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APRIL 30,  2011

BOMBING IN LIBYA – AT 11:07 P.M. ET:  Libya has announced that a son of Muammar al-Qaddafi, and three  of Qaddafi's grandchildren, have been killed in a NATO raid.  From Fox:

NATO says it struck a government building in Tripoli but can't confirm that one of Muammar al-Qaddafi's sons was killed.

Sunday's statement comes hours after an airstrike that the Libya regime said killed Qaddafi's youngest son Seif al-Arab and three of the Libyan leader's grandchildren. Qaddafi escaped unharmed.

NATO says it struck a "command and control building in the Bab al-Azizya neighborhood" Saturday evening, insisting all its targets are military in nature and linked to Qaddafi's systematic attacks on the population.

Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard says he is aware of unconfirmed reports that some Qaddafi family members may have been killed and he regrets "all loss of life, specially the innocent civilians being harmed as a result of the ongoing conflict."

And...

Muammar Qaddafi and his wife were in the Tripoli house of his 29-year-old son when it was hit by at least one bomb dropped from a NATO warplane, according to Libyan spokesman Moussa Ibrahim.

COMMENT:  We certainly wouldn't want to minimize this event, but I'd like to see confirmation.  Some readers may recall that, in the mid-80s, President Reagan ordered a retaliatory strike on Libya after its operatives exploded a bomb in a German cafe frequented by American soldiers.  Libya announced after the strike that a child of Qaddafi had been killed.  This latest claim seems awfully familiar.

Again, we certainly wouldn't take any joy in the inadvertent killing of family members, but we'll withhold acceptance of the story.  Is it possible that NATO has decided to target Qaddafi directly, as the only means of getting him out of power?  I'm sure this will be explored by the media in the next few days.

April 30,  2011     Permalink

AND IN THE REAL WORLD – AT 11:33 A.M. ET:   At any moment there are terror attacks being planned somewhere in the world.  One apparent plan has just been broken up in Germany, and we have to ask what may be happening, secretly, on our own soil.  From CNN:

(CNN) -- A "high-ranking" al Qaeda member in Afghanistan had planned major terror attacks in Germany with at least three recruits who were recently arrested, German authorities said Saturday.

The mastermind had been making plans as early as the beginning of last year and "recruited several dedicated personnel" who were trained along the Afghan-Pakistani border and "plotted to commit at least two attacks in Germany," said federal prosecutor Rainer Griesbaum after the three made an initial court appearance Saturday in Karlsruhe.

According to a federal court statement, the main suspect is a Moroccan national identified as 29-year-old national Abdeladim El-K., who is specifically accused of getting weapons and explosives training at an al Qaeda training camp last year. Authorities believe that the al Qaeda member ordered him in spring of 2010 to carry out a bombing in Germany.

The other suspects are 31-year-old Jamil S., who has German and Moroccan citizenship; and 19-year-old Amid C., who has German and Iranian citizenship. A court statement said the three men had been plotting an attack since December.

COMMENT:  These terror groups are looking at a weakened America, a free world without leadership, and the increasing influence of Islamists in Egypt and other countries in the Muslim world.  You don't think they're encouraged, do you?

April 30, 2011     Permalink 

OBAMAN TRENDINESS – AT 10:50 A.M. ET:  It's become clear that the soaring price of fuel is cutting seriously into the American family.  But you'd never know it by listening to some Democratic spokesmen on TV.  Problem?  What problem?  These people love to talk about "long-term" solutions.  They remind me of the kind of person who, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, wanted immediately to make plans for the UN.  After all, why bother with what's happening now?

But high prices are happening now, and can wreck the plans of a generation if they go much higher.  These prices come on top of a huge recession, which, although technically over, really isn't in many American cities and towns.

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that the Obama energy policies are a fantasy cooked up by ideologists who seem to care little about the immediate impact of their ideas: 

Are high gas prices a good thing?

That is not as dumb a question as it sounds. Examine a few revealing past remarks from President Obama and the cabinet officials who are now in charge of the nation's energy use and oil leases on federal lands. Then decide whether the current soaring gas prices are supposed to be good or bad.

