A HISTORY LESSON STILL UNLEARNED
by Amir Taheri (an Iranian writer based in Europe)
Gulf News
April 18, 2007
With war drums beating louder, senior military commanders in Tehran miss few opportunities to warn the government against plunging the country into an unequal fight with the United States and its allies.
One such warning came last month from the Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRCG) General Rahim Safavi.
In an unusually frank assessment of the situation, he told an audience of guardsmen that the country lacked the necessary means to defend its extensive land and sea borders. He insisted that everything be done to avoid an "unhappy episode".
In Tehran's military circles, the phrase "unhappy episode" is a codeword for the only direct military clash that has so far taken place between the Islamic Republic and the United States.
The clash came on April 18, 1988, exactly 19 years ago today.
At the time, the Islamic Republic censored all news of the event so that most Iranians do not even know that it happened at all. For their part, the Americans also "managed" the flow of information about the clash to prevent its strategic importance from becoming apparent at the time.
Nevertheless, the clash between the navy of the Islamic Republic and a US naval task force led by the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, was subsequently classed as one of the five naval battles of historic importance that established American sup-remacy at sea.
Clash
The background to the clash was rather complicated.
At the time, the Islamic Republic was at war against Iraq under Saddam Hussain, rejecting United Nations pleas for a ceasefire.
Towards the end of 1987, the Islamic Republic started firing on Kuwaiti oil tankers passing through the Gulf on the grounds that Arab oil money fuelled Saddam's war machine. Weeks of efforts by the UN, the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), and the nonaligned bloc to persuade Tehran to stop attacking Kuwaiti tankers produced no results.
It was then that President Ronald Reagan decided to put the Kuwaiti tankers under the US flag and escort them through the waterway.
The Islamic Republic retaliated by mining some of the shipping lanes in the waterway. On April 14, 1988, the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck a mine and was seriously damaged. It was towed to Dubai where it arrived two days later.
The following day experts established that the mine had been made in Iran and placed by the IRCG.
Within hours, President Ronald Reagan ordered the US task force to retaliate. The IRCG responded by firing missiles at US vessels without inflicting any harm.
The US task force seized the opportunity to unleash its superior firepower to virtually break the Iranian navy.
The Americans lost two men, the crew of a helicopter that came down in an accident far from the battle.
The IRCG lost 87 men and over 300 wounded. Later, the Islamic Republic filed a suit against the US at the International Court at The Hague claiming losses amounting to several billion dollars. (The court rejected Tehran's suit in November 2003.)
The battle's effect in Tehran was immediate.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then the leader of the Islamic Republic, was initially inclined to retaliate by ordering Hezbollah to carry out suicide attacks against American and other Western interests.
However, he was persuaded by Hashemi Rafsanjani, then the ayatollah's closest aide, to take a deep breath and maintain a low profile. There was to be no retaliation. The remaining vessels of the Iranian navy were ordered to clear their movements with the US task force in advance to avoid any misunderstanding.
The battle
The battle, nicknamed by the US "Operation Praying Mantis", was followed in July by a tragic accident when the USS Vincennes shot down an Iran Air jetliner by mistake, killing all 290 passengers and crew.
Khomeini interpreted the accident as a deliberate escalation by the US and feared that his regime was in danger. Rafsanjani and other advisers used that fear to persuade the ayatollah to end the war with Iraq, something he had adamantly refused for eight years.
A broken Khomeini appeared on TV to announce that he was "drinking the chalice of poison" by accepting a UN-ordered ceasefire. He was no longer going to Karbala on his way to Jerusalem.
In his memoirs, Rafsanjani makes it clear that without the disastrous naval battle and the downing of the Iran Air jet, Khomeini would not have agreed to end a war that had already claimed a million Iranian and Iraqi lives.
The reason was that Khomeini was leader of a regime that lacked adequate mechanisms for self-restraint. He was the driver of a vehicle with no clutch or reverse-gear, let alone a brake, and thus was doomed to speed ahead until it hit something hard.
Interestingly, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used a similar image recently when he committed the regime to a no-compromise position on the nuclear issue. "This train has no reverse-gear and no brakes," he said.
