Russia: the friend of my enemy...

Just so we’re all on the same page regarding Russia.  I think it was a great step forward for us and for them when the Berlin wall fell in 1990.  The United States got to relax a little bit on the foreign policy front.  Russia got to experience capitalistic markets and freedom of travel.  Soviet satellites got to elect their own governments and have self rule for the first time in 50 or 60 years. 

However, Russia seems hell bent on traveling back into the Soviet era.  It’s been pretty well documented that President Putin has orchestrated violence in Chechnya, meddled in the politics of several former Soviet states, and tightened his grip on power at home.  Putin has taken to criticizing the United States for our unilateralist ways.

You see, not only did Putin apparently forget that he himself rules over Russia in a totally unilateral manner, he also forgot the context in which his remarks were being made. It’s a context of (a) massive military buildup and (b) horrifying incidents of political murder and (c) worldwide fear of Russian efforts to weaponize its energy resources. Putin has just announced a nearly 25% increase in Russian military spending including massive arms sales to American enemies like China, Iran, and Venezuela, and he has presided over a litany of killings of Kremlin critics ranging from Anna Politkovskaya to Alexander Litvinenko (in between are more than a dozen journalists including many names Westerners hardly even know, like Yuri Shchekochikhin). He’d kicked Western oil companies out of Russia’s major oil and gas fields, and gone so far as to arrest and jail major oil company executives (in fact, he just recently announced a whole new round of charges against Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky, essentially trying him for the same crime twice).

Instead of trying to put out the fires of Western concern over these issues, Putin arrogantly chose to pour gasoline on them, just as was done in Soviet times.

At the end of the “cold war” we started treating a long time enemy as an ally, welcoming them with open arms into the western world of capitalism and democracy.  We had assumed that they wanted to be there.  I’m sure that many of them do want to be there, but the leaders seem to be stuck in another era.

We need to stop treating Russia like a friend or even a curious stranger, but as a thug on a dark corner with not so friendly intentions.  That thug is selling weapons to those who would use them to harm the United States or our citizens and slowly attempting to rebuild the former glorious empire.

Recall that early in his administration, Bush met with Putin in Texas and declared that Putin was a friend and that he had looked into his eyes to get a “sense of his soul” and apparently saw nothing nasty there.  Well, George, I see something awry there, and you need to accept that you made a mistake and do something about it instead of ignore the problem and hope people forget that you said that.

Also, check out this post about Turkmenistan, another former Soviet satellite.  They just lost their dearly departed fascist Putin-puppet, and are poised to re-emerge as an independent, and possible western-friendly, nation.  There’s just one catch, that their prime income is natural gas, and their only means to transport it are Russian pipelines.  Robert Mayer sees a way that the United States can make good with the people of Turkmenistan and gain a new friend in a critical region.

Cuba: power void coming

Cuba: the power void.  I.E. what happens when (and just before) Castro leaves this mortal coil at last?
Here’s a story about a couple of military conscripts who killed a senior officer.  The conscripts were trying to help an inmate of the prison they were assigned to escape.

Publius has some thoughts on this.  Notably:

A power void is being sensed. Obviously, Castro’s demise is creating less and less sense of direction, and people in leadership positions don’t know what to do, because they don’t know whether Castro will get well or not. If they make decisions on their own, and then Castro gets well, they could get into trouble if Castro doesn’t like those decisions. Therefore, they have every incentive toward inaction until they are sure the Havana Vampire is dead for good.

Which immediately shows the inefficiencies and flaws in a system where one man has such a tight grip on the reigns of power.

Speaking of tight grips on power, more action from Hurricane Hugo.  Shutting down a Venezuela’s oldest television station and then declaring himself dictator.

Suicide and war tactics

I was watching a WWII documentary on PBS last night, and found some parallels to the current conflict.  Not direct ones and not what you'd think, but they got me thinking.

One of the more devastating weapons that the Japanese had was suicide bombers.  Of course these were not the type that strapped TNT to their chest and walked into coffee shops, but flew missiles with wings (seriously, they showed armed missiles with tiny cockpits and wings, the only purpose being a one way mission for the pilot).  There were also tiny submarines (6 to 8 feet long) built for the same purpose. 

