LFTC - Letter From The Capitol

LFTC - Index 11/12/09

2 posts: (1) Barack's "Guardian Angell"--Wobble Watch; (2) Ford Flourishes Without Uncle Sam's Helping Hand--The Home Front.

LFTC - Barack's "Guardian Angell"

This TAS piece on British pacifist Norman Angell, 1933 Nobel Peace Laureate, sees 44 following Angell's lead. Alas, this is another way in which the lessons of 1989 are lost on our novice President.

LFTC - Ford Flourishes Without Uncle Sam's Helping Hand

Auto maven Paul Ingrassia writes how Ford avoided bankruptcy and federal takeover and thus is doing better than GM & Chrysler.  The UAW is unhappy, but its own resistance to eliminating absurd work rules is the biggest threat to Ford's future (save perhaps Uncle Sam stacking the deck in favor of its wards, GM & Chrysler).

LFTC - Index 11/9/09

2 posts: (1) Berlin 1989 + 20--Wobble Watch; (2) Afghan, Pakistani & American Betrayals--Wobble Watch.

LFTC - Berlin 1989 + 20

Begin by savoring a clip of President Ronald Reagan's 1987 Berlin address (3:59) (full text) in which he called for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down that wall!"  Then savor the 1963 clip of JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner!" speech (4:41).  (For full text of JFK speech scroll down in this link.)  Both were cheered heartily by the Berliners.  As LFTC has earlier noted, JFK's translators blew it.  In German, "ein Berliner" is a dough-nut, and thus JFK said "I am a dough-nut!"  But Berliners, who say "Ich bin Berliner" to indicate residency there, cheerfully let it pass.  JFK immediately followed with "I appreciate my interpreter translating my German" and at the end repeated his formulation.  JFK did better later on in his speech, proclaiming "Lach sie nach Berlin kommen!"--proper German for the theme of his speech that day: calling to those searching for where the center of the struggle between freedom and tyranny lay by proclaiming "Let them come to Berlin!"

Rich Lowry of NRO explains why Barack Obama is skipping the 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  In a nutshell, 44 is just not, as they say, into it.  It's not a "liberal thing": Liberal columnist Pete Hamill recounts his Berlin Wall journeys, then and now.  Euro-historian Timothy Garton Ash looks back at 1989 and sees in what he calls Europe's greatest year ever the continent's greatest triumph (freeing Eastern Europe), that year's greatest surprise (China) and tragedy emerging from the chrysalis (Islamism's fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie, presaging 9/11/2001), all at the same time, in the world's most consequential year since 1945:

In 1989, Europeans proposed a new model of nonviolent, velvet revolution, challenging the violent example of France in 1789, which for two centuries had been what most people thought of as "revolution." Instead of Jacobins and the guillotine, they offered people power and negotiations at a round table.

With Mikhail S. Gorbachev's breathtaking renunciation of the use of force (a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history), a nuclear-armed empire -- which had seemed to many Europeans as enduring and impregnable as the Alps, not least because it possessed those weapons of total annihilation -- just softly and suddenly vanished.

But then, as if this were all somehow too good to be true, 1989 also brought us Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie -- firing the starting gun for another long struggle in Europe, even before the last one was really over.

Daily Telegraph columnist Janet Daley says the West has failed to learn the economic lesson of 1989, i.e., that Marxism had to eventually collapse but a true capitalist system will endure.  A WSJ op-ed explains how Italy's conviction of 23 CIA officers for "rendering" from Italy to Egypt a terrorist wanted in Italy will undermine US-European cooperation in the hunt for terrorists.  Thus another 1989 lesson is lost: fight against the common enemy, not among ourselves.

Claudia Rosett explains why Obama's lack of understanding of how & why the Wall was dismantled impairs his ability to cope with today's challenges:

The threats besetting the world today involve essentially the same old conflict: freedom vs. tyranny. Today's variations on the Berlin Wall can be discerned in places where women face the coerced wearing of the veil; in the prison camps and firewalls of China; in the gulag and murderous border patrols of North Korea; in the rising police state in Russia; the missionary thuggery of Venezuela's Chavista "revolution"; the global tentacles of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and al-Qaida; the security forces that murdered protesters this spring in the streets of Tehran.

