I never read the famous Carter “malaise speech” but now that our role in the world is under debate again it has a renewed currency. Here is the link to the full speech and I must say it is amazing how little progress we’ve made in the past 30 years. Regardless of what you think about Carter’s effectiveness as President, it is becoming increasingly clear that he — along with Eisenhower — tried to give warnings about fundamental dangers to our lifestyle but were heeded little.
What is going to be different about the next 30 years, or will my children read Obama and ask why things didn’t change?
*As a side note, I think that Andrew Bacevich has a very good understanding about the roots of our country’s problems and ties in both liberal and conservative concerns into a very cohesive package. I encourage everyone to watch at least one interview or read one of his books.
The big news in California is that fires continue to burn — and could burn for days. (On a personal note, a show I was supposed to do yesterday was cancelled due to the fires but it would have been iffy getting to the location anyway since some roads near L.A. were closed). Cagle Cartoons owner Daryl Cagle lives in one of the areas impacted by the fires. In this Guest Voice he notes one of the news media’s seeming obsessions.
Celebrity Fires Consume the Media
by Daryl Cagle
A mandatory evacuation remains in effect for my neighborhood in Montecito after the devastating “Tea Fire” this week. My son and I stayed at my house longer than we should have, filling the cars with keepsakes and watering the place down with a garden hose until the howling winds driving the smoke and embers our way become too much for us.
The fire was churning on all the hills behind my house in wide, glowing swaths — not like the usual thin line of flame we’re used to seeing at the leading edge of a fire. Being in the path of the fire, the wind blew the smoke, soot and embers directly at us making it difficult to see more than a few feet at times, and sometimes clearing to reveal a brightening, eerie, orange glow as the fire drew closer. I was sure the fire was only a couple of houses away when we fled. Firemen were directing traffic and calling on people to evacuate; I didn’t see them doing any fire fighting when we left. The fire was moving too fast for fire fighting and all they could do was focus on people.
I found my way past police barricades the next morning to see that my house survived, along with all the houses on my street. I live adjacent to Westmont College, which lost a half dozen buildings, and the next street over from mine, Westmont Road, lost a number of homes. The hills all around are barren and charred. The last report I saw estimated 150 homes lost.
I know how my neighbors feel. I was a college student, living with my mother in the same spot, when the 1977 Sycamore Canyon fire destroyed our home and about 250 others. Both fires started in the exact, same location and burned much the same area.
I also get a sense of deja vu from the media coverage of the fire. Reports from around the world have focused on celebrities who live in town. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, I think the demographics of the change that we started out discussing, which is the great rise in non-whites it’s not a center right country anymore in my opinion. But I think it’s a centrist country with tendencies towards frustration. And back in the 1970s I remember Pat Caddell, who was Jimmy Carter’s pollster, was polling on some of this stuff.
And we sort of semi-collaborated a bit because we thought that affected both parties because the radical center so to speak was angry in a way that neither side could count on. I think that’ll develop again. I don’t want to say radical center. But I think it’s going to be a frustrated centrism that can lurch either left or right, outdated terms, but it’s probably going to be very unhappy if anybody says, “We can reform and privatize Social Security.” And the voter then says, “Yeah, but you bailed out the rich.” End of debate.
Does he see an emerging majority?
I would say it’s the emerging non-majority. In other words, you can’t count on more than a plurality because party attachment isn’t going to run deep enough, which means you can’t possibly build a generational supremacy. I mean, after 1968 Republicans held the White House for 20 of the next 24 years.
And I believe if Bill Clinton hadn’t had a zipper problem, the Democrats would have had it for three terms. But at this point I think what you’ve got is a troubled enough set of circumstances for the United States, economically and globally, that people in the White House are not going to be able to make enough of a stalwart rallying impression to set up another supremacy like you got out of 1860 with the Civil War or 1896 or 1932. I think they’re gone. I think the roots of political parties are more tenuous now. And nobody will have that sort of supremacy.
Phillips goes on to say that the two parties are a duopoly, “a double monopoly that no longer has meaningful ideas but has entrenched interests.” And, he says, “we have socialism coming in a big way. But it’s socialism for the rich.”
At the moment, the nation of Venezuela, governed [or ruled] by Bush’s arch-enemy Hugo Chavez, is one of America’s top suppliers of crude oil. So what do Venezuelans think an Obama presidency would be like?