One main difference was that the Japanese were a bit more honorable than to fly into a coffee shop or something, they were aiming at military targets in their own corner of the ocean.  They're purpose at that stage was desperation, and protection of their homeland.

On the other hand, the U.S. was not afraid to bomb civilians during WWII.   I'm not even going to get into the heavy carpet bombing of Germany, which had the sole intention of killing civilians and destroying cities to affect the German morale.  The U.S. spent a lot of time carpet bombing Japan to, sometimes military targets, but other times cities as well.

The ultimate expression of this was Truman's decision to target two large cities for detonation of the first (and only) wartime use of nuclear weapons.  We targeted civilians because we didn't want to lose any more of our own soldiers trying to invade Japan.  We did it to force them to surrender.  The Japanese were very sensitive to the protection of their families (one of the reasons they fought so hard to keep us out of their ocean). 

So is it wrong that Islamists go after civilians?  I still think it is, but it's not as clear cut as you might think, otherwise we have to denounce the methods of our own generals and Presidents during WWII.

The most important reason I think it's wrong in the current case is motive.  What are they trying to accomplish by killing civilians.  In our case in WWII, we didn't start the conflict.  In fact we were trying to keep out of it when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor (once again, they attacked a military target, not Honolulu).  Also, the Japanese were not all that altruistic either.  Trying to make the best use of military equipment meant trying to reduce U.S. forces and breaking our will to fight in the Pacific.  They could have wasted time and energy trying to bomb mainland U.S. targets, but our Pacific fleet would have walked all over them.

The Japanese also spent considerable effort treating Chinese civilians with much brutality, killing entire villages and small cities worth of them as they rampaged across the Chinese countryside.

Also, we have stopped carpet bombing to get our objectives accomplished, preferring to use strategic and targeted attacks made possible by advances in technology.  However, Islamists don’t have the option of numbers, higher technology or an industrial nation’s resources to compete with us mano-a-mano, so they have to go the guerilla route.

This is not to excuse their tactics, it’s just a bit to think about when we criticize their methods outright.

Road congestion fees

The Kat’s Meow has link to an article about congestion pricing on federal highways.  Joseph Giglio outlines the latest attempt to get this going, but I’m skeptical that it’s going to go anywhere.  Let me rephrase that:  I won’t be totally surprised if something happens here, because it generates money for the government, but considering that it takes something that’s been free for so long, like the National Forests, and puts the management into the hands of private industry, I’m not thinking that we’re going to see this very soon.

I understand the idea, that charging people to use the highways during peak traffic periods would help pay for repairs and reduce the congestion, giving people a smoother ride, reducing road rage and freeing people’s time (and time is money, right?). 

I have some problems with all this, but only small ones.  I’m not against doing this, but Giglio says at least one thing that I don’t agree with.

Congestion pricing means true consumer sovereignty, while liberating the roadway system from dependency on already inadequate revenue sources, like motor vehicle fuel taxes, and construction grants from the Federal Transportation Trust Fund. Not least of all, it's an opportunity to improve the efficiency of our roadway systems.

Gas taxes are inadequate?  Actually, I think that gas taxes are inadequately applied, but only in the sense that we aren’t paying enough of them.  Now don’t get all angry because you think that gas prices are already too high, I would argue that they still aren’t as historically high as they could be, and if any one of the countries we import from runs their supply (or their economy) into the ground the price is going to get lots higher.

But that’s another discussion.  The only true measure of how much people are using the road system is how much gas they are using.  You can argue that cars with higher MPG aren’t paying their fair share, but usually those cars have less impact on the system.  Hybrid cars entering the equation also will need special consideration.  But higher gas taxes have the added benefit of forcing people to use less gas and ease the air pollution. 

I think that the federal and state government should be relying MORE on the gas taxes to maintain and build roads, but then the money they’re spending now on that would just get shuffled instead of reducing the income taxes we pay.

All this to say congestion pricing might be a good idea, but only as a way to reduce congestion on the roads, not as the best way to maintain the system.

Russia: the friend of my enemy...

