The Mellow Doctrine

Roger Cohen of the NYT writes about Obama's 'Mellow Doctrine':

Amazing what happens when you cast aside the testosterone.

I know bristling Dick Cheney believes America’s enemies now perceive “a
weak president,” as do sundry Republican senators, but the truth is that foes of
the United States have been disarmed by Barack Obama’s no-drama diplomacy.

Call it the mellow doctrine. Neither idealistic nor classic
realpolitik, it involves finding strength through unconventional means:
acknowledgment of the limits of American power; frankness about U.S. failings;
careful listening; fear reduction; adroit deployment of the wide appeal of brand
Barack Hussein Obama; and jujitsu engagement.

Already the mellow doctrine has brought some remarkable shifts, even if
more time is needed to see its results.

The Castro brothers in Cuba are squabbling over the meaning of Obama’s
overtures. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez has gone gooey-eyed over the Yanqui
president. Turkey relented on a major NATO dispute, persuaded of the importance
of Obama’s conciliatory message to Muslims.

From Damascus to Tehran, new debate rages over possible rapprochement
with Washington. In Israel, I understand Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is
about to drag his Likud party kicking and screaming to acceptance of the idea of
a two-state solution because he knows the cost of an early confrontation with
Obama.

Not bad for 105 days.

It feels good, even if Pakistan looks bad.

Souter's Shack

I cannot believe this is Supreme Court Justice Souter's home in New Hampshire. It simply boggles the mind.

Pontiac, RIP

Until a few days ago, the Arnolds had a plan. In the tradition of his
father and grandfather, Bob the white-haired elder, 74, would be turning the
dealership over to his son, Bob the dark-haired younger, 44. The handoff would
have happened sooner if not for the embezzlement of $400,000 a couple of years
ago by a longtime employee who was like family and who, it turned out, liked to
gamble.

But a far deeper betrayal came last week, the Arnolds say, when another
family member and poor gambler, General
Motors, announced that by 2010 it would close its Pontiac division and 2,600
of its 6,200 dealerships — all to convince a doubtful Obama administration that
it had a business plan strong enough to beat a bankruptcy deadline of June 1 and
to deserve more government loans.

Pontiac: The Official Car of the 2009 Economic Crisis.

It's so sad to see Pontiac disappear. It was my favorite car of all, so far: a 1990 Pontiac 6000. It looked good, drove well, had lots of power and room, and was fairly good on gas mileage. What more could you want? I still see lots of Pontiacs around, so they seem like a good niche brand. But who am I?

The Big Nightmare: Pakistan

Actually, having read that last post, I'm beginning to think that a missile defense system against Pakistani nuclear missiles falling into Islamist hands might not be such a bad idea.

Forget Iran. As many have been saying for years now, it's Pakistan that is the big nightmare for the West and the world. (One wonders if Israel really understands this?) And we helped bring it about by staying in Afghanistan and pushing the Taliban into Pakistan. Yes, we did.

They call it 'blowback,' at least in CIA terms. And we haven't learned our lesson yet, with our ratcheting up of our military involvement in the Af-Pak region. I don't know what the answer is, but I'm not sure that's it.

Muslim Schooling for Fundamentalists

Islamic education that is also radical Islamist for the poorest people in many Muslim countries is a real problem for the West, but one without a good solution. It would be as if every school in America were run by fundamentalist Christians who always voted for the most conservative Republicans. This article deals with such schools in Pakistan.

With public education in a shambles, Pakistan’s poorest families have
turned to madrasas, or Islamic schools, that feed and house the children while
pushing a more militant brand of Islam than was traditional here.

The concentration of madrasas here in southern Punjab has become an urgent
concern in the face of Pakistan’s expanding insurgency. The schools offer almost
no instruction beyond the memorizing of the
Koran, creating a widening pool of young minds that are sympathetic to
militancy.

In an analysis of the profiles of suicide bombers who have struck in
Punjab, the Punjab police said more than two-thirds had attended madrasas.

“We are at the beginning of a great storm that is about to sweep the
country,” said Ibn Abduh Rehman, who directs the Human Rights Commission of
Pakistan, an independent organization. “It’s red alert for Pakistan.”

A Generation Chooses

My son Adam recently wrote a 'letter to the editor' of his local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC. I think it merits posting here.

A Generation Chooses

What has been one of the biggest explanations for those who oppose
President Obama's budget? They don't want to pass down the debt to their
children.

From this, it seems these people are thinking only about the
welfare of the next generation. The problem is, my generation, the one that will
inherit all of this, doesn't buy it.

We are the most highly educated generation in history, the most
connected generation in history, and one of the most politically and socially
active groups of young people in recent memory. This is good for the country. It
means a smarter electorate, better governance -- a better system.

Of this generation (under 30 years old), over two-thirds voted for
Obama. If the general vote was a landslide, the youth vote was an avalanche.
Yet, when my generation speaks, we seem to be drowned out by the same old
naysayers, relying on the same tactics that brought us to where we see ourselves
... inheriting a monstrous set of problems.

The reason Obama won the youth vote in such high numbers is because he
understands our goals. We know that climate change is occurring, and we are
anxious to start working on clean energy. We know that America's role in the
world must change, and we are happy to see less "cowboy rhetoric."