“Obama will look for a way to liberate his economy from the tyranny of oil, even at the cost of his own automotive and energy industries. He will entrust supply only to time-tested friends like Canada and Mexico, which will be detrimental to only one Latin American country [Venezuela]. As for foreign trade: It was Clinton [a Democrat] who won final approval of NAFTA, so Columbia still has many possibilities. [Colombia is waiting for Washington to approve a similar agreement with them].”
The nail-biting on this planet over the 2008 U.S. presidential election is quite a spectacle. And the question on almost everyone’s lips is this: Will Americans actually do what all the opinion polls say they will - elect a Black man to the U.S. presidency? Clearly - the ‘Bradley Effect’ has once and for all become a part of global electoral lore.
Three days from the vote, Barack Obama is the favorite. The polls, which have never been so numerous, are all in agreement. Analysts in the United States and policy makers around the world expect to see the Black candidate enter the White House on January 20th. A revolution!
But beware! Nothing is done until the Americans have voted. … The bigger question is whether the opinion polls are telling the truth. This competition has no prior equivalent. How many Americans who would normally vote Democratic, when they enter the voting booth, will choose McCain because of Obama’s skin color?”
“A friend of mine ordered a shirt through Amazon supporting John McCain. The shirt came, he put it on and he went to work. Nothing could have prepared him for the spectacle that followed: colleagues and friends alike looked at him with frowns of incomprehension and disgust. It was so intolerable that by mid-afternoon, he decided to change so as not to get into any more trouble in an atmosphere that is a mostly artistic, in other words - leftist. … It was precisely this moral arrogance on the left, when coupled with an obvious lack of sense of humor, which made me a person of the right.”
Much to the surprise of some - not all the world is pulling for Obama.
Perhaps the most pro-McCain country is Poland.
A case in point is this article by Leszek Szymowski of Poland’s WProust, which considers the possibility of an Obama win - as the headline says, ‘A Real Catastrophe.’
“Rapture over the candidacy and the person of Obama should surprise no one: from time immemorial, the majority of media have rooted for Democratic Party candidates. This was the case for “media’s sweethearts” John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and, of course, Bill Clinton. … The same media claque adored Al Gore (who famously said in Latin America ‘a pity I don’t know Latin, then we could talk.’ The trouble is, this time the Democrat might actually win. And that would be a real catastrophe.”
In the area of foreign policy, it’s even worse; Obama is against the war in Iraq and the war on terror in general. This is a bad sign. Putting an end to the war on terror means that Washington is de-facto abandoning its role as a “global cop.” This threatens to give free reign to rogue regimes, such as Iran and North Korea. One can only hope that the voters will come to their senses and elect the candidate who may look worse in a debate, but who won’t destroy what so many generations have been building for so long.
Has America, ‘abandoned all of its prior principles to a pragmatic state centralism based on tax increases’?
According to Alexandre Adler of French Newspaper Le Figaro, not only has the Reagan model been effectively abandoned and the embrace of state-capitalism begun, the military phase of the war against terrorism is over - with one notable exception:
“America is concluding the military phase of the war against terrorism, and is choosing a voluntarist economic model that could lead to a formidable strategic revolution: fewer ‘police operations,’ a radical redefinition of priorities brought on by a new financial austerity, but contradictorily, within Pakistani confines, perhaps the outline of a real war against a genuine army in Pakistan, in an alliance with India and Israel, and who knows what the result would be of a new Iran which is closer to Washington.”
September 19th, 2008 By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
LATER: Bob Herbert writing in the NYTimes, “Rushing to execute Mr. Davis on Tuesday makes no sense at all.”
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With a scant four days left before the scheduled execution of Troy Anthony Davis, Jimmy Carter & Bob Barr have called on Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Parole to reverse its decision to deny clemency:
The Carter Center released a letter Friday urging the state Board of Pardons and Parole to reverse its decision to deny clemency. The letter said flaws in Davis’ conviction and appeals warrant a closer look.
Barr wrote the board Wednesday saying he is “a strong believer in the death penalty as an appropriate and just punishment” but said the proper level of fairness and accuracy required for the ultimate punishment has not been met in Davis’ case.
With so many questions surrounding the case and Georgia intent on going through with the execution, is it really any wonder people see a conspiracy at work?