Just so we’re all on the same page regarding Russia.  I think it was a great step forward for us and for them when the Berlin wall fell in 1990.  The United States got to relax a little bit on the foreign policy front.  Russia got to experience capitalistic markets and freedom of travel.  Soviet satellites got to elect their own governments and have self rule for the first time in 50 or 60 years. 

However, Russia seems hell bent on traveling back into the Soviet era.  It’s been pretty well documented that President Putin has orchestrated violence in Chechnya, meddled in the politics of several former Soviet states, and tightened his grip on power at home.  Putin has taken to criticizing the United States for our unilateralist ways.

You see, not only did Putin apparently forget that he himself rules over Russia in a totally unilateral manner, he also forgot the context in which his remarks were being made. It’s a context of (a) massive military buildup and (b) horrifying incidents of political murder and (c) worldwide fear of Russian efforts to weaponize its energy resources. Putin has just announced a nearly 25% increase in Russian military spending including massive arms sales to American enemies like China, Iran, and Venezuela, and he has presided over a litany of killings of Kremlin critics ranging from Anna Politkovskaya to Alexander Litvinenko (in between are more than a dozen journalists including many names Westerners hardly even know, like Yuri Shchekochikhin). He’d kicked Western oil companies out of Russia’s major oil and gas fields, and gone so far as to arrest and jail major oil company executives (in fact, he just recently announced a whole new round of charges against Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky, essentially trying him for the same crime twice).

Instead of trying to put out the fires of Western concern over these issues, Putin arrogantly chose to pour gasoline on them, just as was done in Soviet times.

At the end of the “cold war” we started treating a long time enemy as an ally, welcoming them with open arms into the western world of capitalism and democracy.  We had assumed that they wanted to be there.  I’m sure that many of them do want to be there, but the leaders seem to be stuck in another era.

We need to stop treating Russia like a friend or even a curious stranger, but as a thug on a dark corner with not so friendly intentions.  That thug is selling weapons to those who would use them to harm the United States or our citizens and slowly attempting to rebuild the former glorious empire.

Recall that early in his administration, Bush met with Putin in Texas and declared that Putin was a friend and that he had looked into his eyes to get a “sense of his soul” and apparently saw nothing nasty there.  Well, George, I see something awry there, and you need to accept that you made a mistake and do something about it instead of ignore the problem and hope people forget that you said that.

Also, check out this post about Turkmenistan, another former Soviet satellite.  They just lost their dearly departed fascist Putin-puppet, and are poised to re-emerge as an independent, and possible western-friendly, nation.  There’s just one catch, that their prime income is natural gas, and their only means to transport it are Russian pipelines.  Robert Mayer sees a way that the United States can make good with the people of Turkmenistan and gain a new friend in a critical region.

LIDAR project in Oregon

I work in the Geographic Information Systems industry, or more to the point, I am a GIS Analyst working for a company that uses that technology in planning and analysis as a part of it’s business model.

With that said, you can imagine that it’s not often that my profession gets brought up in the news very prominently.  Sure, you get fancy maps on the front page to visually aid the reader in understanding news in some region far away from the local area.  Those maps are usually generated with geographic information system software of some sort.  Many media outlets now employ people whose career or training includes GIS.

But an article that specifically talks about the technology only comes around occasionally.  But this week one appeared on the front page of the Oregonian. 

The article is on a project that the state, along with federal and Portland State University geologists to survey parts of Oregon using remote sensing technology to discover and map all the various slides and slide-prone slopes in order to help home owners and home builders assess where the dangers are.

Specifically the technology is called LIDAR (light detection and ranging), which is like RADAR, but uses light pulses instead of radio waves.  The article does a decent job of describing the technology to the lay person, so I won’t go into it here.

The applications for this are numerous, from discovering landslides and ditches to more accurately designing roads through mountainous areas, to inventorying tree canopy and volumes, to studying watersheds with greater accuracy, to analyzing urban areas.  You can get tree and building densities and heights or find drainage patterns in the city that aren’t evident, even from the ground.

It’s an exciting technology, and kudos to the Oregonian for making it a front page extravaganza.

