More Disaffected Dems

Earlier today I wrote about Democrats beginning to criticize Obama. Here is another example. Cenk Uygur is an MSNBC TV personality who is on the left politically. He writes in Huffington Post about Obama:

Just go talk to any group of liberals in the country and see if half of them aren't incredibly pissed off at him. I do it all the time and their whispers of discontent has grown into a cacophony.

Uygur predicts something we've speculated about here at COTTonLINE, a lack of liberal voter enthusiasm:

Giving the Republicans everything they want every single time doesn't appeal to any independents and will lead to half of your own voters staying at home.

He's probably wrong about some independents. Hat tip to RealClearPolitics for the link.

Point of Information

Articles about riots in London, and elsewhere in the U.K. almost uniformly fail to emphasize an important fact. Namely, that these are largely race riots. Most of the rioters are immigrant minorities.

Similarly, many articles about mobs doing violence in the U.S., in places like Philadelphia and Milwaukee, have the same shortcoming. Those too are race riots.

There is a conspiracy in the MSM to leave this fact out of such stories. It is, however, a fact you should know.

Sometimes if you read to the very end of a story you learn that race or ethnicity is an issue. People in the U.K. are unhappy about the news failure too, see this article in The Telegraph.

Political Humor Alert

John Steele Gordon, writing in Commentary about the President's speaking ability as demonstrated in the speech given following the downgrade:

How bad was the president’s speech yesterday? So bad that Dana Perino, former press secretary for George Bush, dismissed it on Fox News last night as the work of TOTUS (Teleprompter Of The United States).

Elegy for Los Angeles

I was born too many years ago in Hollywood, a Los Angeles neighborhood. Although I haven't lived there for most of my life, I continue to be interested in the fate of the City of Angels, or more formally The City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels, a very Hispanic and Roman Catholic name.

My favorite demographer, Joel Kotkin, has written a City Journal elegy for Los Angeles, which he sees on a downward slope. I believe my favorite part of the article is the three tables which show, graphically, the decline of L.A.

The first ranks the twenty largest metropolitan areas by the employment change over the period 2001 to 2011. Los Angeles is third from the bottom, with a loss of 7.1% of its jobs. Only San Francisco and Detroit lost more jobs.

The second chart shows the current unemployment rates of those same twenty metropolitan areas. LA is third from the top with an unemployment rate of 11.4%. Only Detroit and Riverside have higher unemployment rates.

Finally, the third chart looks at net migration in or out for those 20 metropolitan areas over the period 2001-2009. Los Angeles is at the bottom of the chart, having had the greatest out-migration: -11.7% net domestic migration, even greater than New York's at 11.4%.

Emperor's Nudity Realized

Shakespeare wrote in King Lear "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child." We understand this as a comment on the bitterness of having your own disrespect you.

Here at COTTonLINE we've taken a dim view of President Obama since he was elected in 2008, although we hoped to be proven wrong. Unfortunately, two and a half years of events have proven us right. Still, we were never that "thankless child," we didn't start out as Obama boosters.

Now we begin to see substantial numbers of Democrats openly expressing their dismay with the Obama presidency. Dana Milbank, who writes politics from the left for The Washington Post, has the following damning assessment:

The most powerful man in the world seems strangely powerless, and irresolute, as larger forces bring down the country and his presidency.

Then Milbank accuses Obama of failure to lead, saying of his "pep talk to the nation:"

He delivered his statement on the economy beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, but that was as close as he came to forceful leadership.

The rest of the column is the same sort of "what's wrong with Obama?" material from a "thankless child."

Quote of the Day

William McGurn, who writes for The Wall Street Journal, cracking wise about politics:

Amid the partisan bickering, there remains one principle on which all Americans are agreed: Any comparison to Jimmy Carter is always and everywhere a put-down.

Some have alleged that Obama is worse than Carter. I'll wait until mid-November, 2012, to finalize that judgment.

On His Watch

The U.S. Navy has a fine old tradition that we should apply in the current economic meltdown and debt downgrade. Whatever goes wrong on a Navy ship is the responsibility of the captain of the ship; as they say, "it happened on his watch."

The captain doesn't get to blame a snafu on insubordinate or underperforming shipmates. The buck stops with the captain.

The White House is trying to blame either Standard & Poor's or the Tea Party for the debt downgrade and subsequent stock market nosedive. That's nonsense; it happened on "Captain" Obama's watch and he must take the blame.

Ethnic Violence in China

The Uighur people of the western Xinjiang provence are Turkic and Muslim, whereas China's majority population is Han. Needless to say, the two groups are not compatible, in spite of PRC efforts to absorb the Uighur and dominate Xinjiang.

See this article in The Japan Times which deals with the ethnic troubles China faces in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. The article contains some interesting factoids:

Xinjiang's cultural capital, Kashgar, is closer to Baghdad than to Beijing.

Lhasa, Tibet's capital, is almost twice as far from the Chinese capital as from New Delhi.

The restive homelands of ethnic minorities make up 60 percent of Chinese territory — with Tibet and Xinjiang, by themselves, constituting nearly half of China's landmass.

China is the only significant country in the world whose official internal-security budget is higher than its official national-defense budget.

The View from Germany

We cite articles from the United Kingdom with some frequency. It is less common to link to an article from somewhere else in Europe, as we do here with this piece from Der Spiegel. It is a German's discouraged view of U.S. politics.

Jakob Augstein takes as his basic thesis that there is no longer something called "the West," something that includes both Europe and the U.S. He says we Americans have a "broken political culture" marked by hate. He finds the Tea Party values particularly distressing and un-European.

I particularly like this quote, as it suggests Augstein is understanding our differences:

From a European perspective, it all looks very strange: it's a different political culture. There are other rules at play, different standards. More and more we view America with the clear notion that we are different.

