What is the significance of President Obama’s habit of bowing to foreign royalty? Continuing with our coverage of China’s reaction to president Obama’s Asia tour, Diguo Zhunjiang for China’s state-controlled Global Geographic Times asserts that while this results in a great loss of face for the United States, he warns his readers not to be lulled into a sense of complacency by Obama’s apparent shows of respect.

For China’s Global Geographic Times, Diguo Zhunjiang writes in part:

“I regard this as a performance. If we say that his bow upon meeting the Saudi king was a genuine expression of traditional royal awe by the newly-elected Obama, then we can also say that this time, his bow was a way of getting back at domestic critics. His intentions are quite obvious: he wants a change from the cowboy-style arrogance of his predecessor Bush in order to re-establish the United States as a model of civility, but on a deeper level, repair the damage that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have done to America’s image.

“Regardless of how humble it is in appearance, arrogant strategic thinking is in America’s bones and will continue to be so. So we shouldn’t place any hope in this false smile that has been grafted onto the United States. Rather, we should be more vigilant.”

By Diguo Zhunjiang

Translated By Mark Klingman

November 15, 2009

People’s Republic of China – Global Geographic Times – Original Article (China)

While in Tokyo, at noon on November 14, U.S. President Barack Obama met the Japanese emperor and empress at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. Upon meeting him at the door of the royal residence, the tall Mr. Obama made an almost 90-degree bow and shook the Emperor’s hand. Obama stopped just shy of a deep bow, and shook hands warmly with the emperor and empress, saying, “it’s really an honor to meet you, your majesty.”

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

Of course she is. She’s been governor of a large state. She’s run for vice-president. Of  course Sarah Palin is qualified to be president.

by Rick Moran

The debate over “The Greatest Generation” and whether the way America is today could duplicate their stunning achievements in winning two wars and fighting through a depression while maintaining unity has been hashed and rehashed by far superior minds than mine.

But I just can’t help thinking about it after watching the History Channel this week and their excellent series, “Word War II in HD.”

If you haven’t been able to catch any of it, they will run the entire 10 hours on Saturday starting at 8:00 am central time.

Quite simply, it is the grandest, the most heartbreaking, the most stirring documentary series on World War II ever made. And that includes both “Victory at Sea” and “The World at War.”

TWAW is the gold standard – 32 hours of in-depth analysis of the politics, the strategy, the personalities, and ordeals experienced by civilians during the war. But it is rather soulless. It’s academic approach can be dry, although the images and words of survivors lend an emotionalism outside the rather clinical analysis offered.

“Victory at Sea,” on the other hand, went hard for dramatic effect. With the sonorous voice of Leonard Graves supplying the narration and music by Broadway impresario Richard Rodgers, VAS was a made for TV blockbuster that went right for the heart and kept the viewer entranced with its quick cuts, and snappy pace.

Other documentaries of individual battles (there have been a couple of excellent treatments of D-Day) have suffered from using stock footage that, if you watch enough of these things, you recognize from other projects.

But the History Channel sojourn into the past with “World War II in HD” is everything a good documentary should be; highly original, well scripted, images lining up with narration in an artistic mix, all the while marching forward with a pace that allows the viewer to digest the information and feel what the documentarian is feeling about his subject.

But it is the images that capture the mind and rend the soul. Culled from literally thousands of home movies – many in color – and long lost color combat footage, there is a freshness and even an immediacy about the entire package that has held me absolutely in thrall for the entire run of the series.

The technique is itself, fresh and original. Focusing on several individuals who fought in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters, the survivors take us through everything from the home front, their battle experiences, the horror, mud, blood, guts, and monumental sense of loss when a comrade falls. The narration is accompanied by stunning combat footage – real “You Are There” images of mortar rounds exploding just feet from the camera, horrific sights of the wounded and dead, and always, the total destruction that war leaves in its wake.

A small example of the originality of the series can be found in the way that the narration will, from time to time, fade out slowly and the reading of the script is picked up by the actual survivor. It is an extraordinarily effective technique in that it humanizes the actor reading the narration when, after just a few seconds of the survivor reading, the voice of the actor portraying him is slowly brought back up, while the survivor’s words fade away. This is not a new technique but it it works spectacularly.

The music is obtrusive without overwhelming the action. Indeed, the music is used as a dramatic device to measure the pace of the documentary, mirroring the pace of the excellent narration (Gary Sinise). Beautiful editing builds bridges to each succeeding scene, allowing for seamless segues from clip to clip. A truly masterful job.

A word about the HD: It could be that they really didn’t have anything else to call the project, what with “World War II in Color” already taken. Shooting the program in HD is not the reason to watch it, nor is much of it in HD anyway. The films, as you can imagine, are grainy, and out of focus at times so even with an HD TV, it really doesn’t enhance the viewing experience that much.

All in all, “World War II in HD” is a triumph of documentary film making that should do for World War II what Ken Burns’ “Civil War” did for that conflict; bringing the viewer up close to the war while allowing us to get to know some fascinating characters who increase our understanding of the conflict. (Burns’ “The War” was good but lacked the dramatic punch of the History Channel treatment.)

And as the last scenes of the documentary faded and the survivors, now all near or over 80 years old were left with their memories, it hit me that the hackneyed question about whether America today could pull together and perform such magnificent feats of arms and industry as those that my father’s generation manged, needed another airing.

