The Elephant Bar

Germany to Hinder Obama/Holden Trial Conviction of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

2009-11-22T07:26:00.006-05:00

HERE IS WHAT OBAMA SAID ABOUT MILITARY TRIALS WHEN A SENATOR

HERE IS WHAT OBAMA SAYS AS PRESIDENT

Obama has hoisted his own petard and it seems to have been made in Germany. Remember, several members of the al Qaeda cell that planned and executed the attacks of September 11 were previously based in the northern German city of Hamburg. The Germans provided intelligence and evidence to the United States. That was then this is now:

In this case we will observe very closely that the given assurances are kept," Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said.

However it was unclear exactly how evidence from Germany would be distinguished from evidence procured from elsewhere.

The defense lawyer for one of the accused, Ramzi Binalshibh, said that a conviction of his client would "scarcely be possible without evidence from Germany."

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TERRORISM | 21.11.2009
Berlin wants no part in potential 9/11 execution

DW

A legal team is going to New York to prevent the use of evidence provided by Germany in seeking a death penalty. Berlin wants to ensure that promises made by the US are kept if the suspects are found guilty.

A team of observers from the German government is going to New York to oversee the trial of five suspects accused of orchestrating the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Saturday.

The federal trial of the suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants was announced on November 13 by the US Justice Department. The government also asserted that it intends to seek the death penalty if the accused are found guilty.

Germany, which does not have a death penalty, provided evidence for the trial on the condition that it could not be used to support a death sentence. Several members of the al Qaeda cell that planned and executed the attacks of September 11 were previously based in the northern German city of Hamburg.

"In this case we will observe very closely that the given assurances are kept," Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said.

However it was unclear exactly how evidence from Germany would be distinguished from evidence procured from elsewhere.

The defense lawyer for one of the accused, Ramzi Binalshibh, said that a conviction of his client would "scarcely be possible without evidence from Germany."

sjt/AP/dpa
Editor: Andreas Illmer

Burqua Barbie

2009-11-22T03:24:00.002-05:00

One of the world’s most famous children’s toys, Barbie, has been given a makeover – wearing a burkha.

Wearing the traditional Islamic dress, the iconic doll is going undercover for a charity auction in connection with Sotheby’s for Save The Children.

More than 500 Barbies went on show yesterday at the Salone dei Cinquecento, in Florence, Italy.

Makers Mattel are backing the exhibition which is the work of Italian designer Eliana Lorena.

The auction is part of Barbie celebrations for her 50th anniversary this year. The UK’s biggest Barbie fan Angela Ellis, 35, has a collection of more than 250 dolls.

I suppose little Muslim boys can practice being Jihadis when they grow up by pulling the heads off their sister's Burqua Barbies.

My friend John Hull

2009-11-21T12:37:00.009-05:00

I haven't seen John Hull or Rob Owen since 1984. We thought it best to part company at that time. Rob Owen had to burn through $1,000,000 to protect himself from the US Senate. I held my breath and lowered my profile. It worked.

I did have an amusing incident when I was invited to a party at the Vice President's House and met Dan Quayle. I knew Rob Owen worked for Quayle because one of the numbers I used to contact Owen was in the Indiana Senator's office. Several years later when introduced to the then Vice President I said we had a mutual friend in Rob Owen. VP Quayle smiled and asked as to how I knew Rob, and when I mentioned through John Hull, a concerned look rose across his face.

I chuckled and told him it was cool. John Hull was my friend and I knew what Hull did and did not do.

I had no idea John was still alive. I have posted several times about him and how he was railroaded by the "Liar of the Senate", John Kerry. Here is what he has been doing the last 25 years and here is a previous post I did on John Hull.

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Don John: The Man, The Myth, The Legend

Photos by Sonny Brown and
Kristen K. Tucker Evansvilleliving

At his Yucatan ranch, John Hull talks to Kristen K. tucker about growing up in Southern Indiana, the Contra war, and a life spent aiding native Indians.

“Don John” is up to his old tricks.

It could also be said, and it would be true, he’s never stopped doing what he does.

We — editors of this magazine and most people in Evansville — just didn’t know.

For nearly 20 years, the name John Hull hasn’t been heard much around Evansville. But for the decade of the 1980s and into the 1990s, “Don John,” as the Gibson County farmer was called throughout Central America, dominated local news reporting and captured the interest of national news organizations, politicians, presidents, the native Indians of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, the FBI, and the CIA.

The man who for a decade regaled reporters and anyone who would listen about his wartime adventures was keeping a low profile.

Pam Martin, an executive at Growth Alliance for Greater Evansville, who in 1989 interviewed and reported on Hull for the Sunday Courier & Press, even speculated recently as she drove up U.S. Highway 41 past the Patoka exit (where the Hull family farm sits less than a quarter-mile off the highway) if Hull still was alive.

John Floyd Hull Jr., 88, is indeed alive and talking at his 1,200-acre ranch in a remote area of the Mexican state of Yucatan, in the municipality of Tizimin, where he and his wife of 20 years, Emelia, 42, raise 800 Brahman cattle and have demonstrated a commitment to improving the lives of the native Mayan people who inhabit that region.

Two Evansville residents, John Whinrey, an attorney at Frick Powell LLP, and Ron Huffman, a retired Whirlpool engineer, both members of the Rotary Club of Evansville, recently traveled to the Yucatan to visit with Hull and Emelia (“Emie”).

Soon after their visit, I received a phone call in my office on a Friday afternoon. The strong, clear, congenial voice on the phone said, “Mrs. Tucker, this is John Hull. I want to invite you down to my ranch in Mexico.”

John Hull is up to his old tricks. Those who know him — including his grandson Joe Bammer, who owns and operates GrassMasters Sod Farm on part of the Hull family property in Patoka — say that Hull is doing the same thing in Mexico that he began doing in Costa Rica 40 years ago: carving a ranch out of the jungle and working intently to improve the natives’ lives, chiefly through better medical care.

Martin is not surprised. “It sounds just like John Hull. He’ll have one cause after another — humanitarian. Whether it’s on the political fringes or by himself, he’s going to try to improve lives. It’s his brand of assistance. He’ll always be doing what helps people.”

I took Hull’s invitation to visit his ranch seriously and in early January extended a business trip to San Antonio, Texas, to fly to Cancun, Mexico, where Hull said he and Emie would pick me up. Because the Hulls were in El Salvador when they phoned, I had not been able to reach them again until I was in the airport.

“We’re so pleased you’re coming,” Hull said. “We’ll try not to get you kidnapped.”

A few days later I was greeted by Emie Hull in Cancun. Because my flight was a few hours late and people picking up arriving passengers must wait outside, Hull was resting in the leather-seated Chrysler van. I spotted Emie, a pretty Costa Rican woman with strong features and a bright smile, and we began the 100-mile drive through Cancun and into the interior to the Hull ranch. While the roads in this ancient area of Mexico have been improved in recent years, due largely to the tourism industry centering around Cancun and the ruins of Chichen Itza and Tulum, still the drive takes nearly three hours, giving us plenty of time to get acquainted as we stopped several times to see the beach, to eat, and to buy fruit, Mexican pastries, and tortillas.

Early Adventures

John Floyd Hull Jr. learned about adventure early in his life. He was born Oct. 20, 1920, in Princeton, Ind., the second of two sons. Both parents had college degrees; his mother taught school, and his father was a county agricul-tural extension agent.

Hull’s father was outspoken against the Ku Klux Klan and, as a result, had a hard time finding a job in Southern Indiana. But he was able to find a job in Dubois County, where John Jr. started school at age 4.

When Hull’s father landed a job as the Vanderburgh County extension agent, the family moved to 715 Washington Ave., and Hull attended Stanley Hall and Bosse High School before enrolling in Evansville College at the age of 17. Always popular, he told me he beat out Vance Hartke, who would later become a U.S. senator, for senior class president.