Khomeini could have ended the war with Iraq years earlier, obtaining decent terms for Iran. He did not because the extremist nature of his regime made it impossible to even contemplate the fact that realism, prudence and compromise are key elements of good leadership.
Khomeini could not have ended the war. He needed Reagan to do it for him. If the Islamic Republic is a train without a reverse-gear and brakes, it does not need a conductor. It could race ahead until it hits something hard on its way.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Monday, March 10, 2008
Couch Potato Entitlement
this is practically unbelivable, but true. and since the govt. has now taken it upon itself to legislate how we watch TV, and pay out taxpayer dollars to encourage us to do it, I'm going to get at least $40 worth of my tax dollars back. and you should too. BTW, since getting my digital converter box 2 weeks ago i've gotten no signal whatsoever. fortunately RCN cable will be out within another 2 weeks to fix the problem.
just think how great it would be to have our friends in office start fixing the way we get health care--that's not nearly as complex, time sensitive or expensive as TV...
From WSJ
March 8, 2008; Page A8
Among its other achievements, Congress has recently made every teenager in America deliriously happy. It made television a universal entitlement. Specifically, digital TV, with a pricetag for this new taxpayer subsidy of up to $1.5 billion.
Federal law requires that, following the Super Bowl on February 17, 2009, all TV broadcasts will be transmitted only in digital format. Viewers relying solely on "over the air" analog programming will lose their signal. The Commerce Department believes there are some 35 million TV sets in America that don't have a digital converter, and their owners (read: voters) might not be happy to have their sets go black.
So in 2005 Congress authorized the TV Converter Box Coupon Program. Any family can get a $40 coupon -- or two -- to convert its analog TVs to digital. (This is separate from the economic "stimulus" package.) Six million Americans have already snatched up coupons, and Commerce is even underwriting a PR program so Americans will grab them.
Technological change routinely makes consumer items obsolete, but the feds don't pay people to upgrade their computers, microwaves, or home heating systems (not yet at least). Uncle Sam didn't provide coupons so people could exchange their record turntables for CD players. For several years now all new TVs have been sold with digital capability and consumers have had ample time to adjust.
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez says digital TV will "improve our quality of life" and "we want every American to be ready." Consumer Reports finds that the average American family has 2.6 TV sets, and the typical American adult now spends an average of four hours a day watching those TVs. Just what America needs: a taxpayer incentive to spend even more time on the couch.
just think how great it would be to have our friends in office start fixing the way we get health care--that's not nearly as complex, time sensitive or expensive as TV...
From WSJ
March 8, 2008; Page A8
Among its other achievements, Congress has recently made every teenager in America deliriously happy. It made television a universal entitlement. Specifically, digital TV, with a pricetag for this new taxpayer subsidy of up to $1.5 billion.
Federal law requires that, following the Super Bowl on February 17, 2009, all TV broadcasts will be transmitted only in digital format. Viewers relying solely on "over the air" analog programming will lose their signal. The Commerce Department believes there are some 35 million TV sets in America that don't have a digital converter, and their owners (read: voters) might not be happy to have their sets go black.
So in 2005 Congress authorized the TV Converter Box Coupon Program. Any family can get a $40 coupon -- or two -- to convert its analog TVs to digital. (This is separate from the economic "stimulus" package.) Six million Americans have already snatched up coupons, and Commerce is even underwriting a PR program so Americans will grab them.
Technological change routinely makes consumer items obsolete, but the feds don't pay people to upgrade their computers, microwaves, or home heating systems (not yet at least). Uncle Sam didn't provide coupons so people could exchange their record turntables for CD players. For several years now all new TVs have been sold with digital capability and consumers have had ample time to adjust.
