"In the Obama Administration ... It's Easy Being Palestinian"

By Daniel Pipes
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Monday, June 01, 2009

The much-anticipated meeting between Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu on May 18 went off smoothly, if a bit tensely, as predicted. Everyone was on best behavior and the event excited so little attention that the New York Times reported it on page 12.

As expected, however, the gloves came off immediately thereafter, with a series of tough American demands, especially U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's insistence on May 27 that the Netanyahu government end residential building for Israelis in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. This prompted a defiant response. The Israeli governing coalition chairman pointed out the mistake of prior "American dictates," a minister compared Obama to pharaoh, and the government press office director cheekily mock-admired "the residents of Iroquois territory for assuming that they have a right to determine where Jews should live in Jerusalem."

If the specifics of who-lives-where have little strategic import, the Obama administration's rapid and harsh turn against Israel has potentially great significance. Not only did the administration end George W. Bush's focus on changes on the Palestinian side but it even disregarded oral understandings Bush had reached with Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.


Yasir Arafat smiles as Barack Obama meets Mahmoud Abbas in July 2008.

An article by Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post captures this shift most vividly. Diehl notes, based on an interview with Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, that by publicly and repeatedly stressing the need for a without-exception freeze of Israeli building on the West Bank, Obama

has revived a long-dormant Palestinian fantasy: that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while Arabs passively watch and applaud. "The Americans are the leaders of the world. … They can use their weight with anyone around the world. Two years ago they used their weight on us. Now they should tell the Israelis, 'You have to comply with the conditions'."

Of course, telling the Israelis is one thing and getting their compliance quite another. To this, Abbas also has an answer. Expecting that Netanyahu's agreeing to a complete freeze on building would bring down his coalition, Diehl explains that Abbas plans "to sit back and watch while U.S. pressure slowly squeezes the Israeli prime minister from office." One Palestinian Authority official predicted this would happen within "a couple of years" – exactly when Obama is said to expect a Palestinian state in place.

Meanwhile, Abbas plans to sit tight. Diehl explains his thinking:

Abbas rejects the notion that he should make any comparable concession—such as recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, which would imply renunciation of any large-scale resettlement of refugees. Instead, he says, he will remain passive. … "I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements," he said. "Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life."

Abbas's idea of "normal life," one should add, is also largely provided by Washington and its allies; West Bank Palestinians enjoy by far the highest per-capita foreign aid of any group in the world; at just one "donors' conference" in December 2007, for example, Abbas won pledges for over US$1,800 per West Banker per year.

As Diehl tersely concludes, "In the Obama administration, so far, it's easy being Palestinian."
Even if one ignores the folly of focusing on Jerusalemites adding recreation rooms to their houses rather than Iranians adding centrifuges to their nuclear infrastructure and even if one overlooks the obvious counter productivity of letting Abbas off the hook – the new U.S. approach is doomed.

First, Netanyahu's governing coalition should prove impervious to U.S. pressure. When he formed the government in March 2009, it included 69 parliamentarians out of the Knesset's 120 members, well over the 61 minimum. Even if the U.S. government succeeded in splitting off the two parties least committed to Netanyahu's goals, Labor and Shas, he could replace them with right-wing and religious parties to retain a solid majority.

Second, the record shows that Jerusalem takes "risks for peace" only when trusting its American ally. An administration that undermines this fragile trust will likely confront a wary and reluctant Israeli leadership.

If Washington continues on its present course, the result may well be spectacular policy failure that manages both to weaken America's only strategic ally in the Middle East even as it worsens Arab-Israeli tensions.

Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

The Uprising China Would Have Us Forget

By David Burchell
The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/
June 01, 2009

IN traditional Chinese culture the festival of Qing Ming marks the spring equinox: the time of regeneration, of budding and rebirth. In that ancient tradition, rebirth and remembrance are different facets of the same natural process. And so when, after the thawing of the frosts, you venture outside on Qing Ming to "tread on the greenery" afresh, it's appropriate also to tend to the graves of the departed, and to spare them some portion of your budding spring thoughts.


Qing Ming: a rite of ancestral veneration.

Back in 1949, year zero of the Chinese Revolution, the exultant Jacobins of the new regime banned Qing Ming, treating it as yet another benighted symbol of the superstitious past, to be swept away as the slate was wiped clean. Last year, however, as part of the geological thawing of that great revolutionary winter, the Communist Party restored Qing Ming to the festival calendar. And so China's citizens have returned to them, after a brief interruption of 60 years, the traditional right to mourn and remember their friends and ancestors in peace.

Well, most of them, anyway.

In the early morning dew on April 4 this year, when 75-year old retired Shandong University professor Sun Wenguang set off in a hired taxi to the summit of Yingxiong Mountain to engage in his first legal act of public remembrance, he found he had acquired an escort of no fewer than nine police vehicles. As he decamped at the summit, he was greeted by a group of men in plain clothes: they threw him down a two-metre slope and set upon him for a good 10 minutes, breaking three of his ribs.

Sun had made two errors. First, he had announced his intentions on bulletin boards around the university, an institution where he's been harassed as a troublemaker for two decades now, ever since the upheavals of 1989. Second, he'd decided to exercise his new-found right to mourn by honouring the memory of China's most famous non-person, former party secretary and premier Zhao Ziyang.

Zhao, you may recall, was the decent and honourable man who tried and failed to stop the military takeover of Beijing in 1989, and who tried and failed to peacefully disperse the protesters in Tiananmen Square before they were mown down by the battalions of the People's Liberation Army. Zhao then fearlessly defended his actions to a disciplinary meeting of the Party's Central Committee, with the result that his speech was erased from the party records, and the final 16 years of his life were spent under house arrest.

That vast and serried regiment of Beijing apologists, whose self-serving chatter extends from China's meticulously supervised blogosphere through to the boardrooms of some of Australia's largest listed corporations, are happy to tell you at the drop of a hat that nobody in China nowadays remembers the events of June 4, 1989.

And in any case, that those who do remember it don't care. If you should find yourself belaboured by one of these kind individuals - so keen, as they are, to cure you of your human rights prejudices - I'd suggest you ask them why, in that case, it was necessary for China's state security to put a 75-year-old man in hospital for a week for the crime of climbing a mountainside to honour a dead man.

Why, come to that, when Zhao's former senior lieutenant Bao Tong and his wife attempted to leave their own domestic confinement to pay observance to Zhao's corpse, was it necessary for plain-clothed officers to set upon them, too, with sufficient industry that Bao's wife suffered spinal injuries?

Why, again, when a Chinese citizen types the characters for Zhao's or Bao's names into a post on an internet bulletin board, must the words mysteriously disappear in front of their eyes? For a man who no one apparently remembers, and about whom supposedly no one cares, Zhao's name still seems to exert a striking effect upon the legion of snoopers and time-servers in Beijing, such that it seems necessary to wipe the slate clean of his memory again and again.


Zhao Ziyang in 1984.

UPI—Bettmann/Corbis

This Zhao-effect, no doubt, is the reason why another, smaller army of individuals have laboured to spirit his personal testament out of the country, as a memorial to the 20th anniversary of June, 1989. As it happens, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang offers fewer surprises than some keen-eyed readers may have hoped.

Zhao had already communicated most of what he had to say about 1989 to the equally fearless party veteran Yang Jisheng (deputy editor of the dissident journal Chronicles of History) in a series of personal conversations in the 1990s, posthumously published in the Hong Kong-based journal Chinese Law and Government in 2005. The great discovery of the "secret journal" is really that until his death Zhao sincerely believed in the possibility of the Communist Party as an agent of democratic reform, through the gradual assumption of a parliamentary road to freedom. Even as that selfsame party erased every public memory of his life, and cut him off from almost every contact with the outside world.