We recognize the major shortfalls of our health care, transportation
and education systems (not to mention our financial system!), and are eager to
transform them to serve us better.
We have an opportunity to clean up this
pile of problems, and we know we cannot wait any longer. Unfortunately, they
won't just go away without expense.

But to those who fear handing down a large debt: We choose that debt
over our other inheritance.

Adam Lindquist

Endless Options

If you are a parent of a college or high school student, you will enjoy this article.

A Collapsed Republican Party

Frank Rich's take on the Republican Party:

The Republican Party has collapsed, and that is not a good thing for the
country or for Obama. We need more than one functioning party, not just to
ensure checks and balances and pitch in ideas at a time of crisis, but to temper
this president’s sporadic bursts of overconfidence and triumphalist stagecraft.
No one is perfect. We must remember that there is also an Obama who gave us “You’re
likable enough, Hillary,” a faux presidential seal and a convention speech delivered before what Sarah Palin
rightly mocked as “Styrofoam Greek columns” hauled out of a “studio lot.”

That Obama needs a serious counterweight in the political arena. But
the former party of Lincoln and liberty has now melted down to a fundamentalist
core of aging, rural Dixiecrats and intrusive scolds — as small as
20 percent of the populace in the latest polls. Its position on the American
spectrum of ideas is somewhere between a doomsday cult and Scientology.

You can’t blame the president if he is laughing, too. As The Economist recently certified, the G.O.P. is now officially in the throes of “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” The same conservative gang that remained mum when George W. Bush praised Putin’s “soul” and held hands with the Saudi ruler Abdullah are now condemning Obama for shaking hands with Hugo Chávez, “bowing” to Abdullah, relaxing Cuban policy and talking to hostile governments. Polls show overwhelming majorities favoring Obama’s positions. But his critics have locked themselves in the padded cell of an alternative reality. Not long before The Wall Street Journal informed its readers that 81 percent of Americans liked Obama, Karl Rove wrote in its pages that “no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly.”

From derangement it’s a small step to madness. Last week, the president of a prime G.O.P. auxiliary, the Concerned Women for America, speculated that the president’s declaration of “a state of emergency about the flu was a political thing” to push through Kathleen Sebelius’s nomination as secretary of health and human services. At those tax-protesting “tea parties” on April 15, signs and speakers portrayed Obama as a “fascist,” a “socialist,” a terrorist and Hitler. Republican governors have proposed rejecting stimulus money for their states (only to fold after constituents rebelled) or, in the notorious instance of Rick Perry of Texas, toyed with secession from the union.

37th in Health Care

Former Senator Tom Daschle talks turkey on health care in a recent speech:

It’s important that we’re all on the same page, that we agree what the
problem really is. Before we define the problem we have to destroy the myth. And
the myth in our country has long been that we have the best healthcare system in
the world. Why else would kings and leaders all around the world, people of
prominence come to the United States?

Well to a certain extent that is true. But for every king who may come
to the United States, there are thousands of people who leave the US to get
medical care elsewhere. They call it now medical tourism. Thousands of people
leave the United States because the quality and the cost is better in other
countries. So how do we explain, well we explain by simply stating that we have
islands of excellence in a sea of mediocrity.

We are 29th in the world when it comes to infant mortality. 29th. We
are 24th in overall women’s health. We rank 31st in life expectancy. On Pine
Ridge Indian reservation the life expectancy of an Indian male is 47 years. The
same as what it is in Botswana. We rank 37th overall in outcomes. 37th. Below
Costa Rica and just above Slovenia. And I would ask how long would this country
stand for being 37th in the Olympics? We wouldn’t stand for it long.

An Apology Would Be Nice

Felix Salmon of Reuters writes about apologies and why it would be nice to receive some from those who played a part in screwing our economy up:

...we’ve had virtually nothing in the way of apologies for screwing up the
global economy, and it would do us all a lot of good if people who both caused
and benefitted from the financial-services boom would man up and admit to their
mistakes.

Top of the list, just by dint of his present importance in the
government, is Larry Summers. In his tenure as a senior Treasury official during
the Clinton years, Summers was intimately involved in laying the regulatory and
philosophical foundations for the bubble. [Economist Simon] Johnson, who’s been following
Summers’s thinking for some time, says that it has evolved in interesting ways,
especially as regards the over-reliance on the financial sector for economic
growth in the 1990s. It’s not a giant leap from that evolution to a simple
admission from Summers that he made mistakes at the time. Except there’s the
whole problem of Larry’s massive ego, which makes it hard for him to ever admit
being wrong.

Of course, Summers isn’t the only person who should be apologizing: I
very much look forward to reading or watching something similar from Bob Rubin,
who managed to compound his errors at Treasury with further massive blunders at
Citigroup. And the list goes on. Greenspan would be nice, but he’s already
admitted being wrong on some fronts, and has at least engaged substantively with
his critics on most others. Ken Lewis and Stan O’Neal and Sandy Weill and Dick
Fuld, of course. Phil Gramm, absolutely. But let’s start with Summers, since
he’s the one name on the list who’s still actively involved in making incredibly
important decisions which affect the future of the country. And if he can’t
admit to making mistakes, how can he learn from them?