Strip away our gadgets, our scientific wonders, and all the cultural, economic, and social touchstones that make up America today and ask yourself; How much like them are we? There’s no doubt that we are quite different in some respects. But like Robert Graves, the great essayist of the World War I generation who saw extraordinary love in the sacrifice of soldiers who marched lockstep into the most murderous fire, is there that kind of feeling for America today that would allow us to meet such huge challenges?

By World War II standards, our military is tiny. More than 16,000,000 Americans wore their country’s uniform in the Second World War. But there is little doubt that our current military is every bit as good, soldier for soldier, as those who beat the Nazis and the Japanese. So the question isn’t really a military one. It is a question of character. The real question should be; How similar is the character of today’s American to that of the World War II generation? Are we made of the same stuff? Do we believe in America as passionately as they did – enough to put aside our political differences and unite to see the job through to its conclusion?

I have my doubts. The whole idea of American sovereignty is fast disappearing – or at least the sort of sovereignty the WWII generation believed in. Call it a blind faith if you will, or perhaps you think it small minded and childish to harbor such notions that sometimes, there is only one side to take and that is the side of the country of your birth. It’s called “chauvinism” today and is quite unfashionable. But without it, we might have quit in 1944. Without that absolute certainty that we were in the right felt by the overwhelming majority of Americans whether at the battlefront or the homefront – whether fighting with a gun, or laboring in the factories and fields – I don’t think we could have done it.

There are many who would celebrate this loss of faith as the inevitable result of America “growing up” or worse, the consequence of a government that has betrayed the people time and again whether it was Viet Nam, Watergate, or some other national event that showed our leaders using us, lying to us, or betraying the principles on which the country was founded.

And yet…

We don’t know, do we? As implacable a foe as radical Islamism, it can’t come close to the existential threat of Hitler and his thugs or the economic threat to our emerging commercial empire in the Far East by Japan. And remember, all of this played out with the backdrop of a national depression where unemployment was still over 10% and most people hurting economically.

I want to believe we’d be up to those kinds of threats regardless of about which generation of Americans you want to talk. I don’t think it would matter what era you choose, I still see Americans as comprising a specific, exceptional “race” if you will. There are national characteristics unique to people who live here that are found nowhere else. We simply couldn’t have achieved what we have achieved, overcome what we’ve been able to overcome (self-inflicted or otherwise) without some spark deep within us that makes us “Americans.”

The conventional answer might be that we wouldn’t stand a chance fighting a long war like WWII today. But one thing is for sure; if I were a foreign power, I wouldn’t make the mistake that the Kaiser made in 1917, Tojo and Hitler made in 1941, or Saddam made in 1991.

And that is underestimate the United States of America.

Rick Moran is Associate Editor of The American Thinker and Chicago Editor of Pajamas Media. His personal blog is Right Wing Nuthouse.

Ed is urging his readers to melt the phones and get their Senators to vote against this. I’m sorry to say, this is entirely wrong headed thinking. (Though I did call both of my Senators today to remind them of my opposition to the bill itself in its current form.)

Whether they be Republicans or moderate Democrats, I would urge a full throated yes vote tomorrow. To vote no on this action is to say, “No. We are, as you have suggested, nothing more than the Party of No. We have no ideas to present. We have no alternate suggestions. We just don’t want to talk about it.”

You have plenty of ideas and many valid objections to the bill as presented, and an open debate on the floor of the upper chamber is exactly where this should play out in full view of the voters, the press and the public. You should be pointing out that the proposed methods for paying for this plan are mostly fiction. You should be pointing out the across the board taxes which will be imposed. You should be pointing out the highly dubious constitutional basis of any mandate by the federal government forcing citizens to purchase a product from a private provider. You should be pointing out the damaging effect on a major private industry (along with all the jobs that entails) of any so called “public option.”

These are all valid, solid selling points for your argument. You need to make these points like adults and then move toward starting over with a new, leaner bill that accomplishes what so many Americans want in health insurance reform without all of the damaging side effects and costs. But if you vote no on even opening debate, none of this happens. You are simply the party of no. There will be time over the course of this debate to continue digging into the bill’s particulars and bringing these items to the attention of the public. If you vote no, you should be ashamed of yourselves and just get out of the way.

I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon-burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou.

Note, especially, the medium-well-done. Sarah’s confident that those few liberals who still eat meat eat it rare, medium rare, or (for the snootiest among them) bleu. Moving on, from page 133:

I also trimmed the state food budget by keeping our home’s freezer stocked with wild seafood we caught ourselves, as well as organic protein sources hunted by friends and family. We kept an interesting variety of food that way. If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?

Italics are Sarah’s. You have to love the gratuitous swipe at that most liberal of all liberals, the vegan. I imagine Sarah’s spotted them driving their Prius’s on her not infrequent forays into urban areas outside of Alaska.

She goes on to explain the challenges of hunting while serving as governor: Hollywood pressure to ban guns, halt hunting, and save wildlife. For Sarah, doing the governor’s job while hunting and fighting off liberals and raising kids and “cooking dinner and washing dishes” (page 108) was no obstacle.

What Sarah is espousing is a proud Conservative version of the liberal foodie. From page 134:

People outside of Alaska are often clueless about our reliance on natural food sources. (You know you’re in Alaska when at least twice a year your kitchen doubles as a meat-processing plant.) They don’t use common sense in considering why our biologists need responsible tools for abundant game management. But as the ninety-year-old Alaska Native leader Sydney Hunnington told Todd, “Nowadays, common sense is an endangered species.”