It's habitual to think of Zhao as China's almost-Gorbachev: the man who might have disestablished the Communist Party, and introduced political pluralism, if only the party hardliners hadn't got him first. Yet the painful sequence of events recorded in Zhao's testament suggests another, nicer comparison. For, as Zhao goes to enormous lengths to establish, what happened in Beijing in 1989 had no legal basis whatever.

It was, in point of fact, an invasion of the capital by several hundred thousand troops of the Chinese army at the behest of a private group of individuals within the communist leadership, because of a fear that the people had mobilised, and were coming out on the streets in support of the party's general secretary. As Zhao told Yang in 1995, "our party had never done such a thing in all its history".

In short, 1989 was China's Prague Spring, and Zhao was its Dubcek. Ever since, the Chinese Communist Party has been haunted by the obscure but troubling recognition that it is in effect an occupying power in its own country, a kind of benevolent foreign tyrant, like the Moghuls or the British Raj, such as colonised countries have known for centuries.

This is why, I'd suggest, we should take June 4 as our own moment to "tread on the greenery", and to honour the memory of a decent man and his patriotic supporters, even though China's spring is yet to return, and the wisteria is still nipped in the bud.

Bill Buckley and the Future of Conservatism

The most important lesson of his career is that there are limits to accommodation.

By RICHARD BROOKHISER
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
JUNE 1, 2009

In times of perplexity evangelical Christians ask themselves, "What would Jesus do?" Conservatives trying to regroup in the age of Obama might ask themselves, "What would William F. Buckley Jr. do?"

Buckley died in 2008 after almost 60 years as a public intellectual and celebrity. His quirky and hyperarticulate defense of his ideas, in books and columns and on television, gained him celebrity, and he used his stardom to propagate his ideas. He fought in great victories -- he helped create the climate of opinion in which Ronald Reagan was elected president -- and he saw great debacles, from the fall of South Vietnam to the travails of George W. Bush.

I wrote for him and worked with him for almost 40 years, and I believe conservatives might turn to him now, not for salvation, but for a little mental clarity and temperamental reinforcement.


Ismael Roldan

William F. Buckley Jr.

The most important lesson of his career is that there are limits to accommodation. Buckley came to fame in the early 1950s after two decades of liberal Democratic dominance, the Fair Deal of Harry Truman having followed the New Deal of FDR. When Republicans finally recaptured Congress and the White House in 1952, it was a case of new men and old measures. The new president, Dwight Eisenhower, despite his conservative instincts, was unwilling to pick ideological fights. On the sidelines of politics, the poet Peter Viereck called for a New Conservatism dedicated to managing change gracefully and recognizing liberal Democrats like Adlai Stevenson as its natural leaders. Germany, Japan and (it seemed) the Depression had been beaten by great collective efforts. The world had moved into a new era, and conservatives should recognize the fact.

Buckley would have none of it. He wanted a conservatism that stood for capitalism and freedom. The Cold War required another great mobilization, which Buckley supported wholeheartedly, but he would not lose sight of his individualistic goals. In 1955, when he founded National Review as the journal of opinion for his kind of conservatism, he declared its purpose to be "to stand athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'" He yelled because he hoped to be heard. Liberalism had been ascendant for years, but that didn't mean it always would be.

The political vehicle of a late 20th century conservative movement was bound to be the Republican Party. Buckley recognized this, but he was never a party loyalist -- another lesson for today's conservatives. Practically speaking he was married to the GOP, but he never expected it to be faithful to his ideas, and he fought it when it strayed. The election laws of New York, where he worked, allow politicians to run on more than one line, which encourages a proliferation of third parties. He supported the Conservative Party, a right-wing pressure group, from its inception, and ran as its candidate for mayor of New York City in 1965, hoping to defeat the liberal Republican hotshot John Lindsay. (He didn't.)

In 1988, in his home state of Connecticut, Buckley went even further in party disloyalty, backing a liberal Democrat, Joseph Lieberman, against an even more liberal Republican incumbent, Lowell Weicker. This time he won. The party should, as much as possible, support the movement, not the other way around.

For all his feistiness, Buckley knew that counsels of perfection are not for this world. The journalist, poet and ex-Communist spy Whittaker Chambers was one of Buckley's most-admired colleagues. "To live is to maneuver," Chambers told him, and Buckley quoted the line often. It was important for a political movement to establish paradigms -- he called it "keeping the tablets" -- but then one had to make choices.

Though he thought it was possible to change climates of opinion, he knew it was futile to try to change certain facts about human nature. Large institutions are of slow growth and cannot be created or supplanted easily. Buckley was a Roman Catholic traditionalist, unhappy with the vernacular mass and pacifist Vatican diplomacy, but he always opposed schismatics who hectored the church from the right. Despite his turbulent relationship with the Republican Party, he never believed in trying to replace it with a new national party. National Review opposed George Wallace in 1968 and thought that Ronald Reagan's best shot (in 1976 when he failed, and in 1980 when he succeeded) was to work within the GOP.

Another Buckley lesson is always think for yourself. No one was more deferential to the wisdom of his betters. He loved Edmund Burke's purple passage about "the great principles of government . . . which were understood long before we were born" and will continue to be understood "after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity."

But Buckley was always trying to apply those great principles to the problems of the day, and he could be very pert when they took him in new directions. The problem of drug addiction preoccupied him as early as his mayoral run, and he kept thinking about it for years. In 1972 he ran an article in National Review by Richard Cowan, later executive director of The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, calling for the decriminalization of marijuana. By 1996 he edited a symposium in the magazine concluding, bluntly, "The War on Drugs is Lost." This made him the pet of liberals and pot-heads. He didn't care: The drug laws, he decided, were capricious and unenforceable and ought to be changed. That was the proper conservative position, and he would uphold it even if he was almost alone in doing so.

He made some wild suggestions over the years. He decided that Barry Goldwater might win the 1964 election if he tapped former President Eisenhower as his running mate, an idea that was both crazy -- Ike would not have played second fiddle to Abraham Lincoln -- and possibly unconstitutional. Early in his career he justified obstacles to black suffrage in the South -- "the white community," he wrote in 1959, "is entitled . . . to prevail politically because, for the time being anyway, the leaders of American civilization are white." He ended his career in despair over the Iraq War, concluding as early as 2005 that we should bug out -- "our part of the job is done as well as it can be done, given limitations on our will and our strength."

He changed his mind on both issues, embracing the civil-rights historiography of the political scientist Harry V. Jaffa and supporting the surge in Iraq when it began in 2007. Being wrong is the risk you run by thinking and acting. The only people who are never wrong are hermits -- unless withdrawing from the arena is itself wrong. For Buckley quietism was never an option.

He was an activist, but he was always also a man. His final lesson, as important as any of the others, was to take the time to have a blast and honor his creator. It is one of the conservative insights, even of conservative political figures, that there is always more to life than politics. The complete ideologue, by demanding of himself more than flesh can bear, becomes less than human.

So Bill Buckley sailed, skied, played his harpsichord, and worshipped, preferably in Latin if the traditional mass was available. It's tough going out there, and the tough always know when to take a break.

Mr. Brookhiser is the author, most recently, of "Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement," out next week by Basic Books.


Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A19

Today's Tune: Slade - Run Runaway

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The End of the Affair

The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of economics. It’s a tragic romance, whose magic was killed by bureaucrats, bad taste and busybodies. P.J. O’Rourke on why Americans fell out of love with the automobile.

By P.J. O’ROURKE
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
MAY 30, 2009

The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.

Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass.