In 2008, Sen. Ken Salazar (D., Colo.) - now secretary of the interior, in charge of the leasing of federal oil lands - refused to vote for any new offshore drilling...

...From 2007 to 2008, Steven Chu, now secretary of energy, weighed in frequently on global warming and the desirable price of traditional energy. At one point Chu asserted, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." Chu also lamented, "We have lots of fossil fuel; that's really both good and bad news. We won't run out of energy, but there's enough carbon in the ground to really cook us."

In other words, $10 a gallon for gas would be desirable, while an enormous amount of recoverable American oil, gas, coal, tar sands, and oil shale should be left untapped.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama himself had strange ideas about the prospect of expensive prices for fossil-fuel-generated energy: "Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."...

...As for consumers' plight in paying skyrocketing gas prices, the president, now and in the past, has sounded ambivalent. He recently told a questioner, "If you're complaining about the price of gas and you're only getting eight miles a gallon, you know, you might want to think about a trade-in." Few large passenger vehicles today get only eight miles a gallon, and many squeezed Americans in recessionary times cannot so breezily think of "a trade-in."

But why weren't Americans outraged by comments like that, and the policies that followed?  It's not because they were in good shape.  They weren't.  It's because the media blitz on behalf of Barack Obama, the dream of the sixties generation, overwhelmed everything else, and continues to do so.  They used to call Reagan the "Teflon president," but Obama makes Reagan look like Mr. Vulnerability. 

So much of this administration's talk about energy sounds similar to a bull session in the faculty lounge, or what we would expect from lifelong bureaucrats and public functionaries who have never experienced long commutes or struggles in the harsher, profit-driven private workplace.

Absolutely correct.

Since reelection looms, the administration now insists that high energy prices are no longer good, but suddenly bad. And the evil oil companies are mostly to blame!

And, with the help of the press, Obama may turn that into a winning argument.

April 30, 2011      Permalink

REMEMBER LIBYA? – AT 10:20 A.M. ET:  Isn't that a country in the Mideast?  Didn't we do some shooting there recently, for a few days?  Didn't Obama say that the dictator who runs the place has to get out?  Oh yes, I remember it well.

The big shot is still in power, and Obama is out campaigning.  He certainly knows how to conduct foreign policy, doesn't he? 

(Reuters) - Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said on Saturday he was ready for a ceasefire and negotiations provided NATO "stop its planes," but he refused to give up power as rebels and Western powers demand.

The rebels and NATO rejected Gaddafi's offer, saying it lacked credibility. A spokesman for the insurgents said the time for compromise had passed and NATO said air strikes would go on as long as Libyan civilians were being threatened.

Weeks of Western air strikes have failed to dislodge the Libyan leader, instead imposing a stalemate on a war Gaddafi looked to have been winning, with government forces held at bay in the east and around the besieged city of Misrata while fighting for control of the western mountains.

With neither side apparently able to gain the upper hand, Gaddafi struck a more conciliatory tone in an 80-minute televised address to the nation in the early hours of Saturday.

COMMENT:  Conciliatory?  The guy is still in power.  The American president shows no interest.  NATO hasn't got the will or equipment to go long term.  He sees that Syrian leaders can fire into protest crowds and get only wrist slaps.  He can afford to be conciliatory.

The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote an essay called "Defining Deviancy Down."  In it he argued that deviant, unacceptable behavior becomes acceptable over time because people get used to it.  My fear is that Americans will get used to the erratic, strange, and ineffectual foreign policy of the Obama administration, and accept it as normal.  That is a catastrophe.

April 30,  2011     Permalink

APRIL 29,  2011

WHO IS BARACK OBAMA? – AT 10:39 P.M. ET:  It's incredible, but we're still asking that question more than two years after President Obama took office.  I know of no other recent president who remained such an enigma.  John Hughes of the Christian Science Monitor takes a rather dim view of the fact that Mr. Obama is so vaguely defined, despite the massive press coverage that he receives:

The Trump-for-president campaigners have been obsessed with whether President Obama was actually born in the United States. The really intriguing question, however, is not “Where was he born?” but “Who is he?”

