Iran’s testing of long-range missiles and a threat to close access to the Persian Gulf (known by Gulf Arabs and the U.S. Navy as the Arabian Gulf) have ratcheted up tensions with the West. The Islamic Republic is completing 10 days of naval exercises aimed at showcasing its military capabilities, which its leaders say give it control over the Strait of Hormuz.
** OBAMA TODAY – MONDAY. President Barack Obama is in Hawaii and en route to Washington
He has received the daily intelligence and economic briefings in Kailua, where he is staying with his family.
Obama has no scheduled public events.
He and First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha wrap up their Christmas and New Year’s vacation today and return to Washington on Air Force One.
The Obamas kicked off the new year yesterday with a visit to their past.
Following his workout at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, Obama and his family went to the Punchbowl, site of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, to visit the grave of his World War II veteran grandfather, Stanley Dunham.
Then they visited the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, featuring an exhibit of the president’s late mother’s anthropological work, entitled “Through Her Eyes: Ann Dunham’s Field Work in Indonesia.” Dr. Ann Dunham did extensive work for the Ford Foundation and the Asian Development Bank in Indonesia.
The Obamas were joined at the exhibit by the president’s sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, and her family.
After a private lunch, the Obamas spent the afternoon at the beach at Marine Corps Base Hawaii.
Meanwhile, on this, the biggest day of the year in college football — with six major bowl games taking place, including the Rose Bowl and Fiesta Bowl with Pacific 12 Conference representatives Oregon and Stanford — the preposterously early Iowa Republican presidential race is about to wrap up.
In Iowa today it is the war of all against all. Well, not quite, but pretty much. The candidates are all taking shots at one another, with a suddenly ascending Rick Santorum now coming in for his share of the fun.
Ron Paul, who went back to Texas after trying to fend off press questions last week about his views, is back in the state as well.
Iran continued playing into the sense of crisis today by going ahead with more missile tests, both long-range and medium-range.
Iran is wrapping up its planned 10-day series of naval exercises in and around the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important choke point for oil shipments, which Iran threatens to shut down if new sanctions continue to be imposed against its nuclear weapons program.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak added to the brinksmanship, saying that sanctions should be strengthened even further.
Obama is monitoring a variety of other geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES – MONDAY. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
Brown is working on his new state budget, the upcoming State of the State address, and various political plans for 2012, including his big revenue initiative to couple with additional cuts in order to bring the budget into balance.
Happy 2012! Fireworks burst in spectacular fashion over London, host of the 2012 Olympic Games, as Big Ben chimes in the new year and selections from Britain’s globe-spanning popular music play. Usually Moscow wins the fireworks award, but not this time.
** OBAMA TODAY – SUNDAY. President Barack Obama is in Hawaii.
He has received the daily intelligence and economic briefings in Kailua, where he is staying with his family.
Obama has no scheduled public events.
He is vacationing in his home state with First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha through January 1st.
The release of the Des Moines Register Poll on New Year’s Eve reveals a rather volatile and still unsettled situation in the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses, which are coming up on January 3rd.
Over 40% of respondents say they have not made up their minds. And the ground was shifting while the poll was in the field.
The overall results shows a statistical tie between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, with Romney at 24% and Paul at 22%. Rick Santorum is in third with 15%, followed by Newt Gingrich, hammered by millions in attack ads, with 12%.
Half the TV ads that aired in December in Iowa were attacks on Gingrich, most of them from an “independent” committee run by Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign aides which has not disclosed where the money has come from.
Romney is, ironically, the only stable element here. He’s gotten a mostly free ride from opponents and the media, and others have gone up and down and up again, but he is where he’s been all along. Stalled. But if his opponents splinter the non-Romney vote, he is viable.
While Romney is consistent, everything else is inconsistent. In addition to the very high proportion of unsure voters, the poll itself looks different as it progresses through its four-day survey.
Taking only the last two days, Paul drops back into third and Santorum moves up alongside Romney, with the ex-Massachusetts governor at his usual 24% and the ex-Pennsylvania senator at 21%.
Romney didn’t have much to say today, but his rivals did.
Gingrich ripped him, saying that he had been “Romney-boated.”
Paul, who is oddly back in Texas, emerged for some Sunday chat show activity, which quickly turned contentious as he tried to defend his opposition to civil rights laws, sexual harassment laws, lack of concern over the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and other aspects of his peculiar program.
Santorum, suddenly riding high, said for his part that he would bomb Iran if the Tehran regime doesn’t allow inspectors to range throughout the country.
And so it goes.
Iran played into the sense of crisis today by going ahead, contrary to statements yesterday, with a long-range missile test.
Which raises questions of who is on first in Tehran, not to mention who is in charge.
In Syria, even with Arab League monitors in the country for a week, attacks on civilian demonstrators continue, raising criticisms of the monitor program as a useless facade.
Obama is monitoring a variety of other geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES – SUNDAY. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
Brown is working on his 2012 fiscal, political, and rhetorical plans.
In his New Year’s weekend video/radio address, President Barack Obama tells the American people that, by joining together, we can move past the tough debates and help to create jobs and grow the economy in the new year.
** OBAMA TODAY – SATURDAY. President Barack Obama is in Hawaii.
He has received the daily intelligence and economic briefings in Kailua, where he is staying with his family.
Obama has no scheduled public events.
He is vacationing in his home state with First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha through January 1st.
Friday was a chaotic day in the Republican presidential race.
Today promises more of the same, with all of the candidates except Ron Paul campaigning in Iowa on New Year’s Eve.
The Des Moines Register Poll, which has a very good track record, will be released at 5 PM Pacific.
All the candidates are in Iowa today, except for a supposedly surging Ron Paul, who has gone home to Texas.
Paul is turning turtle in the face of ongoing questions about his publishing, promoting, and profiting from racist statements and bizarre conspiracy theories. And with Iran threatening to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, his tactics with regard to the Islamic republic and its nuclear weapons program are being slammed by fellow Republicans as appeasement. That’s the polite version.
After walking out of a CNN interview, Paul had already taken to consistently dodging the press. He will, however, appear on a couple of Sunday chat shows.
Mitt Romney and minions in media and elsewhere are again trying to create the impression that he’s got it locked up. (My experience is that’s a mistake.)
Romney’s sons got into hot water yesterday when Matt Romney, asked why his father refuses to release any tax returns, said he’d heard it said that that might happen after Obama releases his birth certificate and grades.
Which prompted brother Tagg Romney, a friend and business associate of Meg Whitman’s troubled son Griff Harsh V, to interject that it hadn’t been their father who had said that.
Newt Gingrich teared up yesterday when he explained his interest in brain science as a consequence of his mother’s mind spiraling away with age, which Romney boosters mock as his “Hillary moment.” Recall her crying as she was about to lose again in New Hampshire, which she then won.
Rick Santorum, who’s suddenly moved up in Iowa after many months of seemingly fruitless campaigning, is doing the smart thing of just campaigning energetically.
Virginia’s attorney general today announced that his state’s exclusion of all but Romney and Paul from the Commonwealth’s key Super Tuesday primary is wrong and he is moving to correct the situation with emergency legislation, which the governor also says he supports.
In our new world chaos, former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh now says he doesn’t want to come to the US after all. Which is fortunate, since the Obama Administration doesn’t want him here. Instead he says he’ll remain in Yemen — what happened to his supposed need for the best medical treatment — and work with successors to stabilize the country.
Just what protesters don’t want. Saleh should have stayed in Saudi Arabia.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called Egyptian leaders yesterday and today to urge them to back away from their raids on human rights groups, including several US-based NGOs.
We’ll see how that goes.
Iranian saber rattling about closing the Strait of Hormuz is continuing on state television for yet another day, and Iranian air and naval forces continue their exercises in and around the vital choke point for the world’s oil supply.
But Iran announced today that is delaying a planned long-range missile test, and called for renewed talks on its nuclear weapons program.
Despite all the threatening activity, and the obvious threat that Iran poses, oil markets are mostly stable, as you can see from the Energy Market Watch below.
Which I like to think of a vote of conference in the U.S. Navy.
But those markets are based on conventional wisdom as much as insight, and can be stampeded in an instant by decisions made elsewhere.
Obama is monitoring a variety of other geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
NASA scientists will be ringing in the New Year monitoring two spacecraft about to orbit the moon. The mission, run out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is attempting to map the lunar surface, and help us understand how planets are formed.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES – SATURDAY. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
Brown is working on his 2012 fiscal, political, and rhetorical plans.
Brown has raised $1.2 million for his proposed tax initiative for the November 2012 ballot in the past two weeks.
He also has millions left over from his 2010 landslide win over billionaire Meg Whitman’s biggest-spending non-presidential campaign in American history, but I believe he will want to keep that in his re-election kitty.
Am I saying that I think he intends to run for re-election?
** IOWA THEN AND NOW.The chaotic jumble of holding the Iowa presidential caucuses on January 3rd is now fully apparent. With rampant confusion about who will actually participate, and yoyo-ing swings in support — all playing out against a bizarre backdrop of the holidays, millions in disembodied attack ads, and Barack Obama pondering a US-Iran showdown in the Strait of Hormuz — the folly of the accelerated nomination calendar is clear.
It didn’t used to be this way.
When I was Senator Gary Hart’s political director for the first-in-the-nation contest, the Iowa presidential caucuses were held on February 20th, 1984. There was plenty of time for those who voted in the caucuses to consider the candidates and in a great many cases to actually meet them.
Unlike the situation this year, when most have campaigned from TV studios, barely deigning to sweep through Iowa behind carefully controlled facades, the candidates then spent ample time in the state, with voters able to get a measure of them.
Then there were campaign spending limits which were largely adhered to. I say “largely” because campaigns found ways to scrimp and save by renting cars across the state line, a minor dodge which seems quite quaint in today’s post-Citizens United decision milieu of anything goes spending.
And there were no shadowy “independent” campaign groups spending megabucks on TV ads which those in the know understand are actually very much part of the campaign, but fool most voters, such as the Mitt Romney super PAC “Restore Our Future”run by Romney’s aides from his first presidential campaign and funded by Romney backers at his old leveraged buyout firm Bain Capital.
Let’s just say things have not improved.
In January 1984, I was fortunate enough to be on hand for Steve Jobs’s first public unveiling of the Macintosh at Apple’s annual meeting in Silicon Valley, just four weeks before Iowa, as guest of Silicon Valley’s marketing/PR guru Regis McKenna, a big Hart backer with whom I later worked.
From there, I went to the airport and flew to Des Moines for the four-week stretch run of Hart’s Iowa campaign, coming on as political director, joining a state coordinator, Keith Glaser, who had moved over from a choice spot on the Senate staff when the Iowa campaign imploded a few months earlier to inherit what looked like a moribund booby prize. We were in fifth place. … From my December 30th essay.
** IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD CAST IN THE GOP’S RACE TO CASA BLANCA.The Republican presidential race was a reality TV show. But now that the primaries and caucuses are coming right up, it’s a road picture. Here’s how each candidate, a distinct type, is doing right now.
The Legend in His Own Mind
There aren’t many historical figures that the ostentatiously intellectual Dr. Newton Leroy Gingrich hasn’t compared himself with lately, and always quite favorably. He even declared himself the nominee.
But he should have paid a little more attention to sports than that National Merit Scholarship, especially in a process that doesn’t value intellectual capability all that highly. Because there really aren’t many games that are over before half-time. … From my December 24th essay.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th, 2009 Huffington Post column.
The New Year comes to Oz! Australia was one of the first countries to celebrate the arrival of 2012 with a spectacular fireworks display centered around Sydney’s harbor, its famous bridge, and the iconic Opera House.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in three wars in the region, and the Arab awakening underway, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Having crashed over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, 2008, crude oil closed on Friday at $98.83 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Energy markets are closed on the weekend.
This is up about $65 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, reflecting a low point in global economic activity, and down about $15 from the price at the time of the Osama bin Laden raid.
Your posts are welcome in the Forum. You can send me a private tip by clicking on the “Contact” button in the upper right.
There was outrage today from human rights groups in Egypt and internationally after Thursday’s raids on NGOs in Cairo by Egyptian security forces.
** QUICK HITS.A chaotic day in the Republican presidential race. Mitt Romney and minions in media and elsewhere are again trying to create the impression that he’s got it locked up. (My experience is that’s a a mistake.) Newt Gingrich teared up today when he explained his interest in brain science as a consequence of his mother’s mind spiraling away with age, which Romney boosters mock as his “Hillary moment” (recall her crying as she was about to lose again in New Hampshire, which she then won). Ron Paul tried to ignore the mounting attacks on his apologies for Iran as the Strait of Hormuz crisis bubbles. Rick Santorum, who’s suddenly moved up in Iowa, did the smart thing of just campaigning energetically. Meanwhile, off in New Hampshire, the pro-Jon Huntsman super PAC is hitting longtime NH frontrunner Romney hard, saying it’s up to Granite Staters to “stop the chameleon.” … Governor Jerry Brown has raised $1.2 million for his proposed tax initiative for the November 2012 ballot. He also has millions left over from his 2010 landslide win over billionaire Meg Whitman’s biggest-spending non-presidential campaign in American history, but he may want to keep that in his re-election kitty.
** IOWA THEN AND NOW.The chaotic jumble of holding the Iowa presidential caucuses on January 3rd is now fully apparent. With rampant confusion about who will actually participate, and yoyo-ing swings in support — all playing out against a bizarre backdrop of the holidays, millions in disembodied attack ads, and Barack Obama pondering a US-Iran showdown in the Strait of Hormuz — the folly of the accelerated nomination calendar is clear.
It didn’t used to be this way.
When I was Senator Gary Hart’s political director for the first-in-the-nation contest, the Iowa presidential caucuses were held on February 20th, 1984. There was plenty of time for those who voted in the caucuses to consider the candidates and in a great many cases to actually meet them.
Unlike the situation this year, when most have campaigned from TV studios, barely deigning to sweep through Iowa behind carefully controlled facades, the candidates then spent ample time in the state, with voters able to get a measure of them.
Then there were campaign spending limits which were largely adhered to. I say “largely” because campaigns found ways to scrimp and save by renting cars across the state line, a minor dodge which seems quite quaint in today’s post-Citizens United decision milieu of anything goes spending.
And there were no shadowy “independent” campaign groups spending megabucks on TV ads which those in the know understand are actually very much part of the campaign, but fool most voters, such as the Mitt Romney super PAC “Restore Our Future”run by Romney’s aides from his first presidential campaign and funded by Romney backers at his old leveraged buyout firm Bain Capital.
Let’s just say things have not improved.
In January 1984, I was fortunate enough to be on hand for Steve Jobs’s first public unveiling of the Macintosh at Apple’s annual meeting in Silicon Valley, just four weeks before Iowa, as guest of Silicon Valley’s marketing/PR guru Regis McKenna, a big Hart backer with whom I later worked.
From there, I went to the airport and flew to Des Moines for the four-week stretch run of Hart’s Iowa campaign, coming on as political director, joining a state coordinator, Keith Glaser, who had moved over from a choice spot on the Senate staff when the Iowa campaign imploded a few months earlier to inherit what looked like a moribund booby prize. We were in fifth place. …
** NEW SURVEY: OF WELLBEING, AND NOT SO WELLBEING. As 2011 creeps toward its little lamented end, and thoughts turn to New Year’s resolutions, or not, a new Gallup Poll survey presents some interesting findings from the year almost just past with regard to how we view our own wellbeing in these Untied, er, United States.
