HALF-FULL REPORT 09/10/10
The magic is gone. It wasn’t so long ago that Barack Obama could fill football stadiums. In Cleveland Wednesday, he couldn’t fill a rec center at a college in a heavily Democrat town.
According to Time Magazine, the bloom is off the rose for the Obama campaign organization, “Organizing for America,” too.
LIBERALISM SPREADS DARKNESS THROUGHOUT THE LAND
The Washington Post had a story Wednesday on the closing this month, in Winchester, Va., of the last factory in the United States that manufactures incandescent light bulbs. Two hundred workers will lose their jobs.
Those 200 jobs were among the first destroyed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Among their first acts after the Democrats took over Congress in 2007 was to pass a law which, essentially, bans the use of incandescent light bulbs by 2014. The law favors compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), which are manufactured in China.
CFLs cost at least five times as much as incandescent bulbs, and give off less light than the higher wattage incandescents. Prolonged exposure to fluorescent light can trigger migraine headaches.
But these are the least of the problems with CFLs, as Brandy Bridges discovered when she dropped one in her daughter's bedroom.
THE CHINESE CONUNDRUM
Urumchi, Xinjiang, China. Radical fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam is starting to spread through Xinjiang like an infectious disease. Why the Chicoms are allowing it is a mystery - for they are continually shouting wolf over "Moslem terrorism" in Xinjiang as an excuse to oppress the local people, called Uighurs. But there is no such thing. Uighurs are not terrorists because Uighurs have been Sufis for centuries. (See Islam's Anti-Osama for a discussion of Sufism or the Sufi website Naqshbandi.org.) Sufism is the peaceful form of Sunni Islam (just as Ismailism is the peaceful form of Shia Islam as we discussed last week in The Pamir Knot). It promotes a mystical, personal relationship to Allah, rather than performing robotic ceremonies (like praying five times a day with exactly the same words and motions every day, no changes ever) and following rigid rules as do mainstream Sunnis. Instead of robot rituals, Sufis engage in joyous musical dancing, couples whirling themselves into trances. Which is why Wahhabis hate Sufis as much as they hate us Christian infidels. The interesting thing about the Saudi attempt to Wahhabize the Uighurs is that the only recruits are young Uighur guys in the cities and towns. Not the women, and not much of anyone in the villages, which is where most Uighurs live. So far, the only women the young Wahhabi guys have been able to persuade to wear the veil are their mothers. Try and tell young Uighur women she's got to hide her face in public and she'll laugh in your face. What would you expect from a culture that has as its most revered Moslem shrine The Tomb of the Fragrant Concubine?
HOW TO FIGHT THE ISLAMISTS
We have to fight them, because their radical imams, mosques, and schools threaten us; they constitute an assembly line for the next generation of home-grown American jihadi killers. But we can’t ask the courts to silence them, because we want to maintain our 1st Amendment rights.
How, then, do we fight? There are three basic lines of attack. The first is to openly contest their odious doctrines and practices.
Second, we should prevent such people from entering America. Third, there is the “Al Capone strategy.”
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER: MORALITY LAB
I came to the World Trade Center in early 2002 expecting to find a disaster zone, which I certainly did. But I also found an important surprise. I can't imagine that I was the only one to walk away from the WTC with these impressions and with these ideas running through my mind, but if anyone else has tread this ground, I haven't seen it, and it is far too important to let pass in silence.
THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK
President Obama made a strange remark during his speech to a labor audience in Milwaukee Monday.
“They talk about me like a dog,” he said of Republicans. Some think this was a reference to a song by Jimi Hendrix, the guitarist who died of apparent drug and alcohol overdose in 1970. Others speculate it was a botched effort to emulate Franklin Roosevelt’s rejoinder when Republicans criticized him for sending a warship to pick up his dog, Fala, who had accidentally been left behind on a presidential visit to the Aleutians. But it may simply have been recognition that their dog, Bo, polls better than Barack or Michelle.
THE WORST NEWS FOR DEMOCRATS
In a week filled with bad news for Democrats, perhaps the worst was the announcement Tuesday by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley that he will not seek another term.
Being mayor of Chicago has been a lifelong dream for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He could be the boss, instead of just being the flak catcher for the boss.
Rahm Emanuel is a foul-mouthed jerk. But he is the closest thing to an adult in President Barack Obama’s inner circle. And, as a senior White House aide during the Clinton administration and a four term Congressman, he’s the only member of the inner circle to have extensive Washington experience. The other two consiglieres -- Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod -- made their bones in Chicago politics.
If Mr. Emanuel resigns to run for mayor of Chicago, and especially if he does so early, he is likely to be replaced -- in fact if not necessarily in name -- by Ms. Jarrett.
Even if Ms. Jarrett is not offered the chief of staff job, or chooses not to take it, her influence will increase, because the other names being bruited about -- the Webzine Politico mentioned Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and Ron Klain, Vice President Joe Biden’s chief of staff -- lack the close personal relationship with the president that Mr. Emanuel, Mrr. Axelrod, and, especially, Ms. Jarrett have enjoyed.
That’s bad news for Democrats, because Ms. Jarrett’s political judgment is terrible.
ECONOMIC MALPRACTICE
If a medical doctor prescribed a treatment for a patient that only worked in theory, and the patient did not get better, the doctor could rightly be sued for medical malpractice if tried-and-true cures were known. When members of Congress and a president engage in economic malpractice, the patient's (i.e., the American public's) only recourse is to vote them out of office.
The Obama administration claimed that the unemployment rate would not go above 8 percent and that both the economy and job growth would be strong by this time if Congress passed the "stimulus" bill. Instead, the economy is barely growing, and the unemployment rate is rising.
How did they get it so wrong?
THE PAMIR KNOT
Kashgar, Chinese Turkestan. About 55 million years ago, the giant subcontinent of India, which had been drifting north for tens of millions of years after breaking off from the supercontinent of Gondwanaland, began crashing into the Eurasian land mass at a speed of 8 inches a year. It hit not flat-on but at an angle, with the huge projecting tip of the northwest corner of India slamming into Asia first. As it bulldozed underneath Asia ( a process called subduction), an Asian inland ocean called the Sea of Tethys (named after a Greek sea goddess) was tilted up and drained off, becoming the Tibetan Plateau. The edge of Asia buckled like crinkled paper, creating the world's greatest mountain ranges, including the Himalayas. Mount Everest, now at 29,028 feet, was once the bottom of the Tethys Sea, and because India continues to drive under Asia at over a tenth of an inch a year, it will reach over 30,000 feet in a few hundred thousand years. The Himalayas were but one mountain range buckled up by the India-Asia collision. From that projecting tip of the collision, enormous mountain ranges radiated out: the Tien Shan to the north, the Hindu Kush to the south, the Kun Lun to the northeast, and the Karakorum-Himalaya to the east. The center of this radiation is a tortured jumble of gigantic mountains over 20,000 feet high amidst a plateau of over 14,000 feet known since ancient times as "The Roof of the World." The welter of mountain ranges comprising this jumble has been called since the days of Marco Polo (1254-1324) "The Pamir Knot." Polo crossed it in 1272. I finished crossing it yesterday (9/02).
HALF-FULL REPORT 09/03/10
It takes longer for the economy to get better than it does for the economy to get sick. This is the fundamental fact that drives today’s political environment. It’s now too late for the economy to improve enough to provide relief for Democrats on Nov. 2. But there is still plenty of time for it to get worse. Democrats who understand little about economics understand this, which is why they are so grumpy.