Hull studied at Evansville College before enrolling in the federal government’s civil pilot training program. He took pilot courses in Evansville and Indianapolis and was selected to take instructor and acrobatic courses.

In 1940, he joined his older brother, J.D., in California where he trained pilots for the U.S. Army Air Corps, the forerunner of the Air Force. There, Hull taught flying for a year before he was drafted by the Army for occupational duty in Germany. Demonstrating the willfulness and resourcefulness that define him, he persuaded the Army to release him and went to Canada to join the Royal Air Force. Hull says he wanted to fly planes instead of being stationed in Germany.

Soon he was flying B-24 bombers from Canada to India. He claims to have held the Guinness World Record for the fastest halfway-around-the-world flight in 1941.

At the expansive Yucatan ranch home he and Emie built six years ago, Hull displays on the walls framed photographs of the pilots he taught in California, a handsome photo of himself flying a B-24, and a framed newspaper clipping from the Evansville Courier Journal, dated Jan. 26, 1936, that featured his mother, Anna Clark Hull. In the story, on the occasion of the death of King George V of England, Hull’s mother recalled 25 years earlier when she was presented at the court of the king and Queen Mary.

Also on the wall of the ranch home is a widescreen high-definition television. A satellite dish, borrowed from their Gibson County property, receives programs broadcast from the U.S. While Emie manages the daily operations of the ranch and its employees — including cowboys, Portofirio and Ruben, and maid, Helda — Hull takes care of business from his recliner and watches Fox News. While his wit is wry and he is quick with a quip, Hull has Parkinson’s disease and a history of heart disease and isn’t as active as he was even at age 70, when, I learned that first night sitting at their dining room table, Hull and Emie fled Nicaragua (prompted by numerous threats on Hull’s life) on foot, climbing over a 4,000- foot mountain in the middle of the night.

Farming Paradise

About 1949, Hull’s father had left his job in Vanderburgh County to work for the Ford Foundation as a foreign agricultural specialist, which led the Hull family to consider making farming investments in other countries. Hull had become interested in the tropics earlier in the war when he flew bombers from Canada to Central America.

During the 1950s, Hull and his father flew to Central America in their own airplane with soil testing kits to test throughout Central America and into South America. They looked for a location with fertile, mineralized soil; a friendly, pro-American culture; and a stable government. They found that in Costa Rica.

In 1969, Hull was the first American rancher to take up residence in northern Costa Rica. At the peak of his farming operations there, Hull amassed a total of about 12,000 acres under management, nearly all of it in ranches bordering the San Juan River along the Nicaraguan border.

Over the years, Hull, and other Americans he persuaded to follow him to Costa Rica (like wealthy Henderson, Ky., farmer and former Army officer, the late George P. Whittington), tamed Costa Rica’s wild frontier, dotting it with cattle, lumber, and citrus industries. Hull became a Costa Rican citizen (today, he holds dual citizenship with the U.S.) and earned the titles of respect: “Don John” or “El Patron” among the locals.

In the Yucatan, Hull still is called “Don John.” At a recent party Emie hosted at the ranch for the schoolchildren of the tiny neighboring village of San Pilar, a little girl asked if she could kiss “Don John.”

“I’ve not had a woman ask to kiss me in 50 years,” Hull joked.

I had read newspaper accounts from the early 1980s suggesting Hull was the most powerful man in Costa Rica. “Was he?” I asked Emie.

“He was. He was a fantastic asset for North America,” Emie says. “John first got very well known for flying in medical supplies.”

Just as his father had an airstrip on their Gibson County property (Evansville residents may remember the sign, “Hull Airport,” along U.S. Highway 41), Hull established grass runways on many of his Costa Rican farms. When neighboring Nicaragua tipped into a full-scale civil war in 1978, Hull began assisting Costa Rican officials by flying in medical supplies and flying out the wounded.

“I’ve grown very fond of the Indians, in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and now here,” Hull says.

Warring in Nicaragua were the Sandinistas and the Contras. The Sandinistas had taken over a repressive regime in 1979, and within a few months, had made known their ties with Cuba and the Soviet Union and vowed to spread communism across Central America. The Contras were formed from dozens of anti-Sandinista battle groups that staged assaults on the new Nicaraguan government from enclaves deep in the eastern Nicaraguan jungle and from neighboring Honduras and Costa Rica, the area of Hull’s ranches.

“The Costa Rican (National) guard were as much against the communists as anyone; so were the El Salvadorans and the Hondurans,” says Hull. “Luckily, there was an awful lot of help from everywhere, especially over in our area — rural people are anti-communist. Your communist agitation comes from people in the big cities, and out there in the North where I was, and the valley rural area, the people donated rice to me and food that I could give to the Contras. The police offered to close any roads I wanted, where they were going to air drop that night. When everyone cooperated, we felt we were stopping the communist movement...”

Three Million More Foreclosed Homes to Come to Market

2009-11-21T05:48:00.007-05:00

As President, Obama is a failure. To judge for yourself, compare his jobs speech of one year ago in Ohio, with what he is doing and not doing today.

Obama can't help himself. Trying to get his international ego boost, he jets and bows his way across the planet. His travels have not saved one job, one business or one more home from foreclosure.

Thirteen states reported unemployment rates above the national average of 10.2%, according to a government report released on Friday. Michigan is at 15%. California is at 12.5%.

Overall, jobless rates increased in 29 states and the District of Columbia during October, while they fell in 13 states.

Obama announced he will hold a jobs summit on Dec. 3. Obama will meet with financial experts and business leaders to discuss strategies to deal with the nation's labor problem. The man has never held a real job, so as POTUS, he has to have someone explain to him how it is done.

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Even the good die young? High-quality mortgages approaching foreclosure
Posted Nov 20th 2009 2:30PM by Tom Johansmeyer

The loans that got us into this mess were generally the first to fall. Variable rate mortgages written without documentation for people with sketchy credit histories shocked nobody as their slide became an avalanche. But, the good stuff is starting to follow. An increasing amount of fixed rate mortgages offered to borrowers with solid credit histories are feeling their ways to foreclosure. Blame unemployment for this one. When people can't work, it gets pretty hard to pay the mortgage.

Fixed rate, high quality mortgages had a foreclosure a year ago. Last quarter, it jumped to 33%, according to a Mortgage Bankers Association report. As this happened, the amount of homeowners behind on their payments or in foreclosure just set another record high ... for the ninth month in a row. Subprime mortgages are headed in the other direction. Low quality adjustable rate mortgages are now 16% of new foreclosures -- compared to 35% last year. And, more than 18% of Federal Housing Administration loans are anywhere from one payment behind to in foreclosure, with California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida worst off: together, they accounted for 44% of new foreclosures.

The fact that the job market is now to blame for the foreclosure rate does mark a turn in the financial crisis. Until this point, the loans themselves were blamed, especially those involving insane amounts of risk with little verification and (sometimes temporarily) low interest rates. Lending practices have tightened, but the looseness unleashed a contagion on global financial markets which has found its way to the labor market and has revisited housing, though in a different form.

Some are hopeful, but the situation could worsen. Jay Brinkman, chief economist with the Mortgage Bankers Association, notes to The Associated Press that if only a quarter of the 4 million homeowners either three months behind on their payments or in foreclosure are able to stay their homes, "there's a lot of potential inventory coming into the market next year." The foreclosures and subsequent inventory increases would drive prices down, pushing some borrowers into negative equity situations and threatening even more loans.

So, it looks like we're in a footrace. If the job market can recover faster than the foreclosure rate can worsen, it will stabilize the housing market and probably kick us into a virtuous cycle of job growth and home value increases. But, if foreclosures move more swiftly than jobs, the spiral could accelerate.

Mark Levin at The Federalist Society

2009-11-21T03:42:00.004-05:00

The Rights of the Colonists

by Samuel Adams

The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting.

November 20, 1772

Benjamin Franklin's Preface to the English Edition and Editor's Notes and Comments

I. Natural Rights of the Colonists as Men.

Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

All men have a right to remain in a state of nature as long as they please; and in case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and enter into another.