There are a few good signs. For example, obesity has ebbed ever so slightly. Though that may be because too many can’t afford enough food. And young people have more health insurance, thanks to Obamacare. Not that they necessarily need it.
And there is the very interesting question of why obesity is at its lowest level in Colorado, and its highest in West Virginia.
Is it because the mountains are a lot higher in Colorado than in the Mountaineer State? And why is obesity so high in West Virginia? Are they clinging to their gods and gun there? I may have got that last bit a bit wrong …
“1. Lengthy, cumbersome job searches lower wellbeing: The longer Americans are unemployed, the more job applications they fill out, and the more job interviews they go on, the worse their wellbeing becomes. Unemployed Americans who have been out of work for 11 weeks or more are significantly less likely to be thriving and more likely to experiences worry, stress, sadness, and anger.
2. Americans’ weight problem subsides slightly: For the first time in more than three years, more Americans are a normal weight than are overweight, according to Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index data from the third quarter of 2011. The obesity rate also decreased in 2011, but just slightly.
3. More young adults get health insurance: The percentage of Americans aged 18 to 25 who were uninsured declined in 2011, coincident with the implementation of the provision in the new healthcare law that allows adults to stay on their parents’ health insurance until age 26.
4. Colorado still the skinniest state: Residents of Colorado are the least likely in the nation to be obese, as they have been in past years. The obesity rate in that state is 20.1%, which stands in stark contrast to the 34.3% in West Virginia, the highest in the country.
5. Fewer Americans can afford food: The percentage of Americans reporting that they have enough money to buy the food they or their families declined in 2011, nearing a level not seen since the 2008 financial crisis.
6. Employer-based health insurance on the decline: Fewer Americans are getting their health insurance from an employer, with the percentage falling to 44.5% in third quarter of 2011, down from 49.8% in the first quarter of 2008.
7. “Suffering” in the United States holds steady: Four percent of Americans rate their lives poorly enough to be considered “suffering” — this figure has remained essentially the same for the past two years. Low-income Americans continue to be much more likely than those who are better off to be suffering.
8. Many Americans act as caregivers: More than one in six American workers also provide care to an elderly or disabled family member, relative, or friend. Middle-aged, black, and Hispanic Americans are among the most likely to be caregivers.
9. Unhealthy workers carry $153 billion price tag: American workers who are overweight or obese and have other health problems such as diabetes and high blood pressure miss an estimated 450 million additional days of work annually compared with those who are healthy. This results in a cost of more than $153 billion in lost productivity per year.
10. Bad job more harmful to wellbeing than no job: Workers who are “actively disengaged” — meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their work and workplace — rate their lives worse than even those who are unemployed. Forty-two percent of actively disengaged workers are thriving in their lives, compared with 48% of those who are unemployed.”
The Republican presidential candidates are at last fully engaged across Iowa.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama is in Hawaii.
He has received the daily intelligence and economic briefings in Kailua, where he is staying with his family.
Obama has no scheduled public events.
Obama is vacationing in his home state with First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha through January 1st.
Four polls of the Iowa Republican caucuses in the last few days have different results.
NBC News has Mitt Romney narrowly ahead of Ron Paul, 23-21, with a three-way scrum for third between Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich, at 15%, 14%, and 13%.
Another, from Insider Advantage, which was pretty on the money last time, has a three-way tie between Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul, all at 17%.
In contrast, a poll by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic outfit, has Paul ahead of Romney, with Gingrich third, while a Time/CNN poll has Romney ahead of Paul.
Because of the timing, and how difficult it is to poll Iowa, not to mention the race’s unusual twists, I’m leery of all polls till the end of the week.
Ron Paul, speaking yesterday in Iowa, called economic sanctions against Iran for its nuclear weapons program “horrendous.”
And top Iowa Republicans are denouncing Paul himself as a horrendous choice, with Senator Chuck Grassley and hard right Congressman Steve King weighing in heavily this morning.
I think it’s clear, as I wrote last week, that Gingrich has slid in the Hawkeye State after many millions in attack ads and his own tardy responses. Paul has his core following, expanded some by anti-war folks flirting with someone whose actual politics are very archaic. And Romney has his consistent quarter of the vote.
Iowa is a difficult contest to poll properly, and it’s usually badly done by out of state outfits. The gold standard is the Des Moines Register poll, and we won’t have that until Saturday evening.
Iranian saber rattling about closing the Strait of Hormuz is continuing on state television, and Iranian air and naval forces continue their exercises in and around the vital choke point for the world’s oil supply.
Despite all the threatening activity, and the obvious threat that Iran poses, oil markets are mostly stable, as you can see from the Energy Market Watch below.
But those markets are based on conventional wisdom as much as insight, and can be stampeded in an instant by decisions made elsewhere.
Egypt’s interim ruling military council late yesterday raided pro-democracy NGOs across the country, including three US-based groups — the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, and Freedom House.
In all, 17 groups were stormed by security forces which seized computers, phones, documents, money and detained staffers.
The Iranian navy continued its 10-day drill on Friday in international waters near the strategic oil route that passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Their claim is that foreign groups are behind the ongoing protests against the continued military rule which followed the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak last February.
31 groups which have not yet been raided today said that the raids are an effort to hamstring and discredit the opposition movement. The brazen crackdown on these groups, a few of which are funded by the Obama Administration, comes in the wake of bloody repression of demonstrators in the famed Tahrir Square and elsewhere.
The US-based groups are actually officially accredited by Egypt as monitors of its elections, the next phase of which takes place next week.
Islamist parties have won about 65% of the vote so far.
Obama is monitoring a variety of other geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
As expected here, the state Supreme Court yesterday validated Brown’s plan to redirect most of the tax revenue from redevelopment agencies to basic services.
For his part, Brown is working on his 2012 fiscal, political, and rhetorical plans.
The California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the right-wing challenge to the state’s Citizens Redistricting Commission maps for the state Senate on January 10th.
That’s the same day on which Brown unveils his new state budget proposal.
** IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD CAST IN THE GOP’S RACE TO CASA BLANCA.The Republican presidential race was a reality TV show. But now that the primaries and caucuses are coming right up, it’s a road picture. Here’s how each candidate, a distinct type, is doing right now.
The Legend in His Own Mind
There aren’t many historical figures that the ostentatiously intellectual Dr. Newton Leroy Gingrich hasn’t compared himself with lately, and always quite favorably. He even declared himself the nominee.
But he should have paid a little more attention to sports than that National Merit Scholarship, especially in a process that doesn’t value intellectual capability all that highly. Because there really aren’t many games that are over before half-time. … From my December 24th essay.
** KEYSTONE PIPELINE: SMALL PART OF A VERY BIG PICTURE.In the chaos that passes for governance in Washington, the Keystone XL pipeline project looms as a seemingly supreme issue. But it is not. To view it as such is to miss the overall, something our media excels at. … From my December 21st essay.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th, 2009 Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in three wars in the region, and the Arab awakening underway, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Having crashed over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, 2008, crude oil is trading around $100 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
This is up about $66 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, reflecting a low point in global economic activity, and down about $14 from the price at the time of the Osama bin Laden raid.
Your posts are welcome in the Forum. You can send me a private tip by clicking on the “Contact” button in the upper right.
Iowa Straw Poll winner Michele Bachmann insists that her campaign is in fine shape after her Iowa campaign chairman, a first-term far right state legislator, quit her campaign and endorsed Ron Paul. She claims that Paul — who she says is an Iranian apologist — paid for his endorsement, which the Paul crew denies. These are very colorful characters, folks.
** QUICK HITS.Three polls of the Iowa Republican caucuses in the last few days have three different results. The latest, from Insider Advantage, which was pretty on the money last time, has a three-way tie between Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul, all at 17%. In contrast, a poll by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic outfit, has Paul ahead of Romney, with Gingrich third, while a Time/CNN poll has Romney ahead of Paul. … Because of the timing, and how difficult it is to poll Iowa, not to mention the race’s unusual twists, I’m leary of all polls till the end of the week. … Ron Paul, speaking today in Iowa, called economic sanctions against Iran for its nuclear weapons program “horrendous.” … Iranian saber rattling about closing the Strait of Hormuz continued throughout the day on state television, and Iranian air and naval forces continue their exercises in and around the vital choke point for the world’s oil supply. … The California Supreme Court, which gave Governor Jerry Brown a big win on repurposing redevelopment agency funds this morning, will hear oral arguments on the right-wing challenge to the state’s Citizens Redistricting Commission maps for the state Senate on January 10th. … That’s the same day that Brown unveils his new state budget proposal.
** JERRY-RIGGING: BROWN GETS A BIG WIN AT THE SUPREME COURT ON REDEVELOPMENT. As expected, the California Supreme Court this morning sided with Governor Jerry Brown in his determination to redirect tax revenues from local redevelopment agencies to basic services. Local governments have grown accustomed to having big pots of money for favored developers and developments derived from property tax revenues. And among the biggest defenders of this big government/big money stew are Republican politicians, who choose to favor pork they help control.
Brown, looking at the daunting budget picture, and knowing how the system worked from his own time as mayor of Oakland, said it was a luxury that could no longer be afforded. A program intended to help fix urban blight had turned into a big pot of money for gold-plated projects, one fiercely defended by local pols of both parties.
This was a big fight for much of the year, which Brown won in the state legislature, then had to defend in court.
But as readers know, his success there was expected. Now the expectation has become reality.
Ironically, in choosing to sue, redevelopment agencies may have sealed their own doom. The legislation allowed for the agencies to continue to exist if they turned over much of their funds in this emergency situation. The high court said that is illegal. And what is legal is simply shutting down the agencies. Oops.
Local agencies charged with renewing blighted neighborhoods in California soon could be abolished after the state’s highest court ruled Thursday that lawmakers acted legally when they voted earlier this year to eliminate them to close a budget gap.
The decision by the California Supreme Court could provide a financial boost to the state, which has grappled over the past several years with persistent deficits. It also would appear to be a fatal blow to the redevelopment agencies, long seen as a crucial tool for cities seeking to improve run-down areas.
The ruling comes after Gov. Jerry Brown signed a pair of bills passed by state legislators over the summer. The first called for the elimination of redevelopment agencies, while the second allowed individual agencies to stay open if they made payments to the state.
A redevelopment association and others quickly sued the state, arguing that both laws violated a voter-approved ballot measure from 2010 that bars the state from taking funds such as redevelopment money.
With respect to the first bill, the court found Thursday that the state legislature has “the authority to create entities, such as redevelopment agencies, to carry out the state’s ends and the corollary power to dissolve those same entities when the Legislature deems it necessary and proper.”
However, the court also ruled that the second bill is illegal because last year’s ballot measure, Prop. 22, “expressly forbids” the legislature from requiring such payments.
The court’s ruling “validates a key component of the state budget and guarantees more than a billion dollars of ongoing funding for schools and public safety,” said Gov. Brown in a statement.
** NEW POLL: ODD RESULTS ON CANDIDATES SUPPOSEDLY CLOSEST TO AMERICANS’ OWN VIEWS. There are polls, and there are polls, and not infrequently a good poll comes up with perplexing, if not bizarre, results.
A sort of new survey from the Gallup Poll indicates that Mitt Romney, Ron Paul (!), and Jon Huntsman (!) are the closest of all candidates, including President Barack Obama, to voters’ own conceptions of their ideologies.
The exclamation mark on the libertarian isolationist oddball Paul comes for obvious reasons. As for Huntsman, he’s simply not well enough known for voters to have that sort of judgment.
The Paul result may be partially explained by the timing of the poll, which was taken about two weeks ago, before Paul received widespread coverage for his views.
Obama is seen in this sounding as the furthest away from mainstream views.
Which flies in the face of all sorts of other polling by reputable outfits, including Gallup.
This is explained by the fiercely anti-Obama views of Republicans, who quite evidently view him, or at least say they view him, as a major radical. Simply put, they hate Obama. Which skews the result substantially, as Democrats are not as reflexively dismissive in their evaluations of the Republicans.
Americans perceive Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul as closest to themselves ideologically, and Michele Bachmann and Barack Obama as furthest away.
A USA Today/Gallup poll asked Americans to rate their own ideology — and the ideology of the eight major presidential candidates — on a 5-point scale with 1 being very liberal and 5 being very conservative. Americans’ mean score on this scale is 3.3, meaning the average American is slightly to the right of center ideologically. Huntsman’s score matches that at 3.3, but that mean rating excludes the 45% of Americans who did not have an opinion of Huntsman. Of the better known candidates, Romney’s and Paul’s 3.5 scores are closest to the average American’s ideology. …
Iranian forces buzzed the US aircraft carrier John Stennis yesterday in the Arabian Gulf. Iran has threatened to cut off oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz if the West follows through with a plan to sanction Iran’s vital oil exports.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama is in Hawaii.
He has received the daily intelligence and economic briefings in Kailua, where he is staying with his family.
Obama has no scheduled public events.
Obama is vacationing in his home state with First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha through January 1st.
After a spate of promising economic news, Obama is getting some more sobering news today, with jobless claims up for the first time in many weeks.
Meanwhile, the Republicans who would take him on scurry about Iowa attacking one another and pretending not to, and tout polling which I find very suspect given that it’s taken in a holiday period and largely based on robo-calls.
I think it’s clear, as I wrote last week, that Newt Gingrich has slid in the Hawkeye State afte many millions in attack ads and his own tardy responses. Ron Paul has his core following, expanded some by anti-war folks flirting with someone whose actual politics are very archaic. And Mitt Romney has his consistent quarter of the vote.
Iowa is a difficult contest to poll properly, and it’s usually badly done by out of state outfits. The gold standard is the Des Moines Register poll, and we won’t have that until Saturday evening.
Ignoring Christmas-based polling of Iowa, a notoriously difficult contest to poll correctly even when it’s not a holiday, as he knows very well, the vacationing Obama, now riding (relatively) high slides perilously toward a potentially huge geopolitical crisis.
The head of Iran’s navy yesterday made this remarkable statement in a live international broadcast: “Closing the Strait of Hormuz for Iran’s armed forces is really easy. Or, as Iranians say, it will be easier than drinking a glass of water.”
The Obama Administration is going ahead with a $30 billion sale of 84 F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, further strengthening ties with the Gulf Arab states of which the Saudis are the leading power.
That provides further counterweight to Iran down the line. But those planes are not there yet. And the Strait of Hormuz could be affected by swarm tactics involving small boats, mines, aircraft, and anti-ship missiles.
The Saudis are showing their gratitude for the increased US military aid by vowing to make up the difference for any oil that might be taken off the market by Iranian moves. But they would have to get that oil to market themselves, and it’s not clear that they can.
However, oil markets seem to believe they can. After a brief upward move, the price appears to be stabilizing under $100 per barrel.
But that can change in an instant, with market types easily led both by conventional wisdom and by rapid military action.
Turkish jets attacked a Kurdish village inside the Iraqi border, killing dozens of civilians. Turkish forces have lately made a practice of attacking Kurdish guerrillas using Iraq as a safe haven, which shows again the tenuous nature of Iraqi sovereignty.
Obama is monitoring a variety of other geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
The state Supreme Court is prepping a ruling for today on Brown’s plan to redirect most of the tax revenue from redevelopment agencies to basic services.
I think the local governments that sued to protect this golden goose will come up empty.
For his part, Brown is working on his 2012 fiscal, political, and rhetorical plans.
** IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD CAST IN THE GOP’S RACE TO CASA BLANCA.The Republican presidential race was a reality TV show. But now that the primaries and caucuses are coming right up, it’s a road picture. Here’s how each candidate, a distinct type, is doing right now.
