News: April 2009 Archives

Obama "optimistic" about Chrysler yesterday:

April 30 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama struck an upbeat tone about the struggling U.S. automobile industry in a news conference that focused little on the economic and banking crises and instead touched on topics ranging from hand washing to state secrets.

“I’m actually very hopeful, more hopeful than I was 30 days ago,” Obama said last night about the likelihood that Chrysler LLC will reach a deal with debt holders, merge with Italy’s Fiat SpA and remain a competitive automaker. General Motors Corp. can also emerge from its financial woes as a “strong, competitive” company, he said.

Today: Chrysler files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.

Talks between the Treasury Department and lenders aimed at keeping Chrysler LLC out of bankruptcy broke down late Wednesday, making it all but certain that the car maker will file for Chapter 11 protection Thursday, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Administration officials, who have been braced for a Chrysler bankruptcy filing for weeks, say all the pieces are in place to get the country's third-largest employer through the court quickly, perhaps in a matter of weeks.

The talks with Chrysler's lenders broke down after the Obama administration's automotive task force worked into the evening to persuade several hedge funds and other lenders to accept a deal to reduce Chrysler's debt, said people involved in the talks.

Let's hope that not all of the President's optimism is so misplaced.

In a scene out of Bizzaro Top Gun here we can see terrified New Yorkers running for their lives as President Obama buzzes the city with a jumbo jet and fighters for a photo op.

It's hard to believe this actually happened.

(HT: 24th State.)

I like the earth: it's pretty much my favorite planet. I've got no problem with designating one day a year to celebrate how awesome the earth is... but the current incarnation of Earth Day misses the point completely.

Romans 1:25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Instead of modern-day paganism, the magnificence of creation should turn our eyes to our Creator. The earth is awesome because the God who made it is awesome.

Psalm 19:1-4

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.

I don't think the CIA interrogation memos should have been released by the Administration, but former Vice President Dick Cheney is right when he says that they only tell part of the story.

"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort," Cheney said.

Cheney said he's asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

Obama is in perpetual campaign mode and doesn't seem to know what it means to actually be President. When you're a candidate you can play up information that supports you and leave it to your detractors mention anything contrary. You're not (realistically) expected to be a responsible, neutral dispenser of information because you're speaking for yourself and you're trying to win political office. However, once you've won, when you're actually President, you don't just speak for yourself anymore. You can't wield the levers of government power to manipulate information in your favor.

Most Americans understand that there's a trade-off between liberty and safety. It's a clever turn of phrase that "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." but as with most absolutes it cannot be quite right. There are trade-offs in everything, and though it is noble for one man to die for a cause it is absurd for an entire civilization to do the same. People desire both liberty and safety, but when they are obtained they are both temporary and must be constantly defended. Despite Franklin's implication, however, you can never escape the slippery slope between them.

This is the discussion that Candidate Obama doesn't want to have, but President Obama is responsible for leading. Candidate Obama doesn't want to tell people "this much 'torture' bought you this much safety" because he's afraid that the verdict of the American people at large will be different from the verdict of the groups that put him in power. To avoid the discussion, he "leaked" memos that help his cause as if he were a whistleblower rather than The Man. As President he has a responsibility to all Americans and not only his supporters. When he begins to realize that he will perhaps begin to grow into the Office he already occupies.

(Cross-posted at 24th State.)

I'm personally skeptical about the sourcing of this "real story" behind the rescue of Captain Philips from the Somali pirates. The details are too-good-to-be-true for anyone of a conservative bent, and yet not so unbelievable that you can dismiss them out of hand. I imagine the story is close to the truth, even if the writer has no real direct knowledge of the incident.

The one fact that's hard to explain if the President didn't initially insist on a peaceful resolution is that Captain Philips jumped into the water during his first escape attempt and was fired upon, and yet the nearby naval vessels did not engage the pirates remaining on the boat. Once Captain Philips was clear, why weren't the pirates who were shooting at him from the boat immediately killed?

Anyway, I've gotten this story from many different directions all purporting to be true, which means it almost certainly isn't. But it may still be truthy!

I just got home from the Saint Louis Tax Day Tea Party... what a blast! It was the first protest I've been to where I wasn't counter-protesting!

I heard that the park rangers estimated attendance at 8,000 to 10,000 people, and based on my own naive counting I believe it. The atmosphere was incredible, the people were nice and enthusiastic, and everything went off without a hitch. Bill Hennessy, Dana Loesch, the other organizers, and Gateway Pundit (did he help organize?) all deserve a lot of credit.

My impression of the rally:

• It's a learning process. Many of the people there didn't seem to know exactly what to do, probably because this was the first rally they'd been to. The organizers didn't seem to lack for anything: they had free signs and took names and email addresses.
• Getting people out the first time is always the hardest. Now that these 10,000 people have been to one protest, it'll be much easier to get them to come to the next one, and to bring their friends.
• Elected Republicans should be worried. This crowd was their natural constituency, but no one hesitated to boo the officials who didn't show up because they weren't allowed to speak. The speakers went out of their way to highlight the failures of the Republican party over the past nine years, and the crowd was pleased to hear it.
• Representative Todd Aiken was a class act. He stood on stage and watched everything, even though he wasn't allowed/asked to speak. He stood there and took it, even while the crowd chanted "vote them out!".
• People were fired up and wanted to know "now what?". The main advice I'd give to the organizers is that they should have told us what to do next. Every attendee should have been given a flier with contact information for local officials, a URL to a website, and some hint of the next rally or activity that's going to happen. Hopefully the email addresses that were collected will be used for this kind of follow-up, but it would have been nice to have something in-hand when I left.