Today's Wall looms in such ventures as the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, both involving not only the potential use of monstrous weapons by murderous regimes, but nuclear extortionist leverage--which these regimes are already using to bring free nations to heel.

In the matter of facing down such threats, the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, has plenty to teach--especially to a free world with current leaders too much given to disparaging capitalism and downplaying freedom.

CR adds:

The West has by now traveled a long road--from Reagan, who demanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," to Obama, who in Berlin last year recast this piece of history as one big group hug: "A wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."

Unfortunately, it is not the world standing "as one" that brings down such walls. There has always been good and evil. The attempt to straddle such divides, as Washington is now doing with Tehran, is an invitation to be torn apart. The Berlin Wall fell because brave people--on both sides of it--took a clear stand against tyrants and for freedom. That's still how the world works, and America's own fortunes still depend on whether our leaders live up to the principles that brought down the Berlin Wall, or sideline them as yesterday's news.

Here is an NRO symposium (prints 5 pages) on the anniversary.  Historian David Pryce-Jones recalls the role accident played in the fall of the Wall.  This William Buckley NRO link offers WFB's elegant takes on the event, from his book on the subject.

Ex-Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson recalls the joy in Berlin then, and the inspiration Reagan's call had given to those captive behind the Wall:

Ronald Reagan, I recognized in that Berlin hotel room, had given something to people in the East, something difficult to describe but tangible all the same. In predicting that Communism would end up on the ash heap of history, in describing the Soviet Union as an evil empire--in insisting that the West remained fundamentally vibrant and good, the Soviet Union backward and corrupt--Reagan had spoken the unspeakable. He had done what no one could do. And he had thus created for people in the East a new space for thought and feeling, a new sense of the possible.

Reagan had never been alone in calling for freedom. Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and others had all denounced the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, demanding human rights. Yet if an American president could call on the leader of the Soviet Union to tear down the Berlin Wall--if that could happen, if it were true--then what else might prove possible?

Ken Duberstein, then the White House deputy chief of staff, was in the limousine with Reagan as the president drove to the Wall to deliver the address. Years later, Duberstein told me what took place as they arrived. Reagan told Duberstein he was determined to deliver the controversial passage. Then the president smiled. "The boys at State are going to kill me," Reagan said. "But it's the right thing to do."

Alas, 44 seems to listen too much to "the boys (and girls) at State" to reprise with Iran what Reagan did over East Germany.  In a touch of pure irony, Reagan's 1987 Berlin call to Gorbachev came on Jun 12--the very date in 2009 that Iran's fraudulent election was held.  And 44 responded not like Reagan but like the striped-pants set at Foggy Bottom.

For her part, Angela Merkel expressed her thanks to America Tuesday last week, first at a White House photo op with 44, and then in her address to a joint session of the Congress (the first in over 50 years for a German leader).  Here is a neat Merkel quote from the address, for those pressed for time.

My own favorite recollection is another key moment, on October 25, 1989--just 15 days before the Wall was toppled.  Soviet spokesman Gennady Gerasimov announced on American TV that Moscow's new policy for Warsaw Pact nations was the "Frank Sinatra 'My Way' Doctrine"--each country could go its own way.  This sent a powerful signal to all Berliners.  And the rest was, as they say, history--1989 became annus mirabilis for all those who cherish expansion of human freedom within a framework of ordered liberty.

Bottom Line.  At the end of his Berlin speech, JFK proclaimed: "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin."  Had President Obama understood either JFK or Reagan, in their Berlin speeches, he today would proclaim everyone a citizen of Tehran, and make Tehran the locus of today's struggle for freedom.

LFTC - Afghan, Pakistani and American Betrayals

Last week's killing of five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman they had been training shows how dirty a counter-insurgency campaign can get.  More such betrayals and an exit from Afghanistan becomes front-burner.  The enemy knows this.  A new book from a retired French magistrate alleges a Pakistani double-game betrayal of the CIA in the post-2001 wars.  But America is not only sinned against but also sinner: Team Obama's pullback from Iraqi internal affairs has left the UN mediating, which means fakery instead of competence; the result could prove political disaster, and unwind much of the benefit of America's hard-earned position in that country.