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez says digital TV will "improve our quality of life" and "we want every American to be ready." Consumer Reports finds that the average American family has 2.6 TV sets, and the typical American adult now spends an average of four hours a day watching those TVs. Just what America needs: a taxpayer incentive to spend even more time on the couch.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Read Between the Headlines
There's not much new news here, but the message is clear--don't believe all that you read. True about 60,000 jobs were cut in Feb. 08, about 40,000 in Jan. 08, but average job GROWTH in the 6 months preceeding were close to or over 100,000 a piece. And what industries cut the most jobs? Big surprise, financial, manufacturing, construction and retail. Ironically jobs in tourism and recreation increased, which goes to show that people are still spending money somewhere. Oh and retail sales finished 67% above expectations last month, but since analysts were expecting more that, of course, is reason to panic.
WASHINGTON — Employers cut jobs for a second month in February while the unemployment rate fell as more people quit looking for work in the weakening job market, the government said Friday in a report that led to further calls of a 2008 recession.
The Federal Reserve, shortly before the report was released, underscored its concern for the economy by saying it will pump more cash into financial markets to try to ease credit.
The Fed said it will raise its planned March 10 and March 24 auctions to $50 billion each, from $30 billion it had previously announced. The auctions serve as short-term loans to get banks the cash they need to keep lending.
Fed officials also said they would move to even larger amounts at future auctions if necessary.
And the Fed announced another effort to ease credit — a series of repurchase transactions expected to reach $100 billion. In those moves, the Fed buys securities, giving the sellers immediate cash.
The move came after the Fed saw an acceleration in the past few days in a deterioration in credit markets that has been underway worldwide for several weeks, senior Federal Reserve staff members said. They stressed the move was not in direct response to the jobs report.
Ultimately, the hope is that the added liquidity will help ease lending conditions, which will in turn help the entire economy, the staff members said.
The jobs report said businesses cut a seasonally adjusted 63,000 workers in February, worst monthly showing in nearly 5 years, the Labor Department said. The decline followed a loss of 22,000 jobs in January, worse than the 17,000 initially reported. It was the first time jobs were cut for two straight months since May and June 2003.
The unemployment rate, which is calculated based on a separate survey of households rather than employers, fell to 4.8% in February from 4.9% in January. But that showed 450,000 people exited the labor force — the unemployment rate is calculated based on the number of people working and looking for work. Many of those who left the job market said they wanted a job, but were discouraged, according to the Labor Department.
The data Friday "are a strong indication that the economy has fallen into recession," Bear Stearns economists, who have previously been hesitant to call a downturn, said in a statement. "We think the recession began in December 2007, which makes the last economic expansion six years and one month long."
Says Moody's Economy.com economist Sophia Koropeckyj, "There is little silver lining in this report." She says layoffs will likely increase as the year progresses, as consumer spending weakens and business confidence wanes.
But in its report to clients, Data Watch economists Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein said: "Today's report on payrolls is disappointing but not nearly as bad as many are making it out to be.
"Reports on layoffs in February ran below the level of February 2007 and unemployment claims are not signaling recession. What we have is a temporary hiring freeze at many firms in response to fears of a recession, not the kind of layoffs that occur during actual recessions," they said.
The dismal employment report came 15 minutes after the Federal Reserve announced it was taking additional action to help loosen conditions in credit markets.
"The Federal Reserve is in close consultation with foreign central bank counterparts concerning liquidity conditions in markets," the Fed said in its statement.
The Fed has already cut its target for short-term interest rates, which influences borrowing costs across the economy, to 3% from 5.25%, where it stood in September. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are widely expected to cut rates again when they meet March 18, if not before.
The cut could be dramatic, according to a futures market in which participants bet on future Fed moves. Bear Stearns said the Fed could cut another three-quarters of a percentage point this month, in part based on the latest jobs data.
Job cuts were seen in a wide variety of industries in February, suggesting the weakness is spreading far beyond the hard-hit housing sector:
•Manufacturing firms cut 52,000 workers.
•Retailers cut 34,100 workers.
•Construction companies cut 39,000 workers.
•Financial firms, which include insurance and real estate companies, cut 12,000 workers.
There were a few bright spots. Some 36,000 jobs were added in health care and 21,000 were added in the leisure and hospitality industry in February, the government said. Federal, state and local governments also added employees.