So wonderfully clear and clean and natural. Can’t we just all agree with her on that? Of course we can! But I’m left wondering, has she ever seen a CAFO? And what, exactly, does she believe “responsible tools for abundant game management” are? No further word on that.

For the record, I’m an omnivore with retrovore tendencies. I ponder the difference between animal rights and animal welfare. And I, too, eat meat.

Via this week’s delectable doubleX Gabfest.

BONUS VIDEO: Fans gone mad…

I have frequently written on patriotism, “supporting the troops,” the cost of war as measured in “bullets and dollars” and, most important, on the cost of war as measured by the sweat, blood, tears and lives of our valiant troops. This, while Americans back home are not asked to sacrifice in any meaningful manner, and are even encouraged to “go shopping.”

My words, however, are woefully inadequate when compared to a powerful, heart-rending article that appears today in my hometown newspaper.

The column, titled “Military draft would end America’s two-faced patriotism,” in my opinion, eloquently expresses sentiments and emotions that so many of us have felt so strongly over the past eight years, but have not been willing or able to express.

I will share a couple of them here.

The author, Joe James Sawyer, who was in the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) 1st Special Forces from 1963 to 1966, writes:

The cost of asymmetric warfare is evident in the growing numbers of young Americans coming home with horrific injuries inflicted by improvised explosive devices. The lives of those wounded soldiers are shattered — they come home missing limbs, blinded, brain damaged.

There is no end in sight. For all these years, we have carried on a national debate about the necessity of these wars and the terrible cost they carry. That dialogue has been, in the main, dishonest and hypocritical.

[In all the wars we have fought in our history] [A]ll Americans shared the pain when young lives were lost or forever shattered in America’s battlefields. The rich and the poor, black, white, red, yellow and brown — all of us — knew the grief, the loss and the suffering of Vietnam.
.
.
That is no longer true and has not been for far too many years.

He continues:

There are generations of American men and women who have no sense of service, fidelity or sacrifice. There are far too many among us who believe patriotism is to be found in waving flags and wearing yellow ribbons.

We are sending the same men and women to theaters of combat over and over, without relent. This simply cannot continue. It harms our country to do so. It cheapens any claim to patriotism by Americans who wave flags and profess to honor “our” troops while their children will never know what it means to serve the flag of the United States. Just as their parents have never known.

After claiming that others will do “the sacrifice of dying” while “the children of privileged Americans…are sheltered from any threat of having to defend their country” and while enjoying the right “to rant about the need to fight, to display their flag-waving courage and continue their feast unabated,” Sawyer points to the need to again have a universal draft: “If war is to be waged, we all must contribute; we all must sacrifice. Without that, we truly become hollow men.”

Sawyer concludes:

The time must come again when all Americans fight our wars, shoulder to shoulder on the field of combat. Only three things are required to make this come true: a sense of fairness, a sense of duty and a sense of honor.

Regardless of what your position is on the military draft, I urge you to read all of Sawyer’s moving words here.

Like the would-be VP but for much longer and in a far different way, Oprah has been a phenomenon, rising from the depths of poverty to become an American icon with empathy, intelligence and enthusiasm, an Everywoman in constant battles to control her emotional life as well as her weight, educate herself and her audiences with a book club, overcome all obstacles in a world still dominated by men.

Her embrace of Barack Obama last year was the climax of a career that went well beyond race, giving a rhetorically gifted but emotionally standoffish candidate just the touch of humanity needed to connect with her constituency, to say nothing of the $3 million and more she raised for him.

Trading her celebrity at 55 to become a mostly behind-the-scenes Rupert Murdoch, Oprah leaves more than two decades of what has been called “a talk show as group therapy session” for millions

MORE.

– “Actually, the GOP has been the leader in starting good environmental programs in this country.”

Maybe, if you go all the way back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt. More recently, the GOP is the party of global warming denialism and opposition to environmental legislation generally.

– “Just as we were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the ’60s without very much help from our colleagues across the aisle. They love to engage in revisionist history.”

If it’s revisionist history you want, you’ll get it whenever Foxx opens her mouth. She’s certainly old enough to remember that it was a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who was largely (but not solely) responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Furthermore, Republicans were broadly against civil rights, and in fact it was to a great extent their opposition to civil rights that flipped the South from the Democrats, who had long held it, ushering in a new regional and demographic alignment in American politics and paving the way for Republican electoral success over the next few decades, pretty much up to the present. It was only in 2008, with a hugely popular presidential candidate, that the Democrats were able to break through in parts of the South — notably Virginia and North Carolina — that were for the most part solidly Republican. Even with Obama, though, the South remains a Republican bastion, and democrats continue to have a problem winning over white men.

Did some Republicans support civil rights in the ’60s? Of course. A lot of them did — and a lot from parts of the country that are now solidly Democratic, now that the GOP has moved to far to the right. But it’s crazy to think that they did it on their own, or that they were largely responsible for it, or that Democrats not only had nothing to do with it but were actively against it. That last one is insulting, not just to President Johnson but to the many Democrats who were on the front lines of the struggle, and to those who stood with their president to change America for the better.

But, then, this is Virginia Foxx we’re talking about. We shouldn’t be at all surprised by her misrepresentation of historical fact.

(Cross-posted from The Reaction.)