The Legend in His Own Mind
There aren’t many historical figures that the ostentatiously intellectual Dr. Newton Leroy Gingrich hasn’t compared himself with lately, and always quite favorably. He even declared himself the nominee.
But he should have paid a little more attention to sports than that National Merit Scholarship, especially in a process that doesn’t value intellectual capability all that highly. Because there really aren’t many games that are over before half-time. … From my December 24th essay.
** KEYSTONE PIPELINE: SMALL PART OF A VERY BIG PICTURE.In the chaos that passes for governance in Washington, the Keystone XL pipeline project looms as a seemingly supreme issue. But it is not. To view it as such is to miss the overall, something our media excels at. … From my December 21st essay.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th, 2009 Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in three wars in the region, and the Arab awakening underway, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Having crashed over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, 2008, crude oil is trading around $99 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
This is up about $65 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, reflecting a low point in global economic activity, and down about $15 from the price at the time of the Osama bin Laden raid.
Your posts are welcome in the Forum. You can send me a private tip by clicking on the “Contact” button in the upper right.
Iran put on a show of force today as it threatened to cut off oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz if the West follows through with a plan to sanction Iran’s vital oil exports. The US Navy’s Gulf-based Fifth Fleet responded by saying it will not tolerate any such disruption. Around 40% of the world’s oil transported by sea passes through the strait.
** QUICK HITS.While the Republicans scurry about attacking one another and pretending not to, and ignoring Christmas-based polling of Iowa, a notoriously difficult contest to poll correctly even when it’s not a holiday, a vacationing President Barack Obama, now riding (relatively) high slides perilously toward a potentially huge geopolitical crisis. The head of Iran’s navy today made this remarkable statement in a live international broadcast: “Closing the Strait of Hormuz for Iran’s armed forces is really easy. Or, as Iranians say, it will be easier than drinking a glass of water.” … Meanwhile, in California politics, the state Supreme Court is prepping a possible ruling for Thursday on Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to redirect most of the tax revenue from redevelopment agencies to basic services. I think the local governments that sued to protect this golden goose will come up empty. … Brown announced a number of appointments today, including that of Mark Nechodom to be director of the California Department of Conservation. Nechodom, a PhD from UC Santa Cruz who is married to California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, has been serving recently in several senior posts at the U.S. Department of Agriculture regarding environmental markets and climate policy.
** NEW POLL: OBAMA AND DEMOCRATS SEIZE THE EDGE ON ECONOMIC DEBATE. More good news on the fundamentals for President Barack Obama in the form of a new Gallup Poll survey.
Republican behavior in Congress, and rhetoric on the presidential campaign trail, is enabling Obama and fellow Democrats to develop a decided edge on the hot economic issues of the moment.
Democrats and Republicans both give lopsided support to their fellow partisans, continuing the hyper-partisan pattern of the period.
But independents have shifted to Obama’s side of the fight.
Obama is also rated much higher than Congressional Republicans, who just took over the House in November of last year.
Americans have slightly more confidence in President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress (41%) than in the Republicans in Congress (34%) when it comes to the looming debate on what the government should do about a more permanent extension of payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits. …
These findings, collected on Dec. 27 in Gallup Daily tracking, also show that about a quarter of Americans either don’t have an opinion on the issue (10%) or say they have confidence in neither (15%) or both (1%) of the two partisan groups.
Last week, Republican House leadership reluctantly agreed to the two-month extension of the payroll tax cuts and extended unemployment benefits supported by President Obama and the vast majority of the Senate. The temporary extension forestalled an immediate tax increase for millions of Americans and a loss of unemployment compensation for millions more on Jan. 1. Undoubtedly, the issue will again take center stage as politicians in Washington return from their holiday vacations and face the looming Feb. 29 deadline.
Partisan differences in this confidence measure follow predictable lines. More than 8 in 10 Democrats have more confidence in Obama and Democratic leaders, while more than 8 in 10 Republicans have more confidence in Republicans in Congress. Independents give a slight 35% to 27% edge to Obama and the Democrats. …
A separate Dec. 15-18 USA Today/Gallup poll finds Americans more charitable in their ratings of Obama and congressional Democrats than congressional Republicans. That poll asked Americans to more generally rate the job performance of elected officials in Washington this year. Thirty-two percent of Americans rated Obama’s job performance as excellent or good, compared with the 18% who gave the same rating to Democrats in Congress and the 12% who gave such high marks to Republicans in Congress.
** NEW SURVEY: CONSUMER SPENDING UP. More signs of “green shoots” in the economy today, in a new Gallup Poll survey.
Of course, it’s getting to be late in the recovery for us to be lauding green shoots, though, isn’t it?
Consumer spending is up significantly this month. But it’s all due to an initial burst at the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.
Since then, spending has been flat, dropping back to year-earlier levels.
There are still major downdraft factors at work.
Self-reported daily consumer spending in stores, restaurants, gas stations, and online averaged $83 per day in the week ending Dec. 25 — not much different than the $85 of a year ago. After getting off to a good start during the first three weeks of the holiday season, consumer spending decreased to match 2010 levels in the past two weeks. …
Even so, consumer spending averaged $78 over the five-week holiday period of Nov. 21 to Dec. 25. This is up 4.1% from the comparable five-week period of 2010 and essentially the same as the 4.2% increase Gallup registered over the same period in 2009. …
The 4.1% increase in self-reported consumer spending that Gallup found this holiday shopping season is consistent with the National Retail Federation’s holiday sales expectation of a 3.8% increase. The most positive Economic Confidence Index reading since mid-July, some of the lowest unemployment numbers of the year, the lowest jobless claims since 2008, and the lowest gas prices since February all helped to create a more favorable environment for holiday sales in 2011.
While the spending increases this year may seem disappointing to some given all these positive economic trends, there are some significant countervailing factors. Economic confidence remains worse than during each of the previous two holiday seasons, unemployment and underemployment are still high, gas prices are higher than they were a year ago, and Americans’ evaluations of the way the U.S. government is functioning are at record-low levels. Further, the financial crisis in Europe continues to raise havoc with Wall Street and American companies’ international operations.
The 2011 Kennedy Center Honorees were lauded at the White House in early December. Video footage is available now that the annual special has aired. The recipients are classical violinist Yo Yo Ma, actress Meryl Streep, Broadway singing star Barbara Cook, pop star Neil Diamond, and jazz musician Sonny Rollins.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … THE NEW CHRISTMAS TRADITION OF … DOCTOR WHO?
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama is in Hawaii.
He has received the daily intelligence and economic briefings in Kailua, where he is staying with his family.
Obama has no scheduled public events.
Obama is vacationing in his home state with First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha through January 1st.
He got some mixed but mostly unwelcome news yesterday when 70-year old Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson announced that he will not run for re-election.
Nelson has been a thorn in Obama’s side, going beyond the pragmatically necessary to consistently gum up the works of the Obama agenda. But he is a Democrat, if not much of one, and his vote is needed to organize the Senate.
Now, unless Bob Kerry can be persuaded to return from his comfortable East Coast life to make a run for another Nebraska Senate seat, it’s hard to see how Democrats hold on there, making it all the more difficult to hang on to the Senate majority. Though hardly impossible.
Obama will nominate Harvard economist Jeremy Stein and Jerome Powell, an investment banker and former Treasury official, to the two empty seats on the Federal Reserve’s policy-setting board of governors.
The White House’s pick of candidates, who have Democratic and Republican credentials respectively, may help speed their nomination through Congress amid a sluggish economic recovery that has failed to put a major dent in the unemployment rate, now at 8.6 percent.
While neither has laid out detailed views on monetary policy, Stein wrote a paper earlier this year suggesting he would back the Fed’s unconventional efforts to keep down long-term borrowing costs, which have been controversial in Washington. The Fed for over three years has adopted an array of radical measures to keep interest rates low and spur recovery.
Stein, who previously worked for the Obama administration as an adviser to the Treasury secretary and a National Economic Council staff member, specializes in stock price behavior, corporate investment and financing decisions, risk management and capital allocation inside firms. He declined to comment on his nomination.
The choice of Powell, who served at the Treasury during President George H. W. Bush’s term in the late 1980s and early 1990s, could be aimed at mollifying Senate Republicans. They blocked Peter Diamond, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, saying the Nobel prize winner was not qualified for the job and was too sympathetic to government intervention in the economy.
The Republican candidates, sans Jon Huntsman, are today very fully engaged in the fight for Iowa, just six days ahead of the first-in-the-nation caucuses.
We should have a better idea of how things are going in Iowa on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I’m very suspicious of polls conducted over the Christmas holiday, especially when they are robo-polls.
While these games ensue, Obama is dealing with what might sprout into a full-blown major geopolitical crisis.
Or might not.
The commander of Iran’s navy today said that his forces will shut down the Strait of Hormuz if the US and other nations pursue further sanctions against the Islamic regime to try to bring its nuclear weapons program to heel.
This echoed what an Iranian vice president said yesterday.
Could Iran carry out this threat, which would choke off the world’s largest flow of maritime shipment of oil?
I don’t know.
They can certainly try.
But the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, headquartered in Bahrain — and now you see why it is there — will have a lot to say about that, should the deal begin to go down.
Iran’s naval exercises in and around the Arabian Gulf, aka the Persian Gulf, continue.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has vacillated all over the place on the question of negotiation, now says he will accept the opening of a Taliban office in Qatar for the purpose of holding peace talks.
Longtime Yemeni strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, who finally began to turn over power after fighting off months of Arab Awakening demonstrations with a bloody crackdown, has applied for a visa to enter the United States. To seek medical treatment. Saleh already received extensive advanced medical treatment in Saudi Arabia after an assassination attempt wounded him and killed 11 of his associates. The State Department announced late yesterday that Saleh’s visa request is being processed, but no decision has been made.
Obama is monitoring a variety of other geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
Brown held a discussion yesterday with those Capitol reporters who are still around who were still around yesterday in the Governor’s Cabinet Room.
The topics? The year almost just past and the year ahead. I’ll get into all that in depth next week.
** IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD CAST IN THE GOP’S RACE TO CASA BLANCA.The Republican presidential race was a reality TV show. But now that the primaries and caucuses are coming right up, it’s a road picture. Here’s how each candidate, a distinct type, is doing right now.
The Legend in His Own Mind
There aren’t many historical figures that the ostentatiously intellectual Dr. Newton Leroy Gingrich hasn’t compared himself with lately, and always quite favorably. He even declared himself the nominee.
But he should have paid a little more attention to sports than that National Merit Scholarship, especially in a process that doesn’t value intellectual capability all that highly. Because there really aren’t many games that are over before half-time. … From my December 24th essay.
** KEYSTONE PIPELINE: SMALL PART OF A VERY BIG PICTURE.In the chaos that passes for governance in Washington, the Keystone XL pipeline project looms as a seemingly supreme issue. But it is not. To view it as such is to miss the overall, something our media excels at. … From my December 21st essay.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th, 2009 Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in three wars in the region, and the Arab awakening underway, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Having crashed over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, 2008, crude oil is trading around $100 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
This is up about $66 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, reflecting a low point in global economic activity, and down about $14 from the price at the time of the Osama bin Laden raid.
Your posts are welcome in the Forum. You can send me a private tip by clicking on the “Contact” button in the upper right.
Iran, which threatened today to close the Strait of Hormuz, the most important maritime choke point for oil shipments, continued naval exercises in and around those waters.
** QUICK HITS.Longtime Yemeni strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, who finally began to turn over power after fighting off months of Arab Awakening demonstrations with a bloody crackdown, has applied for a visa to enter the United States. To seek medical treatment. Saleh already received extensive advanced medical treatment in Saudi Arabia after an assassination attempt wounded him and killed 11 of his associates. The State Department announced late today that Saleh’s visa request is being processed, but no decision has been made. … Governor Jerry Brown, who has been slow to appoint judges this year, aside from a distinguished state Supreme Court justice, appointed a slew of them today. A whopping 13 judges to local superior courts and one presiding justice for a regional court of appeal. Of Brown’s 14 judicial appointments today, 13 are Democrats and one is an independent. No Republicans. … California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced today that she and seven other AGs have reached a half-billion dollar settlement in a price-fixing case against manufacturers of LCD displays for computers and televisions. All 12 companies are based in Asia, and have agreed to set up compensation funds for customers and pay civil penalties.
** NEW SURVEY: ECONOMIC CONFIDENCE IS UP. A new Gallup Poll survey has some welcome news this week between Christmas and the New Year.
Economic confidence had a big gain over the past month.
But it’s still at rather depressed levels.
And it’s lower than what it was the past two Decembers. Yet higher than it was in December 2008, when the realization of just how bad the economy had been allowed to get was finally sinking in.
But the trendline is good, coming as it does after the big shocks earlier this year of the preposterous gridlock around the federal debt ceiling/deficit and multiple Eurozone shocks.
The Gallup Economic Confidence Index has averaged -38 thus far in December, up from -45 in November — putting December on track to be the most positive month for consumer attitudes since June. However, confidence remains depressed in comparison to the already weak levels seen from January through March. … perceptions of the economy’s direction have seen a particularly sharp increase, rising more than 20 points since August — from -59 to -37. Over the same period, perceptions of current economic conditions have improved from -46 to -39. …
U.S. economic confidence has inched higher each month after descending to -52 in August. However, if Americans’ confidence in the economy in the last week of December is as relatively positive as it was in the three weeks leading up to Christmas, in December it will post the largest monthly increase in economic confidence seen since May. With most of these gains coming from increased public optimism about the economy’s direction, this may be a precursor to further gains at the start of 2012.
One week to the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses. The commentary is actually rubbish, but the visuals are appropriate.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … THE NEW CHRISTMAS TRADITION OF … DOCTOR WHO?
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama is in Hawaii.
He has received the daily intelligence and economic briefings in Kailua, where he is staying with his family.
Obama has no scheduled public events.
Obama is vacationing in his home state with First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha through January 1st.
He got some good economic news today, with the consumer confidence index surging to its highest level since April. That followed a surge in November.
But venerable retail stalwart Sears is closing up to 200 Sears and Kmart stores in the wake of disappointing holiday sales.
Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have embarked on bus tours of Iowa, where the presidential caucuses are just a week from today.
Ron Paul, who’s been largely lying doggo since reports of his promoting and profiting from years worth of publications promoting racism and bizarre conspiracy theories, will return to Iowa on Wednesday.
While Obama enjoys his vacation, rising poll numbers, some promising economic news, and the Republican show, there are very dark clouds on the geopolitical horizon.
Iran today explicitly warned the US and other nations critical of its nuclear weapons program that it will mount a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz if there is any attempt to impose an embargo on Iranian petro products.
Iranian naval forces began a 10-day naval exercise in and around the critical choke point, the most important in the world with regard to the transport of oil by tanker, over the Christmas weekend.
The Strait of Hormuz connects the Arabian Gulf, also known as the Persian Gulf, to the world’s oceans.
Iraq’s sectarian political crisis is deepening just a week after all US forces were withdrawn from the troubled country.
Radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who found refuge in Iran after repeatedly clashing with American troops, today demanded the dissolution of Iraq’s parliament and the holding of early elections.
He says that new elections are the only way to resolve Iraq’s deepening political problems because the current government, which includes many Sunnis, whose secular party actually finished first in the last elections, can’t solve the problems that “threaten to divide” the country.