There are signs that job losses are leading consumers, the engine of the U.S. economy, to hold back.
Valentine's Day sales were up from a year ago across the country for florist Telefora. But growth was far stronger in states that have seen little change or drops in their unemployment rates vs. those that have seen large increases, says Shawn Weidmann, the company's president.
For example, in Wisconsin, where the unemployment rate rose from 4.9% in December 2006 to 5% in December 2007, latest state data available, Valentine's orders surged by triple digits. But in Connecticut, where the unemployment rate rose from 4.1% to 5% at the end of the year, sales growth was lower than the national average.
Friday's employment report also revised some earlier figures downward. It said, for example that only 41,000 jobs were created in December, half the 82,000 originally reported.
The report was much weaker than economists were expecting. They were forecasting employers to boost payrolls by around 25,000.
Workers with jobs, however, saw modest wage gains.
Average hourly earnings for jobholders rose to $17.80 in February, a 0.3% increase from the previous month. That was on target with forecasts. Over the past 12 months, wages were up 3.7%. With high energy and food prices, though, workers may feel squeezed and feel like their paychecks aren't stretching that far.
WASHINGTON — Employers cut jobs for a second month in February while the unemployment rate fell as more people quit looking for work in the weakening job market, the government said Friday in a report that led to further calls of a 2008 recession.
The Federal Reserve, shortly before the report was released, underscored its concern for the economy by saying it will pump more cash into financial markets to try to ease credit.
The Fed said it will raise its planned March 10 and March 24 auctions to $50 billion each, from $30 billion it had previously announced. The auctions serve as short-term loans to get banks the cash they need to keep lending.
Fed officials also said they would move to even larger amounts at future auctions if necessary.
And the Fed announced another effort to ease credit — a series of repurchase transactions expected to reach $100 billion. In those moves, the Fed buys securities, giving the sellers immediate cash.
The move came after the Fed saw an acceleration in the past few days in a deterioration in credit markets that has been underway worldwide for several weeks, senior Federal Reserve staff members said. They stressed the move was not in direct response to the jobs report.
Ultimately, the hope is that the added liquidity will help ease lending conditions, which will in turn help the entire economy, the staff members said.
The jobs report said businesses cut a seasonally adjusted 63,000 workers in February, worst monthly showing in nearly 5 years, the Labor Department said. The decline followed a loss of 22,000 jobs in January, worse than the 17,000 initially reported. It was the first time jobs were cut for two straight months since May and June 2003.
The unemployment rate, which is calculated based on a separate survey of households rather than employers, fell to 4.8% in February from 4.9% in January. But that showed 450,000 people exited the labor force — the unemployment rate is calculated based on the number of people working and looking for work. Many of those who left the job market said they wanted a job, but were discouraged, according to the Labor Department.
The data Friday "are a strong indication that the economy has fallen into recession," Bear Stearns economists, who have previously been hesitant to call a downturn, said in a statement. "We think the recession began in December 2007, which makes the last economic expansion six years and one month long."
Says Moody's Economy.com economist Sophia Koropeckyj, "There is little silver lining in this report." She says layoffs will likely increase as the year progresses, as consumer spending weakens and business confidence wanes.
But in its report to clients, Data Watch economists Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein said: "Today's report on payrolls is disappointing but not nearly as bad as many are making it out to be.
"Reports on layoffs in February ran below the level of February 2007 and unemployment claims are not signaling recession. What we have is a temporary hiring freeze at many firms in response to fears of a recession, not the kind of layoffs that occur during actual recessions," they said.
The dismal employment report came 15 minutes after the Federal Reserve announced it was taking additional action to help loosen conditions in credit markets.
"The Federal Reserve is in close consultation with foreign central bank counterparts concerning liquidity conditions in markets," the Fed said in its statement.
The Fed has already cut its target for short-term interest rates, which influences borrowing costs across the economy, to 3% from 5.25%, where it stood in September. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are widely expected to cut rates again when they meet March 18, if not before.
The cut could be dramatic, according to a futures market in which participants bet on future Fed moves. Bear Stearns said the Fed could cut another three-quarters of a percentage point this month, in part based on the latest jobs data.