Horsepower is not a quaint leftover of linguistics or a vague metaphoric anachronism. James Watt, father of the steam engine and progenitor of the industrial revolution, lacked a measurement for the movement of weight over distance in time—what we call energy. (What we call energy wasn’t even an intellectual concept in the late 18th century—in case you think the recent collapse of global capitalism was history’s most transformative moment.) Mr. Watt did research using draft animals and found that, under optimal conditions, a dray horse could lift 33,000 pounds one foot off the ground in one minute. Mr. Watt—the eponymous watt not yet existing—called this unit of energy “1 horse-power.”

In 1970 a Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. In the time of one minute, for the space of one foot, it could move 12,210,000 pounds. And it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the driver nodded off at the wheel. Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool. A knight in ancient Rome was bluntly called “guy on horseback,” Equesitis. Chevalier means the same, as does Cavalier. Lose the capitalization and the dictionary says, “insouciant and debonair; marked by a lofty disregard of others’ interests, rights, or feelings; high-handed and arrogant and supercilious.” How cool is that? Then there are cowboys—always cool—and the U.S. cavalry that coolly comes to their rescue plus the proverbially cool-handed “Man on Horseback” to whom we turn in troubled times.

Early witnesses to the automobile urged motorists to get a horse. But that, in effect, was what the automobile would do—get a horse for everybody. Once the Model T was introduced in 1908 we all became Sir Lancelot, gained a seat at the Round Table and were privileged to joust for the favors of fair maidens (at drive-in movies). The pride and prestige of a noble mount was vouchsafed to the common man. And woman, too. No one ever tried to persuade ladies to drive sidesaddle with both legs hanging out the car door.

For the purpose of ennobling us schlubs, the car is better than the horse in every way. Even more advantageous than cost, convenience and not getting kicked and smelly is how much easier it is to drive than to ride. I speak with feeling on this subject, having taken up riding when I was nearly 60 and having begun to drive when I was so small that my cousin Tommy had to lie on the transmission hump and operate the accelerator and the brake with his hands.


Car Culture/Corbis

A 1950 Studebaker Commander Convertible, with its famous ‘bullet-nose’ front end.

After the grown-ups had gone to bed, Tommy and I shifted the Buick into neutral, pushed it down the driveway and out of earshot, started the engine and toured the neighborhood. The sheer difficulty of horsemanship can be illustrated by what happened to Tommy and me next. Nothing. We maneuvered the car home, turned it off and rolled it back up the driveway. (We were raised in the blessedly flat Midwest.) During our foray the Buick’s speedometer reached 30. But 30 miles per hour is a full gallop on a horse. Delete what you’ve seen of horse riding in movies. Possibly a kid who’d never been on a horse could ride at a gallop without killing himself. Possibly one of the Jonas Brothers could land an F-14 on a carrier deck.

Thus cars usurped the place of horses in our hearts. Once we’d caught a glimpse of a well-turned Goodyear, checked out the curves of the bodywork and gaped at that swell pair of headlights, well, the old gray mare was not what she used to be. We embarked upon life in the fast lane with our new paramour. It was a great love story of man and machine. The road to the future was paved with bliss.

Then we got married and moved to the suburbs. Being away from central cities meant Americans had to spend more of their time driving. Over the years away got farther away. Eventually this meant that Americans had to spend all of their time driving. The play date was 40 miles from the Chuck E. Cheese. The swim meet was 40 miles from the cello lesson. The Montessori was 40 miles from the math coach. Mom’s job was 40 miles from Dad’s job and the three-car garage was 40 miles from both.

The car ceased to be object of desire and equipment for adventure and turned into office, rec room, communications hub, breakfast nook and recycling bin—a motorized cup holder. Americans, the richest people on Earth, were stuck in the confines of their crossover SUVs, squeezed into less space than tech-support call-center employees in a Mumbai cubicle farm. Never mind the six-bedroom, eight-bath, pseudo-Tudor with cathedral-ceilinged great room and 1,000-bottle controlled-climate wine cellar. That was a day’s walk away.

Getty Images

Henry Ford and his Model T.

We became sick and tired of our cars and even angry at them. Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way,

But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

But our poor cars paid the price. They were flashing swords beaten into dull plowshares. Cars became appliances. Or worse. Nobody’s ticked off at the dryer or the dishwasher, much less the fridge. We recognize these as labor-saving devices. The car, on the other hand, seems to create labor. We hold the car responsible for all the dreary errands to which it needs to be steered. Hell, a golf cart’s more fun. You can ride around in a golf cart with a six-pack, safe from breathalyzers, chasing Canada geese on the fairways and taking swings at gophers with a mashie.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Louis Chevrolet sits behind the wheel of his prototype car in 1911.

We’ve lost our love for cars and forgotten our debt to them and meanwhile the pointy-headed busybodies have been exacting their revenge. We escaped the poke of their noses once, when we lived downtown, but we won’t be able to peel out so fast the next time. In the name of safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible. One might as well pry the back off an iPod as pop the hood on a contemporary motor vehicle. An aging shade-tree mechanic like myself stares aghast and sits back down in the shade. Or would if the car weren’t squawking at me like a rehearsal for divorce. You left the key in. You left the door open. You left the lights on. You left your dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor.

I don’t believe the pointy-heads give a damn about climate change or gas mileage, much less about whether I survive a head-on with one of their tax-sucking mass-transit projects. All they want to is to make me hate my car. How proud and handsome would Bucephalas look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air bags, 5-mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the tail?

And there’s the end of the American automobile industry. When it comes to dull, practical, ugly things that bore and annoy me, Japanese things cost less and the cup holders are more conveniently located.

The American automobile is—that is, was—never a product of Japanese-style industrialism. America’s steel, coal, beer, beaver pelts and PCs may have come from our business plutocracy, but American cars have been manufactured mostly by romantic fools. David Buick, Ransom E. Olds, Louis Chevrolet, Robert and Louis Hupp of the Hupmobile, the Dodge brothers, the Studebaker brothers, the Packard brothers, the Duesenberg brothers, Charles W. Nash, E. L. Cord, John North Willys, Preston Tucker and William H. Murphy, whose Cadillac cars were designed by the young Henry Ford, all went broke making cars. The man who founded General Motors in 1908, William Crapo (really) Durant, went broke twice. Henry Ford, of course, did not go broke, nor was he a romantic, but judging by his opinions he certainly was a fool.

Bettmann/CORBIS

Preston Tucker, in one of the few Tucker cars produced, celebrates being acquitted of charges of fraud over the failure of his automobile business in 1950.

America’s romantic foolishness with cars is finished, however, or nearly so. In the far boondocks a few good old boys haven’t got the memo and still tear up the back roads. Doubtless the Obama administration’s Department of Transportation is even now calculating a way to tap federal stimulus funds for mandatory OnStar installations to locate and subdue these reprobates.

Among certain youths—often first-generation Americans—there remains a vestigial fondness for Chevelle low-riders or Honda “tuners.” The pointy-headed busybodies have yet to enfold these youngsters in the iron-clad conformity of cultural diversity’s embrace. Soon the kids will be expressing their creative energy in a more constructive way, planting bok choy in community gardens and decorating homeless shelters with murals of Che.

I myself have something old-school under a tarp in the basement garage. I bet when my will has been probated, some child of mine will yank the dust cover and use the proceeds of the eBay sale to buy a mountain bike. Four things greater than all things are, and I’m pretty sure one of them isn’t bicycles. There are those of us who have had the good fortune to meet with strength and beauty, with majestic force in which we were willing to trust our lives. Then a day comes, that strength and beauty fails, and a man does what a man has to do. I’m going downstairs to put a bullet in a V-8.

P.J. O’Rourke is the author of 13 books, including “Driving Like Crazy.”

'Shock And Awe' Statism

By George Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
May 31, 2009

Epiphanies are a dime a dozen among congressional Democrats as they discover urgent new reasons to experience the almost erotic pleasure of commandeering other people's money. For example, freshman Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat whose district includes Disney World, was recently there and was inspired.