And it is Team Obama's deal with Moscow, over the head of Poland & Czech Republic, that has Eastern Europe fearing more betrayal by America.  Moscow intends to use its new-found diplomatic position with Team Obama as a basis for exercising vetoes over possible US moves in its former satellite Warsaw Pact territories.  Thus, Moscow has publicly objected to possible deployment of US troops in Poland (requested by Poland's foreign minister), and has warned that a new war may be brewing with Georgia, due to Georgia's refusal to recognize the independence of its two breakaway provinces, South Ossetia & Abkhazia.  That Russian meddling led to the breakaway, and that Russia's invasion was flatly illegal, premised upon its asserted, though non-existent, legal right to "protect" Russian minorities allegedly being abused in the provinces, does not disturb Moscow in the least.  They have an American fish on the hook, and intend to reel in as much as they can, lest they lose the big fish.

Bottom Line.  America can only combat betrayal by its allies if America itself does not betray allies.

LFTC - Index 10/6/09

5 posts: (1) IRAN: Nuclear Warhead Breakout?--Us v. Them; (2) GOP Health Care Plan: Choice & Cost Trump Coverage--The Home Front; (3) House Defends Israel, Rebuffs UN--Us v. Them; (4) China's Father of Rocketry Passes--Us v. Them; (5) Berlin + 20: Reagan Foundation Live Streamed Webcast Airs Today--Us v. Them.

LFTC - IRAN: Nuclear Warhead Breakout?

The Guardian UK reports that Iran may well have tested an advanced nuclear warhead design.  The design is far more advanced than Iran was thought ot have been working on.  The US believes Iran stopped warhead design in 2003, but France & Germany disagree, as surely does Israel.  The Guardian offered this summary:

The UN's nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned.

The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as "breathtaking" and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.

The sophisticated technology, once mastered, allows for the production of smaller and simpler warheads than older models. It reduces the diameter of a warhead and makes it easier to put a nuclear warhead on a missile.

The entire article merits a close read.  Also read this account of Iranian pro-US anti-regime protests in Tehran on the Nov. 4 hostage anniversary. Warhead advances make regime change more imperative than ever.  How to wake President Obama up on this is an increasingly urgent question.

Bottom Line.  All along the assumption of American intelligence has been that Iran has a long way to go to be able to put a nuclear warhead on a missile.  The Guardian story suggests that Iran is years ahead of where our intelligence agencies think it is.

LFTC - GOP Health Care Plan: Choice & Cost Trump Coverage

On Wednesday the GOP introduced its own health care proposal, in the form of an amendment to H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, introduced October 29, 2009 by the Democratic leadership.  (The link is to Rep. Louise Slaughter's statement re the bill--you can download the full text from the link, but it may choke your Internet connection & freeze your computer, as it did mine.)  Here is the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the GOP substitute.  It is projected to cost $61 billion over 10 years, perhaps 1/16th of the Democratic bill and perhaps 1/25th of what the Democratic bill would cost if promised savings do not materialize--such as $400B - $500B Medicare cuts.

Add to the cost of PelosiCare that her bill contains provisions partially repealing the indexation of tax rates on dividends & capital gains, a protection against inflation that has survived more than 20 years.  The WSJ editors supply details--in a piece that should be read in full:

The Pelosi-Obama health tax surcharge will have a similar effect. The tax would begin in 2011 on income above $500,000 for singles and $1 million for joint filers. Assuming a 4% annual inflation rate over the next decade, that $500,000 for an individual tax filer would hit families with the inflation-adjusted equivalent of an income of about $335,000 by 2020. After 20 years without indexing, the surcharge threshold would be roughly $250,000.

And by the way, this surcharge has also been sneakily written to apply to modified adjusted gross income, which means it applies to both capital gains and dividends that are taxed at lower rates. So the capital gains tax rate that is now 15% would increase in 2011 to 25.4% with the surcharge and repeal of the Bush tax rates. The tax rate on dividends would rise to 45% from 15% (5.4% plus the pre-Bush rate of 39.6%).