When men enter into society, it is by voluntary consent; and they have a right to demand and insist upon the performance of such conditions and previous limitations as form an equitable original compact.

Every natural right not expressly given up, or, from the nature of a social compact, necessarily ceded, remains.

All positive and civil laws should conform, as far as possible, to the law of natural reason and equity.

As neither reason requires nor religion permits the contrary, every man living in or out of a state of civil society has a right peaceably and quietly to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience.

"Just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty," in matters spiritual and temporal, is a thing that all men are clearly entitled to by the eternal and immutable laws of God and nature, [418]as well as by the law of nations and all well-grounded municipal laws, which must have their foundation in the former.

In regard to religion, mutual toleration in the different professions thereof is what all good and candid minds in all ages have ever practised, and, both by precept and example, inculcated on mankind. And it is now generally agreed among Christians that this spirit of toleration, in the fullest extent consistent with the being of civil society, is the chief characteristical mark of the Church. Insomuch that Mr. Locke has asserted and proved, beyond the possibility of contradiction on any solid ground, that such toleration ought to be extended to all whose doctrines are not subversive of society. The only sects which he thinks ought to be, and which by all wise laws are excluded from such toleration, are those who teach doctrines subversive of the civil government under which they live. The Roman Catholics or Papists are excluded by reason of such doctrines as these, that princes excommunicated may be deposed, and those that they call heretics may be destroyed without mercy; besides their recognizing the Pope in so absolute a manner, in subversion of government, by introducing, as far as possible into the states under whose protection they enjoy life, liberty, and property, that solecism in politics, imperium in imperio, leading directly to the worst anarchy and confusion, civil discord, war, and bloodshed.

The natural liberty of man, by entering into society, is abridged or restrained, so far only as is necessary for the great end of society, the best good of the whole.

In the state of nature every man is, under God, judge and sole judge of his own rights and of the injuries done him. By entering into society he agrees to an arbiter or indifferent judge between him and his neighbors; but he no more renounces his original right than by taking a cause out of the ordinary course of law, and leaving the decision to referees or indifferent arbitrators.

In the last case, he must pay the referees for time and trouble. He should also be willing to pay his just quota for the support of government, the law, and the constitution; the end of which is to furnish indifferent and impartial judges in all cases that may happen, whether civil, ecclesiastical, marine, or military.

[419] The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.

In the state of nature men may, as the patriarchs did, employ hired servants for the defence of their lives, liberties, and property; and they should pay them reasonable wages. Government was instituted for the purposes of common defence, and those who hold the reins of government have an equitable, natural right to an honorable support from the same principle that "the laborer is worthy of his hire." But then the same community which they serve ought to be the assessors of their pay. Governors have no right to seek and take what they please; by this, instead of being content with the station assigned them, that of honorable servants of the society, they would soon become absolute masters, despots, and tyrants. Hence, as a private man has a right to say what wages he will give in his private affairs, so has a community to determine what they will give and grant of their substance for the administration of public affairs. And, in both cases, more are ready to offer their service at the proposed and stipulated price than are able and willing to perform their duty.

In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.

Undocumented Democrats Unmolested

2009-11-20T19:50:00.002-05:00

Work Site Arrests of Illegals Fall Dramatically

Arrests of illegal immigrant workers have dropped precipitously under President Obama, according to figures released Wednesday.

Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the administration has made such advances on border security that Congress should now work on legalizing illegal immigrants.

Harry Reid currently has 58 votes for nationalizing health care. The Republicans are standing firm against it. If they can't get over the top, there's always plan B. Amnesty. Create 20 million new Democrats to put new backbone in the Donks who are wavering.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy. Meet the lovely Frances Fox Piven.

2009-11-20T07:46:00.001-05:00

The Cloward-Piven Strategy is being discussed as the bedrock belief system of Barack Hussein Obama. If you haven't heard much about it, you will soon. Mark Levin has posted some background here. Piven was married to Richard Andrew Cloward. You can jump ahead to the 25 minute mark to get into the meat of their strategy. More on the strategy below.

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First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.

The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare -- about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level."

Their article called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of "a federal program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living income for all -- working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.

This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements -- mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown -- providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.

Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.

Regarding Wiley's tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests - and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones."These methods proved effective. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," writes Sol Stern in the City Journal. "From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city's private economy."As a direct result of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.

The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in "the end of welfare as we know it" -- the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.

Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven. But New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990s. As his drive for welfare reform gained momentum, Giuliani accused the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966 manifesto as evidence that they had engaged in deliberate economic sabotage. "This wasn't an accident," Giuliani charged in a 1997 speech. "It wasn't an atmospheric thing, it wasn't supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare."

Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.

In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new "voting rights movement," which purported to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.

All three of these organizations -- ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE -- set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with "dead wood" -- invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people -- thus opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and "voter disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections.

The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and "direct action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries.

Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute and his "Shadow Party," through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious campaigns.

Discoverthenetworks

Focus on Blanche Lincoln to stop Health Care Rip-off by the Democrats

2009-11-20T06:16:00.004-05:00

A new Zogby poll suggests that Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) could seriously endanger her 2010 re-election by supporting the health care bill.

In initial match-ups, Lincoln leads state Sen. Gilbert Baker by 41%-39%, within the ±4.5% margin of error, and has a healthier lead of 45%-29% over state Sen. Kim Hendren.

In a series of follow-up questions, respondents were then asked how they would feel if Lincoln supported the bill. In a new match-up with Baker, Lincoln's previous edge of 41%-39% turns into a Baker lead of 49%-37%.

TPM

Washington, D.C. Address 355 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-0404
Phone: 202-224-4843
Fax: 202-228-1371

District Address 101 East Waterman
Dumas, AR 71639
Phone: 870-382-1023
Fax: 870-382-1026

District Address 912 West Fourth Street
Little Rock, AR 72201
Phone: 501-375-2993
Fax: 501-375-7064

District Address 4 South College Avenue, Suite 205
Fayetteville, AR 72701
Phone: 479-251-1224
Fax: 479-251-1410

District Address Miller County Courthouse 400 Laurel Street, Suite 101
Texarkana, AR 71854
Phone: 870-774-3106
Fax: 870-774-7627

District Address Federal Building 615 South Main Street, Suite 315
Jonesboro, AR 72401
Phone: 870-910-6896
Fax: 870-910-6898

Can Obama be so disengaged that he let Eric Holder do his own thing?

2009-11-19T20:49:00.002-05:00

"Many of the lost jobs – in construction, finance, and outsourced manufacturing and services – are gone forever"

2009-11-19T02:15:00.005-05:00

Certainly and emphatically no less qualified than Barrack Hussein Obama

A Tale of Two American Economies

Nouriel Roubini
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Published on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009 6:32PM EST
Last updated on Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009 5:35PM EST

While the United States recently reported 3.5 per cent GDP growth in the third quarter, suggesting that the most severe recession since the Great Depression is over, the American economy is actually much weaker than official data suggest. In fact, official measures of GDP may grossly overstate growth in the economy, as they don't capture the fact that business sentiment among small firms is abysmal and their output is still falling sharply. Properly corrected for this, third-quarter GDP may have been 2 per cent rather than 3.5 per cent.

The story of the U.S. is, indeed, one of two economies. There is a smaller one that is slowly recovering and a larger one that is still in a deep and persistent downturn.

Consider the following facts. While America's official unemployment rate is already 10.2 per cent, the figure jumps to a whopping 17.5 per cent when discouraged workers and partially employed workers are included. And, while data from firms suggest that job losses in the past three months were about 600,000, household surveys, which include self-employed workers and small entrepreneurs, suggest a number above two million.

Moreover, the total effect on labour income – the product of jobs times hours worked times average hourly wages – has been more severe than that implied by the job losses alone, because many firms are cutting their workers' hours, placing them on furlough or lowering their wages as a way to share the pain.