Yours truly also predicted this entire economic collapse at least 5 years ago, but no one took me seriously. Prophets are never appreciated or heeded in their own times. However, I am not pleased that I was correct in my original assessment of Mr. Geithner 7 months ago because the entire country has suffered due to his incompetence, Wall Street Bias, and overall cluelessness towards the needs of Main Street and the vast majority of Americans.

Most politicians are quick to blame others (sometimes correctly) for political and economic problems but they never want to admit they were incorrect in any of their decisions or that they helped make those problems. Unfortunately hindsight is 20-20 and no one is clairvoyant except Madame Olga on the West Side of Cleveland. We all make mistakes – yours truly included – and it is better to quickly fess up publicly to those errors in judgment, change course and move on.

Too many politicians think an admission of error is a sign of weakness so they continue to proudly deny, blame others, obfuscate the real facts, and follow various stupid and discredited policies so as to not have to admit they made any mistakes. This applies to most of our elected leaders regardless of their political or economic positions. I wrote back on 3/19/09:

Many in the general public want some genuine honesty from their politicians. Some voters will always punish our leaders for admitting mistakes because they themselves are unwilling to admit their private errors either. However, most people understand all too well our human imperfections. But we expect people to learn from their errors and move in another direction after taking full ownership of their mistakes.

President Obama would not fare poorly in 2010 or 2012 if he promptly admitted numerous errors he has made while in office – while avoiding admitting any more debatable or obvious mistakes made in U.S. history to which he was not a party. He could then promptly change his focus and move on with renewed public support. That would really distinguish him from other politicians and gain him public respect. There has been sufficient time now to fully judge Secretary Geithner. The President can now point to the worsening general economy and public anger over unregulated massive bailouts of Wall Street to justify his decision to part ways with his chief financial adviser.

I can list a number of policy and tactical mistakes the President has made since taking office, and so can most TMV readers. One major issue today is with those who aare key advisors to the President in making public policy with respect to our country’s financial and economic future. There are many independent and highly capable individuals in the U.S. without any direct ties to Wall Street or prior Administrations who could competently lead the U.S. Treasury Department. Secretary Timothy Geithner is not one of them.

The 2010 Midterm elections are less than a year a way because of Constitutionally-fixed federal elections every 2 years. Mr. Geithner is eminently disposable for the good of the country and for President Obama’s political survival. So Mr. President, please admit some of your mistakes (most people will likely forgive you), and throw Secretary Geithner under the bus – or at least ease him out the rear doors to some cushy Wall Street position where he can do no more harm to the nation.

Marc Pascal – the ever ranting sage in Phoenix, AZ who wishes everyone a pleasant weekend.

Can President Obama persuade China not to be so dependent on growth, particularly trade-dependent growth? Likening Beijing’s obsession with growth to a Chinese version of the ‘Berlin Wall,’ Feng Mengyun of China’s state-run Global Geographic Times expresses his hope that President Obama can do something to talk the Beijing leadership into turning over a new leaf.

With some surprising criticism of the regime, Feng Mengyun writes for the Global Geographic Times in part:

“Prior to thirty years ago, the old Chinese model caused tremendous suffering. But an even graver sin would have been to stick with the system that caused such suffering.

“While [Chinese] exports stand at $1.7 trillion, domestic sales are only $860 billion. China’s trade deficit with the U.S. is $300 billion. This seems like a huge trade surplus, not to mention a contradiction. More difficult to fathom is how much foreign exports are responsible for China’s rise. Today, even with 20 percent of the world’s doors closed to trade, China unceasingly opposes trade protection and domestic unemployment is rising by the million. Is China capable of dealing with this?

“The unpredictable issue is China itself. Because rising growth has become China’s ‘Berlin Wall.’

“Obama’s ‘mutually beneficial’ thinking has already received widespread support in liberal countries, which is why the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize went to the first Black U.S. president. Since he arranged to visit China before going to Norway to collect his Prize, I hope while visiting China, Obama declares: ‘Mr. Hu Jintao, tear down this wall!’

By Feng Mengyun [???]

Translated by Jimmy Chow

November 16, 2009

People’s Republic of China – Global Geographic Times – Original Article (China)

U.S. President Barack Obama, “Ambassador of Peace,” has finally set foot in Beijing. Ahead of his visit, North Korea fired missiles, there was a sea battle between North and South Korea, and Somali pirates took 28 Chinese sailors hostage. What do these events tell Chinese who their enemies and friends are!

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

Senator Evan Bayh (D-Indiana), writing in CNN, says he plans to oppose raising the debt ceiling what the issue comes up for a vote next month. He’s unwilling to raise this ceiling, he writes, unless “Congress adopts a credible process to balance our books and eliminate the red ink” — and he wants to form a “debt commission” to start the process.

A debt commission will force members of Congress to take — or reject — a single gulp of politically difficult medicine to treat the fiscal problems that are ailing our country. Those who choose not to take that medicine would be forced to explain to their constituents why a $12 trillion national debt doesn’t make them queasy.

Unfortunately, members of Congress won’t have to explain anything to their constituents. Partisans and liberals are already taking virtual pens to paper to attack him:

There are, however, some issues to consider. For example, it was none other than Evan Bayh who recently voted to “reform” the estate tax, cutting taxes for the extraordinarily rich, at a cost of $750 billion over the next decade. To pay for it, he recommended … nothing. The costs would simply all be added to the deficit. Given this, I hope he’ll forgive my skepticism about his credibility on the subject of fiscal responsibility.