President Barack Obama on Monday visited Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kaneohe, where a baby grabbed his face. The Secret Service wisely did not intervene.
Iraq’s Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has ordered the arrest of Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi on suspicion of running a death squad. Hashemi denies the charges and has fled to northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region for safe haven. Maliki has also asked parliament to fire Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq.
All this comes amidst a wave of deadly bomb attacks on Baghdad.
Obama is monitoring a variety of other geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES. Governor Jerry Brown is in Sacramento.
At 11 AM, he meets with some state capital reporters to discuss his first year as governor, now rapidly coming to a close, and the year ahead.
I’ve prepped a piece for the first anniversary of the third Brown Inaugural on January 3rd.
** IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD CAST IN THE GOP’S RACE TO CASA BLANCA.The Republican presidential race was a reality TV show. But now that the primaries and caucuses are coming right up, it’s a road picture. Here’s how each candidate, a distinct type, is doing right now.
The Legend in His Own Mind
There aren’t many historical figures that the ostentatiously intellectual Dr. Newton Leroy Gingrich hasn’t compared himself with lately, and always quite favorably. He even declared himself the nominee.
But he should have paid a little more attention to sports than that National Merit Scholarship, especially in a process that doesn’t value intellectual capability all that highly. Because there really aren’t many games that are over before half-time. … From my December 24th essay.
** KEYSTONE PIPELINE: SMALL PART OF A VERY BIG PICTURE.In the chaos that passes for governance in Washington, the Keystone XL pipeline project looms as a seemingly supreme issue. But it is not. To view it as such is to miss the overall, something our media excels at. … From my December 21st essay.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th, 2009 Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in three wars in the region, and the Arab awakening underway, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Having crashed over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, 2008, crude oil is trading around $101 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
This is up about $67 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, reflecting a low point in global economic activity, and down about $13 from the price at the time of the Osama bin Laden raid.
Your posts are welcome in the Forum. You can send me a private tip by clicking on the “Contact” button in the upper right.
It’s not the season of goodwill this year in Iowa.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … THE NEW CHRISTMAS TRADITION OF … DOCTOR WHO?
MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACK.
And now one of the strangest weeks of the year. President Barack Obama is in Hawaii, on vacation as is customary the week between Christmas and New Year’s. He has no public events, well, that he knows of yet. But, thanks to the bizarre election calendar adopted by their party, the, ah, colorful crew of Republicans who seek to depose him are scrambling like mad to try to stake their claims in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Obama, of course, is hoping that bubbling geopolitical crises don’t boil over to the extent that he has to try to publicly manage them. His vacations have a rather sad history of coinciding with crisis of one sort or another.
Obama had a very big week last week simply by standing up to the bizarre Congressional Republican attempt to blockade extension of the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits. But the solution that passed at the last minute was only a two-month extension, and the effort to link the highly controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada is very much alive.
Back in California politics, Governor Jerry Brown and First Lady/Special Counsel Anne Gust Brown spent a rather quiet Christmas in the San Francisco Bay Area. Brown will meet with Capitol reporters — at least those who are around — on Tuesday to discuss the year past and perhaps some of the year ahead. I’ve prepped a piece for the first anniversary of Brown’s inauguration next week.
Aside from that, it’s a very quiet period in the Golden State. And a quiet vacation week for me, as I only published 12,000 words or so. There was something of a kerfuffle last week when an outfit called ProPublica, with which I’m frankly not familiar and which is evidently somewhere back East, claimed an “expose” that Democrats had manipulated the state Citizens Redistricting Commission into drawing congressional districts which will yield more Democrats.
Since “more Democrats” is the obvious demographic and political direction of the state, and since Republican legislative strength in California has been exaggerated because of the incumbent protection act gerrymander approved a decade ago, as I’ve written quite a few times, there’s really not much to it.
Back to the main events.
Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, among others, are launching bus tours of Iowa early this in advance of the first-in-the nation contest on January 3rd. I’ll have much more on that as we go. Ron Paul is playing it cagier about his schedule, perhaps because many of his newsletters promoting and profiting from racism and bizarre conspiracy theories have come to light. I should say, come to light again. Nobody cared four years ago, and in the end, no one will care this year. But for now, it’s placed some real heat on the zealous libertarian ideologue, and has his cadre of followers spinning frantically away, as I noticed on one of my pieces from the Christmas weekend.
The attack ads were stilled for a few days in the Republican presidential race, but they are back up now. Frontrunner Newt Gingrich, assailed on all sides, especially by Romney’s super PAC and also by Paul’s well-funded effort, is going up with a comparative spots describing his economic plan as “Reaganomics 2.0″ and hitting Romney for his past moderation on Reagan.
Gingrich has an ongoing problem in his home state of Virginia, where he, like everyone in the Republican field except for Romney and Paul, suddenly finds himself excluded from a key Super Tuesday primary ballot due to restrictive regulation and enforcement of ballot access. So, ironically, a rule designed to keep fringe candidates off the ballot has placed a fringe candidate on the ballot while keeping the frontrunner in Virginia’s polls off the ballot.
All that was discussed here on NWN on Saturday. Gingrich plans to run as a write-in, which could actually be a benefit to him. There’s only one problem. Virginia law doesn’t appear to allow for write-in candidacies in primaries.
I suspect the Gingrich forces will also look at overly restrictive verification of voter signatures on petitions. Apparently the officials threw out the signatures of all those that did not exactly conform to registered addresses and so forth.
Hmm, this sounds like what conservatives frequently like to do with Democratic voters, doesn’t it?
Virginia is a key Super Tuesday primary. And Gingrich actually lives in Virginia, in McLean. He had dashed back from Iowa/New Hampshire campaigning late last week to personally rally supporters to make sure he made the ballot.
Virginia Republicans require 10,000 valid signatures of registered Republicans to make the ballot, with at least 400 in each of the state’s 11 congressional districts. Gingrich had nearly 12,000 signatures, but has not made it, either because not enough were valid or because he didn’t reach the quota of valid signatures in each district.
To add insult to injury, Gingrich has a big lead in the polls in Virginia.
We had something not entirely unlike this in Gary Hart’s 1984 campaign. We won the Wisconsin primary, but hadn’t qualified delegate slates in time. So we got a big vote, but no delegates.
If Gingrich does manage to mount a write-in campaign, it could be effective and dramatic in a way that a normal campaign is not.
In his first presidential campaign, in 1976, Jerry Brown entered the race so late that he missed not only the early primaries but many filing deadlines for later contests. Including in the Oregon primary.
Solution? “Write-in Jerry Brown for President.” As the t-shirts read. Running as a write-in, Brown garnered a quarter of the vote in a multi-candidate field and finished a very close third. Which was, frankly, as good as a win.
Obama is undoubtedly getting a few chuckles from all this today.
But he has some very daunting news on the geopolitical front.
There is uptick in chatter in Israel about air strikes on Iran to try to knock out its nuclear weapons program.
Iran has begun a 10-day naval exercise in and around the Strait of Hormuz, one of the principal choke points in the world, through which much of the world’s oil supply must flow by tanker to keep the global economy running.
The US Navy is going to have a very tense holiday season.
In Egypt, the second round of that country’s complex parliamentary voting has concluded and results indicate a repeat of the first round.
Islamist parties have again won around 65% of the Egyptian vote, with some 40% going to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has publicly renounced its past radicalism, and 25% going to the Salafists, who are adamant in in their extreme fundamentalism.
Former cricket superstar Imran Khan, a sharp critic of the US policies on AfPak and an increasingly formidable contender for president of Pakistan, drew big crowds over the weekend.
In Afghanistan, another top Northern Alliance leader was killed on Sunday, along with 20 others in a Taliban bombing attack which also wounded 70 people.
In Iraq, the Sunni vice president, wanted on terrorism charges engineered by the Shia-dominated government and fled to the Kurdistan portion of Iraq for safe-keeping, said that the government itself was behind a wave of terror bombings a few days ago that killed dozens across Baghdad.
Another terrorist attack today in Baghdad killed seven people.
In Nigeria, a major African oil-producing state, Christian churches were bombed Sunday by Islamist guerrillas, killing dozens of Christmas worshipers.
And in Russia, where big crowds — including a Christmas Eve throng of some 80,000 — turned out on the weekend to demonstrate against the ruling United Russia Party and its electoral practices which produced a very narrow majority win in parliamentary elections, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev called on Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to step down from power.
Gorbachev chose this Christmas Day, the 20th anniversary of his ending the Soviet Union by resigning its presidency, to push for the departure of the founder of United Russia, who fully intends to return to the presidency in the March elections.
As I mentioned, Obama’s block schedule for the week ahead is clear. He is spending family time, meeting with friends, playing some golf and taking walks, and visiting and working out with the Marines at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, which is just up the road a ways.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama is in Hawaii.
He has received the daily intelligence and economic briefings in Kailua, where he is staying with his family.
Obama has no scheduled public events.
Obama is vacationing in his home state with First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha through January 1st.
Obama is monitoring a variety of other geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
** IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD CAST IN THE GOP’S RACE TO CASA BLANCA.The Republican presidential race was a reality TV show. But now that the primaries and caucuses are coming right up, it’s a road picture. Here’s how each candidate, a distinct type, is doing right now.
The Legend in His Own Mind
There aren’t many historical figures that the ostentatiously intellectual Dr. Newton Leroy Gingrich hasn’t compared himself with lately, and always quite favorably. He even declared himself the nominee.
But he should have paid a little more attention to sports than that National Merit Scholarship, especially in a process that doesn’t value intellectual capability all that highly. Because there really aren’t many games that are over before half-time. … From my December 24th essay.
** KEYSTONE PIPELINE: SMALL PART OF A VERY BIG PICTURE.In the chaos that passes for governance in Washington, the Keystone XL pipeline project looms as a seemingly supreme issue. But it is not. To view it as such is to miss the overall, something our media excels at. … From my December 21st essay.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th, 2009 Huffington Post column.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is proving to be the hit movie of the holiday season. Wait, I thought Tom Cruise wasn’t supposed to be a big movie star anymore. Here’s the sandstorm chase sequence.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in three wars in the region, and the Arab awakening underway, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Having crashed over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, 2008, crude oil is trading around $99 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
This is up about $65 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, reflecting a low point in global economic activity, and down about $15 from the price at the time of the Osama bin Laden raid.
Your posts are welcome in the Forum. You can send me a private tip by clicking on the “Contact” button in the upper right.
In addition to the birth of Jesus Christ, December 25th has seen many notable historical happenings. Among them: On Christmas Day 1776, General George Washington led American forces across the Delaware River in a daring move which sustained the Revolution. In 1818, Silent Night was unveiled in its first public performance in Austria. And in 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned from office in Moscow, ending the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … THE NEW CHRISTMAS TRADITION OF … DOCTOR WHO?
** OBAMA TODAY – CHRISTMAS DAY. President Barack Obama is in Hawaii.
He received the daily intelligence and economic briefings in Kailua, where he is staying with his family.
Obama has no scheduled public events.
Obama is vacationing in his home state with First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha through January 2nd.
The attack ads are stilled in the Republican presidential race. But frontrunner Newt Gingrich has an ongoing problem in his home state of Virginia, where he, like everyone in the Republican field except for Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, suddenly finds himself excluded from a key Super Tuesday primary ballot due to restrictive regulation and enforcement of ballot access.
All that was discussed here on Saturday. Gingrich plans to run as a write-in, which could actually be a benefit to him. There’s only one problem. Virginia law doesn’t appear to allow for write-in candidacies in primaries.
I suspect the Gingrich forces will also look at overly restrictive verification of voter signatures on petitions. Apparently the officials threw out the signatures of all those that did not exactly conform to registered addresses and so forth.
Hmm, this sounds like what conservatives frequently like to do with Democratic voters, doesn’t it?
In our new world chaos, some big disruptive developments on this Christmas Day which are taking up Obama’s share of mind on his vacation.
Iranian naval forces are all over the Strait of Hormuz, the most important choke point in the world with regard to oil supply, as their 10-day “exercise” to counter threats of air strikes against the Iranian nuclear weapons program is well underway.
Former cricket superstar Imran Khan, a sharp critic of the US policies on AfPak and an increasingly formidable contender for president of Pakistan, is drawing big crowds this weekend.
In Afghanistan, another top Northern Alliance leader was killed today, along with 20 others in a Taliban bombing attack which also wounded 70 people.
In Iraq, the Sunni vice president, wanted on terrorism charges engineered by the Shia-dominated government and fled to the Kurdistan portion of Iraq for safe-keeping, said that the government itself was behind a wave of terror bombings a few days ago that killed dozens across Baghdad.
In Nigeria, a major African oil-producing state, Christian churches were bombed today by Islamist guerrillas, killing dozens of Christmas worshipers.
And in Russia, where big crowds have turned out on the weekend to demonstrate against the ruling United Russia Party and its electoral practices which produced a very narrow majority win in parliamentary elections, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev called on Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to step down from power.
Gorbachev chose this Christmas Day, the 20th anniversary of his ending the Soviet Union by resigning its presidency, to push for the departure of the founder of United Russia, who fully intends to return to the presidency in the March elections.
Obama is monitoring a variety of other geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES – CHRISTMAS DAY. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
In the weekend video/radio address, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama offer a special holiday tribute to the men and women who wear our country’s uniform and the families who support them.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … THE NEW CHRISTMAS TRADITION OF … DOCTOR WHO?
** IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD CAST IN THE GOP’S RACE TO CASA BLANCA.The Republican presidential race was a reality TV show. But now that the primaries and caucuses are coming right up, it’s a road picture. Here’s how each candidate, a distinct type, is doing right now.
The Legend in His Own Mind
There aren’t many historical figures that the ostentatiously intellectual Dr. Newton Leroy Gingrich hasn’t compared himself with lately, and always quite favorably. He even declared himself the nominee.
But he should have paid a little more attention to sports than that National Merit Scholarship, especially in a process that doesn’t value intellectual capability all that highly. Because there really aren’t many games that are over before half-time.
In the Republican presidential race, Gingrich’s lead over Mitt Romney was down to two points in the Gallup Poll on Wednesday. Not that Romney is moving up, mind you. He’s where he’s been all year. But millions of dollars in attack ads and lots of coordinated attacks are taking their toll on Gingrich, which may be why he scrapped his original plan to spend Christmas week at home in Virginia and not return to Iowa until Dec. 27. That was, frankly, a preposterously whimsical notion on his part. Instead, he spent Monday and Tuesday in the Hawkeye State, and calling on his opponents to wage positive rather than negative campaigns, especially Mitt Romney’s super PAC. Good luck with that.
But he may already be having a turn in his luck nonetheless. Gingrich, who has been hammered for the past two weeks in TV ads and in a series of coordinated attacks by mostly pro-Romney forces, is moving back up in national polls, while Romney has slid some. Gingrich’s lead in the Gallup Poll, down to only two points on Wednesday, went back up to six points on Thursday, 27 percent to 21 percent.
Romney decided to duck Gingrich’s challenge to debate next week, any time and anywhere Romney wanted. He said that it’s not fair to the rest of the field. But Romney, who fared well when no one asked him any probing questions, and is again showing that he doesn’t really know what someone in his position should know, looks programmed and weak again. Gingrich would likely mop the floor with him in a free-standing debate, and he must know it.
The Man on Top of the Wedding Cake
Ex-frontrunner Mitt Romney demonstrated his uncanny ability to speak out of both sides of his mouth at the same time in the middle of the week. He is saying that he hates super PACs and that they are an embarrassment that should be abolished, but he won’t criticize his own super PAC, run by his 2008 presidential campaign aides and funded with unlimited contributions from his campaign backers, that is smearing Newt Gingrich. Gingrich, he says, has to learn to deal with the heat of the kitchen.