The world, he realized, would be a sweeter place if Congress mandated that all companies with 100 or more employees provide a week of paid vacation to those who work at least 25 hours a week. After three years, they would be entitled to two weeks, and companies with more than 50 employees would have to start providing a paid vacation week. Grayson would not mandate that paid vacations be spent at Disney World.

With the welfare state approaching insolvency and businesses sagging, this is an odd time to augment Americans' entitlement mentality. But the travel and tourism industries think that Grayson's idea is neat.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus want the Treasury Department to subsidize minority owners of broadcasting properties. The broadcasters are not "too big to fail" and so do not pose a "systemic risk," but, the representatives say, failures of minority broadcasters would diminish diversity.

Such government micromanagement of the economy is everywhere. The Post recently reported that Richard Wagoner, the former CEO of General Motors who was removed by the government, remains on GM's payroll "because senior Treasury officials have yet to decide whether he should get the $20 million severance package that the company had promised him." His 2009 compensation -- $1 -- is payable Dec. 31. The $20 million promised to him includes contractual awards, deferred compensation and pension benefits accrued over 32 years with the company. Promise-keeping, including honoring contracts, is the default position of a lawful society. But suddenly, many citizens' legal claims are merely starting points for negotiations with an overbearing government.

State governments, too, are expected to accept Washington's whims, but plucky Indiana is being obdurate. Gov. Mitch Daniels, alarmed by what he calls the Obama administration's "shock-and-awe statism," is supporting state Treasurer Richard Mourdock's objection to the administration's treatment of Chrysler's creditors, which include the pension funds for Indiana's retired teachers and state police officers and a state construction fund. Together they own $42.5 million of Chrysler's $6.9 billion (supposedly) secured debt.

Compliant, because dependent, banks bowed to the administration's demand that they accept less than settled bankruptcy law would have given them as secured creditors. Next, the president denounced as "speculators" remaining secured creditors, who then folded and accepted less on the dollar than an unsecured creditor -- the United Auto Workers union -- is getting. This raw taking of property from secured investors penalized those "speculators" -- retired Indiana teachers and state police officers who, Mourdock says, are being "ripped off by the federal government."

He is asking a court to declare that the Obama administration's actions have violated "more than 100 years of established law by redefining 'secured creditors' to mean something less" and that the actions violate the Fifth Amendment protection against the seizure of private property. Furthermore, he says, the government is guilty of "misuse" of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, which gives the Treasury authority only to aid financial institutions, not industrial companies.

One New Deal improvisation not yet emulated by the Obama administration is the September 1933 slaughter -- while the unemployment rate was 25 percent and millions were hungry -- of 6 million young pigs. The purpose was to raise the price of pork by reducing the supply of it. But the "cash for clunkers" idea is a cousin of that.

The Wall Street Journal's Joseph B. White reports that proposals percolating in Congress would further subsidize Detroit -- and chill the planet, of course -- by bribing people to turn in old cars and trucks (dealers have 400,000 unsold large pickups) and buy vehicles that get better gas mileage. In one plan, if the new truck gets one mile per gallon more than the old truck, the buyer would get $3,500; a two-mpg improvement would be worth $4,500.

Such a policy would counteract the president's environmentally harmful policy of forcing Detroit to quickly produce cars that are much more fuel-efficient -- meaning light, cramped and dangerous. Such products will be powerful incentives for Americans to continue driving their old, more polluting and less fuel-efficient cars. This will deprive Detroit of some customers, but surely the government has thought this through.

georgewill@washpost.com

Film Reviews: "Up"

UP, UP & HOORAY!

PIXAR'S EXCITING, AFFECTING 'UP' IS OUT OF THIS WORLD

By Lou Lumenick
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
May 29, 2009

PIXAR extends the longest winning streak in Hollywood history with "Up," an exquisite work of cinematic art that also happens to be the funniest, most touching, most exciting and most entertaining movie released so far this year.

The animation studio's latest instant classic -- and its first offered in 3-D in many theaters -- is also the best directed and written film I've seen thus far in 2009, and quite possibly this century.

Yes, that is an unqualified endorsement -- and the point where I say I'd really prefer you stop reading and go enjoy this movie without a lot of advance information.

This is a hugely imaginative and magical fantasy adventure that explores issues such as loss and dreams deferred with such a light and universal touch that it will appeal to an extremely broad audience.

Directors Pete Docter ("Monsters, Inc.") and Bob Peterson and their co-screenwriter Tom McCarthy brilliantly draw on such cinematic touchstones as "It's a Wonderful Life" and "The Wizard of Oz." They're also inspired by less likely sources such as "Fitzcarraldo," "The Red Balloon" and Jules Verne's "The Lost World" -- not to mention Warner Bros.' animated Road Runner and even the logo of its archrival, DreamWorks Animation.

All of this is deftly wrapped in a deceptively simple story. The main protagonist, Carl Fredricksen, is first seen as a youngster in a wondrous prologue watching a newsreel in which his hero, adventurer Charles Muntz, is accused of fabricating a giant bird skeleton he claims to have brought back from South America.

Carl's faith is unshaken, and he finds a kindred spirit in young Ellie -- whom he eventually marries when they grow up. For years they dream of visiting Paradise Falls, the site of Muntz's supposed discovery, but this never happens for a variety of reasons culminating in Ellie's death many decades later.

In the film proper, Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) is a grumpy 78-year-old who greatly resembles Spencer Tracy toward the end of his career. Carl has shut himself in the home he shared with Ellie and is defying efforts by a real-estate developer to relocate him to a retirement community.

When matters come to a head, Carl comes up with an ingenious -- and quite magical -- way to stay in the house: thousands of balloons he uses to lift it off its foundations and on its way to Paradise Falls.

Turns out he has a stowaway: Russell (Jordan Nagai), an 8-year-old Junior Wilderness Explorer who Carl finds endlessly annoying -- but who turns out to be an asset on his improbable journey.

There are more surprises when they get to South America, including the brilliantly colored bird that Muntz claimed to discover, whom Russell nicknames Kevin, and a pack of dogs with electronic collars that translate their thoughts into words.

There are plenty of laughs and action sequences -- including chases and a sword fight -- that will delight the kids, punctuated with poignant moments of yearning.

I saw "Up" projected in 3-D, expertly deployed to draw the audience into the film's elaborate textures and stunning backgrounds, which include mountains over which Carl and Russell drag the house on ropes.

But this film is so eye-popping -- the colors and images are so vivid -- that this is the rare 3-D movie you can see in 2-D without feeling the least bit cheated.

"Up," which packs a dozen good films' worth of fun, wisdom and artistry into 89 minutes with a minimum of dialogue, is as satisfying an experience as I've had in a movie theater in years.

lou.lumenick@nypost.com

Up

Two cranks and a plucky kidin an Up-lifting aerial tale

by Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
May 27, 2009
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/

"Up" is a wonderful film, with characters who are as believable as any characters can be who spend much of their time floating above the rain forests of Venezuela. They have tempers, problems and obsessions. They are cute and goofy, but they aren't cute in the treacly way of little cartoon animals. They're cute in the human way of the animation master Hayao Miyazaki. Two of the three central characters are cranky old men, which is a wonder in this youth-obsessed era. "Up" doesn't think all heroes must be young or sweet, although the third important character is a nervy kid.

This is another masterwork from Pixar, which is leading the charge in modern animation. The movie was directed by Pete Docter, who also directed "Monsters, Inc.," wrote "Toy Story" and was a co-writer on "WALL-E" before leaving to devote full time to this project. So Docter's one of the leading artists of this latest renaissance of animation.

