At last — conferees have been selected for the Iran sanctions legislation.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights begins to pull back the curtain on the New Black Panther case. The hearing begins today.
Didn’t we reset our relationship? A “spokesman for the Russian foreign ministry on Thursday criticized US plans to station missiles near Poland’s border with Russia, the Interfax news agency reported.” It seems that U.S. concessions beget only more Russian demands.
Nicholas Kristof learns that Obama’s a no-show on human rights. “Until he reached the White House, Barack Obama repeatedly insisted that the United States apply more pressure on Sudan so as to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur and elsewhere. Yet, as president, Mr. Obama and his aides have caved, leaving Sudan gloating at American weakness. Western monitors, Sudanese journalists and local civil society groups have all found this month’s Sudanese elections to be deeply flawed — yet Mr. Obama’s special envoy for Sudan, Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, pre-emptively defended the elections, saying they would be ‘as free and as fair as possible.’”
Michael Steele may have finally overstayed his welcome in the RNC. After all, he says there is “no reason” for African Americans to vote Republican. Well, sometimes it’s hard to figure out which party he’s chairman of.
I think this is the point: “Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday said the Senate is not ready to tackle immigration reform and that bringing a bill forward would be ‘CYA politics.’ … Graham also said moving ahead with immigration would scuttle the Senate’s capacity to deal with climate legislation. ‘It destroys the ability to do something like energy and climate,’ he told reporters in the Capitol.” Sounds good!
Enough with the Bush-bashing: “Most American voters think it is time for the Obama administration to start taking responsibility for the way things are going in the country. A Fox News poll released Thursday finds 66 percent of voters think President Obama should start taking responsibility. That’s more than three times as many as the 21 percent who think it’s right to continue to blame the Bush administration for the way things are going today.”
“But Russia’s aggression is really about the subordination of Georgia, a democratic, market-oriented U.S. ally”
lol. I ‘d hardly call jailing your opponents “democratic” and russia’s bottom line stacks up pretty darn well against georgias. and ours!
Internatnionalist blather from Obama. Insane aggressiveness from Maj. Kong McCain.
I don’t much care for it, especially when the phrase “United Nations” is in the script, but if I must choose, give me the blather rather than the war.
“If diplomacy fails,. . . it’s further evidence that we need Him”. Sorry if I botched your words a bit, but that line really captures what Obama is about. It is not hyperbole to say that he posits himself as a messianic figure and that is, in fact, his appeal to many of his supporters.
Other left-liberal types are handicapped enough in how they view the world, refusing, as you say, to take the world as it is. To this blindness, Obama adds delusions of grandeur. This nation and the world cannot afford, especially at this time, to have such a bloated and benighted man as its president.
“Blather rather than war.” How touching, Grumpy Old Man. “All we are saying, is give blather a chance.” But after that, what? Even Obama seems to recognize a need for something more, after his first blathering statement on Georgia. But I sense something else other than a simple scurrying from rhetorical mush to a poll-driven effort to sound realpolitik. Appeasers like Obama do not always just surrender after appeasement fails. Sometimes they lash out blindly to compensate. I have a feeling that an Obama administration might be full of blathering efforts to appease punctuated by truly King Kong-like lashing out over-reactions. So I do not expect mere blather from Obama over his four or eight years. I expect cowardice and dodging followed by disaster and violence on a scale far beyond what a firm McCain administraion would produce.
#4 John Burack
I take your point; it’s a risk. (“Cowardice” is the wrong word, though.)
I’m not fond of either candidate, each being scary, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, in his own way. McCain is so reflexively aggressive (and Russophopic in particular), and is surrounded by men like Schoenemann, that he scares me more. If he were a Scrowcroftian realist, he might be the lesser of two evils; if fear, however, he’s no such thing.
Both candidates and President Bush have missed the obvious response to Russia’s invasion and border readjustment in the name of protecting it’s nationals and fellow ethnics.
It needs a nuanced response that reminds the bear he has a soft underbelly in Manchuria as well as a sharp tooth and claw end. The fact that the Beijing Olympics are on makes it a perfect time to make a comment or initiate a study about the mixed up ethnic populations in the Russian East.