussein through a combination of the no-fly zone in Iraqi Kurdistan and troops stationed in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was cited by Usama bin Laden as a specific reason for the attack on 9/11.
Indeed: read the whole post. It could also be that American foreign policy will evolve. The foreign policy flop of the Carter years (policies generally to the left) and the foreign policy flop of the Bush II years (a neocon policy that many neocons are now saying WOULD have worked if it had been competently carried out — which sounds more like a rationalization than an objective analysis) have both proven undesirable. So will the U.S. try a yet different approach?
Another Consequence Of The Democratic Victory: It’s unlikely that station ownership rules will be relaxed.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.