The movie will be shown in 3-D in some theaters, about which I will say nothing, except to advise you to save the extra money and see it in 2-D. One of the film's qualities that is likely to be diminished by 3-D is its subtle and beautiful color palette. "Up," like "Finding Nemo," "Toy Story," "Shrek" and "The Lion King," uses colors in a way particularly suited to its content.

"Up" tells a story as tickling to the imagination as the magical animated films of my childhood, when I naively thought that because their colors were brighter, their character outlines more defined and their plots simpler, they were actually more realistic than regular films.

It begins with a romance as sweet and lovely as any I can recall in feature animation. Two children named Carl and Ellie meet and discover they share the same dream of someday being explorers. In newsreels, they see the exploits of a daring adventurer named Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), who uses his gigantic airship to explore a lost world on a plateau in Venezuela and then bring back the bones of fantastic creatures previously unknown to man. When his discoveries are accused of being faked, he flies off enraged to South America again, vowing to bring back living creatures to prove his claims.

Nothing is heard from him for years. Ellie and Carl (Edward Asner) grow up, have a courtship, marry, buy a ramshackle house and turn it into their dream home, are happy together and grow old. This process is silent, except for music (the elder Ellie doesn't even have a voice credit). It's shown by Docter in a lovely sequence, without dialogue, that deals with the life experience in a way that is almost never found in family animation. The lovebirds save their loose change in a gallon jug intended to finance their trip to the legendary Paradise Falls, but real life gets in the way: flat tires, home repairs, medical bills. Then they make a heartbreaking discovery. This interlude is poetic and touching.

The focus of the film is on Carl's life after Ellie. He becomes a recluse, holds out against the world, keeps his home as a memorial, talks to the absent Ellie. One day he decides to pack up and fly away -- literally. Having worked all his life as a balloon man, he has the equipment on hand to suspend the house from countless helium-filled balloons and fulfill his dream of seeking Paradise Falls. What he wasn't counting on was an inadvertent stowaway, Russell (Jordan Nagai), a dutiful Wilderness Explorer Scout, who looks Asian American.

What they find at Paradise Falls and what happens there I will not say. But I will describe Charles Muntz's gigantic airship that is hovering there. It's a triumph of design, and perhaps owes its inspiration, though not its appearance, to Miyazaki's "Castle in the Sky." The exterior is nothing special: a really big zeppelin. But the interior is one of those movie spaces you have the feeling you'll remember.

With vast inside spaces, the airship is outfitted like a great ocean liner from the golden age, with a stately dining room, long corridors, a display space rivaling the Natural History Museum and an attic spacious enough to harbor fighter planes. Muntz, who must be a centenarian by now, is hale, hearty and mean, his solitary life shared only by robotic dogs.

The adventures on the jungle plateau are satisfying in a Mummy/ Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones sort of way. But they aren't the whole point of the film. This isn't a movie like "Monsters vs. Aliens," which is mostly just frenetic action. There are stakes here, and personalities involved, and two old men battling for meaning in their lives. And a kid who, for once, isn't smarter than all the adults. And a loyal dog. And an animal sidekick. And always that house and those balloons.

A longer version is here:http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/05/up_up_and_away_in_my_beautiful.html
Cast & Credits
With the voices of:
Carl- Edward Asner
Russell- Jordan Nagai
Muntz- Christopher Plummer
Dug- Bob Peterson
Beta- Delroy Lindo
Gamma- Jerome Raft
Tom- John Ratzenberger

Disney/Pixar presents a film directed by Pete Docter. Written by Bob Peterson. Running time: 96 minutes. Rated PG (for some peril and action).

copyright 2005, rogerebert.com


Up and Away

The latest Pixar film impresses, as expected.

By Frederica Mathewes-Green
http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 29, 2009

I knew Up was one of those rare first-rate movies when I found myself really yearning to see it for a second time. Actually, that wouldn’t have been so unusual, except that I was still sitting in the theater and had only gotten through 20 minutes of seeing it for the first time. It’s that good.

And that in itself isn’t so unusual, considering that this is a film from Pixar Studios, whose previous films (Wall-E, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., Toy Story) have been not only excellent, but also original. Leave it to the other animation studios to crank out films in which bland themes (like “Follow Your Dreams”) provide vehicles for pop-culture references and gross-out jokes. In recent years, Pixar gave us a robot cleaning up an abandoned planet Earth, a rat who wants to be a French chef, superheroes chafing under forced retirement, and the courageous monsters who must inhabit children’s closets. Imagination still exists, in some quarters.

The central image of Up is of an elderly man towing a house. He’s pulling it along by means of a garden hose connected to a low faucet, and the building is held aloft by masses of helium balloons, though it sinks a little lower every day. The man is crossing a flat, dark-gray landscape interrupted by pillars of rocks stacked in inscrutable patterns. (You can say, “Yeah, yeah, the old ‘man-towing-a-house’ story,” but I promise this one’s different.)

The house, you see, is a Valentine. Seventy years before, Carl Frederickson met his bride, Ellie, in this house. At the time it was broken-down and abandoned, but when they married they bought it and fixed it up. From childhood Carl and Ellie had cherished a dream of emulating their hero, intrepid explorer Charles Muntz, and the whimsical expression of this dream was a childish crayon sketch of their home at the edge of South America’s Paradise Falls. (The film’s crew journeyed to Venezuela’s Tabletop Mountains for inspiration.) Now Ellie has died, every other structure around the home has been bulldozed, and since the couple was childless, Carl’s life seems pointless and empty. So he’s going to put that house at the edge of Paradise Falls, if — as he says, and as seems likely — “it kills me.”

But that isn’t what kids are going to like, or even notice, about this movie. For them, it’s mostly about Dug the talking dog, and Russell, Carl’s chubby eight-year-old sidekick, and Kevin, a glorious, 13-foot-tall iridescent bird. This is a really hilarious movie, and there are plenty of chases and action sequences, too (this is only the second Pixar film to have a PG rating, in this case for “peril”). But, as in other Pixar films, there is an intriguing theme underneath all the fun; here, as before, the theme has to do with the goodness of marriage and family life, and the self-sacrificing love a parent (or parent-figure) has for a child.

In a way, Up is a variation on It’s a Wonderful Life. Carl regrets that he was never able to bring Ellie to Paradise Falls, but he comes to see that their ordinary hometown life was a sweet and significant adventure in itself, one that gave Ellie joy. Russell finds that the wilderness is “more wild” than he expected, and “not like they say in books,” and that what he misses is eating ice cream and counting cars with his dad: “It might sound boring, but I think the boring stuff is what I remember most.”

We also see that someone who looks like a grumpy old man can be instead an interesting old man, courageous and inventive. He’s not “grumpy” on general principles, but for the very good reason that he has lost the love of his life. We see that there is such a thing as love for a lifetime, and that love between people who have grown old together is beautiful. And we see Carl register it as a real tragedy when he learns that Russell’s dad has gone on to a new wife, one who tells Russell “not to phone and bug him so much.”

Up is remarkable for other reasons: It is the first animated film to open the Cannes Film Festival, and the first 3-D movie from Pixar. The 3-D effects are used as artistic elements to support the story, rather than just calling attention to themselves. For example, 3-D is used to shorten the perspective and induce a confined feeling as we see Carl spending lonely days in the house after Ellie has gone. In a typically clever shot, Carl chugs slowly across the screen on his stair-glide, to the sultry strains of the “Havanaise” from Carmen.

The most eye-popping use of 3-D actually comes in the Disney and Pixar logos, before the movie itself begins. After the logos fade, we see something that looks familiar: rows of heads before us in a theater, watching a movie. That film turns out to be a 1930s-era newsreel of the dashing explorer Charles Muntz, and we step into the story as we see Carl as a child, watching along with us. Pretty nifty.