Job cuts were seen in a wide variety of industries in February, suggesting the weakness is spreading far beyond the hard-hit housing sector:
•Manufacturing firms cut 52,000 workers.
•Retailers cut 34,100 workers.
•Construction companies cut 39,000 workers.
•Financial firms, which include insurance and real estate companies, cut 12,000 workers.
There were a few bright spots. Some 36,000 jobs were added in health care and 21,000 were added in the leisure and hospitality industry in February, the government said. Federal, state and local governments also added employees.
There are signs that job losses are leading consumers, the engine of the U.S. economy, to hold back.
Valentine's Day sales were up from a year ago across the country for florist Telefora. But growth was far stronger in states that have seen little change or drops in their unemployment rates vs. those that have seen large increases, says Shawn Weidmann, the company's president.
For example, in Wisconsin, where the unemployment rate rose from 4.9% in December 2006 to 5% in December 2007, latest state data available, Valentine's orders surged by triple digits. But in Connecticut, where the unemployment rate rose from 4.1% to 5% at the end of the year, sales growth was lower than the national average.
Friday's employment report also revised some earlier figures downward. It said, for example that only 41,000 jobs were created in December, half the 82,000 originally reported.
The report was much weaker than economists were expecting. They were forecasting employers to boost payrolls by around 25,000.
Workers with jobs, however, saw modest wage gains.
Average hourly earnings for jobholders rose to $17.80 in February, a 0.3% increase from the previous month. That was on target with forecasts. Over the past 12 months, wages were up 3.7%. With high energy and food prices, though, workers may feel squeezed and feel like their paychecks aren't stretching that far.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Sweet Home Chicago
Second City No More
Over the weekend, Chicago lifted itself to the top of a tax dishonor roll: The city's cumulative sales-tax rate is now the steepest of any major metropolitan area in America, at 10.25%. That blows past the former valedictorian, Memphis (9.25%), as well as New Orleans (9%), Denver (8.6%), and even New York and Los Angeles. Congratulations.
After five months of budget skirmishing, the Cook County Board of Commissioners approved the new sales tax, to 1.75% from .75%, by a single vote. That's on top of Illinois's 6.25%, municipal Chicago's 1.25%, and a 1% transportation sales tax for Cook and the collar counties that takes effect later this year.
This is only the latest in a succession of Chicago tax increases: a November 2007 "fee increase" of some $270 million, a January 2008 real estate tax totaling $530 million, not to mention Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's $717 million in proposed tax increases statewide. Supposedly the deal -- Board President Todd Stroger was pushing for an increase twice as high -- will reduce the county's $234 million deficit.
Not so coincidentally, the $426 million that the county optimistically expects to collect each year will also fund somewhere between 700 or 800 new patronage jobs, and maybe more, which were lobbied for by the public-employees unions. A scathing report from a federal court monitor, released Friday, depicts rampant abuse in county hiring practices. Laurence Msall, president of the nonpartisan Chicago Civic Federation, argues that the county already spends its $3 billion budget irresponsibly, pointing to more than $100 million in possible reforms.
Mr. Msall notes dryly that the county is "not only refusing to tighten its belt, it's acting as if it doesn't have to wear a belt." Then again, it'd be business as unusual if patronage were somehow extracted from Chicago's machine politics. Too bad for the city's actual businesses and residents.
Over the weekend, Chicago lifted itself to the top of a tax dishonor roll: The city's cumulative sales-tax rate is now the steepest of any major metropolitan area in America, at 10.25%. That blows past the former valedictorian, Memphis (9.25%), as well as New Orleans (9%), Denver (8.6%), and even New York and Los Angeles. Congratulations.
After five months of budget skirmishing, the Cook County Board of Commissioners approved the new sales tax, to 1.75% from .75%, by a single vote. That's on top of Illinois's 6.25%, municipal Chicago's 1.25%, and a 1% transportation sales tax for Cook and the collar counties that takes effect later this year.