Walid Jumblatt

Michael Totten interviews the Druze radical and anti-Syrian Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt. There simply is no better journalist in Lebanon right now than blogger Michael Totten.

“Nobody in Lebanon said or believed it was possible to disarm Hezbollah by force,” he said. “But nobody else also…as a Lebanese I don’t accept a state within a state. We have a state within a state. And a separate army, the Hezbollah army, next to the official army. Their intelligence is stronger than our intelligence. They control part of Lebanon without the possibility of the Lebanese state to enter it and enforce law and order. That’s the situation.”

“So what do you think the solution is?” I said.

“The solution is not in Lebanon,” he said. “The solution is in Tehran.”

When asked about Iraq and whether America should leave...

“It would be bad for Lebanon and for the Middle East if the US withdraws from the Middle East. Because we will face a different Arab and Muslim world. It is very strange and ironic that even the pro-Iranians in Iraq are asking the Americans to stay. You could write a theater about it. Making the Americans totally withdraw from the Arab world would be a mistake, would be a disaster for the moderates in the Arab world. The radicals and the Iranians would win.”

Darfur. Again.

There’s still nothing being done about the genocide in Darfur.

By now, these sadists and their powerful patrons must have figured out the obvious: that no one is going to stop them. Nearly six months have passed since the United Nations authorized the deployment of peacekeepers to end the genocide. But Khartoum continues to wrangle and bluster over the terms of that deployment, and it still seems unlikely that a U.N. force large enough to stop the killing will ever arrive in western Sudan. Meanwhile, many, including the U.N.'s new secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, hold out hope for a negotiated settlement between Darfur's rebel groups and Khartoum. But, so far, the rebel factions haven't even been able to unite, let alone bargain effectively with the government. And, besides, Khartoum--which wants to prolong the genocide it designed and orchestrated--is hardly in a rush to cement a genuine peace accord.

I often wonder if there was something that you or I can do, but apart from write your Senator or Rep, or the President himself, I think this is about all I can do.  We need to take action, realizing that the UN will never do anything to stop this.  We all did say something like “never again” regarding genocide, didn’t we?

Solar warming?

Climate change might be more controlled by solar radiation than by greenhouse gasses.  At least that’s the news that would be reaching your TV if the media weren’t so committed to repeating and promoting the mantra that humans are the cause of the recent climactic changes.

You might have read recently that new reports revealed that humans in fact were the cause of the greenhouse effect.  But that report, which has yet to officially see the light of day, says that scientists are only 90% certain that that’s the case.

The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latter-day Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

But some scientists, who have better track records predicting climate changes, think that the sun and the stars affect our climate more than we ever could.

The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

So it’s not a closed case, is it?  If there’s one scientist on earth who can provide a convincing argument, or a repeatable experiment, that contradicts the theories of the majority of scientists, then it’s not a closed case.  That’s science.  The meme that Al Gore and the press would have you believe, that the debate on global warming is over, is politics.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

New Dollar Coins and the Penny debate

The government is creating a new series of dollar coins, extending the use past the  Susan B/Sacagawea area.  The format will be like the modern Quarter, in that the face will cycle through all the Presidents of the USA in order, starting with Washington this year. 

One wonders what they are trying to accomplish with this, other than people buying the coins for the single purpose of taking them out of circulation and into collections.   There is considerable discussion about the option of replacing the dollar bill with the dollar coin going forward, but the arguments against doing that are still strong.  Dollar bills are much more easily carried around. 

I think that in time, once inflation gets to the point that bubble gum costs a dollar, replacing the bill might be a better idea, but for now the bill stays.

However, I’m still a proponent of removing the penny from circulation entirely.  People still seem not to agree with that, as the AP poll indicated that over 70% of the 1,000 people asked said that it shouldn’t be eliminated.  However, how many people are aware that the penny costs more to make than it’s worth in the marketplace (1.4 cents per penny)?  How much money would the government (our taxes, remember) save not having to manufacture pennies any more?  Their only purpose these days is to make up the difference in sales taxes, which are calculated as a fraction of a dollar.  Sure, you say, that fraction often ends up in between nickels, i.e. 3% sales tax on two dollars is 6 cents).  But at another level, 3% of $2.50 is .075 cents, and we don’t worry about the .5 cents.  It’s meaningless.  As are pennies in this day and age.