The one thing I disliked was that once the characters are all in place, the film becomes simply a series of action sequences. (I had the same criticism of Finding Nemo.) It’s as if the plot pauses, and we just keep re-running the loop of danger, chase, battle, escape, in different settings. We don’t learn anything new about the characters, because the last chase sequence already demonstrated that they are either courageous (good guys) or nefarious (bad guys). For me, this phase of the movie just drags, though of course for many audience members the action scenes will be the best part.

The filmmakers do deserve kudos for making the extra effort of rendering such scenes true-to-life in terms of weight, texture, and impact; it isn’t simply as big and loud as possible. This goes for the whole film. You’ve probably never seen a house held up by helium balloons, but it just feels right — you will believe a house can fly. The structure creaks and leans the way you think it would, and when Carl cuts a few balloon strings to lower it a bit, they ping the way they ought to. Early on the house sails into a lightning storm, and it feels like the real thing (this might be the scariest part of the film for little ones).

I was also impressed that, having given us the house as a symbol of Carl and Ellie’s love, the filmmakers allow it to be bashed and damaged on its dangerous journey. The cost of this adventure is real, but it’s worth it — a lesson Russell, along with all the kids watching, will find useful when he himself is 78.

— Frederica Mathewes-Green writes regularly for Beliefnet.com, Christianity Today, and other publications. She is the author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism, among other books.

North Korea provokes with impunity

A rogue nuclear test staged on the day to honor American war dead is greeted with only half-hearted diplomatese from Washington.

By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion
Friday, May 29, 2009

What does a nuclear madman have to do to get America's attention? On Memorial Day, the North Koreans detonated "an underground atomic device many times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki," as my old colleagues at The Irish Times put it. You'd think that'd rate something higher than "World News In Brief," see foot of page 37. But instead Washington was consumed by the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, who apparently has a "compelling personal story."

Doesn't Kim Jong-il have a compelling personal story? Like Sonia, he grew up in a poor neighborhood (North Korea), yet he's managed to become a nuclear power, shattering the glass ceiling to take his seat at the old nuclear boys' club. Isn't that an inspiring narrative? Once upon a time you had to be a great power, one of the Big Five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, to sit at the nuclear table: America, Britain, France, Russia, China, the old sons of power and privilege. But now the mentally unstable scion of an impoverished no-account backwater with a GDP lower than Zimbabwe has joined their ranks: Celebrate diversity!

Evidently, some compelling personal stories are more compelling than others. In The Washington Post, Stephen Stromberg argued that Kim's decision to drop the Big One on a three-day weekend was evidence of his appalling news judgment. Other blasé observers shrug that it's now an American holiday tradition. It began when Pyongyang staged the first of its holiday provocations on Fourth of July 2006, and, amidst all the other fireworks displays, America barely noticed. No doubt there'll be another Hiroshima on Labor Day or Thanksgiving. Geez, doesn't the hick in the presidential palace get it? There's no point launching nukes when everyone's barbecuing chicken or watching football.

Well, you never know: Maybe we're the ones being parochial. If you're American, it's natural to assume that the North Korean problem is about North Korea, just like the Iraq war is about Iraq. But they're not. If you're starving to death in Pyongyang, North Korea is about North Korea. For everyone else, North Korea and Iraq, and Afghanistan and Iran, are about America: American will, American purpose, American credibility. The rest of the world doesn't observe Memorial Day. But it understands the crude symbolism of a rogue nuclear test staged on the day to honor American war dead and greeted with only half-hearted pro forma diplomatese from Washington. Pyongyang's actions were "a matter of …" Drumroll, please! "…grave concern," declared the president. Furthermore, if North Korea carries on like this, it will – wait for it – "not find international acceptance." As the comedian Andy Borowitz put it, "President Obama said that the United States was prepared to respond to the threat with 'the strongest possible adjectives.' Later in the day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the North Korean nuclear test 'supercilious and jejune.'"

The president's general line on the geopolitical big picture is: I don't need this in my life right now. He's a domestic transformationalist, working overtime – via the banks, the automobile industry, health care, etc. – to advance statism's death grip on American dynamism. His principal interest in the rest of the world is that he doesn't want anyone nuking America before he's finished turning it into a socialist basket case. This isn't simply a matter of priorities. A United States government currently borrowing 50 cents for every dollar it spends cannot afford its global role, and thus the Obama cuts to missile defense and other programs have a kind of logic: You can't be Scandinavia writ large with a U.S.-sized military.

Out there in the chancelleries and presidential palaces, they're beginning to get the message. The regime in Pyongyang is not merely trying to "provoke" America but is demonstrating to potential clients that you can do so with impunity. A black-market economy reliant on exports of heroin, sex slaves and knock-off Viagra is attempting to supersize its business model and turn itself into a nuclear Wal-Mart. Among the distinguished guests present for North Korea's October 2006 test were representatives of the Iranian government. President George W. Bush was much mocked for yoking the two nations together in his now all but forgotten "axis of evil" speech, but the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported a few weeks ago that the North Korean-built (and Israeli-bombed) plutonium production facility in Syria was paid for by Tehran. How many other Iranian clients are getting nuclear subsidies? It would be interesting to learn who was on the observation deck for the Memorial Day Hiroshima re-enactment, but North Korea is one of the most closed societies on the face of the Earth, certainly when compared with the more closely scrutinized corners of the Middle East. In other words, it's the perfect partner for any state that wants to pursue certain projects under the Western radar screen.

It is remarkable in just five years how the world has adjusted to the inevitability of a nuclear North Korea and a nuclear Iran. Nudge it on another half-decade: Whose nuclear ambitions will be unstoppable by 2015? Syria's? Sudan's? Selected fiefdoms in Somalia?

Barack Obama came to power pledging to talk to America's enemies anywhere, anytime. Alas for America's speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-teleprompter diplomacy, there are no takers for his photo-ops. In the ever more pitiful straw-clutching of the State Department, America is said to be banking on a post-Kim era. He's apparently had a bad stroke and might be dead within a decade or three. So what? It's a safe bet that whoever emerges from a power struggle between the family, the party and the military is committed to nuclearization as the principal rationale of the state. Likewise in Iran's imminent election, both "extremists" and "moderates" are pro-nuke. You want an Iranian moderate? Here's Hashemi Rafsanjani, the moderate guy who lost to that crazy Ahmadinejad last time round: He called Israel "the most hideous occurrence in history," which the Muslim world "will vomit out from its midst" with "a single atomic bomb." Nuking the Zionist Entity is as bipartisan as motherhood and apple pie.

More to the point, the feeble bleatings from the State Department that there may be internal change down the road emphasize the central feature of the present scene: the absence of meaningful American power. While America laughed at North Korea, Iran used it as a stalking horse, a useful guide as to the parameters of belligerence and quiescence a nuclearizing rogue state could operate within. In what Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post calls "the post-American world," other nations will follow that model. We are building a world in which the wealthiest nations on the planet, from Norway to New Zealand, are all but defenseless, while bankrupt dysfunctional squats go nuclear. Even with inevitable and generous submissions to nuclear blackmail, how long do you think that arrangement will last? In the formulation of Janet Napolitano, we are on the brink of "man-caused disaster."

©MARK STEYN

Today's Tune: Alphaville - Forever Young

(Click on title to play video)

Israel and the Axis of Evil

By Caroline Glick
The Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/
May 28, 2009

North Korea is half a world away from Israel. Yet the nuclear test it conducted on Monday has the Israeli defense establishment up in arms and its Iranian nemesis smiling like the Cheshire Cat. Understanding why this is the case is key to understanding the danger posed by what someone once impolitely referred to as the Axis of Evil.

Less than two years ago, on September 6, 2007, the IAF destroyed a North Korean-built plutonium production facility at Kibar, Syria. The destroyed installation was a virtual clone of North Korea's Yongbyon plutonium production facility.