Here's a few seconds of video from the west side of Keiner Plaza. Keep in mind that there are at least as many people on the east side of the plaza on the opposite side of the speakers' platform.

Click the extended entry for pictures.

I guess it's sad for the people involved, but... it's kinda funny to me. Two killed in swordfight.

A man died Monday, days after he was stabbed in a swordfight with the grandson of a woman who was also fatally stabbed when she tried to intervene in the fight, police said. ...

Rondeau and Adolf Stegbauer got into an argument at a home in the 5200 block of Raceway Road that escalated when one of the men grabbed a sword, prompting the other man to also brandish a sword.

Not the... uh... sharpest knives in the drawer.

Glenn Reynolds gives a good overview of the Tax Day Tea Party movement.

The protests began with bloggers in Seattle, Wash., who organized a demonstration on Feb. 16. As word of this spread, rallies in Denver and Mesa, Ariz., were quickly organized for the next day. Then came CNBC talker Rick Santelli's Feb. 19 "rant heard round the world" in which he called for a "Chicago tea party" on July Fourth. The tea-party moniker stuck, but angry taxpayers weren't willing to wait until July. Soon, tea-party protests were appearing in one city after another, drawing at first hundreds, and then thousands, to marches in cities from Orlando to Kansas City to Cincinnati.

As word spread, people got interested in picking a common date for nationwide protests, and decided on today, Tax Day, as the date. As I write this, various Web sites tracking tea parties are predicting anywhere between 300 and 500 protests at cities around the world. A Google Map tracking planned events, maintained at the FreedomWorks.org Web site, shows the United States covered by red circles, with new events being added every day. ...

There's good news and bad news in this phenomenon for establishment politicians. The good news for Republicans is that, while the Republican Party flounders in its response to the Obama presidency and its programs, millions of Americans are getting organized on their own. The bad news is that those Americans, despite their opposition to President Obama's policies, aren't especially friendly to the GOP. When Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele asked to speak at the Chicago tea party, his request was politely refused by the organizers: "With regards to stage time, we respectfully must inform Chairman Steele that RNC officials are welcome to participate in the rally itself, but we prefer to limit stage time to those who are not elected officials, both in Government as well as political parties. This is an opportunity for Americans to speak, and elected officials to listen, not the other way around."

So, do you think they will listen? If not, what next?

The uproar over this DHS rightwing extremist report seems a but overwrought to me. A lot of the outrage seems to have started with Michelle Malkin, but the paranoia began with Roger Hedgecock. (Whereas other reaction, like Stephen Gordon, seems a bit more measured.)

Anyway, yes, I think the DHS bulletin is offensive and misguided. I'm not sure it's worth getting so worked up about, though.

ACORN comes across as rather petty as they dismiss interest in the Tea Party movement as beneath them.

"This is the first we've heard of these so-called 'tea parties.' And, frankly, a bunch of small get-togethers by fringe conservative activists dedicated to simply saying 'no' is of little interest to us," said ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring.

He did not say where the pro-Obama rallies would take place, leaving open the possibility that they may clash with some tea parties. ...

"The idea that ACORN is out to disrupt these meet-ups of fringe activists is yet another conservative fantasy," Kettenring said.

I'll be at the St. Louis Tax Day Tea Party, maybe we'll see some ACORNers there.

For decades the American carrier battle group has reigned supreme over the world's oceans, but now China may have an effective counter: the anti-surface ballistic missile (ASBM).

With tensions already rising due to the Chinese navy becoming more aggressive in asserting its territorial claims in the South China Sea, the U.S. Navy seems to have yet another reason to be deeply concerned.

After years of conjecture, details have begun to emerge of a "kill weapon" developed by the Chinese to target and destroy U.S. aircraft carriers.

First posted on a Chinese blog viewed as credible by military analysts and then translated by the naval affairs blog Information Dissemination, a recent report provides a description of an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) that can strike carriers and other U.S. vessels at a range of 2000km.

The Information Dissemination link has lots more technical information. One particularly interested tidbit is:

Reconnaissance Satellites - I think you can look at the Ziyuan and Yaogan series of satellites that have EO, CCD and SAR sensors as possibilities here. They could also be talking about the FY series, which is actually expected to be a constellation of Earth Observation satellites. I think it's important that in the 18th Committee on Earth Observation Satellites plenary and workshop in 2004, they announced they would launch over 100 Earth Observation satellites. I don't know enough about this to comment on which specific satellites I think will be used for scanning ships, but the blog did mention that China has used FY-2 series of satellites to track movement of targets. Another possibility is launching many short duration, micro-Earth Observation satellites in times of conflict. It mentioned that China can launch a 100 kg satellite on 12 hours notice. In peace mission 05. They launched an experimental satellite on August 2nd for detection/science experiment work. This operated for 27 days and returned to earth on August 29th after the conclusion of the exercise.

Emphasis mine.

Yeah yeah, I'm late. Too busy celebrating I guess. But still, happy Easter!

Despite the video below, the White House is denying that President Obama bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia.

Just jump to 0:50 in the video and decide for yourself!

The White House is denying that the president bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at a G-20 meeting in London, a scene that drew criticism on the right and praise from some Arab outlets.

"It wasn't a bow. He grasped his hand with two hands, and he's taller than King Abdullah," said an Obama aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Welcome aboard, new American citizens!