Many of the lost jobs – in construction, finance, and outsourced manufacturing and services – are gone forever, and recent studies suggest that a quarter of U.S. jobs can be fully outsourced over time to other countries. Thus, a growing proportion of the work force – often below the radar screen of official statistics – is losing hope of finding gainful employment, while the unemployment rate (especially for poor, unskilled workers) will remain high for a much longer period of time than in previous recessions.

Consider also the credit markets. Prime borrowers with good credit scores and investment-grade firms are not experiencing a credit crunch at this point, as the former have access to mortgages and consumer credit while the latter have access to bond and equity markets.

But non-prime borrowers – about one-third of U.S. households – do not have much access to mortgages and credit cards. They live from paycheque to paycheque – often a shrinking paycheque, owing to the decline in hourly wages and hours worked. And the credit crunch for non-investment-grade firms and smaller firms, which rely mostly on access to bank loans rather than capital markets, is still severe.

Or consider bankruptcies and defaults by households and firms. Larger firms – even those with large debt problems – can refinance their excessive liabilities in or out of court, but an unprecedented number of small businesses are going bankrupt. The same holds for households, with millions of weaker and poorer borrowers defaulting on mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, student loans and other consumer credit.

Did the Chinese scare Obama with some hard cold facts?

Consider also what is happening to private consumption and retail sales. Recent monthly figures suggest a rise in retail sales. But, because the official statistics capture mostly sales by larger retailers and exclude the fall by hundreds of thousands of smaller stores and businesses that have failed, consumption looks better than it really is.

And, while higher-income and wealthier households have a buffer of savings to smooth consumption and avoid having to increase savings, most lower-income households must save more, as banks and other lenders cut back on home-equity loans and lower limits on credit cards. As a result, the household savings rate has risen from zero to 4 per cent of disposable income. But it must rise further, to 8 per cent, in order to reduce the high leverage of the household sector.

To be sure, the U.S. government is increasing its budget deficits to put a floor under demand. But most state and local governments that have experienced a collapse in tax revenues must sharply retrench spending by firing policemen, teachers and firefighters while also cutting welfare benefits and social services for the poor. Many state and local governments in poorer regions are at risk of bankruptcy without a massive federal bailout.

Moreover, income and wealth inequality is rising again. Poorer households are at greater risk of unemployment, falling wages or reductions in hours worked, all leading to lower labour income, whereas on Wall Street, outrageous bonuses have returned with a vengeance. With the stock market rising and home prices still falling, the wealthy are becoming richer, while the middle class and the poor – whose main wealth is a house rather than equities – are becoming poorer and being saddled with an unsustainable debt burden.

So, while the United States may technically be close to the end of a severe recession, most of America is facing a near-depression. Little wonder, then, that few Americans believe that what walks like a duck and quacks like a duck is actually the phoenix of recovery.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

2009-11-18T19:04:00.006-05:00

UN: Fight climate change with free condoms

By MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng, Ap Medical Writer Wed Nov 18, 8:21 am ET

LONDON – The battle against global warming could be helped if the world slowed population growth by making free condoms and family planning advice more widely available, the U.N. Population Fund said Wednesday.

The agency did not recommend countries set limits on how many children people should have, but said: "Women with access to reproductive health services ... have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions."

"As the growth of population, economies and consumption outpaces the Earth's capacity to adjust, climate change could become much more extreme and conceivably catastrophic," the report said.

The problems faced by Soviet forces in Afghanistan carry echoes for Nato

2009-11-18T02:56:00.006-05:00

Not that you need it, but here is some bad news and then some even worse news.

First the bad.

The Senate will soon increase the national debt limit to above $13 trillion. That is paltry compared to what follows. The next ten years show a hyperbolic curve to financial ruin, brought to you by politicians that can't help themselves.

Democrats are nervous, twitchy, and are considering attaching a debt increase provision to the Defense Department spending bill. They will claim they are doing that for patriotic reasons. They are spending us into the abyss for God and country.

Meanwhile the twin sources of economic calamity and declining American security, Iraq and Afghanistan, grind on and on. Democracy is expensive you know, especially for the tribes of Islam, tribes who hate each other intensely and trust each other even less.

Now the worse news.

How do we get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, when we decide it is time to get out? Forget the reasons that will be fabricated for leaving, how do we do it?

The BBC examines how the Soviets did it. First let's examine the Soviet time-line in Afghanistan which spanned ten years. (We are in our eighth year.)

1979 - Brezhnev sends in troops
1988 - USSR pledges to withdraw
1989 - final Soviet withdrawal
Soviet deaths - estimated at 15,000
Afghan deaths - estimated at one million
The Soviets spent a paltry $12 billion. (To date the US has spent $1,300 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

_____________________

Soviet lessons from Afghanistan

Andrew North
BBC News

All the most senior ministers were at the Afghan strategy meeting.

They knew things were not going well, but from their leader there was a whiff of panic.

"We just need to be sure that the final result does not look like a humiliating defeat: to have lost so many men and now abandoned it all... in short, we have to get out of there."

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev - the speaker of those words - was understandably alarmed.
It was June 1986, almost a year since he had taken the decision to start withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan and hand over more responsibility to the government there.

But Soviet losses, already above 10,000, kept mounting.

With conflicting signals this week about the direction of Western policy in Afghanistan, there is a hint of the same kind of panic and indecision.

Soviet exit strategy

US President Barack Obama is still deciding whether to send in thousands of US reinforcements.

Yet the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown - facing ever-greater opposition to the Afghan war - has been highlighting possibilities for UK troops to pull back in some areas next year.

It is less than two weeks since he was saying: "We cannot, must not and will not walk away."

But as Mr Gorbachev found, getting out is at least as difficult as staying in.

It took almost four years to pull out entirely - because of a combination of dithering over strategy and last-ditch efforts by Moscow to prop up its client government in Kabul in the hope of maintaining some pride and influence.

The former Soviet leader's difficulties are detailed in previously secret transcripts of Politburo meetings and diary entries recently released by the Washington-based National Security Archive.

They make sobering reading for British and American leaders, as they decide whether to double-up or cut their losses in Afghanistan.

There are certainly differences - not least America's determination to make the Soviet withdrawal as costly as possible in blood and treasure.

Lost battle

But there are echoes too of the difficulties the US and its allies face now.

By the late 1980s, Moscow's exit strategy was basically the same as Nato's today - to build up an allied government in Kabul with sufficient trained army and police forces to defend itself, thereby allowing foreign troops to leave.

But even with the backing of a 100,000-strong Soviet army and billions of rubles in aid, the Afghan government struggled to establish its legitimacy and authority much beyond the capital - much like President Hamid Karzai's Western-backed administration today.

This bleak assessment of the situation in late 1986 by the Soviet armed forces commander, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, sounds eerily familiar.

"Military actions in Afghanistan will soon be seven years old," Mr Akhromeev told Mr Gorbachev at a November 1986 Politburo session.

"There is no single piece of land in this country which has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nonetheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels.

"The whole problem is that military results are not followed up by political actions. At the centre there is authority; in the provinces there is not.

"We control Kabul and the provincial centres, but on occupied territory we cannot establish authority. We have lost the battle for the Afghan people".

Familiar problems

By that point, Soviet trainers had created an Afghan army 160,000-strong - double the size of the force Nato has trained so far - together with thousands of much-feared secret policemen.

Yet once Soviet forces had left, they could do little more than defend Kabul and a few other cities.
Only massive military aid, coupled with incompetence and in-fighting among the US-backed mujahideen opposition, allowed the Afghan government Moscow left behind to cling on in Kabul for a few more years before finally collapsing.

There were familiar problems too with the financial assistance Moscow gave.

It hoped the funds would bolster the capacity of the Afghan government and pay for projects that would benefit people, winning hearts and minds.

However corruption rendered much of its useless.

As the Politburo discussed a new aid request from Kabul in January 1987, Marshal Sergei Sokolov said: "In 1981, we gave them 100m roubles of free assistance. And all of that went to the elite. And there was nothing in the hamlets - no kerosene, no matches."