He is correct that where Europe is, and wants to be, is not where American conservatives want the U.S. to be.

The Columbian Exchange

COTTonLINE can't always maintain a laser-like focus on politics and foreign policy, or even strange science. Sometimes we need to wax philosophical, as we do here.

I just read a Wall Street Journal article about something called the Columbian Exchange, so named by historian Alfred W. Crosby, according to the article's author Charles C. Mann. He looks at all of the unintended biological, sociological and economic consequences of Christopher Columbus linking up Europe with the Americas.

Tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco, corn (aka maize) are all from the Americas, as are peppers. Can you imagine Italian cuisine before the tomato? Or imagine the hordes of Asia without their ever-present cigarettes? On the other hand, the citrus produced in Florida and California is an import from the old world. Mann has many more fun examples, I recommend the article to you.

Dropping the Bomb

Pundits never tire of debating the wisdom of the use by the U.S. of nuclear weapons upon Japan at the end of World War II. Mostly, those who find the use horrifying are trying by one means or another to show that the two nukes shouldn't have been dropped.

Now an ethnically Japanese historian who works in the United States, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, has come up with yet another argument. He believes the war ended because of the Soviet Union's last-minute declaration of war against Japan and attack upon their forces in Manchuria. The viewpoint is explained in an article by Gareth Cook in The Boston Globe.

The article emphasizes something rarely discussed in this literature: nukes weren't so very much worse than massive fire bomb raids on Tokyo and elsewhere, at least in the short run. I believe the comparison was true, before long term radiation damage could manifest itself.

Was President Harry S. Truman right to order the use of the atom bombs? Given the information he had, yes, certainly. Second-guessing history is a mug's game.

Political Humor Alert

Alex Spillius, writing in The Telegraph (U.K.), about whether, following the recent debt ceiling deal, the U.S. can continue to lead the world:

The world is one collapsed southern European economy away from disaster and crying out for American leadership, and Washington gave us another committee.

Committees have earned their bad reputation.

Quote of the Day

Doyle McManus, who writes for the Los Angeles Times and is often a panelist on Washington Week on PBS, leads his column with this thought:

The central question facing Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign is this: Can the president persuade voters to let him keep his job when so many of them have lost theirs?

Inasmuch as reelection campaigns are always a referendum on the performance of the incumbent President, the question is certainly central.

Weird Demographic Science

CNN World has an article about in which countries do people live longest. Of the top ten countries, numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 are all tiny mini-states or quasi-states. They are, in the order indicated: Monaco, Macau, San Marino, Andorra, Guernsey, Singapore, Hong Kong.

I'll bet you think the healthy Scandinavian countries are the balance of the top ten. Sorry, numbers 5, 9, and 10 are Japan, Australia, and Italy. These three are all serious nations, although only Japan has a partial reputation for healthy living.

What is there about tiny places that enables people to live longer? We don't know for certain, maybe they lie about their longevity? As King Mongkut said in The King and I, "It is a puzzlement."

A possible scenario: perhaps many tiny places don't have room or funds for retirement homes or fancy hospitals so these exist "across the border." Their elderly citizens may go across the border and die in the adjacent country, reducing the "at-home" death rate. I could believe that to be true of all the little places listed above except Singapore and to a lesser degree Hong Kong.

Political Humor Alert

The often humorous Mark Steyn, writing for the National Review Online, about the spending dysfunctions of our federal government:

America is a moat, and it’s filled with government spendaholics. You could toss a poor alligator in there, but they’d pick him clean in seconds, and leave what was left for Nancy Pelosi’s shoes.

Much of the article is a biting diatribe about the faults of GOP front-runner Mitt Romney.

County Fair Pig Judging

The other DrC has a blog (http://cruztalking.blogspot.com) entry on the county fair pig judging we saw this morning. She has some good photos of the event as well. I particularly recommend and endorse her conclusions about the good lessons learned through 4H.

A thing many may not know: 4H is an instrumentality of the U.S. Government, run by USDA. They have a beautiful old conference center on Connecticut Avenue, in Washington, D.C.

Back in the day I attended a couple of USDA meetings there, at one of which I heard the now-mildly-infamous Earl Butz speak. BTW, Earl was an excellent after-dinner speaker.

Predicted S&P Downgrade Occurs

The Associated Press reports on the Yahoo News page that the threatened Standard & Poor's downgrade of U.S. federal debt from AAA to AA+ has occurred. The article says S&P suggests that a further downgrade to AA could happen within the next two years.

Cost: Left Won't Bolt

Jay Cost, who writes for The Weekly Standard, examines the issue of whether there is any chance the left will do other than vote for Obama. His conclusion is strongly argued:

Obama will win 90 percent or so of the Democratic vote, and 90 percent of the liberal vote. It’s a guarantee.

As I've noted here, there is little chance of liberals voting Republican. There is a chance some of them will stay home or refuse to work for Obama's reelection.

Noonan on Reagan

Peggy Noonan, who writes for The Wall Street Journal, knows political speechwriting. She reminds us of why Reagan spoke so well:

In his farewell address he went out of his way to say he never thought of himself as a great communicator. He thought he simply communicated great things.

"Great things" are things your audience believes to be both true and important.

Glamour vs. Charisma

Virginia Postrel, writing for Bloomberg, does an insightful analysis of our President's difficulties. She says in 2008 we thought he had charisma but all he really had was glamour.

Postrel points out how these two are not the same. Perhaps the key quote is this:

If you think of Barack Obama as a charismatic president, it is hard to explain why his supporters are so angry. He should be able to win them over. But if you understand his appeal as glamour, then his problems aren’t surprising.

And she explains why.