This past March the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported that Iranian defector Ali Reza Asghari, who before his March 2007 defection to the US served as a general in Iran's Revolutionary Guards and as deputy defense minister, divulged that Iran paid for the North Korean facility. Teheran viewed the installation in Syria as an extension of its own nuclear program. According to Israeli estimates, Teheran spent between $1 billion and $2b. for the project.

It can be assumed that Iranian personnel were present in North Korea during Monday's test. Over the past several years, Iranian nuclear officials have been on hand for all of North Korea's major tests including its first nuclear test and its intercontinental ballistic missile test in 2006.

Moreover, it wouldn't be far-fetched to think that North Korea conducted some level of coordination with Iran regarding the timing of its nuclear bomb and ballistic missile tests this week. It is hard to imagine that it is mere coincidence that North Korea's actions came just a week after Iran tested its solid fuel Sejil-2 missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers.

Aside from their chronological proximity, the main reason it makes sense to assume that Iran and North Korea coordinated their tests is because North Korea has played a central role in Iran's missile program. Although Western observers claim that Iran's Sejil-2 is based on Chinese technology transferred to Iran through Pakistan, the fact is that Iran owes much of its ballistic missile capacity to North Korea. The Shihab-3 missile, for instance, which forms the backbone of Iran's strategic arm threatening to Israel and its Arab neighbors, is simply an Iranian adaptation of North Korea's Nodong missile technology. Since at least the early 1990s, North Korea has been only too happy to proliferate that technology to whoever wants it. Like Iran, Syria owes much of its own massive missile arsenal to North Korean proliferation.

Responding Monday to North Korea's nuclear test, US President Barack Obama said, "North Korea's behavior increases tensions and undermines stability in Northeast Asia."

While true, North Korea's intimate ties with Iran and Syria show that North Korea's nuclear program, with its warhead, missile and technological components, is not a distant threat, limited in scope to faraway East Asia. It is a multilateral program shared on various levels with Iran and Syria. Consequently, it endangers not just the likes of Japan and South Korea, but all nations whose territory and interests are within range of Iranian and Syrian missiles.

Beyond its impact on Iran's technological and hardware capabilities, North Korea's nuclear program has had a singular influence on Iran's political strategy for advancing its nuclear program diplomatically. North Korea has been a trailblazer in its utilization of a mix of diplomatic aggression and seeming accommodation to alternately intimidate and persuade its enemies to take no action against its nuclear program. Iran has followed Pyongyang's model assiduously. Moreover, Iran has used the international - and particularly the American - response to various North Korean provocations over the years to determine how to position itself at any given moment in order to advance its nuclear program.

For instance, when the US reacted to North Korea's 2006 nuclear and ICBM tests by reinstating the six-party talks in the hopes of appeasing Pyongyang, Iran learned that by exhibiting an interest in engaging the US on its uranium enrichment program it could gain valuable time. Just as North Korea was able to dissipate Washington's resolve to act against it while buying time to advance its program still further through the six-party talks, so Iran, by seemingly agreeing to a framework for discussing its uranium enrichment program, has been able to keep the US and Europe at bay for the past several years.

THE OBAMA administration's impotent response to Pyongyang's ICBM test last month and its similarly stuttering reaction to North Korea's nuclear test on Monday have shown Teheran that it no longer needs to even pretend to have an interest in negotiating aspects of its nuclear program with Washington or its European counterparts. Whereas appearing interested in reaching an accommodation with Washington made sense during the Bush presidency, when hawks and doves were competing for the president's ear, today, with the Obama administration populated solely by doves, Iran, like North Korea, believes it has nothing to gain by pretending to care about accommodating Washington.

This point was brought home clearly by both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's immediate verbal response to the North Korean nuclear test on Monday and by Iran's provocative launch of warships in the Gulf of Aden the same day. As Ahmadinejad said, as far the Iranian regime is concerned, "Iran's nuclear issue is over."

There is no reason to talk anymore. Just as Obama made clear that he intends to do nothing in response to North Korea's nuclear test, so Iran believes that the president will do nothing to impede its nuclear program.

Of course it is not simply the administration's policy toward North Korea that is signaling to Iran that it has no reason to be concerned that the US will challenge its nuclear aspirations. The US's general Middle East policy, which conditions US action against Iran's nuclear weapons program on the prior implementation of an impossible-to-achieve Israel-Palestinian peace agreement makes it obvious to Teheran that the US will take no action whatsoever to prevent it from following in North Korea's footsteps and becoming a nuclear power.

During his press briefing with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last Monday, Obama said the US would reassess its commitment to appeasing Iran at year's end. And early this week it was reported that Obama has instructed the Defense Department to prepare plans for attacking Iran. Moreover, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, has made several recent statements warning of the danger a nuclear-armed Iran will pose to global security - and by extension, to US national security.

On the surface, all of this seems to indicate that the Obama administration may be willing to actually do something to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Unfortunately, though, due to the timeline Obama has set, it is clear that before he will be ready to lift a finger against Iran, the mullocracy will have already become a nuclear power.

Israel assesses that Iran will have a sufficient quantity of enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb by the end of the year. The US believes that it could take until mid-2010. At his press briefing last week Obama said that if the negotiations are deemed a failure, the next step for the US will be to expand international sanctions against Iran. It can be assumed that here, too, Obama will allow this policy to continue for at least six months before he will be willing to reconsider it. By that point, in all likelihood, Iran will already be in possession of a nuclear arsenal.

Beyond Obama's timeline, over the past week, two other developments made it apparent that regardless of what Iran does, the Obama administration will not revise its policy of placing its Middle East emphasis on weakening Israel rather than on stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. First, last Friday, Yediot Aharonot reported that at a recent lecture in Washington, US Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton, who is responsible for training Palestinian military forces in Jordan, indicated that if Israel does not surrender Judea and Samaria within two years, the Palestinian forces he and his fellow American officers are now training at a cost of more than $300 million could begin killing Israelis.

Assuming the veracity of Yediot's report, even more unsettling than Dayton's certainty that within a short period of time these US-trained forces could commence murdering Israelis, is his seeming equanimity in the face of the known consequences of his actions. The prospect of US-trained Palestinian military forces slaughtering Jews does not cause Dayton to have a second thought about the wisdom of the US's commitment to building and training a Palestinian army.

Dayton's statement laid bare the disturbing fact even though the administration is fully aware of the costs of its approach to the Palestinian conflict with Israel, it is still unwilling to reconsider it. Defense Secretary Robert Gates just extended Dayton's tour of duty for an additional two years and gave him the added responsibility of serving as Obama's Middle East mediator George Mitchell's deputy.

FOUR DAYS after Dayton's remarks were published, senior American and Israeli officials met in London. The reported purpose of the high-level meeting was to discuss how Israel will abide by the administration's demand that it prohibit all construction inside Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria.

What was most notable about the meeting was its timing. By holding the meeting the day after North Korea tested its bomb and after Iran's announcement that it rejects the US's offer to negotiate about its nuclear program, the administration demonstrated that regardless of what Iran does, Washington's commitment to putting the screws on Israel is not subject to change.

All of this of course is music to the mullahs' ears. Between America's impotence against their North Korean allies and its unshakable commitment to keeping Israel on the hot seat, the Iranians know that they have no reason to worry about Uncle Sam.

As for Israel, it is a good thing that the IDF has scheduled the largest civil defense drill in the country's history for next week. Between North Korea's nuclear test, Iran's brazen bellicosity and America's betrayal, it is clear that the government can do nothing to impact Washington's policies toward Iran. No destruction of Jewish communities will convince Obama to act against Iran.

