Of Course U.S. Rebalancing Is about China. by Justin Logan

Brad Glosserman has penned a provocative article arguing that America's rebalancing toward the Asia-Pacific isn't about "fear of China." Fear may be too strong a word, but the argument is still wrong. Of course it's about China.

It's telling that Glosserman's article itself is all about China. For instance, he mentions Washington's support for freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. But the recent friction hasn't been between Vietnam and the Philippines. It isn't Malaysia claiming almost all the territorial waters there. No, the current panic in the South China Sea is all about China.

Conversations with 'Gov. Gary'. by Gene Healy

Last fall, GQ ran a profile of former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, under the headline "Is This the Sanest Man Running for President?" The piece noted that in 2003, Johnson scaled Mount Everest with a broken leg, and in 2005, broke his back paragliding off the highest mountain in Maui. "Sanest"? Well, maybe not.

But Johnson, now running on the Libertarian Party ticket, is certainly the most interesting candidate in the 2012 field — and that's not an attempt to damn with faint praise.

Photo credit: Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com

The Richter Scale > Global Politics Mitt Romney Vs. Republican Bigotry
By Stephan Richter

The United States was founded on the principle of religious tolerance. And yet, Barack Obama’s reelection hopes may rest on a sizable segment of the country’s conservative electorate being unable to bring itself to vote for a Mormon for president, explains Stephan Richter.

ormer Massachusetts governor and current U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney may succeed in tapping into the coffers of former financial backers of the Bush family’s political fortunes. One would expect no less from a man who has all the patrician bearing of George Bush, Sr.

But all of the money raking, supremely important as it is in U.S. elections, may do him no good in the end.

Will bigotry among Republicans help deliver a second term to a man whom they profess to disdain, if not hate?

At a recent discussion, I asked a speculative question about the policies of a future Romney Administration. It was a largely Republican crowd, and I had tried to be nice. To no avail. As I was walking out after the event, a septuagenarian defense type sidled up to me and hissed under his breath, “This country will never elect a Mormon as president.”

And then I realized that the man, acting so adamantly against his own basic political instincts, had basically pronounced Barack Obama’s reelection. Lots of disappointed liberals may stay home in November 2012, but so will a lot of Republicans if Mitt Romney is their party’s standard-bearer.

Photo credit: SVLuma/Shutterstock.com

Globalist Perspective > Global Finance Rebuilding Through Reform: How to Ensure Global Financial Stability
By Esther L. George \|

While policymakers are busy trying to mitigate the damage of the recent financial crisis, they also need to be thinking ahead to the next crisis. Esther L. George, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, urges policymakers to ask what really went wrong last time — and what can be done to build a more resilient financial system for the future.

he current crisis is following much the same pattern of previous financial crises — an inability or unwillingness to see the warning signs and take preventive action, followed by massive damage, and then working through the emergency policy steps and the rebuilding of our financial system.

Financial institutions want to get back quickly to a more profitable state, and the public wants a prompt and painless return to prosperity.

While we know we cannot prevent the next financial crisis, public policy and preventive steps play an important role in establishing the overall stability and resiliency of our financial system. Consequently, getting these steps right is essential if we are to avoid setting the stage for an even more severe crisis.
We must also recognize that our resolve in dealing with financial crises unfortunately tends to diminish after a crisis passes. Understandably, financial institutions want to get back quickly to a more profitable state, and the public wants a prompt and painless return to the prosperity they enjoyed before the crisis.

As a result of this substantial pressure, many policymakers and market participants become reluctant when it is time to make the hard judgments about effective reforms and instituting greater risk restraints. Signs of this are already occurring with the efforts by financial institutions and others to weaken or delay stronger capital standards and other provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act. That would be unwise.

Tyrants and Human Nature

Walter E. Williams

The agendas of liberals, progressives and assorted tyrants desperately depend on the aspects of human nature they often condemn, such as acquisitiveness, profit motive, self-interestedness and greed. This crossed my mind while reading "How Departures From Economic Freedom Can Affect Freedom In General," by Dr. John Taylor, a Hoover Institution scholar. Taylor tells how former Wells Fargo CEO Dick Kovacevich was forced to take Troubled Asset Relief Program funds even though Wells Fargo did not need or want the funds. Kovacevich was threatened that if he did not accept TARP money, regulators would declare his bank capital-deficient even though Wells Fargo had a triple-A rating. At the time, October 2008, Wells Fargo was in the process of acquiring Wachovia, and to be declared capital-deficient would have killed the deal. U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke could rely on acquisitiveness, profit motive and self-interestedness to bully Wells Fargo into accepting TARP money. They also knew that Wells Fargo's competitors would go after Wachovia. If all sound banks had refused TARP money, Paulson and Bernanke's tyrannical threats would have failed.

Crovitz: Who Really Invented the Internet?

A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: "The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet."
It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.

News Versus Propaganda

Thomas Sowell

Since so many in the media cannot resist turning every tragedy into a political talking point, it was perhaps inevitable that (1) someone would try to link the shooting rampage at the Batman movie in Colorado to the Tea Party, and that (2) some would try to make it a reason to impose more gun control laws.
Too many people in the media cannot seem to tell the difference between reporting the news and creating propaganda.