Somehow, I have a feeling that Romney is going to end up feeling the heat of something fiercer than a boiling tea pot. Romney, incidentally, falsely claimed in an MSNBC interview that the United Nations approved the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He continues to show a very shallow knowledge of key geopolitical matters.
Former President George H. W. Bush, whose former chief of staff John Sununu has been ripping Gingrich out of his personal pique at the then-House-speaker’s refusal to go along with the Bush tax hikes, which violated Bush’s own famed “read my lips: no new taxes” mantra, endorsed Romney on Thursday. I don’t know that that’s going to have a huge impact.
Doctor What
“What this country really needs, right now, is a doctor.”
– The Master, Doctor Who
Perhaps so. But Dr. Paul is not the Doctor.
The situation in Iowa has become much less clear. Romney, who is not moving anywhere that I see, despite all his spending — both from his official campaign and from the super PAC he deplores but wouldn’t dream of disavowing (run, naturally, by his 2008 campaign aides and funded by his backers) — and heightened activity, continues to have big problems there. But Dr. Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman, is moving up and may be in a lead or tie with Gingrich. His move is based entirely on young voters. Among older voters, those who historically participate, he is far behind. Will these younger voters turn out for Paul? Do they know much about him?
As one of the ultimate fringe candidates, Paul has received little serious attention, and thus little serious scrutiny, from the media or from the people he is running against. The reality is that Paul does not stand up to scrutiny.
First, there is the matter of his ideology, which would largely dismantle the government we know and rely on. And there is his geopolitical stance, which is similar to Dennis Kucinich’s. Paul is so isolationist as to veer into anti-Americanism, blaming the U.S. for terrorist attacks on Americans and accepting Iran’s say-so about its nuclear program, while dismissing United Nations findings about its nuclear weapons aspect.
That would be a big problem in the Democratic Party, much less the Republican Party.
Then there are Paul’s racist newsletters and his penchant for some truly ludicrous conspiracy theories, including the supposed creation of AIDS by the CIA. …
** OBAMA TODAY – CHRISTMAS EVE. President Barack Obama is in Hawaii.
He received the daily intelligence and economic briefings in Kailua.
Obama has no scheduled public events.
Obama is vacationing in his home state with First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha through January 2nd.
Republican presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich got a big lump of coal for his Christmas stocking today.
His campaign failed to qualify him for the Virginia primary ballot. Which is a big problem and a personal embarrassment.
Virginia is a key Super Tuesday primary. And Gingrich actually lives in Virginia, in McLean. He had dashed back from Iowa/New Hampshire campaigning late in the week to personally rally supporters to make sure he made the ballot.
Virginia Republicans require 10,000 valid signatures of registered Republicans to make the ballot, with at least 400 in each of the state’s 11 congressional districts. Gingrich had nearly 12,000 signatures, but has not made it, either because not enough were valid or because he didn’t reach the quota of valid signatures in each district. The Virginia elections statement isn’t clear and it’s Christmas Eve, so I ain’t making any calls.
To add insult to injury, Gingrich has a big lead in the polls in Virginia!
We had something not entirely unlike this in Gary Hart’s 1984 campaign. We won the Wisconsin primary, but hadn’t qualified delegate slates in time. So we got a big vote, but no delegates.
Gingrich says he’s appealing the decision and, failing that, will run an aggressive write-in campaign.
Which, I know from another experience, can be very effective.
In his first presidential campaign, in 1976, Jerry Brown entered the race so late that he missed not only the early primaries but many filing deadlines for later contests. Including in the Oregon primary.
Solution? “Write-in Jerry Brown for President.” As the t-shirts read. Running as a write-in, Brown garnered a quarter of the vote in a multi-candidate field and finished a very close third. Which was, frankly, as good as a win.
Only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul have qualified for the Virginia ballot so far. So, ironically, a rule designed to keep fringe candidates off the ballot has placed a fringe candidate on the ballot while keeping the frontrunner in Virginia’s polls off the ballot.
Texas Governor Rick Perry, who, unlike Gingrich, has raised some very big money, also didn’t make the Virginia ballot. There’s no excuse for that.
Obama is undoubtedly getting a few chuckles from all this today.
But he has some very daunting news on the geopolitical front.
There’s been another uptick in chatter in Israel about air strikes on Iran to try to knock out its nuclear weapons program.
So Iran has begun a 10-day naval exercise in and around the Strait of Hormuz, one of the principal chokepoints in the world, through which much of the world’s oil supply must flow by tanker to keep the global economy running.
The US Navy is going to have a very tense holiday season.
In Egypt, the second round of that country’s complex parliamentary voting has concluded and results indicate a repeat of the first round.
Islamist parties have again won around 65% of the Egyptian vote, with some 40% going to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has publicly renounced its past radicalism, and 25% going to the Salafists, who are adamant in in their extreme fundamentalism.
And this Christmas Eve has seen big protests again in Russia, with over 50,000 people turning out in Moscow to protest against the ruling United Russia Party.
Obama is monitoring a variety of other geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES – CHRISTMAS EVE. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
Before flying out to Honolulu for his much delayed family Christmas vacation, President Barack Obama on Friday signed the two month-long extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits.
** OBAMA TODAY – FRIDAY. President Barack Obama is in Washington and en route to Hawaii.
He received the daily intelligence and economic briefings and met with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
Obama then delivered a statement in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
At 10:05 AM Pacific, he departed the White House on Marine One en route Andrews Air Force Base, where he boarded Air Force One.
At 10:20 AM Pacific, Obama departed Andrews Air Force Base en route Honolulu, Hawaii.
At 8:25 PM Pacific, Obama arrives in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Obama lands at Hickam Air Force Base, one of the principal targets of the Pearl Harbor attack 70 years ago, then proceeds to his family vacation getaway on Oahu, in the Castle Point neighborhood of Kailua.
First Lady Michelle Obama and their girls Malia and Sasha have been out in Obama’s home state for days waiting for dad while he’s been stuck in Washington waiting for Congressional Republicans to come to their senses and at last avoid raising taxes on millions of Americans and plunging many more into destitution.
Well, for two months, at least.
I’m not paying as close attention this week to some of the particulars, but I’ve seen statements from the House Republicans who were blocking the deal and frankly they read like Sanskrit to me.
This is a big win for Obama, who gained throughout the week in public standing simply by doing the only logical thing, i.e., not play along with a deranged approach.
But it is a sign of the devolution of US politics that it is such a win, for all that’s been accomplished is averting a politically self-destructive disaster for another two months.
Obama called on Congress, once back from its holiday revels, to get a deal done “without drama” to extend the programs for the rest of 2012.
There’s a lot of chortling at House Speaker John Boehner’s expense today, but he was clearly more than willing to do the right, and logical thing. And in the end he made it happen by eliminating the possibility of debate during a GOP caucus conference call yesterday and by leaving Tea Party types no option today other than to try to force Congress back into session next week. Which would have been an even greater act of self-immolation than we’ve seen so far.
So Obama is at last off to his home state for the holidays, where he will be until January 2nd.
Meanwhile, sniping in the Republican presidential race continued the day before Christmas weekend.
Newt Gingrich again challenged Mitt Romney to release his taxes, which the former leveraged buyout artist-turned-Massachusetts governor and two-time presidential candidate refuses to do.
Rick Perry, who is spending a lot of money on TV, joined Gingrich today in issuing that challenge.
Gingrich was in South Carolina today, where the latest polls show him with a big lead for the January 21st primary and where he has, surprisingly enough, the biggest organization on the ground.
For his part, Romney has spent a lot of time this week in New Hampshire, his supposed redoubt of strength, which looks a little rickety to me. The Manchester Union Leader, which shook up the establishment’s conception of the race by endorsing Gingrich, is attacking Romney regularly now, today taunting him for his refusal to debate Gingrich while hiding behind the skirts of his former campaign aides’ super PAC attacks on the ex-speaker, funded by big Romney backers.
“Romney appears satisfied to settle for an economy in which fewer people succeed, while the majority of Americans are left to tread water or fall behind. His proposal would actually double down on the policies that caused the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression and accelerated a decades-long assault on the middle class.”
Think of it as the Obama crew sighting in their guns on Romney, in the event that he does come back to win the nomination, as just the latest incarnation of a familiar target.
Talking with some, it’s clear that they think they know how to take down Gingrich as well.
I think Obama can and should beat any of these Republicans. But Gingrich is the most dangerous, because he has greater dynamics, especially compared to the relatively stiff, overly slick Romney, who has real trouble talking straight. Gingrich could win a debate against Obama, and has the knack of rubbing a few words together to create a fire. And in our new world chaos, one or more very big things may well go wrong next year. Make that wrong-er.
Take Syria, for example, where dozens were killed today in Damascus in terrorist bombings the Assad regime blamed on Al Qaeda just as Arab League representatives were arriving to monitor the situation.
Syrian opposition leaders accused the regime of planting the bombs themselves to try to justify the ongoing bloody crackdown which continues despite repeated promises to the contrary.
The Obama Administration, the European Union, and now many Arab states have imposed sanctions on the Assad regime. But they haven’t worked yet. Further intervention is complicated by Syria’s alliance with Iran, already on high alert with criticism of its nuclear weapons program, threats of air attack from Israel, and what looks like a series of covert actions against it.
There is a great deal of dry tinder on the global stage, waiting for a match to set it ablaze.
Obama is monitoring a variety of geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES – FRIDAY. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
California Senate Republican Leader Bob Dutton announced this morning that he will step down from his leadership post in January. He will be succeeded by caucus chairman Bob Huff, who on a radio show with me early this year said that, while he was for no new revenues to help get rid of a $25 billion budget deficit, he also was not for an all-cuts budget. He was, he said for “$25 billion in reforms.”
When I asked him what that meant beyond the sound of the words he’d just uttered, he couldn’t say.
Since then, there’ve been more signs of reasonableness from the incoming Senate minority leader.
Just days after the final withdrawal of US forces, and the attempted arrest of Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, the nation’s highest ranking Sunni official, on charges of terrorism, Iraq is teetering ever closer to chaos. A series of 12 bombings hit Baghdad Thursday morning, in mostly Shia areas, followed by two more in the evening, killing some 67 people and wounding approximately 200 more.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD CAST IN THE GOP’S RACE TO CASA BLANCA.
** OBAMA TODAY – THURSDAY. President Barack Obama is in Washington.
He has received the daily intelligence and economic briefings and met with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
He then delivered a statement challenging House Republicans to stop blocking extension of the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits.
Obama has been getting very much the best of this, with rising poll numbers, as discussed here yesterday.
So the House Republicans caved in this afternoon, agreeing to a two-month extension passed on Saturday in the Senate.
It was never clear to me that the House Republicans had anything approaching a conceptually coherent position, much less a position that made any political sense. Had they persisted any longer, they might as well have signed over the White House for another Obama term.
Whatever their position was, what was clear was that House Speaker John Boehner again lost control of his party caucus.
As Obama gets the best of the economic argument this month, and gets another shot at getting the best of it in two more months, he also got some good economic news today.
New jobless claims dropped again, to a level not seen for more than three and a half years.
In the race between those who seek to challenge him next fall, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has been hammered for the past two weeks in TV ads and in a series of coordinated attacks by mostly pro-Romney forces, is moving back up in national polls, while Romney has slid some.
Romney decided to duck Gingrich’s challenge to debate next week, any time and anywhere Romney wanted. He said that it’s not fair to the rest of the field.
But Romney, who fared well when no one asked him any probing questions, and is again showing that he doesn’t really know what someone in his position should know, looks programmed and weak again. Gingrich would likely mop the floor with him in a free-standing debate, and he must know it.
Former President George H.W. Bush, whose former chief of staff John Sununu has been ripping Gingrich out of his personal pique at the then House speaker’s refusal to go along with the Bush tax hikes, which violated Bush’s own famed “Read my lips/No new taxes” mantra, today endorsed Romney. I don’t know that that’s going to have a huge impact.
Gingrich, who this time last week was planning a long and leisurely Christmas weekend at home before realizing that he couldn’t wait until December 27th to get his butt back to Iowa, had to tear himself away to make sure that he had enough signatures to qualify for the Virginia primary ballot. Which he did.
But Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Jon Huntsman were not so fortunate, and are out of the running in what could be a key contest after the first wave of states.
While Congressional Republicans act with incoherence, and the Republican presidential field plays its reindeer games, seriously bad things are happening in geopolitics.
In Iraq, the fragile sectarian peace is being shattered just a few days after the completion of the US withdrawal.
Nearly 70 people were killed today in a series of coordinated bombings across Baghdad. This comes in the wake of the attempted arrest of the Iraq’s Sunni vice president on terrorism charges. That worthy decamped to the Kurdistan portion of Iraq, where he is being protected by the territorial government against the Shia-dominated national administration.
Turkey has withdrawn its ambassador to France, following French parliamentary passage criminalizing any denial of Armenian genocide practiced by the Turks nearly a century ago. This fight between two of the most powerful and important members of NATO — who each played a key role in helping the rebels win the Libyan War, NATO’s most notable success of recent years — comes at a very bad time for efforts to forge an ongoing working alliance between Western and Islamic powers.
In Pakistan, more bad news as that country categorically rejects today’s US report on last month’s deadly air strikes on two Pakistani outposts on the Afghan border which left some two dozen Pakistani soldiers dead.
The report from the Pentagon is that US forces, which for quite awhile were distractingly described officially as NATO forces, were at some fault for not having up to date maps showing the outposts’ position. But the US is claiming that Pakistani forces prompted the deadly skirmishing by firing first on US special forces and Afghan troops operating in the area.
The Pakistanis flatly reject this version of events. In a preemptive move last week, anticipating this sort of half-hearted acknowledgement of fault, the Pakistanis put out their version of events saying that they notified the US months ago about the outposts, which in any event were on ridgelines visible to the naked eye with Pakistani colors atop the facilities. And that their forces did not fire first.
More bad news in Syria, as well, where despite a supposed agreement with the Arab League to cease and desist attacks on pro-democracy demonstrators, more attacks continued today following an apparent massacre of a few hundred yesterday.
And in the Horn of Africa, a devastating drought has brought famine that threatens hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people. Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya learned today that they will shortly received more than $100 million in food aid from the US.
The region is facing the worst drought since World War II.
Against this cavalcade of chaotic disaster, there is some good news from Russia, riven by protest in the wake of hotly disputed parliamentary elections which left the ruling United Russia Party with a bare majority less than three months before presidential elections.
Outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev, deferring to his old boss, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, in the ex-spymaster’s desire to return to the presidency, announced today that there will be some new democratic reforms as well as the creation of a public television network which will provide access that the state-run TV networks do not. The moves are somewhat limited, but significant nonetheless.
Medvedev is slated to become prime minister if Putin, as I expect, manages to hang on in the March presidential race.
Obama is monitoring a variety of geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES – THURSDAY. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events as of this morning.
Brown has made several major appointments today and in the past few days.
The state is getting new directors of the California Lottery, the state Employment Development Department, and the Department of Corporations.
Robert O’Neill, a 60-year-old former KPMG accounting executive will run the lottery, which has $3 billion in annual game sales and provides $1 billion per year to schools.
Pamela Harris, a 56-year-old Placerville Democrat who has worked for the state since the late ’70s, has served as acting director of the Employment Development Department since 2009.
