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.
And Ron Paul is at last getting scrutiny for his fringe views, some of which are even fringier than you may have imagined. Here’s more of this stuff, from his own publishings, courtesy of the New Republic. It’s filled with a vicious sort of bigotry, not what one expects from his seemingly mild-mannered affect.
Paul’s a cult figure, with Ayn Rand economics and geopolitical views that make Dennis Kucinich seem mainstream.
Vice President Joe Biden joined in the fun of the Republican race today with an op-ed in the Des Moines Register taking Romney to task for his championing of a supposed “merit economy vs. entitlement economy.”
“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.
Gingrich’s lead in the Gallup Poll, down to only two points on Wednesday, is back up to six points today, 27% to 21%.
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 did the US government learn of Kim’s death? By, er, monitoring news media.
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.
He has no scheduled public events.
** 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.
Good luck with that.
While the Republicans scrap with one another in the mud, Obama is rising up again, his job approval rating back up to 49% in the new Washington Post poll. He also has significant leads over all Republicans in other polling I’m seeing.
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.
** TOP DOG IN THE BIG DES MOINES DOGPILE? IT’S NEWT! … From my December 11th column.
** NEWTONIAN MOTION: ACTION BEGETS FLAWED REACTION. … From my December 10th column.
** NEWTONIAN MOTION: IN IOWA, A LOT CAN HAPPEN IN FOUR WEEKS. … From my December 6th column.
** JERRY BROWN AND THE 2012 INITIATIVE WARS. … From my December 3rd feature.
** ALTERNEWT: GINGRICH “ALTERNATE HISTORY” NOVELS REVEAL MUCH ON PRESENT POLITICS. … From my December 1st essay.
** A SUBLIME AND RIDICULOUS DAY: MARS MISSION AND AFPAK DEBACLE. … From my November 28th essay.
** SOUND AND FURY: THE UTTERLY UNSURPRISING “SUPER-COMMITTEE” FLOP. … From my November 22nd essay.
** DARWINIAN: OBAMA GOES POST-IRAQ IN OZ, REPUBLICANS RACE TO THE PAST. … From my November 21st essay.
** FROM GOVERNATOR TO MOONBEAM. … From my January 3rd, 2011 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.
Read 
| Comments (86) |
Good good news video of President Obama signing the economic legislation.
woo-hoo, big win for Barack!!!
Damn, the Reeps finally stopped taking acid…
Happy Christmas to American friends.
Good Christmas Weekend address by President and Mrs. Obama. Merry Christmas all.
Great Christmas talk by Barack and Michelle! God bless our brave troops. Merry Christmas!!
Truly an excellent even visionary featured HuffPost article on Keystone, Canada, Climate, and California.
Sad about our brethren to the Great White North, their ambitions so potentially fatal for our futures.
The “Race to Casa Blanca’s Mad Madcap Cast”… What a hoot!
That’s a wonderful holiday message by the President and First Lady.
Happy Holidays!
80,000 Muscovites rallied against the Premiere on Saturday. It is no merry Christmas in Kremlin today.
Sergei, thanks for keeping us informed about what is happening in Moscow.
Good news historical news video on December 25th.
Many amazing things have happened on this wonderful day…
Merry Christmas!!
This was a busy Christmas.
You are welcomed, Larry. American friends should know that torture in Afghanistan is bad as was true in Soviet Union days.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/opinion/kabuls-stealth-attack-on-human-rights.html
What new video today?
Lots.
I saw that. It’s a disturbing story, run by the Afghans themselves who are quite good at oppressing one another …
>sergei says:
December 26, 2011 at 6:12 am (Edit)
You are welcomed, Larry. American friends should know that torture in Afghanistan is bad as was true in Soviet Union days.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/opinion/kabuls-stealth-attack-on-human-rights.html
Oh, yes.
>Len says:
December 25, 2011 at 4:54 pm (Edit)
This was a busy Christmas.
The Kremlin will have to make some big adjustments.
>sergei says:
December 25, 2011 at 5:26 am (Edit)
80,000 Muscovites rallied against the Premiere on Saturday. It is no merry Christmas in Kremlin today.
Yes, it’s very nice.
>Requiem says:
December 24, 2011 at 4:08 pm (Edit)
That’s a wonderful holiday message by the President and First Lady.
Happy Holidays!
Indeed.
>Requiem says:
December 24, 2011 at 4:04 pm (Edit)
The “Race to Casa Blanca’s Mad Madcap Cast”… What a hoot!
Thanks, I appreciate it. Canada’s move is stunning, and stunningly unreported.
>Requiem says:
December 24, 2011 at 3:58 pm (Edit)
Truly an excellent even visionary featured HuffPost article on Keystone, Canada, Climate, and California.
Sad about our brethren to the Great White North, their ambitions so potentially fatal for our futures.
It’s a very fine message.
>Jonas Blane says:
December 24, 2011 at 11:37 am (Edit)
Good Christmas Weekend address by President and Mrs. Obama. Merry Christmas all.
It won’t be the end, because too many like it.
>Cooper Hawks says:
December 23, 2011 at 5:06 pm (Edit)
Damn, the Reeps finally stopped taking acid…
Indeed, to a point, in a relative sense of things …
>Capitol Boy says:
December 23, 2011 at 2:57 pm (Edit)
woo-hoo, big win for Barack!!!
Whatever.
And the oligarchs wonder why OWS hates their freedoms..-.Buy Best Price GW2 Gold
Why haven’t the bankers been prosecuted-? The simple answer is that going after them would expose the politician-s who defended them. It would hurt the false narrative that has been created that blamed the crisis on corporate greed. As if companies only recently started caring about their bottom line. Companies are expected to care about their bottom line. Maintainin-g that bottom line means staying in business and continuing to employ people. Money is in politics because of the heavy handed interactio-n the government has with business. The government can literally make or break some companies which gives them an incentive to have political influence. As long as that incentive exists then so will the influence. The simple reason for that is that people are corruptibl-e. Ultimately regulation-s are only as powerful as those who are to enforce them. Many of those regulators are overseen by Congress.gw2 gold,buy guild wars 2 gold
By the time FDR took office, soldiers were camped out near the White House demanding jobs and benefits. There was a massive “run” on the banks. People came and withdrew their money, which banks don’t have, it’s been loaned. So banks “called” mortgages like they could do then, demanded repayment. Which they didn’t get so they foreclosed-.diablo 3 gold
… [Trackback]…
[...] Read More Infos here: newwestnotes.com/2011/12/20/christmas-week-edition-with-updates-2/ [...]…
… [Trackback]…
[...] Read More Infos here: newwestnotes.com/2011/12/20/christmas-week-edition-with-updates-2/ [...]…
What’s Ron Paul’s favorite form of excercise?An evening Constitutional.
… [Trackback]…
[...] Find More Informations here: newwestnotes.com/2011/12/20/christmas-week-edition-with-updates-2/ [...]…
… [Trackback]…
[...] Read More Infos here: newwestnotes.com/2011/12/20/christmas-week-edition-with-updates-2/ [...]…
… [Trackback]…
[...] Read More Infos here: newwestnotes.com/2011/12/20/christmas-week-edition-with-updates-2/ [...]…