Today Israel stands alone against the mullahs and their bomb. And this, like the US's decision to stand down against the Axis of Evil, is not subject to change.


caroline@carolineglick.com

Derrick Rose and the ripple effect

Think it doesn't matter? Consider UCLA, Gillispie as fraud victims

BY RICK TELANDER
Chicago Sun-Times Columnist
http://www.suntimes.com/sports/index.html
May 29, 2009

Let's say you're of the cynical, entertain-me-now school of fandom.

You don't care a wit that young Bulls star Derrick Rose has been implicated as the beneficiary of some serious academic cheating at both his alma maters -- Simeon High School and the University of Memphis.


Derrick Rose and John Calipari in 2008

According to NCAA allegations first reported by the Memphis Commercial-Appeal and Chicago high school sources informing the Sun-Times, some person other than Rose allegedly took his college-entrance SAT, and someone with access to Rose's Simeon transcripts changed one of his grades from a D to a C just as Rose was applying to colleges.

So what, you say. He's a pro now. He was always gonna be a baller. Go, Bulls!

That's fine.

Live in your world of beer-can-on-the-belly sports relativism.

But just ponder the ripple effect and the hypocrisy revealed by the academic fraud before you lumber to the fridge for another cold one.

First off, Rose might never have gotten into a powerhouse hoops college like Memphis without the cheating. He might have had to spend time at a junior college or even go overseas to play. Had he not gone to Memphis, the Tigers almost certainly would not have made it to the 2008 NCAA championship game.

Think that matters to UCLA, which lost to Memphis in the semis?

Rose was clearly a one-and-done mercenary, something head coach John Calipari always new full well.

Partly because Rose went to Memphis, Calipari, then making $2.35 million a year and with four years left on his contract, abruptly bolted for Kentucky this April, becoming the nation's highest-paid college basketball coach in the process. His new deal? Eight years at $4.1 million per.

Gillispie topples

Think former Wildcats coach Billy Gillispie -- canned in March with five years left on his deal -- liked that? Not much. Gillispie just filed a $6 million lawsuit against Kentucky claiming breach of contract and fraud.

Oh, and here's a nice tidbit. ESPN.com, citing inside sources, stated in late March that, ''with a strong recruiting class coming in and a tradition already established at Memphis, Calipari wouldn't leave if the UK job was offered.''

Ha!

He was gone in an eye blink.

And, of course, so was Rose.

Off to the NBA, where, based largely on his display while at Memphis, and to a lesser degree at Simeon, where he led his team to back-to-back state championships, he was taken No. 1 in the 2008 NBA draft. Think that was worth a little money?

And how much was it worth to other parties, such as Rose's constantly pressuring, Svengali-like older brother Reggie?

As Rose's former club basketball team coach, Luther Topps, said of the NCAA investigation, ''Reggie moved me and [Simeon head coach Robert Smith] out of the way long before that, as soon as the money got involved.''

And, of course, partly because of where he was drafted and the role expected of him with the rebuilding Bulls, Rose flourished and was named NBA rookie of the year.

That, too, is both an honor and money in the bank.

Sanctimony minus standards

Let's think about the NBA itself for a moment.

This kind of manipulative fraud is precisely what commissioner David Stern almost guaranteed would blossom to new levels after he sanctimoniously declared that nobody could play in the NBA until at least one year after high school.

No more Kevin Garnetts or Kobe Bryants.

It's not that Stern and his league care about education -- the NBA has no diploma standards or even literacy standards whatsoever. What the NBA wants is the orderly entrance of older players who are a little more -- shall we say, polished? -- than post-adolescents.

We all know the phoniness involved in big-time athletes going to institutions of higher learning when those athletes have no academic mission, and when the schools have interest in the athletes only as stadium-fillers.

But when the hypocrisy becomes public like this, it indicts a lot more than just phonies like Calipari (Oh, and it's for sure the coach knew nothing!)

Consider the Chicago Public School system. Somebody can change a transcript grade -- as was done on the Simeon computer -- and the CPS investigators discipline ... no one?

Who took Rose's SAT?

That's not easy to do, what with IDs and signatures and the like.

If this were done for a non-athletic kid who desperately wanted to go to college to better himself or herself, to learn -- and then that student flourished academically -- you could even justify such an opportunity given.

But this was done in the name of let's-rob-the-bank.

Bulls vice president of basketball operations John Paxson is a straight arrow who agonizes over character.

Would he have taken Rose if he knew the kid had allegedly cheated this way?

Yes, this was all stuff done back in the ''amateur'' days. But you know something? Those days weren't so long ago. And they don't vanish under the weight of cash.

Derrick Rose has been a likable point guard in his one pro season.

But how do you explain the lesson here to, say, Chicago school children?

Practice your crossover, kids. As you know, schoolwork's for dummies.

Burke and Obama

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) had a lot to say about the Obama administration.

By Thomas Sowell
http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 29, 2009, 0:00 a.m.
http://www.tsowell.com/

The other day I sought a respite from current events by rereading some of the writings of the 18th-century British statesman Edmund Burke. But it was not nearly as big an escape as I had thought it would be.



Statue of Eedmund Burke in Bristol, England (w/ bullet holes in the head and forearm).

When Burke wrote of his apprehension about “new power in new persons,” I could not help thinking of the new powers that have been created by which a new president of the United States — a man with zero experience in business — can fire the head of General Motors and tell banks how to run their businesses.

Not only is Barack Obama new to the presidency, he is new to running any organization. One of Burke’s fears was that “we may place our confidence in the virtue of those who have never been tried.”

Neither eloquence nor zeal is a substitute for experience, according to Burke. He said, “eloquence may exist without a proportionate degree of wisdom.” As for zeal, Burke said: “It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance that it is directed by insolent passion.”

The Obama administration’s back-and-forth on the question whether American intelligence agents who forced information out of captured terrorist leaders will be subject to legal jeopardy — even though they were told at the time that what they were doing was not only legal but a service to the nation — came to mind when reading Burke’s warning about the dangers of continuing to change the rules and values by which people lived. Burke asked how we could expect a sense of honor to exist when “no man could know what would be the test of honour in a nation, continually varying the standard of its coin”?

The current drive to take from “the rich” for the benefit of others came to mind when reading Burke’s warning against creating a situation where “any one description of citizens should be brought to regard any of the others as their proper prey.” He also warned that “those who attempt to level, never equalise.” What they end up doing is concentrating power in their own hands — and Burke saw such new powers as dangerous, even if they were used only sparingly at first.

He said, “the true danger is, when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients and by parts.” He also said: “It is by lying dormant a long time, or being at first very rarely exercised, that arbitrary power steals upon a people.”

People who don't like “the rich” or “big business” or the banks may be happy that President Obama is sticking it to them. But such arbitrary powers can be turned on anybody. As John Donne said: “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” There is a lot of wisdom in those words.

The Constitution of the United States set out to limit the powers of the federal government, but judges have greatly eroded those limitations over the years, and the dispensing of bailout money has allowed the Obama administration to exercise powers that the Constitution never bestowed.

Edmund Burke understood that, no matter what form of government you have, in the end the character of those who wield the powers of government is crucial. He said: “Constitute government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of the powers which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state.”

He also said, “of all things, we ought to be the most concerned who and what sort of men they are that hold the trust of everything that is dear to us.” He feared particularly the kind of man “whose whole importance has begun with his office, and is sure to end with it” — the kind of man “who before he comes into power has no friends, or who coming into power is obliged to desert his friends.” Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and others come to mind.

The biggest challenge to America — and to the world — today is the danger of Iran with nuclear weapons. President Obama is acting as if this is something he can finesse with talks or deals. Worse yet, he may think it is something we can live with.

Burke had something to say about things like that as well: “There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.” Acting — not talking.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.