Jan Owen, a 59-year-old West Sacramento Democrat, is the new head of the Department of Corporations. He was at the Department of Financial Institutions from 1996 to 2000, then moved to the private sector where he worked at the California Mortgage Bankers Association, Washington Mutual, JP Morgan Chase, and Apple.
Brown also appointed a host of commissioners to various regulatory bodies dealing with medical, building practices, paroles, the lottery, and farm labor.
President Barack Obama is getting a boost in the polls from Republican foot-dragging and would-be gamesmanship over extension of the soon-to-expire payroll tax cut and jobless benefits, which in the Senate version was incongruously linked to the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD CAST IN THE GOP’S RACE TO CASA BLANCA.
** OBAMA TODAY – WEDNESDAY. President Barack Obama is in Washington.
He has received the daily intelligence and economic briefings and met with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
Obama is up in another poll, this one from CNN, following on the heels of his rise in the latest Washington Post poll.
Obama’s job approval rating is again up to 49%. For that, he can thank his new positioning on economic issues, and he can thank the Republicans.
The 49% approval rating is the president’s highest since May, when his number hit 54% thanks to a bounce following the killing of Osama bin Laden. Since then, in CNN polling, Obama’s approval rating has hovered in the mid-40s.
“President Barack Obama’s approval rating appears to be fueled by dramatic gains among middle-income Americans,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “The data suggest that the debate over the payroll tax is helping Obama’s efforts to portray himself as the defender of the middle class.”
Obama’s gains have come at the expense of the Republicans in Congress and the GOP in general. By a 50% to 31% margin, people questioned say they have more confidence in the president than in congressional Republicans to handle the major issues facing the country. Obama held a much narrower 44% to 39% margin in March.
While Obama rises, Congressional Republicans are hoist by their own petard, riven by internal maneuverings around utterly unrelated issues, such as the Canadian shale oil pipeline fervently sought by Big Oil and its backers in the Senate, and unrealistic Tea Party demands that have again revealed that House Speaker John Boehner can’t control his own party caucus.
Meanwhile, the Republican presidential race lurches onward, with ex-frontrunner Mitt Romney demonstrating his uncanny ability to speak out of both sides of his mouth at the same time.
Yesterday and today he is saying that he hates superPACs and they are an embarrassment that should be abolished. But he won’t criticize his own superPAC, run by his 2008 presidential campaign aides and funded with unlimited contributions from his campaign backers, that are smearing Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich, he says, has to learn to deal with the heat of the kitchen.
Somehow, I have a feeling that Romney is going to end up feeling the heat of something fiercer than a boiling tea pot.
Romney, incidentally, falsely claimed today in an MSNBC interview that the United Nations approved the US invasion of Iraq. He continues to show a very shallow knowledge of key geopolitical matters.
Gingrich continues to lead narrowly in most national polling (though he has a big lead in one poll I saw), his slide now having been arrested. And he continues to lead in most of the state polls.
The situation in Iowa has become much less clear.
Romney, who is not moving anywhere that I see, despite all his spending — both from his official campaign and from the superPAC he deplores but wouldn’t dream of disavowing — and heightened activity, continues to trail Gingrich there. But Ron Paul, the libertarian, is moving up and may be in a lead or tie with Gingrich.
His move is based entirely on young voters, some of whom are reportedly Democrats. Among older voters, those who historically participate, he is far behind.
Will these younger voters turn out for Paul? Do they know much about him?
As one of the ultimate fringe candidates, Paul has received little serious attention, and thus little serious scrutiny, from the media or from the people he is running against.
The reality is that Paul does not stand up to scrutiny.
First, there is the matter of his ideology, which would largely dismantle the government we know and rely on. And there is his geopolitical stance, which is every bit as as on the fringe as Dennis Kucinich’s. Paul is so isolationist as to veer into anti-Americanism, blaming the US for terrorist attacks on Americans and accepting Iran’s say-so about its nuclear program, while dismissing United Nations findings about its nuclear weapons aspect.
Paul is the biggest crank running for the Republican presidential nomination.
And, with this wacky field, that is saying something.
While this plays out, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is demanding that US forces immediately cease all night raids, which are merely the lynchpin of US operations in the Afghan War. Afghan civilians have been angered for years by too many deaths of non-combatants in the increasingly widespread practice.
International leaders continue to struggle to come to grips with the emergence of a new leader in the Hermit State, North Korea, following the surprise death of his father, Kim Jong-il.
How reassuring that no sparrow may fall over a state determined to be a global rogue in nuclear weapons and missile proliferation.
Obama is monitoring a variety of geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
Pacific Gas & Electric’s latest embarrassment, the two blackouts at the Monday Night Football clash between the resurgent San Francisco 49ers and the defending American Football Conference champion Pittsburgh Steelers, won handily by the home team 49ers, has become an embarrassment in the international media. But at least PG&E’s latest problem didn’t kill people, as the deadly natural gas blast in a Bay Area neighborhood did last year, or cause the blockage of an entire freeway, as the company’s hydraulic test of a flimsy pipeline did earlier this year.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES – WEDNESDAY. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
** KEYSTONE PIPELINE: SMALL PART OF A VERY BIG PICTURE.In the chaos that passes for governance in Washington, the Keystone XL pipeline project looms as a seemingly supreme issue. But it is not. To view it as such is to miss the overall, something our media excels at.
President Barack Obama received some good news and some bad news over the weekend, when on an 89-10 vote, the Senate passed the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits extension. But for only two months. Which then became even more complicated when House conservatives refused to go along, despite the decided conservative aspect of using the needs of middle class and jobless Americans as a lever to push a controversial shale oil pipeline.
Why the short-term play? To try to force the Obama Administration to make a decision now on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project which would carry shale oil from Canada.
Development interests say it means lots of jobs, and an advance toward independence from Middle Eastern oil.
Environmental interests say it means danger for underground aquifers and that the jobs are largely illusory, with much of the oil fated to be shipped abroad anyway.
Here is the big backdrop to all this maneuvering, in which Keystone is only a small part of a very big picture.
As the United Nations struggled the weekend before last to cobble together a continuation of the international framework to cut greenhouse gas emissions — even as they have actually gone up sharply in the past two years — Canada became the first nation to formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol.
Why?
Two reasons. Canada has vast stores of hydrocarbons in the form of difficult to access shale oil. Getting at it is a technically challenging process which entails more greenhouse gas emissions, and shale oil and gas produce more such emissions than conventional oil and gas.
And Canada is an Arctic nation.
As the greenhouse effect melts the polar ice caps, the Arctic Sea is becoming not only no longer ice-locked, but navigable. And as it becomes navigable, it becomes open to exploration and exploitation.
Deep beneath what had been the impregnable ice caps are vast stores of petroleum and minerals. This is why I’ve written from time to time over the past few years about the international struggle to stake claims to the Arctic.
Russia has been especially aggressive in this regard. Moscow is home to more billionaires than any other city on the planet, and virtually all of those fortunes derive from fossil fuel energy and commodities.
But Canada, under its conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is clearly not about to withdraw from the new oil rush at the top of the world, having gone so far as to be the first to withdraw from Kyoto.
The irony, of course, is that Russia, Canada, and other powers eying the Arctic are taking advantage of the the opportunities suddenly afforded there by the cooking of the planet by pursuing a geostrategy that will, of course, further cook the planet.
Not only through continuing to yoke the world to its reliance on the old petro energy economy, but through release of methane gas, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, locked beneath the Arctic permafrost. …
As those desperate moves to avert complete failure in global climate politics, even as the effects of climate change became all the more apparent, played out, Governor Jerry Brown was readying his conference on climate change in San Francisco.
All politics may be local, but it is now also global.
Brown hosted his all-day Governor’s Conference on Extreme Climate Risks and California’s Future last Thursday at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.
Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — who held three big Governors’ Global Climate Summits during his second term — was a last minute addition to the program, which included UN climate chief Dr. Ravendra Pachauri, a Nobel Prize winner, and Sir Richard Branson, head of the Virgin Group.
As an event, Brown’s conference was decidedly on the undercooked side.
Since I first reported it and discussed it in October on my New West Notes blog, the conference had relatively little play in the run-up to it, with information coming late and in sketchy form.
Googling “Jerry Brown climate” on the morning of the conference yielded my recent Huffington Post piece — “Jerry Brown Pulls A Trigger, Invokes Rome, and Focuses on Climate and Initiatives” — at the top of the page, and the conference is only one of several aspects of the article. There was little else to be found.
In the end, for all its promise, the conference resulted in no announced agreements or initiatives, and yielded rather routine coverage in the Northern California press and on news wires. There are still no transcripts or videos available.
It was, as one top Brown ally put it, “a single which should have been a home run.” …
HOLIDAY SEASON PUBLISHING NOTE: Publishing will be less frequent than usual the week before Christmas.
Then New West Notes will pick up heavily again as the final run-up to the preposterously early Iowa Republican presidential caucuses on January 3rd is fully underway.
I remember in my day the first-in-the-nation Iowa contest being on a proper date of February 20th. But a sort of deranged one-upsmanship has prevailed since then among the states, so here we are, confronted again with presidential caucuses and primaries lighting up in the midst of the college football bowl season. Oh, well.
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden welcomed some of the last returning US soldiers from Iraq home to American soil on Tuesday at Andrews Air Force Base, following the final pullout over the weekend.
** OBAMA TODAY – TUESDAY. President Barack Obama is in Washington.
He has a fairly vague and rather light public schedule so far, as the complex and rather bizarre Congressional maneuvering around the payroll tax cut and jobless benefit extensions, and the Keystone shale oil pipeline from Canada, continue to play now that House Republicans have blocked the bill passed in the Senate early on Saturday.
On Monday, Obama received the daily intelligence and economic briefings and met with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
Obama and Vice President Joe Biden received the daily intelligence and economic briefings in the Oval Office.
Then they went to Joint Base Andrews where they took part in a ceremony marking the return of the United States Forces – Iraq Colors
All part of the end of Iraq War.
All residual US combat forces have been withdrawn from Iraq.
And, lo and behold, there is big trouble already.
Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, the highest ranking Sunni representative in the Shia-dominated government, was the subject of an arrest warrant today on charges of terrorism.
His party finished first in the parliamentary elections, but was aced out of the opportunity to try to form a government through lengthy and arcane blocking practices.
Speaking of lengthy and arcane blocking practices, House conservative Republicans have voted down the payroll tax cut/jobless benefits extension measure passed by the Senate on Saturday. They say they want a year-long extension, not just two months.
In Iraq, there are fresh fears of a rise in sectarian violence after authorities issued an arrest warrant for the Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, on charges of terrorism.
But precisely how that is structured is unclear to me.
Meanwhile, senators have already left on holiday, while House leaders — who appear to have lost control of their own caucus once again — try to force them back.
In the Republican presidential race, Newt Gingrich’s lead over Mitt Romney is down to two points in national polling.
Not that Romney is moving up, mind you. He’s where he’s been all year.
But millions of dollars in attack ads and lots of coordinated attacks are taking their toll on Gingrich.
Which may be why he scrapped his original plan to spend Christmas week at home in Virginia, and not return to Iowa until December 27th.
Which is, frankly, a preposterously whimsical notion on his part.
Instead, he is spending Monday and Tuesday in the Hawkeye State. And calling on his opponents to wage positive rather than negative campaigns, especially Mitt Romney’s superPAC.
Obama is monitoring a variety of geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES – TUESDAY. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
He has no scheduled public events.
On Monday, Brown took part in the annual Capitol Menorah Lighting in advance of Hanukkah. He spun off the situation to invite listeners to imagine a future of solar energy.
The eight-day Jewish holiday, he opined, provides an opportunty “to reflect on the whole idea that we’re running out of oil so we need a miracle. Today’s miracle is not to find more oil, but to utilize the sun.
“When we continue to use our intelligence we’re going to take that sun through the miracle of modern science and technology and we’re going to light up California, our cars, our homes our air conditioners,” the decades long solar champion declared. “And we are going to reduce significantly and every year the amount of money we are sending over to the Middle East to some very dangerous characters who do not have our best interests in the heart.”
Meanwhile, Americans Elect, a somewhat mysterious, seemingly independent political force qualified on Monday as the first new party on the California ballot since the mid-’90s. I haven’t seen any reporting in the California press about who or what is behind this.
They spent some $2 million gathering a little over a million valid signatures to qualify for a line on the presidential ballot, where they say they may provide a non-Democratic/Republican ticket of centrist independents.
How it would fare, or, more accurately, who it would hurt, depends of course on who the players turn out to be.
Rumors in New York are that billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has some designs on this project.
The group has now qualified for the ballot in 12 states.
** NEWTONIAN MOTION: THE BIG TALK CAMPAIGN.Just two-and-a-half weeks to go till the Iowa caucuses, and new Republican frontrunner Newt Gingrich’s experimental campaign is up for a big test.
Before he took the lead in the race, he’d only raised a few million dollars. Mitt Romney, the stall candidate stuck between a fifth and a quarter of the projected vote, raised far more, and spent it, too.
Romney’s campaign, like those of most of the rest of the field — with the possible exception of Ron Paul, whose isolationist libertarian crusade probably crested and fell back in Thursday’s debate when he dismissed the UN nuclear watchdog report on Iran’s nuclear program and said that jihadists attack America because we are bombing them — is very conventional. Raise money from the usual suspects, travel, make an early show in the early states, line up endorsements, hire what consultants you can afford, prepare advertising for dissemination on television, radio, online, and in the mail, organize phone banks and precinct walks, and so forth.
Gingrich, in contrast, has risen to the top of the heap on a campaign powered almost entirely on his own Big Talk politics. It’s Big Talk in terms of his bombastic style, Big Talk in terms of the scale, if not always credibility, of his ideas, and Big Talk in terms of, well, the campaign itself.
This is a campaign about a guy who is talking. On talk shows, in speeches, and in debates. Saying what his chief strategist, who is also named Newt Gingrich, tells him to say, saying it when he decides to say it.
As such, it’s an implicit challenge to conventional campaigning, and the vast industry that has grown up around it. Gingrich has to do some of that, of course, because some of it still works. But his success in resuscitating his candidacy and becoming, at the least, a top contender of the presidency is not a welcome development for the political/media complex that surrounds the industry.
It’s a singular development which may not remain singular all that long, if it continues to work in the face of carpet bombing ads from Romney’s ostensibly independent “super-PAC,” one of those results of the horrible Citizens United Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited spending on behalf of a candidate so long as blatant coordination does not occur.
Of course, a lot can happen in a few weeks in Iowa, as I pointed out here on The Huffington Post the other day. In the Gary Hart campaign of 1984, we went from fifth to second in four weeks, changing the equation of the race and setting the stage for Hart’s New Hampshire triumph eight days later. … From my December 17th column.
** JERRY BROWN PULLS A TRIGGER, INVOKES ROME, AND FOCUSES ON CLIMATE AND INITIATIVES.Governor Jerry Brown is in the midst of a very consequential week, pulling the trigger on mid-year “trigger” cuts in the state budget, hosting a major conference on climate change, and dealing with 2012 initiative politics. He also commented for the first time on the Occupy Wall Street movement, drawing an historical parallel to Rome. …
Brown had just gotten some very good news from the latest Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll. His tax initiative plan is favored by nearly two-thirds of California voters.
Brown’s job approval rating is at 46%, the expected range it’s been in essentially since shortly after his election. Good enough for this political environment, and better than anyone else, though less than it could have been.
Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s job approval rating in this poll a year ago was at 32%, a recovery from the low 20s where it had been early in the summer. And higher than the oft cited 23%, which is from a late summer Field Poll. …
I believe, based on discussions I had last week and the week before with well-placed sources among the potential initiative promoters, that the field will begin to clear. I expect the Think Long Committee of billionaires and former officeholders to avoid going to head to head with Brown’s initiative. As I’ve pointed out, Think Long can’t win next November with its plan, which cuts taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and extends the sales tax to all manner of services. …
The Brown conference’s setting, a wonderful facility founded just a few years after the California Gold Rush in the middle of the 19th century, when Brown’s ancestors came to the Golden State, is fitting for this governor who is a fan of H.G. Wells. … From my December 14th feature.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th, 2009 Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in three wars in the region, and the Arab awakening underway, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Having crashed over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, 2008, crude oil is trading around $100 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
This is up about $66 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, reflecting a low point in global economic activity, and down about $14 from the price at the time of the Osama bin Laden raid.
Your posts are welcome in the Forum. You can send me a private tip by clicking on the “Contact” button in the upper right.
In his weekend video/radio address, President Barack Obama expresses gratitude for the achievements of the men and women who served in the war in Iraq and welcomes our troops home as we at last mark the official end to the war.
HOLIDAY SEASON PUBLISHING NOTE: Publishing will be less frequent than usual the week before Christmas.
Then New West Notes will pick up heavily again as the final run-up to the preposterously early Iowa Republican presidential caucuses on January 3rd is fully underway.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … NEWTONIAN MOTION: THE BIG TALK CAMPAIGN.
** OBAMA THIS WEEKEND. President Barack Obama is in Washington.
Obama has received the daily intelligence and economic briefings and met with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
He has no scheduled public events this weekend.
Obama received some good news and some bad news Saturday morning.
On an 89-10 vote, the Senate passed the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits extension. But for only two months.
Why the short-term play? To try to force the Obama Administration to make a decision now on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project which would carry shale oil from Canada.
Development interests say it means lots of jobs, and an advance toward independence from Middle Eastern oil.
Environmental interests say it means danger for underground aquifers and that the jobs are largely illusory, with much of the oil fated to be shipped abroad anyway.
Here is the big backdrop to all this maneuvering.
As the United Nations struggled last weekend to cobble together a continuation of the international framework to cut greenhouse gas emissions — even as they have actually gone up sharply in the past two years — Canada became the first nation to formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol.
Why?
Two reasons. Canada has vast stores of hydrocarbons in the form of difficult to access shale oil. Getting at it is a technically challenging process which entails more greenhouse gas emissions.
And Canada is an Arctic nation.
As the greenhouse effect melts the polar ice caps, the Arctic Sea is becoming not only no longer ice-locked, but navigable. And as it becomes navigable, it becomes open to exploration.
Deep beneath what had been the impregnable ice caps are vast stores of petroleum and minerals. This is why I’ve written from time to time over the past few years about the international struggle to stake claims to the Arctic.
Russia has been especially aggressive in this regard. Its capital Moscow is home to more billionaires than any other city on the planet, and virtually all of those fortunes derive from fossil fuel energy and commodities.
But Canada, under its conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is clearly not about to withdraw from the new oil rush at the top of the world, having gone so far as to be the first to withdraw from Kyoto.
The irony, of course, is that Russia, Canada, and other powers eying the Arctic are taking advantage of the the opportunities suddenly afforded there by the cooking of the planet by pursuing a geostrategy that will, of course, further cook the planet.
Would stopping the Keystone pipeline stop Canada from pursuing its anti-Kyoto course? Not on the whole, clearly. Would it gum up the works some? Perhaps.
But my observation is that water seeks the ocean.
Russia, incidentally, is seeing more protests this weekend, but smaller ones than those which last weekend shocked the Kremlin and observers around the world. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has clearly taken a major hit to his popularity.
But on his annual Thursday night telethon, in which he spends hours taking live questions from around the nine time zone nation, Putin was his usual confident self, insistent on his still likely victory in the March presidential election, and blaming outsiders for stirring up popular discontent.
In Egypt, pro-democracy protesters are again on the streets and are again getting a violent response from the Egyptian Army. Nine have been killed so far and hundreds wounded. I’ve seen live footage of Egyptian troops firing into crowds.
The great February revolution which toppled Hosni Mubarak in February after only 18 days of protest has turned, as feared, into something else. The military insists on maintaining its “interim” rule and what elections have been held have been dominated by Islamist parties.
Better news comes from Libya.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is in Tripoli. The first Pentagon topper ever to visit the historic Libyan capital praised the Libyan people and their new government and pledged ongoing alliance with the US. Which pledge was warmly welcomed.
He also paid his respects to America’s fallen from our first foreign war over 200 years ago.
Panetta laid a wreath on the graves of sailors lost aboard the USS Intrepid 207 years ago.
The crew aboard the Intrepid was on a mission on September 4th, 1804, to destroy pirate ships moored in Tripoli harbor during the First Barbary War when their vessel exploded.
Navy Lieutenant Richard Somers, Intrepid’s commander, and his dozen officers and sailors were killed.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is the first Pentagon chief to ever set foot on Libyan soil. The former California congressman’s visit Saturday comes after an eight month-long US, European, and Arab-backed rebellion that ousted decades-long dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Panetta visited the Tripoli memorial to the US Navy dead from America’s first overseas war, that against the Barbary Pirates ordered by President Thomas Jefferson.
“These brave sailors from the Intrepid, who died in the service of their country, have our nation’s enduring respect and gratitude,” Panetta said.
“Having sailed into harm’s way to secure our nation’s interests, they volunteered for a dangerous mission and paid the ultimate price,” he said. “Their courage, and that of their fallen sailors and Marines, have forever emblazoned the shores of Tripoli in our nation’s conscience.”
This was America’s first overseas war, against the Barbary Pirates, ordered by President Thomas Jefferson.
While that history has been honored, the Republicans who would challenge Obama in November 2012 continued their maneuverings.
Mitt Romney received something of a boost yesterday with the endorsement of new South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. But Haley’s numbers have slid precipitously, and she faced a firestorm of criticism from the South Carolina right for her backing of Romney’s bid, including a fusillade from beyond by Rush Limbaugh. Romney trails Newt Gingrich by a wide margin in this early primary state.
Romney and Haley campaigned together on Saturday in South Carolina
Romney’s superPAC launched TV attack ads yesterday against Gingrich in Florida, where the ex-House speaker leads by a big margin.
For his part, Gingrich has picked up the endorsements of the the speakers of the Iowa and New Hampshire state houses of representatives.
Obama is monitoring a variety of geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES. Governor Jerry Brown is in Northern California.
** JERRY BROWN PULLS A TRIGGER, INVOKES ROME, AND FOCUSES ON CLIMATE AND INITIATIVES.Governor Jerry Brown is in the midst of a very consequential week, pulling the trigger on mid-year “trigger” cuts in the state budget, hosting a major conference on climate change, and dealing with 2012 initiative politics. He also commented for the first time on the Occupy Wall Street movement, drawing an historical parallel to Rome. …
Brown had just gotten some very good news from the latest Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll. His tax initiative plan is favored by nearly two-thirds of California voters.
Brown’s job approval rating is at 46%, the expected range it’s been in essentially since shortly after his election. Good enough for this political environment, and better than anyone else, though less than it could have been.
Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s job approval rating in this poll a year ago was at 32%, a recovery from the low 20s where it had been early in the summer. And higher than the oft cited 23%, which is from a late summer Field Poll. …
I believe, based on discussions I had last week and the week before with well-placed sources among the potential initiative promoters, that the field will begin to clear. I expect the Think Long Committee of billionaires and former officeholders to avoid going to head to head with Brown’s initiative. As I’ve pointed out, Think Long can’t win next November with its plan, which cuts taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and extends the sales tax to all manner of services. …
The Brown conference’s setting, a wonderful facility founded just a few years after the California Gold Rush in the middle of the 19th century, when Brown’s ancestors came to the Golden State, is fitting for this governor who is a fan of H.G. Wells. … From my December 14th feature.
** TOP DOG IN THE BIG DES MOINES DOGPILE? IT’S NEWT!They said it was going to be a joint rumble against new frontrunner Newt Gingrich, a veritable dogpile in Des Moines. But the ex-House speaker showed that he is the smartest guy on the stage, that stage. And that all those years of honing his media chops on C-SPAN and his study of media dynamics underlie the game changer in this race.
In contrast, Mitt Romney, as I suggested in my piece yesterday on the Huffington Post, “Newtonian Motion: Action Begets Flawed Reaction,” revealed live and in person that he really doesn’t know how to get after Gingrich. And that he is a guy who doesn’t realize that slick and shallow only works in a commercial.
Media skills were dominant in this debate, and Gingrich has them. He parried every attack from every direction, and turned some of them to his decided advantage. And then there was Romney. Remind me, where did people get the idea he’s a good debater? From “debates,” really joint appearances, in which, oddly, no one asked him tough questions, perhaps? … From my December 11th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th, 2009 Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in three wars in the region, and the Arab awakening underway, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Having crashed over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, 2008, crude oil closed on Friday at $93.53 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Energy markets are closed on the weekend.
This is up about $60 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, reflecting a low point in global economic activity, and down $20 from the price at the time of the Osama bin Laden raid.
Your posts are welcome in the Forum. You can send me a private tip by clicking on the “Contact” button in the upper right.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was on hand in Baghdad yesterday to officially retire the flag of U.S. Forces-Iraq. The veteran California political figure presided over the formal cessation of US intervention in the troubled country and handover of all security responsibilities to Iraqi forces. There are less than 4,000 US troops left in Iraq, down from 150,000 when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … NEWTONIAN MOTION: THE BIG TALK CAMPAIGN.
** QUICK HITS. Mitt Romney received something of a boost today with the endorsement of new South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. But Haley’s numbers have slid precipitously, and she faced a firestorm of criticism from the South Carolina right for her backing of Romney’s bid, including a fusillade from beyond by Rush Limbaugh. Romney trails Newt Gingrich by a wide margin in this early primary state. … Newt Gingrich has picked up the endorsements of the the speakers of the Iowa and New Hampshire state houses of representatives. … Romney’s superPAC launched TV attack ads today against Gingrich in Florida, where the ex-House speaker leads by a big margin.
** NEW POLL: THE GREAT CAMPAIGN IS ABOUT TO KICK INTO HIGH GEAR. CAN YOU FEEL THE EXCITEMENT?! Or not.
A new Gallup Poll on popular expectations for the 2012 election season, now well underway, indictates that voters are, well, not all that wowed.
And that would be putting it diplomatically.
Think of the passengers in the car saying: “Are we there yet?”
Oh, and it’s not a matter of folks who are not getting enough attention from the candidates.
In fact, the voters who are getting the most attention are the ones who are already most sick of the campaign.
With the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses serving as the kickoff of voting in the 2012 presidential election campaign, Americans would likely prefer to fast-forward to the end of the campaign than watch it unfold. Given a choice, 70% of Americans say they can’t wait for the campaign to be over, while 26% can’t wait for it to begin. …
Gallup asked the same question Nov. 30-Dec. 7 of residents in 12 states that are expected to be the most important in deciding the electoral vote outcome — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The eventual nominees are likely to focus their campaign efforts on these 12 swing states, meaning their residents will be bombarded with candidate advertisements, events, and grass-roots outreach.
But even before those efforts have begun in earnest in most of these states, swing-state residents express a slightly higher level of negativity toward the campaign than the overall population, with 75% saying they can’t wait for the campaign to be over and 21% saying they can’t wait for it to begin. …
Nationally, there is little difference by party in feelings about the upcoming campaign — 67% of Democrats and 66% of Republicans can’t wait for the campaign to be over.
More generally, all key subgroups look forward more to the campaign’s end than its beginning, but some slightly less so than others. For example, men (31%) are more likely than women (21%) to say they can’t wait for the campaign to begin.
The greatest differences in feelings toward the campaign are by age. Senior citizens, who have seen more presidential elections than younger Americans, are least likely to be looking forward to the campaign, with 16% saying they can’t wait for it to begin. That compares with 27% or more of those in each of the younger age groups. …
NOTE: With some travel and technical issues at this time of year, publishing is less frequent than usual at the moment.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama is in Washington.
Obama received the daily intelligence and economic briefings and met with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
He then delivered remarks at the 71st General Assembly of the Union for Reform Judaism at the new National Harbor development in Washington.
It’s almost over, folks, one of America’s longest wars, the existence of which probably impelled Obama’s run for the presidency in the first place.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta presided yesterday in Baghdad over a flag lowering and encasement of the colors ceremony which formally marked the end of America’s Iraq War. The veteran California political figure declared the war over, saying that the US looks forward to an “independent, free and sovereign Iraq.” He thanked the more than one million troops who served there since a US-dominated “coalition of the willing” force invaded Iraq on March 20th, 2003.
It remains to be seen how things will go in Iraq after the US departure.
I’m not at all optimistic.
Removing Saddam Hussein removed the greatest counterweight to Iran in the region. And Iran had far more potential influence in Iraq than Messieurs Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz ever realized.
Now that influence is becoming very manifest.
But our ADD American culture has moved on. And with good reason, to our near melted down and still stubbornly slow to recover domestic economy.
Which is actually a globalized economy, not that it gets reported that way.
Obama got some good economic news yesterday in the form of the lowest unemployment claims in the past few years.
And global markets are seemingly stable a week after what looks like an historic European Union — minus only the UK, which held out against any new regulation of the City of London, its equivalent of Wall Street — decision to routinize member state budgets through the EU and have new regulations on the financial sector.
He got more good news last night with agreement between Democrats and Republicans to pass the necessary spending bill.
But political fighting still continues on extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance.
Obama’s would-be Republican rivals held their last debate before the holidays last night in Sioux City, Iowa.
Most of the field took dead aim at frontrunner Newt Gingrich, with Mr. Walks Through the Raindrops Mitt Romney back to getting his customary free ride in the process.
For his own part, Romney did not take shots at Gingrich, defaulting to his bland presentation points of his own perceived virtues and the supposed defects of Obama.
After some rocky going in the beginning, Gingrich did pretty well. We’ll see how his lead holds up against heavy Romney spending against him.
Ron Paul, who delights in attacking Gingrich but not Romney, saw the end of any shot he had at winning in Iowa, where he’s been moving up in third, when he let loose with his libertarian isolationist zealotry in full flower.
Jihadist terrorists attack America, he explained, “because we bomb them.”
He also claimed that the UN nuclear watchdog report on Iran’s nuclear weapons program is wrong.
It’s one thing to be against more foolish adventurism. It’s another to be such a head in the sand isolationist as to deny reality.
Obama is monitoring a variety of geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
Governor Jerry Brown and former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who joined forces to sue the Bush/Cheney Administration in November 2007 over its attempts to stop California’s landmark climate change program, joined forces again on Thursday at Brown’s Governor’s Conference on Extreme Climate Risk and California’s Future in San Francisco.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES. Governor Jerry Brown is in San Diego and Northern California.
Brown went to San Diego today where he joined forces with business leaders and elected officials from the region to dedicate the new North American headquarters of Soltec.
The facility, which has received no government funding for this project, is slated to produce concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) modules for the U.S. renewable-energy market and employ 450 people, while supporting an additional 1,000 indirect jobs in the region.
Brown was joined at the event by a host of notables, including San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, San Diego Gas & Electric CEO Jessie Knight, California Public Utility Commissioner Timothy Simon and CleanTech San Diego President & CEO Jim Waring.