And just like that, Bayh’s entire suggestion is chucked out the window. Steve Benen goes on with the usual spiel about how its really more the Republicans fault anyway — an increasingly tired excuse, from my perspective, for the lack of fiscal discipline by The Powers That Be.

Now, I’m just an average non-economist, but here’s how I see this: It does not matter who did what in the past.

Long-term deficits drive up interest rates for consumers, raise prices of goods and services, and weaken our country’s financial competitiveness and security.

The bigger our deficits, the fewer resources we have to make critical investments in energy, education, health care and tax relief for small businesses and middle-class families.

The bigger our deficits, the more we must borrow from foreign creditors like China, allowing governments with competing interests to influence our economic and trade policies in ways that run counter to our national interest.

Elementary school tactics like finger-pointing do nothing to forestall these problems, and partisan sniping merely increases the unproductive polarization. Yet people are indulging themselves at every opportunity — no doubt because it makes great red meat to feed the ongoing frenzy.

And, of course, it’s much easier to point and blame than fix problems.

Listen: I don’t care anymore that George W. Bush cooked the Iraq War funding books. I don’t care anymore which party enabled the Fannie Mae cluster and pushed funding for mortgages people couldn’t afford. I don’t care anymore whether there was a “D” or an “R” trailing behind anybody’s name… whether it was last month, or last year, or during my grandfathers’ days.

We’re in the midst of a massive national belt-tightening — a process both necessary and long-overdue. From the citizen who borrowed against tomorrow because s/he “had to have” that wide-screen television, to the lawmaker who “had to bring home the bacon”, we’ve been the very epitome of excess borrowing and consumerism. It’s brought us right to our knees, and we’re going to stay there until our leaders find some fortitude.

Folks are going to have to suck it up and do without a pet project or cause for while — no matter how worthy or near-and-dear it may be.

I’m sorry about that, but this utter failure to control our spending is eventually going to crash all those projects anyway — and if the people currently in charge are unable to get past their own ideological childishness, then I want them out of there, donkey or elephant.

Period.

Cathleen Rogers, the Democratic Elections Commissioner in Hamilton County stated that they discovered a problem with their voting machines the week prior to the election and that the “virus” was fixed by a Technical Support representative from Dominion, the manufacturer. The Dominion/Sequoia Voting Systems representative “reprogrammed” their machines in time for them to use in the Nov. 3rd Special Election. None of the machines (from the same manufacturer) used in the other counties within the 23rd district were looked at nor were they recertified after the “reprogramming” that occurred in Hamilton County.

This, of course, is setting tongues a’wagging across the blogosphere, even though the full hand count of the affected precincts, along with the mandatory 3% sample hand count in the rest of the areas and the nearly complete absentee ballot count still shows the race to be out of Doug Hoffman’s reach, though closer than initially reported. In fact, the New York State Board of Elections already conducted a review of the somewhat dubious new machines and found that they performed in a “very successful fashion.”

Still, some such as our friend Sammy at Yid with Lid are asking if this doesn’t taint the results of the entire affair. There should be questions being raised here, but not about shadowy conspiracies to put the wrong candidate in office. The Help America Vote Act was a great idea, and it’s accomplished some admirable things in various parts of the country, but in other areas its reach was too wide. We’ve been using lever machines to vote in New York for as long as I can remember,and you know what? We’ve had one of the lowest rates of “disputed” elections in the nation. They’re old, yes, but they work like champions.

The problem is, they sit fairly high off the ground and the machines are big, so even fully able but shorter voters can have trouble reaching the top levers. (In our precinct they still employ the high tech solution of having a plastic milk crate in the booth for vertically challenged voters to stand on.) And they do provide a challenge to people in wheelchairs. So some areas are now moving to these computerized machines, leading to the situation described above. One of our silly state legislators asked last year, “Couldn’t we just cut the legs off of one of them at each polling station and put it closer to the ground?” Such horse and buggy thinking was, of course, laughed off the floor.

We could not, however, leave the specter of scandal at a few malfunctioning machines, and as Sammy points out, Doug Hoffman has decided to blame ACORN (who else?) for his loss.

Doug Hoffman, the Conservative candidate in this election says that he was forced to concede after having been given erroneous election results on Nov. 3rd, in particular from Oswego County. Oswego County’s election night results were off by over 1,000 votes. Hoffman claims that the “chaos” on which Oswego County chairs blame the errors and “inspectors who read numbers incorrectly when phoning in results… sounds like a tactic right from the ACORN playbook.”

This, of course, has the usual collection of whack-a-doos running around like their hair’s on fire and their pants are catching. What better way to explain the loss than a combination of the sinister forces of ACORN and the evil labor unions “mischief?” Strangely enough, when I checked ACORN’s web site for a list of their many offices in NY23, the only one in New York I could find was in Brooklyn. Suspecting some sort of error on the web site, I called down there to get the addresses of their North Country Centers for Electoral Corruption. The confused woman who answered the phone had apparently never heard of Watertown and asked if I needed directions on which bus to take to get to 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn. I hung up at that point.

And really… doesn’t ACORN tend to congregate in the big urban centers? Do you really think they have a lot of outreach efforts in places like Inlet in Hamilton County? (During the fall and winter their burgeoning population of 400 drops to around 150 as the summer vacationers leave town.) Let’s be clear here… ACORN has a ton of problems and I’m glad that Congress is cutting off their funding until if/when they can get their act together. But we’re talking Big Pine Country here. Most of these people still think of acorns as things that fall from trees and get loaded into slingshots by kids.