As for the business payroll penalty, it is imposed on a sliding scale beginning at a 2% rate for firms with payrolls of $500,000 and rising to 8% on firms with payrolls above $750,000. But those amounts are also not indexed for inflation, so again assuming a 4% average inflation rate in 10 years this range would hit payrolls between $335,000 and $510,000 in today's dollars. Note that in pitching this "pay or play" tax today, Democrats claim that most small businesses would be exempt. But because it isn't indexed, this tax will whack more and more businesses every year. The sales pitch is pure deception.

Broadly speaking the GOP alternative to the Democrats' 2000-page monstrosity focuses on tort reform, insurance reform--federalizing regulation to eliminate state impediments--cafeteria choice akin to the plan Congress enjoys, all at a cost that is a fraction of the Democratic proposals.  The major concession to fiscal reality is not mandating universal coverage--which youths do not need, save for catastrophic care.  Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) details how state regulations mandating dubious benefit coverage push up health insurance costs.

SPECIAL 9:30 AM ADDITION: FRIDAY'S ANNOUNCED UNEMPLOYMENT RATE OF 10.2 PERCENT IS THE HIGHEST SINCE 1983.  THIS WILL NOT HELP NANCY PELOSI IN ROUNDING UP WAVERING DEMOCRATS FOR SATURDAY'S VOTE ON THE HOUSE DEMOCRAT HEALTH CARE BILL.

Bottom Line.  The GOP plan is far better, in that it is affordable, choice-friendly (N.B., many youths are uninsured by choice) and targets lawyers, whose tort suits comprise as much as one-tenth of the nation's $2.5 TR annual health care bill.  The bill cannot pass a Democratic Congress, let alone would 44 sign it.  What it can do is set up a debate for 2010.

LFTC - House Defends Israel, Rebuffs UN

On Tuesday, while voters went to the polls, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 867, defending Israel's conduct during the Gaza War and rejecting the UN's Goldstone Report that condemned Israel and largely exonerated Hamas.  Read the entire Resolution, but savor one of its five final zingers:

(1) considers the `Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict' to be irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.

AMEN.

LFTC - China's Father of Rocketry Passes

The Los Angeles Times reports that China's father of rocket & missile technology passed away at age 98.  The LA Times obit is interesting, as the scientist was deported in 1955 on suspicion of pro-Communist sympathies.  Opinion is split on whether his loyalty was legitimately in question, determination of which is a vexing, difficult exercise in which mistakes are often made.  In the event, the exile vented his anger in revenge, in guiding Beijing's entry into the space age--and ICBM age too.

LFTC: Berlin + 20: Reagan Foundation Live Streamed Webcast Today

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation's Live November 6, 2009 Berlin conference will be live-streamed over the Web.  Here is the website link for the RRPF Berlin Conference webcast, which will begin 7:30 AM PST (10:30 AM EST); it ends 10 hours later, at 5:30 PM PST (8:30 PM EST).  Enjoy.

LFTC - Index 11/5/09

5 posts: (1) Election 2009: Follow-Up--The Home Front; (2) Energy: All Hail for "Shale Gale"!--"It's the Earth Stupid!; (3) Military Marvel: Gorgon Aloft--Us v. Them; (4) Military Mess: 1,300 Satellites Aloft--:It's the Earth Stupid!"; (5) A Hero Meets the Odds--Us v. Them.

LFTC - Election 2009 Follow-Up

Tuesday's Message to Both Parties.  THE CENTER RULES.  Politics maven Jay Cost cautions that election returns ought generally be interpreted narrowly, and that if voters perceive a politician to have failed to perform no amount of political hocus-pocus will save the day.  Just ask Jon Corzine.  Dan Henninger gets it, in a brilliant column that is a must-read.  Put simply, the new norm is volatility, with voters distrusting both parties:

Welcome to the permanent American tea party.

You will recall how when the tea-party movement erupted during the congressional recess in August, it was spun on the left that these events were the creation of conservative ideologues. At the start, yes. By the end, though, it was about anxieties deeper than that.