This is only the latest in a succession of Chicago tax increases: a November 2007 "fee increase" of some $270 million, a January 2008 real estate tax totaling $530 million, not to mention Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's $717 million in proposed tax increases statewide. Supposedly the deal -- Board President Todd Stroger was pushing for an increase twice as high -- will reduce the county's $234 million deficit.
Not so coincidentally, the $426 million that the county optimistically expects to collect each year will also fund somewhere between 700 or 800 new patronage jobs, and maybe more, which were lobbied for by the public-employees unions. A scathing report from a federal court monitor, released Friday, depicts rampant abuse in county hiring practices. Laurence Msall, president of the nonpartisan Chicago Civic Federation, argues that the county already spends its $3 billion budget irresponsibly, pointing to more than $100 million in possible reforms.
Mr. Msall notes dryly that the county is "not only refusing to tighten its belt, it's acting as if it doesn't have to wear a belt." Then again, it'd be business as unusual if patronage were somehow extracted from Chicago's machine politics. Too bad for the city's actual businesses and residents.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Obama campaign caught on paper
From the American Thinker
Canadian diplomatic memo disproves Obama campaign claims (updated)
Thomas Lifson
The man who tantalizes the unhappy voter with promises of change may be discovering that this diplomacy stuff is a little more difficult than it looked. After threatening the NAFTA treaty while pandering to Ohio voters facing declining manufacturing employment, the Obama camp was blindsided by a report from the Canadian television network CTV that his campaign had privately reassured Canadian officials previously that he wouldn't really change NAFTA, no matter what was said on the campaign trail, that it would just be a Northern version what the late Senator Patrick Moynihan called "Boob bait for the bubbas."
The Obama campaign denied such a meeting:
The Obama campaign told CTV late Thursday night that no message was passed to the Canadian government that suggests that Obama does not mean what he says about opting out of NAFTA if it is not renegotiated.
Oh-oh!
It turns out that diplomats often write up memoranda when they meet with people like campaign advisors to a leading presidential candidate in the United States. Who knew? Not the Obama campaign, apparently.
So now that such a memo has turned up, widely circulated among the Canadian diplomatic corps, Team Obama is saying that those stupid Canadians weren't able to understand that their advisor really meant. Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports:
Barack Obama's senior economic policy adviser said Sunday that Canadian government officials wrote an inaccurate portrayal of his private discussion on the campaign's trade policy in a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The memo is the first documentation to emerge publicly out of the meeting between the adviser, Austan Goolsbee, and officials with the Canadian consulate in Chicago, but Goolsbee said it misinterprets what he told them. The memo was written by Joseph DeMora, who works for the consulate and attended the meeting.
Goolsbee disputed a section that read: "Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign. He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."
"This thing about `it's more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans,' that's this guy's language," Goolsbee said of DeMora. "He's not quoting me.
"I certainly did not use that phrase in any way," Goolsbee said.
So, if we believe this version of the Obama campaign's story, then we have an important Obama advisor creating a seriously false impression in the diplomatic corps of our largest trading partner. Telling them that they didn't understand is not an excuse. Diplomats are supposed to be in control of their message.
It is scarcely credible that Canadian diplomats are intentionally misquoting or misinterpreting Goolsbee as a means of sabotaging Obama (interfering in internal political affairs, as diplomats phrase it). The memorandum was prepared well before Obama spoke out against NAFTA in Ohio. So we are left with the conclusion that Team Obama is simply clumsy, and that's the charitable interpretation. Is making American diplomats inept the kind of change we want? Is that the hope Obama is selling?
Let's face facts: if Team Obama is capable of screwing up relations with the country most similar to us, the country that knows us best, and that has the biggest stake in the health of our economy and continuing American good will, imagine what kind of havoc would be created when dealing with the likes of the Russians, the Chinese, the Syrians, or the Palestinians.
Update -- Michael Dobbs writes at The Fact Checker: (hat tip: Instapundit)
The bottom line is that it has taken four days to drag something approaching the full story out of the Canadian embassy and the Obama campaign. As I suggested before, both Obama and Clinton have exaggerated their opposition to NAFTA in order to win votes in economically depressed Ohio. This is a case where the technical parsing of the truth by the Obama campaign falls well short of the whole truth.