"Saved or created" means save face by creating numbers

2009-11-17T20:48:00.002-05:00

Recovery.gov reported that 30 jobs were saved or created with $761,420 of federal stimulus spending in Arizona's 15th Congressional District. One problem with the claim -- the state has only eight districts

Talladega County of Alabama, claimed that it had saved or created 5,000 jobs from only $42,000 in government money -- which would amount to $8.40 in annual income per job if each position received an equal amount of funding....

...nearly $6.4 billion was used to "create or save" nearly 30,000 jobs in 440 non-existing districts, including in New Mexico's 4th, 22nd, 35th and 40th Districts. New Mexico has three Congressional Districts.

"I was alarmed to see that Democrats have spent $3,582,587 to create five jobs in Florida's 86th congressional district, " said Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Fla. "In the fighting 53rd they spent $460,000 of your taxpayer dollars to create zero jobs."

Florida has 25 U.S. Congressional Districts.

The same accountants are being used by Pelosi and Reid to turn a three trillion dollar health care bill into one that only reportedly costs $999,999,999,999.99, because that last penny is the deal breaker.

New York City - 1950 - New York

2009-11-17T09:19:00.001-05:00

As Goes Ohio, So Will Go Obama

2009-11-17T02:16:00.008-05:00

Change, you can feel the change.

Pre-election and for a few months thereafter, an Obama speech would stop crowds at airport televisions. I rarely looked at the screen then, instead I studied the faces, and saw an enthralled public. Black and white faces would exchange smiles. There was a genuine belief that change was coming. In the last months, a lot has changed, but not in the way the myth merchants had in mind.

Obama is now in the red in Ohio as voters disapprove 53 - 42 percent of the way the President is handling the economy, and disapprove 57 - 36 percent of the way he is handling health care. In September, Ohio approved of his handling of the economy 48 - 46 percent and split on his handling of health care 44 - 45 percent.

Those polls were taken before the inexplicable political decision to try terrorists in NYC. Even the Democratic Governor of New York rejects that politically foolish decision. Obama has burned much of his capital and yet has hardly started anything that is appealing to the American public. Obama has foolishly made himself look detached, indecisive and ideological at a time when the public is looking for leadership and common sense.

The public has noted as will Congress. Congress has an election in 2010 and that is only 44 days and a wake-up away.

_____________

Poll: Obama's overall approval rating falls to new low in Ohio

November 12, 10:21
PMCincinnati Political Buzz Examiner
Joshua Burns

President Obama's approval ratings have fallen to a new low in Ohio. For the first time, Ohio voters disapprove 50 - 45 percent of the job President Barack Obama is doing, down from his 53 - 42 percent approval September 16 and 49 - 44 percent approval July 7.

The Quinnipiac poll of Ohio voters conducted from November 5-9 is particularly problematic for the President as the dates of the survey spanned the weekend in which the House of Representatives' healthcare reform bill was passed. Nevertheless, his disapproval in a key swing state reached an all-time high.

"The Democratic wave that swept through Ohio in 2006 and 2008 may be cresting. [F]or the first time President Barack Obama is under water in the most important swing state in the country," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "In July, when the President's job approval began falling nationally from the high 50s and low 60s into the low 50s, Ohio was the first place it showed up in the polls," said Brown.

Ohio voters disapprove 53 - 42 percent of the way the President is handling the economy and disapprove 57 - 36 percent of the way he is handling health care. In September, they approved of his handling of the economy 48 - 46 percent and split on his handling of health care 44 - 45 percent.

Public Option for Rex

2009-11-16T21:16:00.007-05:00

"In the health care bill, we're now offering insurance for dogs." --Glenn Beck on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 in his radio program

Included in the House health care bill is the creation of a Public Health Workforce Corps to address shortages in the public health workforce. The program would provide scholarships and education loan repayment assistance for public health professionals serving in areas of need. Veterinarians are included among those public health professionals.

The inclusion of veterinarians in the health bill didn't sit well with Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., who noted on the House floor on Nov. 7, 2009, that the loan repayment program will cost $283 million over five years.

"So the real question I have for you folks (Democrats): Why are veterinarians part of this health care bill?" Stearns asked.

And where is the money coming from to pay for doggie health care?

A government report says that Democrats' health care bill "would reduce senior care: A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending ... would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday."

American workers under siege from China?

2009-11-15T18:03:00.004-05:00

China has now become the biggest risk to the world economy

Far from taking over as the engine of growth from an exhausted West, China is making matters worse. Its "beggar-thy-neighbour" policies continue to play havoc with global trade and risk tipping the world into a second leg of the Great Recession.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph

Published: 6:21PM GMT 15 Nov 2009

"The inherent problems of the international economic system have not been fully addressed," said China's president Hu Jintao. Indeed not. China is still exporting overcapacity to the rest of us on a grand scale, with deflationary consequences.

While some fret about liquidity-driven inflation, Justin Lin, World Bank chief economist, said the greater danger is that record levels of idle plant almost everywhere will feed a downward spiral of job cuts and corporate busts. "I'm more worried about deflation," he said.

By holding the yuan to 6.83 to the dollar to boost exports, Beijing is dumping its unemployment abroad – "stealing American jobs", says Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. As long as China does it, other tigers must do it too.
Western capitalists are complicit, of course. They rent cheap workers and cheap plant in Guangdong, then lobby Capitol Hill to prevent Congress doing anything about it. This is labour arbitrage.

At some point, American workers will rebel. US unemployment is already 17.5pc under the broad "U6" gauge followed by Barack Obama. Realty Track said that 332,000 properties were foreclosed in October alone. More Americans have lost their homes this year than during the entire decade of the Great Depression. A backlog of 7m homes is awaiting likely seizure by lenders. If you are not paying attention to this political time-bomb, perhaps you should.

President Obama said before going to China this week that Asia can no longer live by shipping goods to Americans already in debt to their ears. "We have reached one of those rare inflection points in history where we have the opportunity to take a different path," he said. Failure to take that path will "put enormous strains" on America's ties to China. Is that a threat?

It is fashionable to talk of America as the supplicant. That misreads the strategic balance. Washington can bring China to its knees at any time by shutting markets. There is no symmetry here. Any move by Beijing to liquidate its holdings of US Treasuries could be neutralized – in extremis – by capital controls. Well-armed sovereign states can do whatever they want.

If provoked, the US has the economic depth to retreat into near autarky (with NAFTA) and retool its industries behind tariff walls – as Britain did in the 1930s under Imperial Preference. In such circumstances, China would collapse. Mao statues would be toppled by street riots.

Mr Hu sounded conciliatory last week. China is taking "vigorous" steps to cut reliance on exports, still 39pc of GDP. "We want to increase people's ability to spend," he said.

Beijing is indeed boosting pensions and extending health insurance to the countryside so that people feel less need to save, but cultural revolutions take time. All we have seen so far are "baby steps", says Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach.

The reality is that much of Beijing's $600bn stimulus has been spent building yet more plant and infrastructure so that China can ship yet more goods, or has leaked into property and stocks.

Credit has exploded. Allocated by Maoist bosses for political purposes, it has become absurd. China is rolling as much steel as the next eight producers combined. It is churning more cement than the rest of the world. Fixed investment is up 53pc this year. Once you know that Hunan authorities have torn down two miles of modern flyway so that they can soak up stimulus by building it again, or that the newly-built city of Ordos is sitting empty in Inner Mongolia, you know what must come next.

Pivot Asset Management said lending has touched 140pc of GDP, "well beyond" levels that have led to crises in the past. With the revolution's 60th birthday out of the way, the central bank has begun to tighten. New yuan loans halved in October. So be careful. Pivot said a hard-landing in China could prove as traumatic for world markets as the US sub-prime crash.