Brown also got some good big picture economic news today. California’s unemployment rate fell to its lowest point in two and a half years.
It’s now 11.3%. For most of the past year it has been around 12.5%. The last time it was this low was in May 2009.
Last month, the state’s unemployment rate was 0.4% higher.
Brown hosted his all-day conference on climate change on Thursday at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.
Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was a last minute addition to the program, which included UN climate chief Dr. Ravendra Pachauri, a Nobel Prize winner, and Sir Richard Branson, head of the Virgin Group.
In a fiery talk opening the conference, Brown denounced the Republican Party and libertarian ideologues as greenhouse deniers and promoters of “cult-like behavior” designed to lead “political lemmings” over a cliff.
It didn’t sound like something intended to promote a continuation of Brown’s practice earlier this year of spending a lot of time courting potential Republican legislative votes.
Of course, that didn’t actually work.
Appearing later in the afternoon, Schwarzenegger — who championed renewable energy and the state’s landmark climate change program as governor and is continuing to work with the United Nations on these issues — said that he is “proud” of Brown as his successor. He urged a positive, conciliatory approach of inclusiveness with regard to climate change. He also noted that, while it was exciting to be there, it “was also weird, in a way.” Since just the day before he was filming in New Mexico on his new movie, The Last Stand, “slamming a guy’s head into a bridge.
Schwarzenegger spoke of avoiding enviro gloom and doom talk, and instead focusing on jobs, health, energy independence, and national security.
** JERRY BROWN PULLS A TRIGGER, INVOKES ROME, AND FOCUSES ON CLIMATE AND INITIATIVES.Governor Jerry Brown is in the midst of a very consequential week, pulling the trigger on mid-year “trigger” cuts in the state budget, hosting a major conference on climate change, and dealing with 2012 initiative politics. He also commented for the first time on the Occupy Wall Street movement, drawing an historical parallel to Rome. …
Brown had just gotten some very good news from the latest Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll. His tax initiative plan is favored by nearly two-thirds of California voters.
Brown’s job approval rating is at 46%, the expected range it’s been in essentially since shortly after his election. Good enough for this political environment, and better than anyone else, though less than it could have been.
Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s job approval rating in this poll a year ago was at 32%, a recovery from the low 20s where it had been early in the summer. And higher than the oft cited 23%, which is from a late summer Field Poll. …
I believe, based on discussions I had last week and the week before with well-placed sources among the potential initiative promoters, that the field will begin to clear. I expect the Think Long Committee of billionaires and former officeholders to avoid going to head to head with Brown’s initiative. As I’ve pointed out, Think Long can’t win next November with its plan, which cuts taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and extends the sales tax to all manner of services. …
The Brown conference’s setting, a wonderful facility founded just a few years after the California Gold Rush in the middle of the 19th century, when Brown’s ancestors came to the Golden State, is fitting for this governor who is a fan of H.G. Wells. … From my December 14th feature.
** TOP DOG IN THE BIG DES MOINES DOGPILE? IT’S NEWT!They said it was going to be a joint rumble against new frontrunner Newt Gingrich, a veritable dogpile in Des Moines. But the ex-House speaker showed that he is the smartest guy on the stage, that stage. And that all those years of honing his media chops on C-SPAN and his study of media dynamics underlie the game changer in this race.
In contrast, Mitt Romney, as I suggested in my piece yesterday on the Huffington Post, “Newtonian Motion: Action Begets Flawed Reaction,” revealed live and in person that he really doesn’t know how to get after Gingrich. And that he is a guy who doesn’t realize that slick and shallow only works in a commercial.
Media skills were dominant in this debate, and Gingrich has them. He parried every attack from every direction, and turned some of them to his decided advantage. And then there was Romney. Remind me, where did people get the idea he’s a good debater? From “debates,” really joint appearances, in which, oddly, no one asked him tough questions, perhaps? … From my December 11th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th, 2009 Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in three wars in the region, and the Arab awakening underway, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Having crashed over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, 2008, crude oil is trading around $94 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
This is up about $60 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, reflecting a low point in global economic activity, and down $20 from the price at the time of the Osama bin Laden raid.
Your posts are welcome in the Forum. You can send me a private tip by clicking on the “Contact” button in the upper right.
President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama welcomed home troops at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, home of U.S. Special Operations Command and the Army’s rapid reaction airborne corps, on Wednesday as the Iraq War at last draws to a close.
** NEW COLUMN COMING UP … NEWTONIAN MOTION: THE BIG TALK CAMPAIGN.
** QUICK HITS. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta presided today in Baghdad over a flag lowering and encasement of the colors ceremony which formally marked the end of America’s Iraq War. The veteran California political figure declared the war over, saying that the US looks forward to an “independent, free and sovereign Iraq.” He thanked the more than one million troops who served there since a US-dominated “coalition of the willing” force invaded Iraq on March 20th, 2003. … In a fiery talk opening his climate change conference today in San Francisco, Governor Jerry Brown denounced the Republican Party and libertarian interests as greenhouse deniers and promoters of “cult-like behavior” designed to lead “political lemmings” over a cliff. … In an appearance this afternoon at the Brown conference, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said that he is “proud” of Brown as his successor. He urged a positive, conciliatory approach of inclusiveness with regard to climate change. He also noted that, while it was exciting to be there, it “was also weird, in a way.” Since just the day before he was filming in New Mexico on his new movie, The Last Stand, “slamming a guy’s head into a bridge.”
NOTE: With some technical and travel issues, publishing is less frequent than usual at the moment.
** NEW POLL: GINGRICH STRONG WITH MOST RELIABLE REPUBLICAN VOTERS. I’m seeing some erosion in former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s huge leads over former frontrunner Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republican presidential field.
But Gingrich does have something going for him that may be a decisive contrary factor. He is strong with the people most likely to vote in the Republican primaries.
A new Gallup Poll survey indicates that Gingrich runs much better than Romney and the rest with the highest propensity Republican voters.
They tend to be the oldest voters, and are thus the ones who have clear memories of his stint as the Republican leader who led the party in from the wilderness in the 1990s.
One of the things I find most interesting about the situation is that Gingrich is both a classic “trend candidate,” as I call someone who is intriguing and hot in the media, and a “settled candidate,” as I call someone who appeals to a party bedrock.
Gingrich is the insurgent in this scenario while Romney is the establishmentarian. But unlike most establishment frontrunner, Romney does not have a strong call on the actual voters who usually underlie that establishment’s hold on a party.
Thus Romney is in the awkward position of having to rely on lower information/lower propensity voters who are usually attracted to the flashy trend candidate. Which is why trend candidates often do not win.
Newt Gingrich’s current lead in Republican preferences for the GOP presidential nomination is largely attributable to particularly high support from the types of Republicans who might be expected to turn out heavily in the upcoming primaries — older Republicans and core identifiers with the Republican Party. Roughly 40% of Republicans aged 55 and older as well as core Republicans (as opposed to independents who lean Republican) and conservatives currently favor Gingrich for the nomination. This contrasts with 21% to 23% of each group backing Mitt Romney. …
Gingrich also leads Romney among those 35 to 54 years of age. Romney leads among young Republicans, aged 18 to 34, but, at 26%, is only slightly ahead of Gingrich and Ron Paul among this group, with both receiving close to 20%.
The significance of the older, more Republican-oriented nature of Gingrich’s support base is that these groups traditionally turn out to vote at higher rates than their younger, more independent counterparts. This is reflected in the self-reported “thought” that various subgroups of Republicans currently say they are giving to the presidential election. According to USA Today/Gallup polling conducted Dec. 6-7, 83% of Republicans aged 55 and older say they have given quite a lot or some thought to the election, almost twice the level recorded among those aged 18 to 34 (45%).
** JERRY BROWN PULLS A TRIGGER, INVOKES ROME, AND FOCUSES ON CLIMATE AND INITIATIVES.Governor Jerry Brown is in the midst of a very consequential week, pulling the trigger on mid-year “trigger” cuts in the state budget, hosting a major conference on climate change, and dealing with 2012 initiative politics. He also commented for the first time on the Occupy Wall Street movement, drawing an historical parallel to Rome.
As long expected, Brown on Tuesday found himself having to pull the trigger on mid-fiscal year budget cuts occasioned by lower than forecast California state revenues. But for less than feared following a report last month by the Legislative Analyst Office. …
“America will have a hard time functioning if the inequality continues,” he said. “But reversing it in the face of globalization and technological innovation will be very difficult.”
Then the old UC Berkeley classics major harkened back to the history underlying his Latin education.
“In Rome there was the old fight between the aristocrats and the plebeians,” he noted. “It took a few hundred years for Rome to fall apart.”
Brown had just gotten some very good news from the latest Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll. His tax initiative plan is favored by nearly two-thirds of California voters.
Brown’s job approval rating is at 46%, the expected range it’s been in essentially since shortly after his election. Good enough for this political environment, and better than anyone else, though less than it could have been.
Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s job approval rating in this poll a year ago was at 32%, a recovery from the low 20s where it had been early in the summer. And higher than the oft cited 23%, which is from a late summer Field Poll. …
I believe, based on discussions I had last week and the week before with well-placed sources among the potential initiative promoters, that the field will begin to clear. I expect the Think Long Committee of billionaires and former officeholders to avoid going to head to head with Brown’s initiative. As I’ve pointed out, Think Long can’t win next November with its plan, which cuts taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and extends the sales tax to all manner of services. …
Schwarzenegger, who last week won the Renewable Energy Leader of the Decade award from the American Council on Renewable Energy, had been mentioned as a likely attendee at the UN climate summit, but did not go. He didn’t go to the UN climate summit last year in Cancun, Mexico, either.
He was last at the annual climate summit in 2009, in Copenhagen, Denmark, which was a cobbled-together vague semi-success where Schwarzenegger announced that he would form the R20 group of subnational governments around the world to work on renewable energy and climate change issues.
The Brown conference’s setting, a wonderful facility founded just a few years after the California Gold Rush in the middle of the 19th century, when Brown’s ancestors came to the Golden State, is fitting for this governor who is a fan of H.G. Wells. …
Reality seldom matched predictions as the massive US intervention in Iraq unfolded.
** OBAMA TODAY. President Barack Obama is in Washington.
Obama and Vice President Joe Biden received the daily intelligence and economic briefings and met with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
Obama then delivered a statement at a We Can’t Wait event at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Obama and Biden then had lunch in the Private Dining Room.
Obama got some good economic news today in the form of the lowest unemployment claims in the past few years.
Could there, perhaps, hopefully, be something of a trend of better news emerging?
On Tuesday, Obama got some good news in the form of increased retail sales for the sixth month in a row.
While Obama has a quiet day after several days of focus on the end of the long-running Iraq War, his would-be Republican rivals gear up for the final debate before the January 3rd Iowa caucuses.
That’s tonight, from 6 PM to 8 PM Pacific on Fox News.
Former frontrunner Mitt Romney has dropped the pose of only a few days ago that he knows nothing about any attacks on frontrunner Newt Gingrich.
Instead, he’s lodging more himself, today describing the former House Speaker as a “zany historian.”
Romney also launched a new TV which extols him as an economic leader and job creator, something the Democrats very hotly dispute given his corporate takeover background, and poses the funding as government programs as a “moral choice” involving borrowing money from China. Thus tapping into deep anxiety about the rise of China in the conservative base.
Romney raised big money from his Wall Street backers on Wednesday during a series of fundraisers in New York City.
For his part, zany historian Gingrich — who actually led the Republicans to power in 1994, ending a 40-year Democratic dominance of the House, helping balance the federal budget, and impeaching President Bill Clinton — stayed mostly positive today.
He gets to try to fend off his challengers tonight from all sides, as he did so successfully last Saturday night in Des Moines.
As attacks mount, from Romney and his superPAC, Ron Paul, and Rick Perry, the underfunded Gingrich campaign may have an emerging ace in the hole. That is a “super-Pac” of its own.
Las Vegas mogul Sheldon Adelson is reportedly planning to spend $20 million, perhaps through “Winning Our Future.” The problem for Gingrich is that I’m saying perhaps, because there are at least three pro-Newt super-PACs floating around out there, which may make organization chaotic.
And while the superPAC situation is a big joke, with all but the most blatant coordination illegal, it will take some adroit maneuvering to make it clear where the money should go.
Obama is monitoring a variety of geopolitical crises, mostly related to the Arab awakening, AfPak, and Iraq.
War Zone Times: Iraq is eleven hours ahead of Pacific time, and Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific time.
** FROM THE JERRY FILES. Governor Jerry Brown is in San Francisco.
He is hosting his all-day conference on climate change at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.
Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is a last minute addition to the program, which includes UN climate chief Dr. Ravendra Pachauri, a Nobel Prize winner, and Sir Richard Branson, head of the Virgin Group.
Since I first reported it and discussed it in October, the conference has had relatively little play in the run-up to it, with information coming late and in sketchy form.
If you Google “Jerry Brown climate” you will find my latest Huffington Post piece at the top of the page, and the conference is only one of several aspects of the article.
California Democratic Party chairman John Burton says he will promote an oil severance tax initiative for the November 2012 ballot.
California is the only major oil producing state without such a tax.
Is this a problem for Brown’s initiative plans, which hinge in part on there not being a plethora of competing tax initiatives on the ballot?
Perhaps. But perhaps not so much.
Burton’s oil tax would be a levy on one industry, an unpopular industry at that. Other potential initiatives are broader levies on large numbers of voters.
** TOP DOG IN THE BIG DES MOINES DOGPILE? IT’S NEWT!They said it was going to be a joint rumble against new frontrunner Newt Gingrich, a veritable dogpile in Des Moines. But the ex-House speaker showed that he is the smartest guy on the stage, that stage. And that all those years of honing his media chops on C-SPAN and his study of media dynamics underlie the game changer in this race.
In contrast, Mitt Romney, as I suggested in my piece yesterday on the Huffington Post, “Newtonian Motion: Action Begets Flawed Reaction,” revealed live and in person that he really doesn’t know how to get after Gingrich. And that he is a guy who doesn’t realize that slick and shallow only works in a commercial.
Media skills were dominant in this debate, and Gingrich has them. He parried every attack from every direction, and turned some of them to his decided advantage. And then there was Romney. Remind me, where did people get the idea he’s a good debater? From “debates,” really joint appearances, in which, oddly, no one asked him tough questions, perhaps? … From my December 11th column.
** NEWTONIAN MOTION: ACTION BEGETS FLAWED REACTION. Mitt Romney sure doesn’t think Newt Gingrich is a “flavor of the month.” The ex-speaker’s Newtonian motion has propelled him into polling leads in all the state polls I’ve seen except for New Hampshire, and he’s closing there. So Gingrich’s action has sparked a strenuous reaction. … From my December 10th column.
** OBAMA: RIDING WITH HISTORY. (NOTE: As Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, this column was the featured column on the top of the front page of the Huffington Post.) … From my January 19th, 2009 Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM AL JAZEERA. With the US entangled in three wars in the region, and the Arab awakening underway, it’s valuable to keep up with news and perspectives from the leading Middle Eastern-based TV news network. Based in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, Al Jazeera is very influential and more than a bit controversial. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer. The NWN live link to AJ does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti. While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. Having crashed over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, 2008, crude oil is trading around $94 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
This is up about $60 from the low of $34 per barrel prior to enactment of the Obama economic recovery program, reflecting a low point in global economic activity, and down $20 from the price at the time of the Osama bin Laden raid.
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