It would be nice to think: ”Just as they are beginning to realize their engagement strategy with Iran, North Korea, and other rogue regimes has yielded little progress, hopefully the failed Christmas Day attack will cause the Obama administration to realize that their terrorist engagement strategy is fatally flawed as well.” Remember this is the gang that thinks the Cairo speech was one of the top three things Obama did to combat terrorism. Huh?? Jamie Fly observes: “It makes you wonder what other actions round out the top three. Pledging to close Guantanamo Bay? Banning enhanced interrogation procedures?” The KSM trial!
As for that trial, it is a very dangerous decision and a very expensive one: “Security for the federal trial of self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four accused cohorts will run $200 million a year, sources told the Daily News.” And no one thinks this will take only a year.
Michael Gerson writes that “it is difficult to argue that the Obama administration has even attempted to create an atmosphere of urgency in the war on terror. The listless, coldblooded and clueless response of the Hawaii White House to the Christmas Day attack was only the most recent indication. Over the last year, nearly every rhetorical signal from the administration — from the use of war-on-terror euphemisms such as ‘overseas contingency operations’ and ‘man-caused disasters’ to its preference for immediately categorizing terrorism as the work of an ‘isolated extremist’ — has been designed to convey a return to normalcy, a contrast to the supposed fear-mongering of the past.”
Maybe it’s the terrorism or ObamaCare: “Republican candidates start the year by opening a nine-point lead over Democrats, the GOP’s biggest in several years, in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.”
Nancy Pelosi gets snippy: “Pelosi emerged from a meeting with her leadership team and committee chairs in the Capitol to face an aggressive throng of reporters who immediately hit her with C-SPAN’s request that she permit closed-door final talks on the bill to be televised. A reporter reminded the San Francisco Democrat that in 2008, then-candidate Obama opined that all such negotiations be open to C-SPAN cameras. ‘There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail,’ quipped Pelosi, who has no intention of making the deliberations public.”
But Obama was head of Harvard Law Review! We heard a lot of that during the campaign. It was supposed to be reassuring, I guess. Wasilla’s most famous mayor isn’t impressed: “President Obama was right to change his policy and decide to send no more detainees to Yemen where they can be free to rejoin their war on America. Now he must back off his reckless plan to close Guantanamo, begin treating terrorists as wartime enemies not suspects alleged to have committed crimes, and recognize that the real nature of the terrorist threat requires a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor.”
Tom Maquire wants to know if “terrorist-coddling liberal elites really believe that prisoners provide just as much (or as little) information whether we observe their rights under US criminal procedures or their rights as detainees of the US military? Do terrorist-coddling liberal elites really believe that all these Miranda warnings and provision of access to lawyers really doesn’t [sic] encourage anyone to keep anyone quiet?” I imagine they think it’s all worth it because we’re impressing jihadists with the wonders of our constitutional system — which they want to replace with sharia. So it doesn’t really make much sense.
Uh-oh: “The number of people preparing to buy a home fell sharply in November, an unsettling new sign that the housing market may be headed for a “double-dip” downturn over the winter.The figures Tuesday came after a similarly discouraging report on new home sales, illustrating how heavily the housing market depends right now on government help.”
A helpful reminder here, “lest we forget just exactly with whom the Israelis are dealing.”
Katrina would never have been the disaster it was save the additional collapse of the levee. No one living within that levee was stupid about the necessity of it “holding” in the face of a hurricane. It was the water, stupid, that flowed with intensity into a city built literally underwater that made Katrina the hellish emergency it was. Mississippi and Alabama were much less harmed by Katrina, mostly because of the added problem of rushing flood waters. It wasn’t so much the hurricane (heck we are used to hurricanes) as it was the WATER, that made rescue effort so difficult. If China can’t fix that/those dams, it will be Katrina-like in that there will be a double tragedy…one from nature and one from man-made structures that fail when stressed.
I too hope they can patch this dam.
We know that the Three Gorges Dam has something like seventy cracks that cannot be repaired. The problem is shoddy construction, so called dofu char 豆腐渣 construction–this means bean curd dregs and suggests, how to say? weakness. A Hong Kong satirical magazine years ago had a send up column on “Let’s learn Mandarin!” in the run up to the handover. Among phrases: “Foreman, please add more sand to this concrete.” So this is an endemic problem. In Chengdu it was noted that while school buildings regularly collapsed, government offices did so only rarely. The best constructed building I have seen in China is the headquarters of the military commission–great blocks of dressed granite. Should survive a mild nuclear hit.
One other problem: skyscrapers. In Manhattan if you dig down about fifty feet or so you come to bedrock. Therefore the Empire State Building and so forth can be firmly anchored. In St. Petersburg and Shanghai you have nothing but mud all the way down. So buildings are on piles. So far no skyscrapers in SPB that I know of. But Shanghai is chock a block. Some are already beginning to tilt. An earthquake will thrown them all over the place. So will a falling water table that exposes wood to decay. One reason the old Cathay Hotel where Noel Coward stayed &c &c cannot be restored is that its foundations are somehow cracked in a way that cannot be repaired and has to do with the muck on which it is constructed. And that hotel was CAREFULLY constructed, maybe seventy years ago, using nothing but the best.
arthur waldron beat me to it. China id built on corruption and incompetence.