The world economy is still skating on thin ice. The West is sated with debt, the East with plant. The crisis has been contained (or masked) by zero rates and a fiscal blast, trashing sovereign balance sheets. But the core problem remains. The Anglo-sphere and Club Med are tightening belts, yet Asia is not adding enough demand to compensate. It is adding supply.

My view is that markets are still in denial about the structural wreckage of the credit bubble. There are two more boils to lance: China's investment bubble; and Europe's banking cover-up. I fear that only then can we clear the rubble and, very slowly, start a fresh cycle.

How our Rube-in-Chief does it vs. Chinese President Hu

2009-11-15T10:42:00.001-05:00

Obama would do well at a Tokyo train guard:

Another POTUS daddy issue? The disturbing truth about the late Barack Obama Sr.

2009-11-15T05:44:00.009-05:00

Mark Ndesandjo, the once intensely private half-brother of President-elect Barack Obama talks to the Telegraph in China.

Remember the treatise from Maureen Dowd on the relationship of George W. Bush, to his father?

Recall the vigor in which the press seized the chalice from her dowdy hands and carped and analyzed about GWB and George the elder. Theories and speculation shuddered through the media and nary a leg tingled.

The daddy issue may be back.

__________________

Our alcoholic father beat me, says Barack Obama's half brother, Mark

As President Barack Obama begins his China visit, his half brother who lives there reveals that when he was a child their father was a violent drunk

By David Eimer in Guangzhou Telegraph
Published: 5:17PM GMT 14 Nov 2009

The southern Chinese city of Shenzhen is a world away from Washington DC.

The booming border town and the staid American capital are both home to members of the Obama family. That, though, is where the similarities end, because while Barack Obama resides in the splendour of the White House and is perhaps the most recognisable person on the planet, his younger half-brother Mark lives anonymously in a rented two-bedroom flat in Shenzhen's suburbs.

Now, on the eve of his older sibling's first-ever visit to China, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo has emerged from the shadows to reveal the disturbing truth about the late Barack Obama Sr, his and President Obama's father.

Last week, Mr Ndesandjo published an autobiographical novel, Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Tale of Love In The East. It paints a shocking picture of his abusive and alcoholic father, one that is at odds with the man portrayed in Dreams From My Father, President Obama's best-selling 1995 memoir.

"I can remember my father hitting my mother and me. They're memories I don't like to dwell on because it's very painful for me," said Mr Ndesandjo, who has lived in China for seven years.

"I had a very difficult early childhood and there were things that happened to me that really hardened me."

In his book, Mr Ndesandjo describes a father who was a heavy drinker and who began to abuse his wife, verbally and physically, soon after they were married. Their son witnesses his mother running, screaming, into the night to escape being beaten.
"There were some thumps as of someone falling," reads one passage. "His father's angry voice raised itself... He didn't remember what they were fighting about, but his stomach felt sick and empty.

"His mother was being attacked and he couldn't protect her. 'You bastard!' he remembered her screaming out. And that was just one night. There were many more."

The novel gives a new insight into President Obama's dysfunctional family. His father was married four times and had eight children. The 43-year-old Mr Ndesandjo was born in Kenya to Mr Obama Sr's third wife Ruth Nidesand, a Jewish-American whose parents were originally from Lithuania. They met in Boston, where Mr Obama Sr had gone to study at Harvard after divorcing his second wife, Barack Obama's mother. The future President was just two years old when his father left him, and they would meet again only once, in 1971.

That lack of contact may explain the very different views the brothers have of their father, who became a government economist but died in a car crash while driving drunk in 1982.

President Obama's image of his father came from stories told by his relatives. In Dreams From My Father, the young Barack describes crying over his father's grave because he had ended up back in Kenya and "could not outlive a mocking fate".
Present throughout his memoir is a tone of regret that is in sharp contrast to Mr Ndesandjo's pointed portrait, in Nairobi to Shenzhen, of a troubled and violent man.

Unlike President Obama, though, he stayed with his father until he was eight, when his mother left her husband to return to the United States. "The things I've said about him are based on what I knew, my own personal experiences. I'm not speaking for anybody else. But I lived with him," said Mr Ndesandjo.

"My mother used to say he was a brilliant guy but a social failure. This was a guy who was a goat-herder, but he still achieved. He went to Harvard and had a very respected position in Kenyan society. But then it sort of crumbled away."

His mother has since returned to Kenya, where she runs a kindergarten in Nairobi, but raised Mr Ndesandjo in Boston, where he took his stepfather's surname. "It was a huge culture shock for me to go to America. It was very, very difficult because I had no support structure. The only thing I had to pull me through was my mother," he said.

Nairobi to Shenzhen is dedicated to her, as well as to his younger brother David, who died in a motorcycle accident.
Mr Ndesandjo has only met his famous sibling on a few occasions, the most recent being at his inauguration as President in January. With his shaven head, red bandana and a gold stud in his left ear, his style is very different from President Obama's. But they share the same slim build, as well as a vague facial resemblance. Mr Ndesandjo was also as elusive as any politician, refusing to be drawn on whether he has discussed his father with his brother, or anything concerned with US-China relations, when he met The Sunday Telegraph in a Guangzhou hotel.

He denied that the release of his novel, which he is self-publishing via a small "vanity press" in California, had been timed to coincide with his brother's four-day visit to Beijing and Shanghai, which starts today.

"I've been working on this book for a number of years. It just happens to be coming out now. I did have publishers who were interested in it, but they wanted me to write about my brother and I didn't want to do that," said Mr Ndesandjo, who is now writing his autobiography.

There is no doubt, though, that the timing is beneficial because of the huge interest in President Obama's debut trip to China, the first state visit by a US President since 1998. Climate change, trade and further co-operation to rein in North Korea's nuclear programme are expected to be top of the agenda when Mr Obama sits down with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao.

Both the Chinese and the Americans have stressed the importance of the US-China relationship in the run-up to the talks, but there is plenty of potential for disagreement. President Obama has said he will raise China's unwillingness to allow its currency, the yuan, to float freely, something which makes US exports more expensive. The Chinese would like President Obama to make a statement acknowledging their sovereignty over Tibet.

But Mr Ndesandjo is more concerned that his brother meets his Chinese wife. "My plan is to introduce my wife to him. She's his biggest fan," he said.

He married Liu Zuehua, from central Henan Province, last year. "She's the focus of my life, but I really want to keep that private," he said.

They live a modest existence in Nanshan, a district of Shenzhen close to the border with Hong Kong, in one of the high-rise apartment blocks that house the millions of Chinese who have flocked to the province in recent years, to work in the companies and factories that have made it a boom town.

Mr Ndesandjo is not obviously wealthy, though. "I took advantage of a promotion and got cable TV installed for a few days so we could watch the election night last November," he said.

With degrees in maths and physics, as well as an MBA, he spent 11 years working for telecommunications companies in the US. Made redundant after 9/11, he decided to move to China in 2002. "I didn't want to go back into the corporate world; I wanted to do something different. I liked the idea of the intellectual challenge of learning the language," said Mr Ndesandjo, who now speaks and writes fluent Mandarin.

Since being in Shenzhen he has been involved in an online communications company and was a partner in a chain of barbecue restaurants. Now, he spends his days practising Chinese calligraphy, writing and teaching piano at a local orphanage. A keen jazz and classical pianist, he occasionally gives concerts for charity and is donating 15 per cent of his novel's proceeds to a fund for disadvantaged children.

More than anything, living in China seems to have helped him come to terms with his traumatic childhood. He will be passing on what he has learned to President Obama when they meet. "I'd encourage my brother to understand that China is really about family," said Mr Ndesandjo. "Families here have a tremendous bond. That's why people in China work so hard and have the goals they do. You have to understand that if you want to understand China

Obama's ego, so inflated, will require a ZIP code of its own.