During the 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama sent shivers down the spines of many Americans with electrifying oratory that swept him into the White House on a tsunami of public anticipation and excitement.

By many accounts, he has since proved to be a president of aloofness and withdrawal on issues both at home and abroad – an approach that defies attempts to define his vision and leaves us so far with a fuzzy picture of his leadership.

Is he an overcautious politician, practicing a sphinxlike reticence to avoid damaging his aura? Or is he simply incapable of the resolute decisionmaking that a President Ronald Reagan or even a President Bill Clinton would have brought to these turbulent times?

I vote for the second choice.

In a well-analyzed speech, the president offered a puzzling definition of his foreign-policy doctrine, which seemed to say that the US might or might not intervene in instances of aggression, but only with multilateral support and not for very long, depending on how tough the circumstances were.

Yeah.  Not exactly, "We will pay any price, bear any burden..."

If the US is ever to substantially reduce its mounting national budget deficit, the current costs of Medicare and Social Security, which make up a huge proportion of the budget, must be curbed. Beyond brief talking points, Obama is ducking the politically charged issue of entitlement reform while lambasting the Republicans for “asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it.” This may be smart politics in 2012, but it is not the kind of White House leadership required to solve the entitlement problem.

And finally...

Obama has assigned Vice President Biden to be his point man in the looming battle in Congress over deficit reduction plans. Mr. Biden is a man of irrepressible energy and volubility, but he will have his work cut out for him. He can only move a deal so far forward. In the end, the president will have to demonstrate an involvement and leadership that has so far been elusive.

And, what's more, it never seems to get better.  We often hear that outstanding presidents grow in office.  Obama has sat in the office.  He seems exactly the same person he was when he was inaugurated.  We elected a personality, not a leader.  We elected a decision examiner, not a decision maker.  We are paying a price.   With the economy faltering once more, the Mideast in flames, and allies increasingly ignoring the American president, that price can only increase.

April 29, 2011       Permalink

MORE MAJOR NEWS FROM BRITAIN – AT 8:17 P.M. ET:  Let's not be smug about it, and think that the royal wedding is the only major news coming out of Britain.  There is scholarship, deep thought, major research, as London's Telegraph proudly tells us:

Animal lovers should stop calling their furry or feathered friends “pets” because the term is insulting, leading academics claim.

Domestic dogs, cats, hamsters or budgerigars should be rebranded as “companion animals” while owners should be known as “human carers”, they insist.

Even terms such as wildlife are dismissed as insulting to the animals concerned – who should instead be known as “free-living”, the academics including an Oxford professor suggest.

The call comes from the editors of then Journal of Animal Ethics, a new academic publication devoted to the issue.

It is edited by the Revd Professor Andrew Linzey, a theologian and director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, who once received an honorary degree from the Archbishop of Canterbury for his work promoting the rights of “God’s sentient creatures”.

In its first editorial, the journal – jointly published by Prof Linzey’s centre and the University of Illinois in the US – condemns the use of terms such as ”critters” and “beasts”.

COMMENT:  Of course they're right.  When I once called my Australian Terrier, Misty, a pet, she sat me down and explained that we no longer use the p-word.  Dogs, she said, sometimes use it among themselves as a sign of solidarity, but it was rude for humans to use it.  I was embarrassed.  I really was.  But I did pay Misty's Social Security taxes.

I wonder who's paying for this research.

April 29, 2011     Permalink

HOGGING THE SPOTLIGHT – AT 9:18 A.M. ET:  President Obama, who assures us that he's a grownup, as compared with everyone else in town, sometimes acts like a spoiled child.  Today he'll be at Cape Canaveral to observe the second to last launch of a space shuttle. 