The GOP is now spinning the results in Virginia and New Jersey as proof that voters are fed up with the liberal ideologues in the White House and Congress. Yes, but it's deeper than that.

What was learned Tuesday is that the American voter is absolutely, totally, unremittingly disgusted with both political parties. More than anything, the American voter is desperate for political leadership.

That electorates in two politically significant states, led by the widening independent movement, could swing within one year from enthusiasm for electing Barack Obama to support for Virginia's OK Republican Bob McDonnell and New Jersey's lackluster Chris Christie is simply astonishing.

One lesson from Tuesday' vote that the GOP core must heed: Grassroots activism must touch issues near & dear to voters in order to succeed.  Fighting over who is a real Republican or seeking a national mandate will backfire, as it did in NY State's 23rd Congressional District.  A Democrat has the seat for the first time since...the 1870s--not a misprint, the 1870s.

As for the Democrats, Karl Rove noted that Governor-Elect Bob McDonnell's 18-point winning margin was the largest in modern Virginia history.  He also swept into office every statewide candidate.  Rove also writes today in his WSJ weekly column that a 5-point swing in 2010 towards the GOP would spell disaster for Democrats.  Rove applies those numbers to 2008's results:

Even a five-point swing in 2010 could bring a tidal wave of change. Today, Democrats enjoy 60 votes in the Senate, Republicans a mere 40. Had there been a five-point swing away from Democrats last fall, the party would have started this year with 54 seats and the Republicans 46.

A five-point shift in 2006 would have left the GOP in control of the House. In 2008, a five-point shift would have produced a Democratic loss of six House seats rather than a gain of 21. It would also have put John McCain into the White House with 279 Electoral College votes to Mr. Obama's 259.

Byron York canvassed issues and found health care behind jobs and the economy as a voter issue.  If the Democrats wish to lose the House next year and seats in the Senate and the Presidency in 2012, they will take this advice from Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos: spurn bipartisanship in favor of liberal orthodoxy, or the base will stay home.

Michael Barone sees the union agenda as the biggest loser in Tuesday's tally.  He notes that unions comprise only 8 percent of private-sector workers and thus are predominantly public employees.  And worse for Democrats, voters are on to this:

The unions' unprecedented political push in 2008 has not been unnoticed by the voters. Mr. Corzine's cozy relationship with public employee union heads proved a liability in New Jersey, and in Virginia Mr. McDonnell campaigned hard against card check and the Obama agenda. The Gallup organization reports that Americans are less pro-union than they have been at any time since it first started asking the question in 1936. Maybe around the country union members will start asking their leaders what they have gotten for all the money they've spent on politics.

NANCY PELOSI, IN A SURREAL "LSD MOMENT," DECLARED VICTORY BASED UPON THE NYS CD 23rd RACE, DISSING LOSING TWO KEY GOVERNORSHIPS.  Dennis Miller said last night that Nancy has "a sub-reptilian intellect....She could lose a game of tic-tac-toe to an amoeba."  (UH-OH: the ASPCA--American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Amoebas--may well lodge a formal protest.)

Looking to 2010, ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina announced her candidacy for the California Senate seat now held by Barbara Boxer; CF must first win the GOP primary.  If she succeeds she could join eBay founder-CEO Meg Whitman on the Golden State 2010 ballot; MW is running for the governorship. 

Dick Morris & spouse Eileen McGann say that ObamaCare is now dead.  They note that more than 80 Democratic Members of the House and more than 20 Democratic Senators come from jurisdictions John McCain carried in 2008.  They also note that victor Bob McDonnell edged out his 2009 opponent, Creigh Deeds, by a few tenths of a percentage point in their previous race, for Virginia Attorney-General.

Bottom Line.  America is a center country, tilting a tad right or left depending upon time & circumstance.  Voters trust neither party.  Performance on substance rules the day.  Neither party's ideology matters much.  Fail to perform, and you will be out.

LFTC - Energy: All Hail for "Shale Gale"!

Two energy mavens tout oil shale as America's next big energy frontier.  advances in extractive technologies have boosted shale's estimated share of natural gas production in America from 10 percent in 1990 to 40 percent today.  there will be more shale in our future, to our great benefit.