2009-11-15T05:32:00.003-05:00

Obama’s swelling ego

By Jeff Jacoby Boston Globe
Globe Columnist / November 14, 2009

PRESIDENT OBAMA was too busy to attend the celebrations in Germany this week marking the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. But he did appear by video, delivering a few brief and bloodless remarks about how the wall was “a painful barrier between family and friends’’ that symbolized “a system that denied people the freedoms that should be the right of every human being.’’ He referred to “tyranny,’’ but never identified the tyrants - he never uttered the words “Soviet Union’’ or “communism,’’ for example. He said nothing about the men and women who died trying to cross the wall. Nor did he mention Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan - or even Mikhail Gorbachev.

He did, however, talk about Barack Obama.

“Few would have foreseen,’’ declared the president, “that a united Germany would be led by a woman from [the former East German state of] Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it.’’

As presidential rhetoric goes, this was hardly a match for “Ich bin ein Berliner,’’ still less another “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’’ But as a specimen of presidential narcissism, it is hard to beat. Obama couldn’t be troubled to visit Berlin to commemorate a momentous milestone in the history of human liberty. But he was glad to explain to those who were there why reflections on that milestone should inspire appreciation for the self-made “destiny’’ of his own rise to power.

Was there ever a president as deeply enamored of himself as Barack Obama?

The first President Bush, taught from childhood to shun what his mother called “The Great I Am,’’ regularly instructed his speechwriters not to include too many “I’s’’ in his prepared remarks. Reagan maintained that there was no limit to what someone could achieve if he didn’t mind who got the credit. George Washington, one of the most accomplished men of his day, said with characteristic modesty on becoming president that he was “peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.’’

Obama, on the other hand, positively revels in The Great I Am.

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,’’ he told campaign aides when he was running for the White House. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that . . . I’m a better political director than my political director.’’

At the start of his presidency, Obama seemed to content himself with the royal “we’’ - “We will build the roads and bridges. . . . We will restore science to its rightful place. . . . We will harness the sun and winds,’’ he declaimed at his inauguration.

But as the literary theorist Stanley Fish points out, “By the time of the address to the Congress on Feb. 24, the royal we [had] flowered into the naked ‘I’: ‘As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress.’ ‘I called for action.’ ‘I pushed for quick action.’ ‘I have told each of my Cabinet.’ ‘I’ve appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general.’ ’I refuse to let that happen.’ ’’ In his speech on the federal takeover of General Motors, Obama likewise found it necessary to use the first-person singular pronoun 34 times. (“Congress’’ he mentioned just once.)

At this rate, it won’t be long before the president’s ego is so inflated that it will require a ZIP code of its own.

Then again, how modest would any of us be if we were as magnificent as Obama knows himself to be? “I am well aware,’’ he told the UN General Assembly in September, “of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world.’’

In 1860, writes Doris Kearns Goodwin in her celebrated biography “Team of Rivals,’’ an author wishing to dedicate his forthcoming work to Abraham Lincoln received this answer: “I give the leave, begging only that the inscription may be in modest terms, not representing me as a man of great learning, or a very extraordinary one in any respect.’’

Obama has often claimed Lincoln as a role model, but apparently it only goes so far.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

Remember the highlight of Obama's Russian Triumph?

2009-11-13T23:35:00.005-05:00

I confess to utter contempt for the Russians. It is personal with me, but I try and temper my judgement, barely successful at times. I was stupefied by the inanities of GWB and his man-love for Vladimir Putin, KGB vavasour.

Had it not been done to the President of the United States, I would have been amused at the amateur hour performance of Obama when he was in Russia and his utter misunderstanding and naivete in dealing with them.

This was highlighted by the deal with the Russians to overfly Russia to support the Afghanistan debacle.

You will recall that we stabbed Poland in the ass on the sixtieth anniversary of the Nazi and Russian attack on Poland. Russia, you will recall, invaded Poland’s eastern front in 1939, two weeks after Nazi Germany overran Poland’s western border. Stalin and his thugs then murdered the entire elite Polish officer corps.

In a ceremony described as “moving” by Russian diplomats, President Obama officially canceled a Bush-era deal that would have placed a missile-defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland. Obama must have been wearing George Bush's presidential knee pads when he met Putin.

Never mind.

Back to Obama's diplomatic coup on the Russian overflights to Afghanistan. Let's check it out and see how it is going.

______________________________________________

Russian Deal on Afghan Supply Route Not a Deal Yet

By PETER BAKER NY Times
Published: November 13, 2009

WASHINGTON — When he met President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia in April, President Obama sought to open an important new supply corridor for Afghanistan by flying American troops and weapons through Russian airspace. Visiting Moscow in July, he sealed a deal for as many as 4,500 flights a year, in what he called a “substantial contribution” to the war and a sign of improving relations with Russia.

Notes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era. Go to the Blog »
Seven months after the idea was raised and four months after the agreement was signed, the number of American flights that have actually traversed Russian airspace?

One. And that was for show.

The failure so far to translate words into reality amid bureaucratic delays, including one involving a Russian agency insisting on charging air navigation fees that the Kremlin had said would be waived, underscores the challenges of Mr. Obama’s effort to transform ties between Washington and Moscow. For all of the lofty sentiments expressed at high-profile summit meetings, actual change has never been easy to deliver.

The need to break through the logjam will soon take on fresh urgency if Mr. Obama decides to deploy tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan. For eight years, the American military has struggled to find and maintain reliable supply routes into Afghanistan, but Mr. Obama may send more troops in a single order than at any point in the war, straining the system.

Because of the difficulties in getting supplies to Afghanistan through Pakistan, the new Russian air corridor “would be fairly important,” said Ronald E. Neumann, a former ambassador to Afghanistan and now president of the American Academy of Diplomacy. “This doesn’t answer the question of how much we’ll be able to rely on the Russian connection, and that will be a big part of how much of a difference it can make.”

Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington who has advised Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, said the United States “needs as many options as it can get” to send troops and equipment.

“There is no way to predict how reliable any given route will be during a war that seems nearly certain to last for three to four more years,” he said. “There is no way to guarantee Pakistani stability, and almost any major base could be the subject of a large-scale Taliban bombing. The U.S. can live without a Russian option, but it would be much better off with one.”

The uncertainty comes at a tenuous moment in Russian-American relations, as Mr. Obama seeks more support from the Kremlin in pressing Iran to scale back its nuclear program, and as the United States and Russia race to agree on a new nuclear arms treaty before the current one expires Dec. 5.

The problems with opening the air corridor as part of a so-called northern distribution network stem from a variety of technical issues that American officials are working to resolve, among them a dispute over who will pay. Under the pact that Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev sealed in July, the Russians agreed to waive air navigation fees typically charged for right of passage and air traffic control.

American officials said the new route would save $133 million a year in fuel, maintenance and other costs. But the Russian agency that collects the navigation fees has so far refused to exempt the Americans.

The Obama administration is sending a technical team to Moscow to try to work out what standards should apply to the flights, and spokesmen for the two governments played down the problem.

“We are working through procedural delays on the Russian side and hope to begin regular flights soon,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary.

Aleksei Pavlov, a spokesman for Mr. Medvedev, said the Kremlin had every intention of fulfilling the agreement. “We are eager to resolve this issue in the nearest future,” he said.

But such seemingly minor complications have bollixed Russian-American agreements before. President Bill Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin agreed in 1998 to open a joint early warning center in Moscow, where Russian and American personnel would work side by side to detect missile launches and avoid misunderstandings that could lead to accidental war.

Their successors renewed the agreement, but the center has been delayed for 11 years amid disputes over issues like construction liability. Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev vowed to try again last summer, but in the latest holdup, the Russians have delayed allowing American inspectors into the country to examine the still unopened facility.

The idea of sending American forces through Russia to a war zone is fraught with a complicated history and mutual suspicion. For years, the idea was out of the question. Then in 2008, Russia agreed to open a land corridor, but only for nonlethal supplies.

The agreement to allow American troops and weapons to fly over the territory of Russia, its onetime cold war enemy, was seen as a symbolic breakthrough as much as a logistical one, and administration officials argued that it was a triumph even if no planes actually ever used the route. Still, just as some people in Moscow appear apprehensive about American forces in their airspace, some American officials are wary of putting too much faith in the Russians, who could easily close down the corridor if political tension rises again.