I’d rather save the tax revenue.

The Good Stem Cells

Stem cells are cells originating in some area of human biology that can be used to recreate tissues of the human body.  Their most obvious application would be for replacement organs, skin, muscle, bone matter, etc.  Basically, embryonic stem cells have been the ones that scientists with much media access have been promising are the only ones that can be made into all three different “germ layers” or subtypes of cells.  That is to say they can be used to create any type of cell structure in the human body.

There have been small blurbs and hiccups as of late regarding adult stem cells and their utility for creating human tissues.

For a long while, adult stem cells were believed to be only capable of differentiation to a limited number of mature cells, depending on the type of adult stem cell with which you start. For example, a marrow cell could become any number of types of marrow or blood cells, but it couldn't become a muscle cell. That's a different germ layer.

Yet it's been virtually a state secret that for over five years researchers, beginning with a team headed by physician Catherine Verfaillie of the University of Minnesota Stem Cell Institute, have been reporting numerous types of adult stem cells (she used those from marrow) that in the lab could form mature cells from three germ layers.

But never mind all that.  Adult stem cells can’t be multiplied outside of the body for very long, whereas embryonic stem cells may replicate in a lab for years.

And lets also forget the fact that embryonic stem cell research has produced no viable treatments as of yet, whereas adult stem cells have been producing treatments for about 40 or 50 years now.

But the big excitement is that there might be an even better option.

Anthony Atala, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, reported that stem cells in the amniotic fluid that fills the sac surrounding the fetus may be just as versatile as embryonic stem cells. At the same time they maintain all the advantages that have made adult stem cells such a success.

The advantage there is that taking stem cells from amniotic fluid is a pretty low risk procedure, and is done quite frequently anyway during amniocentesis when testing the fetus for problems.

I’m not holding my breath that this gets out with any gusto by the larger media outlets.
Even better,  I’ll bet you all didn’t know this:

Scientifically, all embryonic stem cells tend to become cancerous; they require permanent, dangerous, immunosuppressive drugs because the body rejects them as foreign; and they are difficult to differentiate into the needed type of mature cells. Non-embryonic stem cells, however, do not become cancerous; they are far less likely to cause rejection (especially the youngest, including umbilical cord and amniotic/placenta); and they have been used therapeutically since the late 1950s (originally for leukemia) because they have the amazing ability to form the right type of mature cell merely upon being injected into a body that needs that type of cell.

It is these biological differences that have held embryonic stem cell research back, not a lack of federal funds.

The only problem with this, of course, for the left, is that it would take the heat off of President Bush entirely.  So here’s a funny question.  If Bush had never opposed funding stem cell research based on embryonic stem cells, would the left had come to the conclusion that embryonic stem cells should be left behind in favor of other types on their own, as there would be no reason to champion the embryonic sort politically?  Should we blame Bush for the media cover up of these more viable methods?

Armenian holocaust

Just finished watching the movie Ararat, from writer/director Atom Egoyan.  The movie is about the Armenian holocaust, similar to the Jewish holocaust in that Armenians claim that Turkish Ottomans attempted to exterminate the Armenian people’s during WWI.

(The mountain of Ararat is in Turkey, area of traditional Armenia close to the present day Armenian border.  It is over 16,000 feet high, 5000 meters, is a stratovolcano.  Most Armenian history is centered in the area around the mountain.  It is the traditional location of the final resting place for Noah’s Ark)

The background is more detailed than that, with the Ottomans on the tail edge of an empire that extends back several hundred  years, and after WWI the empire would fall and organize around the Turkish republic that exists today.  Reading the history, it’s unclear how much the Armenians were pushing for more territory, knowing that the Ottoman’s were weakening and they would get support from Russia, and it might be that they were working on the side of the Russians, but the manner in which the Turks responded was devastating.  It’s estimated that almost a million people, men women and children, were killed, allowed to starve to death, succumb to diseases or just outright shot.