But I suppose all of this was inevitable. It’s become a mainstay of American politics for the losers to question the validity of any close elections. This is a way to undermine the legitimacy of the winner in the eyes of the public and we’ve been seeing it more and more since 2000. Even the election of Barack Obama, who finally won one of the fist fairly clear victories with an electoral majority since before Bill Clinton’s time, is now being claimed to have been stolen by ACORN and others by more than half of registered Republicans.

We’ll eventually get a final (and hopefully clean) count of all the votes in NY23 when the state election board certifies it. Of course, by then the popular legends will drown out any facts and figures and Bill Owens’ (likely very short) term in office will have this story as an asterisk on it in the history books.

With high official unemployment and unofficial under-employment and uncounted unemployed rates of 10.2% and 18% respectively, we have to create many new jobs – and fast. Tax cuts only help those individuals, households and businesses that have taxable income. Prior history indicates they will not have the desired multiplier effect on the economy when most will be funneled towards paying down massive private debts or into new savings due to overall low consumer confidence and an economy that is still mired in a protracted jobless weak recovery.

OTHER OPTIONS IN ADDITION TO A NIP

The one sector that can use money the fastest and most effectively is small business. Companies under $10 million in gross annual revenues and with fewer than 100 employees historically account for nearly half of our nation’s economic and job growth. They will continue to be the primary engines for our country’s future growth and global competitiveness. Large corporations and public bureaucracies have proven to be some of the slowest and lest effective entities in using public stimulus money. This nation must concentrate on creating new and expanding existing smaller enterprises to get us out of this deep recession.

SBA guaranteed loans are at a standstill because banks across the nation have tightened their lending standards so as to render the minimal SBA loan program to smaller companies essentially non-existent. This dire situation will not ameliorate until the Federal Government directly channels money for grants and loans to small businesses through local SBA development corporations and its many local assistance offices. It must also get retired executives in SCORE to play a greater role in assessing grant and loan applications, and mentoring the recipient small businesses. This possible nationwide program will be discussed in further detail in another of my future TMV postings.

Proposed tax credits to employers to hire more people is an idea just waiting to be abused and buried in massive and confusing paperwork. Counting jobs created or saved by the original March 2009 Stimulus bill has become a silly effort in fantasy accounting. The same would occur with tax credits which are expensive and circuitous means of accomplishing what targeted direct federal spending can do much faster and more efficiently. We need a simple, fast, transparent, and fiscally honest way of generating new jobs.

HOW WOULD NIP WORK

Many unemployed and underemployed people can only develop new skills in different industries by working on the job or by going back to school. Most of them also still need to support families and pay normal living expenses at the same time. The only way we can accomplish this nationwide workforce retraining for the future is through a National Internship Program (NIP) funded directly by the Federal Government. Here’s how it would work.

A public-private national Internet jobs bank would be created for individuals to connect with internships in public entities and private companies locally and across the country. A simple nationwide job form would be used plus all applicants would also be able to attach their resumes. All individuals who sign up for the NIP would have to appear in person to a state employment assistance office to verify their right to work in the U.S. No intern could be judged upon their credit history, age, sex, race, or other impermissible factors. However, current school status and dependent children would have to be factors with respect to their available hours. Criminal backgrounds would only be factors with respect to limiting those interns to certain fields.

On the same Internet NIP clearinghouse, governmental entities and private companies would list all their open internship positions with reasonable prerequisites. They could also scan all submitted applications and resumes of individuals to fill their Internship openings. Every intern would still have to compete for all open positions through personal interviews and their public applications. However the temporary internships would turn more upon their overall backgrounds, personal presentations, and future potential. Internships could be terminated at will by any employer but because all direct financial considerations would be eliminated, employers would tend to avoid terminations based upon economic factors.

PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP

Since there are only 1.4 million people in the Federal civilian workforce, most of the new internship positions would be created at the State, city or local level, or in private industry. The hiring public and private entities would determine what the NIP would pay their interns, ranging from $9 to $14 per hour. The hourly rate would depend upon the required skills, education, and experience for the opening, the particular talents and attributes of the intern, and finally the cost of living and unemployment compensation rate in their states and communities. Employers could also request up to $2,500 from the NIP to assist any intern to relocate to a new city in order to best match individual potential with appropriate internship opportunities. Interns could also be supplied with public transit passes to get to and from employment.

The NIP would provide cost-free workers to all public and private employers who decided they needed the extra help or those that determined they will need additional personnel in the future but currently cannot afford to train them. An intern would work for at least 30 days but not more than 2 years at any location. Interns would work from 20 to 40 hours a week, the work schedule being flexible with the intern’s school and family commitments. Any intern could be hired permanently on a full-time basis at any time by any employer with whom they were placed.

Some interns could work 2 part-time positions, and be assigned to several different public entities and private companies over a 2-year period. Interns would make important networking connections by working instead of receiving unemployment checks and food stamps. Their direct job experiences would greatly enhance their chances of obtaining future meaningful employment after the economy fully recovers. Some other interns might work part-time and start a small business simultaneously that would become their principle livelihood after the nation fully exits this deep recession. Paid interns would have all their student loan payments deferred without incurring interest charges until they were permanently hired.