Why this, and why not the last launch?  Well, Gabrielle Giffords, still recovering from a grievous gunshot wound to the head, will be there to watch her husband, the shuttle's commander, fly into space.  You'd think the president would give Giffords this day alone, but I guess he couldn't resist the chance to share the spotlight with the sympathetic congresswoman.  The Politico reports: 

President Barack Obama told Floridians more than a year ago that no one was more committed to human space flight than he, an aficionado who appreciates Tang orange drink, Sputnik references and the program’s place in the American imagination.

But Florida still feels a bit lost in his orbit.

Obama returns to the state Friday, where the principal storyline will be his attendance alongside Rep. Gabriel Giffords (D-Ariz.) at the emotional launch of a space shuttle mission led by her husband — her first public event since suffering gun shot wounds to the head.

Yet Obama has a parallel purpose — to ease the political damage of job losses in the space industry and reaffirm his commitment to space exploration, which looms large in a high-unemployment battleground state that looks to the skies for its future, self-image and economic well-being.

Obama sparked a political backlash last year with a fundamental reordering of NASA. He sought to scrap a planned return to the moon and turn to private companies and foreign nations to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. The proposal left the industry feeling uncertain about its future, despite his efforts to protect the agency’s funding and plot a new course to put astronauts on an asteroid and Mars within 25 years.

Depending on foreign nations to ferry astronauts does not sit well with Americans.  We have dominated space exploration, and Americans like to be leaders.  Someone tell the White House.

Not only that, his trip follows the loss of a promised $40 million grant to help laid-off shuttle workers find new jobs, a casualty of the recent federal budget deal between the White House and Congress. Two weeks ago, NASA’s prime shuttle contractor announced another 2,000 layoffs as the agency winds down the 30-year-old program.

Why is it that this president takes aim at every area of American pride?  A journalist said this week in a New Yorker piece that Obama's approach can be called "leading from behind."  Yeah, I'm afraid that's right.  And staying behind.

Reagan told us it was always morning in America.  Obama wonders whether that's a good thing.  And that's the difference between a great president and a political misfit.

April 29, 2011      Permalink

AGAIN, IN SYRIA – AT 8:41 A.M. ET:  Mass demonstrations are erupting in Syria again today, another indication of a Mideast in flames.   And again the government is ready to fire into crowds, having received nothing more than a wrist slap from the "international community."  The president of the United States, who hustled American ally Mubarak out of power in Egypt, seems entirely detached.  From Reuters:

(Reuters) - Thousands of Syrians called on Friday for the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad and pledged support for the city of Deraa where tanks and troops have tried to crush resistance to his authoritarian rule, activists said.

"The people want the overthrow of the regime!" demonstrators chanted in the Damascus suburb of Saqba, a witness said, defying violent repression in which 500 people have been killed since the nationwide protests broke out in Deraa last month.

Demonstrations erupted on Friday in the central cities of Homs and Hama, Banias on the Mediterranean coast, Qamishly in eastern Syria and Harashta, a Damascus suburb. Shots were heard in coastal Latakia and two small protests broke out in Damascus, witnesses, an opposition leader and a human rights group said.

In Deraa, Syrian soldiers fired shots in the air to prevent people attending Friday prayers or protesting, a resident told Reuters. Another said busloads of people were heading to Deraa from nearby villages, trying to converge for demonstrations.

"The snipers are on rooftops of buildings firing at anything that moves. They are preventing people from going to the streets," Abu Mohammad told Al Jazeera television.

As this is happening, the UN Human Rights Council is poised to make Syria a member.  Unbelievable.

The news from the Mideast is generally grim, with potential implications for the United States, the price of oil, terrorism, and peace.  The Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, and the extremist group Hamas, which controls Gaza, have reached a reconciliation agreement, which means the Palestinian "government" will have a faction formally designated as "terrorist" by the United States.  That may have to mean a cutoff in American aid.  The agreement, which may or may not last, was brokered by Egypt, which is playing an increasingly unhelpful role in Mideast affairs.  Egypt is drifting further and further away from pro-Western policies, with Islamists gaining strength all the time.  It is moving toward normalizing relations with Iran, a serious blow to American influence. 