You might say that this was a function of Turkey’s effort to fight a Russian front, but the history of Ottoman discrimination against the Armenians because of their Christian heritage is pretty well documented, and the party in power in Constantinople at the time was lead by Ismail Enver, a radical racist.

It’s also documented that there was a system of concentration camps similar in function to the Nazi camps during WWII.  Since the Ottomans were on Germany’s side during the first world war, many Germans recorded the Armenian condition.  Many were disgusted, but the international reaction was muted, and Hitler noted that the world seemed to have forgotten about the Armenians.  He folded that into his worldview about the Jews and justified his strategy of genocide with the adage that “no one remembers the Armenians.”

Actual Hitler quote:

“I have placed my death-head formation in readiness -- for the present only in the East -- with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space [Lebensraum] which we need. Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

The movie wasn’t all that good, in the end.  The story was about Armenian immigrants to Canada, living there but still dealing emotionally with the events of the past in Turkey.  The story centers around a film being made by an old survivor’s son who just wants the story to be told.  However, I found the acting to be sub-par (with exception to Christopher Plummer) and the plot to be scattered at times.  There is no effort given to any treatment of Turkish people, except for a man of Turkish descent who is acting in the movie, characterized by boorish attitude and is gay.

I also thought that there was too much violence and sexual situations.  Do you have to show the sex and the rape and focus on it for more than 30 seconds at a time for this to be a good movie?  No, and the movie lingered too long on scenes like this with no purpose.  It should be enough to say there was rape and murder without having to show so much of it.

Anyway, I won’t be seeing that movie again, and don’t really recommend it.  However, I do recommend reading some on the holocaust materials and learning a little bit about Armenia.  It’s a culture that goes back to Biblical times, during the empires of Sumer, Babylon and Assyria.  The tribes of the region were first united into a nation some time before 1000 BC, but the first well known nation in the region was the Urartu, which caused the empires of the Mesopotamian plains much grief.  They, along with the Hittites of Anatolia, were the reason that the Babylonians and Assyrians never were able to tame the mountains and expand the empires into what is now modern day Turkey.

Armenia, in 300AD, was one of the first nations, if not the first, to recognize Christianity as the state religion.  They have been predominately Christian ever since, resisting conversion from Islamic movements across the plateau for over a millennia.

However, they have come under the rule of many empires in that time, including the Byzantine, Arabic, Persian and Ottoman empires.  In the 20^th century, the eastern part of historic Armenia (outside Turkey) became independent for a couple of years after WWI before the Soviet red army took over.  They regained independence in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved, but still only control an area slightly larger than Maryland.

Armenia today is a republic, with a President, Prime Minster and a single parliament (unicameral).  They’ve done better than some at recovering from the Soviet dominated economic system, moved away from the large agro-industrial system in place before 1991 to a mix of small scale agriculture and service industry.

They have had tension with Muslim Azerbaijan (which is east, on the Caspian coast) over a region called Nagorno-Karabakh, which the Soviets gave to Azerbaijan in the 1920s, but is culturally Armenian.  Since 1991 many people of both cultures have been driven out of their homes one way or the other by both countries.

Government Blackmail

Once upon a time there was a government that was running out of all the money that it wanted to expand and maintain a cafeteria of services to the community.  Whether government should or should not be offering all the services that legislators and special interests want it to is another question, but here is the government we have.

Take education for instance.  Budget shortfalls are common, but the tough questions are not asked, like why is the budget so high, and at least reasonable by other state’s standards, but coming up short at the school level.  So the powers that be, education loving legislators, school pundits and supporters cry that our schools are withering away and don’t have enough money, but in order to convince us that we need to pony up more money, they do something deplorable.

They dangle very popular programs in front of us, saying that these age-old programs, like sports and music, will have to go if they don’t get more money.  Sometimes that works.  Other times it doesn’t.

In November, both Jackson and Josephine Counties voted against the levies necessary to keep their libraries open.  Neither was close--59/41 there and 57/43 here in JoCo.  They were the only two library levies in the state that were voted down; twelve passed and two failed because not enough folks voted.  Note that in Jackson County's case, the levy was to be paid only if the safety net (county payments and O&C funding) went away.