The latest transit agreement formally went into effect Sept. 4. A week later, the Pentagon sent Moscow a general description of cargo and personnel that would be shipped under the agreement, as well as the regular destinations of the planes, according to an administration official. The Russians accepted the request, and the two sides arranged for a single test flight on Oct. 8, just before Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Moscow.

But the dispute over the air transit fees has yet to be solved, complicated by whether the planes used will be American military craft or contracted civilian planes. Moreover, the American side is still working to amend its overflight agreements with Poland and Kazakhstan so the flights can traverse those countries as well.

Administration officials said that they remained confident these issues could be worked out, and that they had requested a second test flight to try to advance the program. They said that they did not expect Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev to talk about the issue when the presidents meet in Singapore on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting, but that they hoped to resolve it at lower levels.

Clifford J. Levy contributed reporting from Moscow.

13 dead, 29 wounded, and one victim

2009-11-13T18:28:00.004-05:00

Major Nidal M. Hasan allegedly acted out his anger at Fort Hood. Who are we to attribute religious motives?

The Army major charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder in last week's shooting rampage at Ft. Hood is paralyzed, according to his civilian counsel, retired Col. John Galligan.

Galligan said that his client was also experiencing intense pain in his hands and that that Hasan's speech is garbled. He expressed unhappiness that the charges were apparently read to his client in the hospital yesterday without either him or his military counsel present.

"Well, there's no legal requirement that I be present when the charges have been preferred," Galligan said. "However, given as you've noted the high profile nature of the case, given his location and status, still in the ICU, and described by me based on the last timing I saw him in a medical condition that I would describe as guarded, I was extremely upset to learn that they were going about this important step in the pretrial procedural process without formally notifying me - by that I mean ensuring that I knew it was going to be done, coordinating it in advance. That would have permitted me to be down there.

"In all honesty, my first five minutes with the client was spent almost apologizing for the manner in which it went down..."

As the Army considers adding a fourteenth murder charge (one of the American Imperialist soldiers was pregnant) the Commander-in-Chief stifles a yawn while attending the memorial services at Fort Hood

Obama needs a forum to figure out jobs creation. Understandable, he never had a real one.

2009-11-13T02:31:00.006-05:00

Chin up. Another forum. The polls are showing growing anxiety over the absence of job creation. Obama has created some jobs and saved others, but they are in the only area Obama understands, the public sector.

Public and government jobs do little to stimulate the economy. One year into his presidency and Obama still has no clue as to how to create sustainable new jobs.

The chart below shows the creation and destruction of US jobs over time. In bulk terms, every job created from 2004 until July 2007, has been lost. That is six million jobs.

Business Insider

US Envoy to Afghanistan Urges No More Troops. Say what?

2009-11-12T00:03:00.009-05:00

Whoa baby, what is going on in Dodge? Is this Karl Elkenberry some defeatist pinko? Let's look at the dossier:

Education

Eikenberry graduated from Goldsboro High School in Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1969 and then studied as an undergraduate at West Point, where he graduated in 1973. In August 2007 he returned to Goldsboro to receive the key to the city from the mayor. (Sounds good so far)

He received an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Harvard, where he would later return as National Security Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and an M.A. in political science from Stanford, where he was also a Ph.D candidate. In addition, Eikenberry has studied in Hong Kong at the UK Ministry of Defence Chinese Language School, earning the Foreign Office's Interpreter’s Certificate for Mandarin Chinese, and Nanjing University, earning an advanced degree in Chinese History. (Geez, a US Ambassador with some qualifications for a change.)

Military Career

Eikenberry served two tours of duty in the war in Afghanistan. ( The boy is no theoretical academic) His first tour in Afghanistan was from September 2002- September 2003. During this time he filled two positions; his primary duty was as the United States Security Coordinator for Afghanistan and the second position was the Chief of the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan (OMC-A). As the Security Coordinator he worked closely with UNSG Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi to forge a unified international effort to build a cohesive security sector. This Security Sector Reform (SSR) project included building the Afghan National Army (U.S.), reforming the Afghan Police (Germany), Counter-Narcotics (U.K.), Judicial reform (Italy), and Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration of the militias (Japan and U.N.). In his role as Chief of the OMC-A he was the chief architect of the strategy that built and fielded the first Afghan Army Corps. During his second tour he was Commander of the Combined Forces Command for 18 months, leaving in 2007 to become the Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee. (I think he may have a better grasp than even Glenn Beck)

Ambassador

On January 29, 2009, The New York Times reported that President Barack Obama had chosen Eikenberry to be the next U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, replacing William Braucher Wood. The choice of a career army officer for the sensitive post was described by The Times as "highly unusual". On April 3, 2009, the Senate confirmed Eikenberry's nomination, and on April 29, 2009, he was sworn in as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan.

(Gen. Eikenberry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the United States and its international partners must redouble efforts to reverse Taliban gains in the embattled south and east of the country as well as deal with the booming drug trade that fuels them. He also promised more support to the Afghan national army and police.

"The way ahead is clear but the resources to date have, regrettably, been insufficient," he said.

Speaking hours before the Obama administration is set to unveil a new strategy for the war that will deal with Afghanistan and Pakistan, Gen. Eikenberry said it was "unclear" whether Pakistan's intelligence service has dropped support for the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"We can succeed in Afghanistan, it's true, but if we don't address the problem, the linked problems in Pakistan, then we'll have no lasting success," he told the panel.)

The official announcement of his nomination was made on March 11. Following his confirmation as ambassador, he retired from the U.S. military with the rank of Lieutenant General on April 28, 2009. Eikenberry has been allowed to bring his family and wife, Ching Eikenberry, to live with him in Kabul. (Wikipedia and other news sources)

OK, that was then, now what is going on today?

Envoy urges no US troop increaseBBC

The US ambassador in Kabul has written to the White House arguing against sending thousands more American troops to Afghanistan.

In a leaked cable, Karl Eikenberry expressed doubts about the competence of President Hamid Karzai's government.

The message arrived amid intense debate over strategy, with President Obama yet to make a decision on troop numbers.

This dramatic intervention seems to put the envoy at odds with generals wanting reinforcements, correspondents say.

On Wednesday, Mr Obama he held his eighth meeting in a series aimed at refocusing Afghan policy.
Mr Eikenberry, a former US commander in Afghanistan, also raised concerns about corruption within the Afghan government.

He said it was "not a good idea" to send more troops, the BBC has been told.

The cable arrived days before Mr Obama held a crucial strategy session - to discuss the question of whether to send tens of thousands more troops to confront and push back the Taliban.

The cable appears to be a dramatic and last-minute intervention by the ambassador, BBC Washington correspondent Adam Brookes reports.

It comes right at the end of weeks of White House deliberation over how to proceed in Afghanistan, and appears to put the ambassador at odds with the US army, whose generals favour reinforcing and intensifying America's campaign in Afghanistan.

Military commander 'fuming'

The top US military commander in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley McChrystal, has asked for at least 40,000 more US troops.

Barack Obama has held eight meetings with his security advisors.

The US currently has some 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, contributing to a coalition force of more than 100,000.
Gen McChrystal was "fuming" about Mr Eikenberry's intervention, sources said.

At Wednesday's meeting, White House officials said Mr Obama discussed timeframes for four options presented at the meeting but took no decisions on them.

The president said the US commitment should not be open-ended and governance there must improve, they added.

Among the key outstanding issues is said to be the reliability of the government of President Karzai, who was recently declared the winner of a widely criticised election.

Critics have said the decision on Afghanistan is taking too long, while Mr Obama has said he does not want to rush a decision that involves putting troops at risk.

By the way, what was our guy, Karzai, actually saying to the Afghanis during the election? "He knows the Taliban", so he says.

Happy Veterans Day to you and me.

2009-11-11T08:12:00.004-05:00

The best (part time) job I ever had. Call in with your requests.