Canadian diplomatic memo disproves Obama campaign claims (updated)
Thomas Lifson
The man who tantalizes the unhappy voter with promises of change may be discovering that this diplomacy stuff is a little more difficult than it looked. After threatening the NAFTA treaty while pandering to Ohio voters facing declining manufacturing employment, the Obama camp was blindsided by a report from the Canadian television network CTV that his campaign had privately reassured Canadian officials previously that he wouldn't really change NAFTA, no matter what was said on the campaign trail, that it would just be a Northern version what the late Senator Patrick Moynihan called "Boob bait for the bubbas."
The Obama campaign denied such a meeting:
The Obama campaign told CTV late Thursday night that no message was passed to the Canadian government that suggests that Obama does not mean what he says about opting out of NAFTA if it is not renegotiated.
Oh-oh!
It turns out that diplomats often write up memoranda when they meet with people like campaign advisors to a leading presidential candidate in the United States. Who knew? Not the Obama campaign, apparently.
So now that such a memo has turned up, widely circulated among the Canadian diplomatic corps, Team Obama is saying that those stupid Canadians weren't able to understand that their advisor really meant. Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports:
Barack Obama's senior economic policy adviser said Sunday that Canadian government officials wrote an inaccurate portrayal of his private discussion on the campaign's trade policy in a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The memo is the first documentation to emerge publicly out of the meeting between the adviser, Austan Goolsbee, and officials with the Canadian consulate in Chicago, but Goolsbee said it misinterprets what he told them. The memo was written by Joseph DeMora, who works for the consulate and attended the meeting.
Goolsbee disputed a section that read: "Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign. He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."
"This thing about `it's more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans,' that's this guy's language," Goolsbee said of DeMora. "He's not quoting me.
"I certainly did not use that phrase in any way," Goolsbee said.
So, if we believe this version of the Obama campaign's story, then we have an important Obama advisor creating a seriously false impression in the diplomatic corps of our largest trading partner. Telling them that they didn't understand is not an excuse. Diplomats are supposed to be in control of their message.
It is scarcely credible that Canadian diplomats are intentionally misquoting or misinterpreting Goolsbee as a means of sabotaging Obama (interfering in internal political affairs, as diplomats phrase it). The memorandum was prepared well before Obama spoke out against NAFTA in Ohio. So we are left with the conclusion that Team Obama is simply clumsy, and that's the charitable interpretation. Is making American diplomats inept the kind of change we want? Is that the hope Obama is selling?
Let's face facts: if Team Obama is capable of screwing up relations with the country most similar to us, the country that knows us best, and that has the biggest stake in the health of our economy and continuing American good will, imagine what kind of havoc would be created when dealing with the likes of the Russians, the Chinese, the Syrians, or the Palestinians.
Update -- Michael Dobbs writes at The Fact Checker: (hat tip: Instapundit)
The bottom line is that it has taken four days to drag something approaching the full story out of the Canadian embassy and the Obama campaign. As I suggested before, both Obama and Clinton have exaggerated their opposition to NAFTA in order to win votes in economically depressed Ohio. This is a case where the technical parsing of the truth by the Obama campaign falls well short of the whole truth.
Should the Left Take a Bow on the Reality of Global Cooling?
One way to interpret the facts presented in this article from Daily Tech.com would be that man made-up global warming isn't actually happening despite what TV tells you. The more likely spin may be that "green" politicians can now take credit for their environmental efforts finally saving the world from a heat stroke. To that I can only say, "way to go guys, you really helped us all out of a jam there. Why don't you just start running the rest of my life now!?"
World Temperatures according to the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. Note the steep drop over the last year.Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.
World Temperatures according to the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. Note the steep drop over the last year.Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.
Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
Lorne Gunter, National Post
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008
Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."
China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.
In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.
The ice is back.
Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.
And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.
According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.
"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.
But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."
He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008
Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."
China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.
In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.
The ice is back.
Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.
And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.
According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.
"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.
But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."
He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)