TOTAL PUBLIC COST

If one million interns were paid between $9 and $14 per hour working full time, the total cost to the Federal Budget would run around $30 billion annually. If 10 million interns were employed under this proposed NIP, the total cost over 2 years would run around $600 billion. Compared to the 2009 Stimulus Bill, the Wall Street Banking Bailouts, the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Proposed Healthcare Reforms, this would be a modest federal expenditure to directly help 10 million people and their families. Furthermore it would directly create new economic activity across the country much faster than any other job or economic stimulus proposals.

Private companies would not be able obtain interns in excess of 10% of their total workforce. Enterprises under $1 million in annual gross revenues could get up to 4 Interns at public expense, possibly with some minimum total payroll being required. All interns would not be able to work at any company or for any of its affiliates if they were employed there anytime during the prior 2 years, nor could they be assigned to most start-up ventures. The principle paperwork for managing this program would be that a supervisor or human resource director at each public and private entity would have to verify the hours worked by each Intern to authorize the weekly payments by NIP.

QUICK, MEASURABLE AND PERMANENT NATIONWIDE BENEFITS

This proposed National Internship Program would be the most effective, efficient, and sensible approach to comprehensively address the serious systemic workforce problems facing this nation. As designed, the private sector would play a major role in determining where many of the interns would be assigned.

The simplicity, efficiency, directness, transparency, and nationwide public-private benefits of a NIP might result in prompt Congressional approval, particularly with the 2010 Midterm elections less than a year away. It could become the largest publicly-funded program that would rapidly reduce unemployment by directly assisting the private sector. It would also precede and compliment many other needed long-term stimulus and infrastructure projects.

Marc Pascal

Rep. Foxx is only the most recent Republican to push what is at best a distortion of the truth about which political party is responsible for getting civil rights laws like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Congress. TP’s Matt Corley, author of this piece, debunks the myth once again:

To support the claim that Republicans were actually the architects of civil rights, conservatives often point out that a “higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported the civil-rights bill.” But this ignores the “distinct split between Northern and Southern politicians” on the issue. When this is taken into account, the facts show that “in both the North and the South, Democrats supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act at a higher rate than the Republicans.”

The first of those two links in the above paragraph goes to a 2003 post by John Fonte at National Review Online. Here are the money grafs (emphasis is mine):

The civil-rights bill of 1964 was enacted with strong bipartisan and bi-ideological (conservative and liberal) support. But, the credit for the civil-rights victory has gone almost exclusively to liberals and Democrats, particularly to Senator Hubert Humphrey (D, Minn.) in Congress, and to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. However, much of the hard work of advancing the legislation was done by congressional Republicans — conservative stalwarts including Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, Charles Halleck of Indiana, William McCulloch of Ohio, Robert Griffin of Michigan, Robert Taft Jr. of Ohio, Clarence Brown of Ohio, Roman Hruska of Nebraska, and moderates such as Thomas Kuchel of California, Kenneth Keating of New York, and Clark MacGregor of Minnesota. All of these Republicans served as major leaders of the pro-civil-rights coalition either as floor managers or captains for different sections of the bill.

Although the Democrats controlled both houses of the Congress at the time, a much-higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported the civil-rights bill. For example, in the House, Republicans voted for civil rights by a margin of 79 percent to 21 percent, 136-35. The Democrats’ margin was 153-91 or 63 percent to 37 percent.

Anything jump out at you about the states these lawmakers come from?

Yeah. That’s right. They are all Northern states.

Now let’s jump over to the second link in that paragraph I quoted from Think Progress. That link goes to a June 1999 piece, originally published in the Washington Times, called “Voting and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” (Emphasis is mine.)

… On the surface it would indeed appear that the Republicans, and not the Democrats as commonly assumed, were the champions of civil rights in the 1960s.

However, a slightly more careful analysis of the Civil Rights Act voting record shows a distinct split between Northern and Southern politicians. Among the southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia), Senate Democrats voted 1-21 against the bill (5%) while Republicans voted 0-1 (0%). In the House, southern Democrats voted 7-87 (7%) while southern Republicans voted 0-10 (0%). Among the remaining states, Democrats voted 145-9 in favor of the bill (94%) while Republicans voted 138-24 for the bill (85%). In both the North and the South, Democrats supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act at a higher rate than the Republicans.

The marriage within the Democratic Party of the northern liberals and the southern Dixiecrats had always been a strange one based more upon a common enemy (the Republican Party) than upon common ideals. In fact, when the 1948 Democratic platform came out strongly in favor of civil rights, delegates from 13 southern states held their own convention shortly after the adjournment of the Democratic National Convention and nominated Strom Thurmond to run for president on their own “States Rights Democrats” ticket.

While Mr. Davis is clearly correct in his assertion that Southern Democrats were staunch foes of civil rights in the 1960s, Southern Republicans, though fewer in number, were equally adamant in their opposition to civil rights legislation.

The modern Democratic Party owes its current character far more to the Northern liberals than to the Dixiecrats. If the old Southern Democrats are to be labeled as racist, then Al Gore and Bill Clinton are Southern Democrats in name only as their defense of civil rights places them solidly among the Northern Democrats and not with the Dixiecrats of old.

In the two decades following the 1960s, the now-notorious “Southern Strategy” begun by Richard Nixon and continued by Ronald Reagan led to an exodus of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party. Those were the Democrats who voted against the emancipating legislation of the civil rights era: the racist, white supremacist Dixiecrat Democrats — not the ones who form the Democratic Party today.

Now read this poll:

Losing NY-23 candidate Doug Hoffman became the latest in an increasingly long line of conservative politicians to blame his problems on ACORN yesterday despite the complete lack of evidence the organization played any role in his defeat.

