Blogito, Ergo Sum
by Gregg Calkins
22 November 2010, a Monday
Ships are lining up to load coal for furnaces in China, which has evolved from a coal exporter to one of the world’s leading purchasers.
Do I need to tell you they weren’t going to play our fun cap-and-trade game?
South Korea has not responded to the existence of a new nuclear enrichment plant that was revealed Sunday.
Why were they surprised?
An amusing editorial, no doubt:
Secret political donations cast a shadow of doubt and distrust over a huge portion of the spending on midterm elections.
This is the same NYTimes which fills most of its news columns with quotes from anonymous sources
Not that
Paul Krugman has one-way glasses or anything, but he warns...The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing.
When Obama was elected, following the first two years of control of congress by Nancy and Harry, Republican leaders approached him to see how they were going to work WITH him. You can look this up. Obama explained to them what bipartisanship meant in two words: "I won," he said. Period. End of discussion,. It was crystal clear who was going to be doing the governing, so Republicans stepped aside and said okay, have it your way.
Now you would think this would have delighted the Democrats, who at one point held a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate as well as control of the House, but it seems like they weren’t all that happy, somehow. But if America isn’t governable today then perhaps it’s because only one party has done all of the governing so far.
Obama even foolishly admitted his style of governing...it’s okay if Republicans come along for the ride, he said, but just like black people from an American heritage he never shared, they’ll have to sit in the back.
It was stupid as well as merely foolish because it removed one of his favorite tropes...the one where he blamed the Republicans for steering the car into the ditch even though Harry and Nancy had been at the wheel since FY ’07, something economist Krugman knows but the politically partisan Krugman hopes you do not.
And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.
Perhaps he slipped in pointing out that, according to this logic, the country should have been quite governable during the past four years?
Krugman is imbalanced over the very thought that Republicans have been elected into power in one chamber, even if they haven’t actually been seated yet. But Democrats still are in power in both houses at the moment, and congress is in session.
Since we just finished four years of Democrats controlling BOTH houses of Congress, plus the presidency, along with ALL of the levers of power, the American people clearly recognized one-party rule was not such a good idea.
I mean, if they had thought 100% Democrat rule was so wonderful they’d have decided the Republican Party was unnecessary and eliminated it entirely.
We can sort of guess who is going to be the most upset at the notion of actually sharing some of their power for a change, presuming, as Obama warned us, they can overcome enough of their fear to think clearly. Frightened men, he said, don’t do that very well.
For a supposedly literate and intelligent man, Obama apparently is unfamiliar with Samuel Johnson, who said: "Depend on it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
Fear has certainly wonderfully concentrated the minds of vulnerable Democrats in the Senate facing 2012. For that reason, if no other, I expect more cooperation with Republicans then Democrats have exhibited in the past as they went their way all on their own.
These days, national security experts are tearing their hair out over the decision of Senate Republicans to block a desperately needed new strategic arms treaty. And everyone knows that these Republicans oppose the treaty, not because of legitimate objections, but simply because it’s an Obama administration initiative; if sabotaging the president endangers the nation, so be it.
As noted earlier, Democrats have controlled the Senate for four years now. The Senate knew, during the last two years of the Bush administration, when the treaty would expire. If national security was really at stake here then the Democrats had the opportunity to renew or reconfigure the treaty while Bush was still president. Did they do so? No?
Then Obama was elected and Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate,. Did they pass this vital treaty at that point. No?
In fact, are we in such a funk now because the treaty is about to expire this December, an impression you might easily gain from Krugman’s hyperventilation?
Well, no...it expired a year ago, while Obama was fiddling all sorts of tunes besides this one. The Senate, controlled by Democrats, could have proposed the new treaty at any time prior to its expiration, assuming they really thought it was vital for national security. Apparently they did not.
What Krugman really wants for Obama now, urging last-second action by a lame-duck Senate, is another equivalent of his Nobel Peace Prize, something which will make him look good without actually having done anything.
You want to know how to tell Krugman is being false about Republican motives when he says they are "just not interested in helping a Democrat govern"?
Easy. Because next year the Senate WILL approve a new treaty. And Obama will still be president when it happens. He will still claim the credit for signing it in front of an admiring television commentator. If the country hasn’t already been at risk for the past two years, the year before the treaty expired and especially the year after, then Mr Krugman’s apparent sudden panic today is purely and simply political posturing against Republicans, nothing more.
James P. Rubin hopes you are a little bit stupid, too:DESPITE months of negotiations on Capitol Hill, Senate approval of President Obama’s New Start arms control treaty is in serious jeopardy. And it raises the question: Are treaties, and in particular arms control treaties, even worth the trouble anymore? ...
...the same treaties that are so easily ratified in other countries are, for good or ill, often left to languish in the Senate, where 67 votes are needed for approval. ...many widely shared goals — from children’s rights to a ban on nuclear weapons testing — are held hostage by a small group of senators, who often represent a tiny percentage of the American public.
Fortunately, there is an alternative: we could achieve roughly the same results without signing a treaty. International negotiations would still be needed, but instead of a binding treaty, the administration could commit to pursuing Congressional action to accomplish the agreed terms. The effect would be the same, but the process would be much easier at home, requiring a simple majority in the Senate, instead of two-thirds.
This strategy is already being used on climate policy. After the Senate failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change that was negotiated during the Clinton administration, it became clear that any treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions would be a lost cause.
Mr Rubin, who complains about the small group of senators representing a tiny percentage of the American public, apparently accidentally fails to tell us the Senate vote against Kyoto was 96-0. Well, maybe he’s just too dumb to remember, himself, because he tells us:
Treaties on arms control, with elaborate legal definitions and verification procedures, were necessary during the cold war because the Soviet Union was a closed society, in which military programs were closely guarded secrets. And given the high stakes involved, treaties helped ensure that large-scale cheating could be detected in time to respond.
Yeah, sure. What good is a treaty with a closed and secretive society when you have no means to verify whether they are honoring it or not? The sad truth is that treaties bind only the people who are willing to honor them, and typically that means only one side. I spent three decades in the real estate business and as a result of that experience I advised my landlord clients never to sign leases with their tenants. This is because the law will enforce the lease against the landlord much more readily than they will against the tenant...or even can, even if they would, because the tenant has typically either disappeared from view or has no assets available for compensation.
An agreement which effectively binds only one set of hands is no agreement at all.
And whenever you feel that you must, for some reason, make some kind of binding agreement, you’d better make damn sure you’ve thought it all the way through and back out again.
Remember the old adage: marry in haste; repent at leisure.