To many voters, library funding was simply the opening volley in a bigger battle over potential tax increases and cuts in services driven by the loss of the safety net.  In both cases, county leadership dangled the libraries before the voters as the first cut unless a new levy was approved.  Voters reacted badly to the blackmail.

I wish that lobbyists in Oregon would figure this out.  Oregonians are increasingly hostile toward tax increases to the point that soon only Multnomah county will be able to pass any.  A few years ago, in 2000, Multnomah passed one of the only local income taxes in the nation to support the local school systems during the recession.  When the tax expired, they tried to extend the income tax, although a lesser percentage than before.  An attempt was made to make it more palatable by asking the surrounding counties to join in on the fun.  The surrounding counties outright refused to be included, as it polled very badly in those regions.   So the income tax died a timely death.

But the situation remains.  Even though the economy has returned to some semblance of pre-recession levels, the schools are apparently still in financial trouble.  Why is that?  Could the districts perhaps be poorly run? 

I remember reading in an Oregonian article years ago that even though the Portland School District was losing students dramatically, the central offices were actually expanding, and bureaucracies have a tendency for resisting any reduction in size.  But dangling programs that are important to the public is blackmail, plain and simple, and eventually the voters aren’t going to play that game and everyone is going to lose, like poor Jackson County.

Give strategy a chance

Foreign Policy magazine is certainly not a bastion of conservatives, so when they advise that we should all at least give Bush’s troop surge a chance before condemning it, that’s significant.

The cold, hard truth about the Bush administration’s strategy of ‘surging’ additional U.S. forces into Iraq is that it could work. Insurgencies are rarely as strong or successful as the public has come to believe. Iraq’s various insurgent groups have succeeded in creating a lot of chaos. But they’re likely not strong enough to succeed in the long term. Sending more American troops into Iraq with the aim of pacifying Baghdad could provide a foundation for their ultimate defeat, but only if the United States does not repeat its previous mistakes.

The mistakes they are referring to regard our behavior in Vietnam, of course, which had nothing to do with military defeat and everything to do with political defeat here at home.

Myths about invincible guerrillas and insurgents are a direct result of America’s collective misunderstanding of its defeat in South Vietnam. This loss is generally credited to the brilliance and military virtues of the pajama-clad Vietcong. The Vietnamese may have been tough and persistent, but they were not brilliant. Rather, they were lucky-they faced an opponent with leaders unwilling to learn from their failures: the United States. When the Vietcong went toe-to-toe with U.S. forces in the 1968 Tet Offensive, they were decimated. When South Vietnam finally fell in 1975, it did so not to the Vietcong, but to regular units of the invading North Vietnamese Army. The Vietcong insurgency contributed greatly to the erosion of the American public’s will to fight, but so did the way that President Lyndon Johnson and the American military waged the war. It was North Vietnam’s will and American failure, not skillful use of an insurgency, that were the keys to Hanoi’s victory.

Some insurgencies do succeed, but in order to do so, they must have some semblance of a regular army to back up the pot-shots that guerrilla fighters take on the enemy’s forces.  Such as the American revolutionary forces.  The Iraq insurgency has no such force.

Donald Stoker worries that this new strategy comes to late, and that public opinion and morale has already fallen to such a low point that American resolve to withstand the insurgency might fail before al-Qaeda’s guerrilla’s finally give out.  I don’t think we’re there yet, and since Bush doesn’t have to worry about another election soon, there’s time for this action to show some results before the Republicans really get hammered in congress.

However, you’ll notice that after sustaining losses in the last election, many Republicans are playing a game of cut-and-run on the President.  After years of support they are starting to distance themselves for runs in 2008, and even out own Senator, Gordon Smith, is voting for the resolution to condemn Bush’s new strategy before it even hits the ground.  To do so, without any real evidence that the strategy won’t work, or the importance of maintaining security in Iraq, is just political pandering at the expense of the Iraqis and the battle with worldwide extremism.  I can’t respect that, and might find myself voting against Smith the next time he’s up for re-election.  Sad, but true.

The left has been pushing for years that Iraq is just like Vietnam, no matter how much evidence to the contrary.  But prophecy can be self-fulfilling if enough people believe it, and that’s what we’re facing now.