The Republican base is with him though. PPP’s newest national survey finds that a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately. Clearly the ACORN card really is an effective one to play with the voters who will decide whether Hoffman gets to be the Republican nominee in a possible repeat bid in 2010.

Belief in the ACORN conspiracy theory is even higher among GOP partisans than the birther one, which only 42% of Republicans expressed agreement with on our national survey in September.

The ACORN line has been largely promoted by talk radio hosts, then picked up by politicians — yet another sign of the talk radio political culture at work.

Once upon a time, Republican politicians exploited the far right and conservative talk show hosts who could be counted on to get far right members of the party’s political base to the polls to vote Republican. Now, increasingly, the tail is wagging the dog in terms of some prevalent beliefs, talking points and some matters of party strategy. It’s yet another sign of the GOP’s weakening center, which is also reflects the country’s sagging center in an era of intensifying partisan and ideological polarization — as well as a sign of today’s less assertive elected Republican party leadership.

Some Democrats still charged after 2000 that George W. Bush lost the election. But the party leadership in general didn’t question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court’s election (remember Al Gore’s 2000 concession speech?) and the de-delegitmizing George Bush was not the key opposition theme during his presidency But — as in the case of centrists, independents and moderates — Republicans are not a monolithic block, as this poll shows. This poll seems to represent the Glenn Beck fan portion of the party which will pick up the ball and run with anything that can be used to argue that Obama is not a legitimate President. But here in lies the danger for the GOP.

Writes My DD’s Jonathan Singer:

Overall, the American people roundly reject the notion that ACORN somehow stuffed enough ballots — at least 9,500,000 of them — to somehow steal the election from John McCain and give it to Barack Obama. (This theory also compels the conclusion that ACORN somehow forged every single pre-election poll, including even those from Fox News (.pdf), the trend of which tracked almost exactly with the ultimate election results.) Indeed, Americans say no to this theory by a 62 percent to 26 percent margin — including a 72 percent to 18 percent margin among Independents.

If the Republicans want to continue to live in their own world with their own “facts”, they can certainly go ahead and do that. But it’s not so easy to woo new voters to one’s cause when those being wooed think those doing the wooing have only an attenuated relationship with reality.

Her story represents the stories that I dread will become absolutely the norm and her story represents the stories that other women who are unhappy with the new guideline recommendations about breast cancer screening dread.  That, under the new recommendations, a 30 year old woman will either not perform self-breast examinations which otherwise would give her something with which she could go to a doctor and ask for more screening, or that if she does ignore the new guidelines (which argue against self-examination: “[the task force] discouraged doctors from teaching breast self-examination” – yes, you read that right) and go ahead and do self exams, that when they then go to their doctors and ask for the screening, the doctor will require some ridiculous threshold before he or she will approve or recommend the screening. And that even then, the woman’s insurance won’t cover it since the guidelines say that it’s imperfect and not recommended for women under 50.

That passivity will be approved and routine.  That women will not trust themselves to know their body, that they will not bother because the system does not want to bother – because the system is so concerned about the harm of anxiety and over-biopsying.

I’ve read the guidelines, the reports and the very carefully worded explanations written by people I trust and admire.

But I am trusting my instinct on this and I am telling you – disapproving of self breast-examination and suggesting that women will have to walk in with such a threshold of concern for what they’re feeling about their body absolutely makes me irate at the thought of what a set back this is for women – for humans, for patients – to be in control of their health.

And the utter disregard for the human toll these illnesses take on everyone around the one diagnosed with the breast cancer.

Anxiety sucks. I’ve been there done that for years with shadows on films and MRIs that required additional testing.  And while I have a “family history” we don’t have the gene – and a very small percentage of women do have the gene mutations currently known to be responsible for a very small percentage of breast cancer.  My Gale score isn’t high enough to get me into most clinical trials.

From the New York Times:

While many women do not think a screening test can be harmful, medical experts say the risks are real. A test can trigger unnecessary further tests, like biopsies, that can create extreme anxiety. And mammograms can find cancers that grow so slowly that they never would be noticed in a woman’s lifetime, resulting in unnecessary treatment.

Over all, the report says, the modest benefit of mammograms — reducing the breast cancer death rate by 15 percent — must be weighed against the harms.

Screening in the 40-49 decade results in a 15% reduction in fatalities? I’ll take that over reducing the harm of anxiety and overbiopsying anyday.

With such longevity, Sen. Robert Byrd embodies almost a century of American history that transformed a nation of backwaters dotted by big cities into a metropolitan sprawl with access to 24/7 knowledge about the whole world.

Byrd, a self-made man if there ever was one, started as a gas jockey and butcher in West Virginia during World War II, who discovered a taste and talent for politics by joining the Ku Klux Klan at the age of 24 and rising to the position of Exalted Cyclops.

His worldview then is reflected in a 1944 letter: “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side… Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”

Jump-cut to May 2008, and here is Sen. Robert Byrd endorsing an African-American candidate as “a shining young statesman, who possesses the personal temperament and courage necessary to extricate our country from this costly misadventure in Iraq, and to lead our nation at this challenging time in history. Barack Obama is a noble-hearted patriot and humble Christian, and he has my full faith and support.”

In his journey from benighted to Obama, Byrd’s finest hour came on the eve of the Iraq invasion in 2002.

Read the rest of this entry.

Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant

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