Libya?  Who knows what's happening.  It's been pushed off the front page.  But NATO is still engaged, and Gadaffi is still in power. 

Is anyone in Washington watching?  Wasn't Egypt a major ally just yesterday, and a major recipient of American aid?  Didn't we just return our ambassador to Syria because we thought the government was reformist? 

Anyone know how to play this game?  Not the president, apparently.

April 29, 2011       Permalink 

OBAMA FALTERING – AT 8:23 A.M. ET:  The first debate among potential GOP candidates for president will be held next week, and we'll consider that the official opening of the campaign season.  For President Obama, the current political news is less than exciting.  His numbers continue to slide:

(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama’s weekly approval rating remained at its all-time low for the second straight week, according to the Gallup poll.

In the week of April 11-17 and again in the week of April 18-24, 43 percent of the Americans polled by Gallup said they approved of the job Obama was doing as president.

That matched the all-time low for Obama’s weekly approval in the Gallup poll. Previously, Obama had earned a 43 percent approval rating in the back-to-back weeks of Aug. 16-22, 2010 and Aug. 23-29, 2010.

Obama’s weekly approval rating peaked at 67 percent in the week of Jan. 19-25, 2009—the week he was inaugurated.

COMMENT:  Poll numbers won't take on truly serious meaning until the Republicans have a nominee, or at least a frontrunner.  Barbour has dropped out, and it appears that Mike Huckabee, who has been among the GOP favorites, may soon follow.  Trump is there, but in the end won't be taken seriously.  The betting is that Sarah will say no.  Ron Paul, who has essentially declared, is a pro-Islamist disgrace.  Mitt Romney essentially leads the field, but with remarkably little popular support. 

We're not left with much electricity.  I see the term "dark horse" being used more and more in political commentary, reflecting the dissatisfaction with the Republican field.  True, a party nominee achieves instant status, and even one of the "dull" ones might well surprise us.  Mitch Daniels, the ultra-competent governor of Indiana, needs an emergency charisma transplant, but is immensely popular in his home state.   Remember, many Republicans thought Ronald Reagan in 1980 was an over-the-hill movie actor who had some nerve running for president. 

We'll watch the debate next week.  Give us signs of life.

April 29, 2011       Permalink

THIS MORNING – AT 7:58 A.M. ET:  While all of you were warmly comfy in your beds, dreaming sweet dreams, I was up early as usual, researching Urgent Agenda, and heroically facing down the demons of the left, single-handedly holding them at bay on behalf of American purity.

However, I did take a few minutes out to peek at the royal wedding.  It happened to come at an hour when the left was having its tofu breakfast.

Boy, these Brits do those things well, don't they?  I mean, the empire is shot to hell, the Royal Navy may soon be down to three rowboats and a rubber ducky, but royal weddings...nobody does it better.  They get Westminster Abbey, free of charge I think, and they get these fellas from the Church of England, each one of whom has a voice from the well.  The Metropolitan Opera doesn't have better voices. 

And those uniforms.  I tell you, the Brits do the 19th century with real respect.  I haven't seen uniforms like that since striking doormen marched down Fifth Avenue in New York.  I looked out at that assemblage, and all I could think of was...that will be some dry-cleaning bill.

Some observations:  Kate – I believe that's the bride's name – didn't look particularly happy.  It looked as if she were thinking, "What am I doing in a flat like this?"  In fact, no one looked happy.  As great a show as it was, it could've used a little Italian or Greek spirit.  The royals aren't exactly knee slappers.

One person in the crowd stood out – Prince Charles, who looked 107, give or take a few months.  He looked almost as old as his mother, the queen.  I can't see Charles becoming king.  It just wouldn't be good for tourism.  The gent who got married today, William, is a better candidate.  Seems like a decent enough chap, and looked reasonably human.  Charles appeared as if he'd just been done by a discount taxidermist.

I hope the food is good.  I ordered the pizza.

April 29, 2011     Permalink