Mexican Drug Trafficking (Mexico's Drug War)

Although Mexico has been a producer and transit route for illegal drugs for generations, the country now finds itself in a pitched battle with powerful and well-financed drug cartels.
In January 2012, the Mexican government reported that 47,515 people had been killed in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderón began a military assault on criminal cartels soon after taking office in late 2006.
The official tally, provided by the attorney general’s office, included data only through September 2011, and it showed that drug-related killings increased 11 percent, to 12,903, compared with the same nine-month period in 2010. Still, a government statement sought to find a silver lining, asserting that it was the first year since 2006 “that the homicide rate increase has been lower compared to the previous years.”
But that was unlikely to calm a public scared by the arrival of grisly violence in once-safe cities like Guadalajara and in the region around Mexico City.

Once Just a Stopover for Drug Traffickers, Argentina Has Now Become a Destination. By EMILY SCHMALL

BUENOS AIRES — Héctor Jairo Saldarriaga, alias the Dagger, changed his address here three times in the weeks before his killer finally caught up with him in April in front of a family-run cafe in the middle-class neighborhood of Barrio Norte.

Enlarge This Image

Angie Sanclemente Valencia, center, a Colombian beauty pageant winner, in Buenos Aires in 2010. She is serving time for a drug-smuggling conviction.

While investigating his death, the police discovered that he had three Argentine passports under false names but was really a Colombian who had once worked as an assassin for a prominent Colombian drug trafficker.

As the trafficking of illegal drugs picks up in Argentina, residents are growing accustomed to front-page news of drug raids, shootouts and the grim reality that the country is no longer simply a transit point for the world’s most-wanted drug traffickers from places like Mexico and Colombia. For many of these outlaws, Argentina has become home base, a comfortable refuge where many of them lie low while keeping a hand in the industry.

Mexico's Enrique Peña Nieto, man of mystery

Many wonder about the convictions of the president-elect, who never veers far from the script. To some, he's a creation of a PRI cabal and a key TV network.

By Tracy Wilkinson and Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times

MEXICO CITY — He bears tiny white scars all over his hands from the sea of supporters who grasped at his outstretched arms, clawing to greet him, during three months of music-filled rallies and mobbed appearances in almost every Mexican state.

For months now, images of the handsome young politician and his glamorous soap-opera-star wife have filled Mexican television screens and fan magazines. Young admirers showed up at his campaign events wearing fake versions of his trademark hair flip.

Pressure mounts on PRI over its Mexico presidential election win

MEXICO CITY -- In an unusual union, Mexico's left and right came together Thursday to challenge the victory of President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto, alleging that his party financed its campaign in part with laundered money.
Gustavo Madero, president of the conservative National Action Party, which now occupies the presidency but got trounced in the July 1 vote, announced at a news conference that he had evidence of money laundering by Peña Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Oswaldo Paya dies at 60; Cuban anti-Castro activist

Oswaldo Paya gained global recognition as top organizer of the Varela Project, seen as the biggest nonviolent campaign to change Cuba's communist system.

Cuban dissident leader Oswaldo Paya greets supporters in Havana in 2003. (Adalberto Roque, AFP/Getty Images / July 24, 2012)

Cuban activist Oswaldo Paya, who spent decades speaking out against the communist government of Fidel and Raul Castro and became one of the most powerful voices of dissent against their half-century rule, died Sunday in a car crash in Cuba. He was 60.
Paya and a Cuban man described by media as a fellow activist, Harold Cepero Escalante, died in an accident in La Gavina, just outside the eastern city of Bayamo, Cuban authorities said. A Spaniard and a Swede also riding in the car were injured.

Mexican economy needs war on drugs, Oliver Stone says

Mexico cartel attacks on press take toll on drug war coverage

The Mexican press, as evidenced in recent attacks on two newspaper offices, grapples with decisions about how — and whether — to cover the drug war in ways that won't endanger

By Tracy Wilkinson,

MEXICO CITY — The nearly simultaneous attacks on the offices of the two newspapers were disturbingly similar: Gunmen armed with automatic rifles and grenade launchers opened fire, shattering glass and terrifying those inside.

But the responses by the two news outlets that came under siege, leaving staffers shaken but unhurt, have been markedly different.

El Mañana newspaper in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, the northeastern region's dominant daily, announced in an editorial a day later that it would no longer report on "violent disputes," an allusion to the battle between rival drug-trafficking networks fighting over a vast network of criminal activities.

The Drug War in Mexico: Corruption Is Better Than Slaughter

by Ivan Eland

Will Enrique Peña Nieto, the new president of Mexico from the corrupt and authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), go easy on drug traffickers? Let’s hope so.
During his campaign, Mr. Peña Nieto vowed to battle murder, extortion, kidnapping, and other violent crimes but said little about going after drug traffickers. During its unrivaled 70-year reign that ended in 2000, the PRI was accused of cutting deals with crime syndicates to keep the peace. Although such agreements were corrupt, perhaps corruption is better than the militarized U.S.-backed anti-drug war of Felipe Calderón, the current Mexican president. Fatigue with that costly war, which has killed more than 50,000 Mexican civilians in recent years, played a significant role in Mexicans bringing back a venal and autocratic PRI that they had thrown out of office 12 years before.

The Drug War Finds New Ways to Fail

by Ivan Eland

The federal government’s effort to battle drug abuse has been a tragic and expensive failure. But of course, admitting that would make politicians, who regularly endorse it to sound tough, seem foolish and careless with taxpayer dollars. So the War on Drugs continues, while of necessity it slowly morphs into new forms of federal waste and unnecessary intrusion into people’s lives.
Militarized federal law enforcement just can’t cope with trendiness in recreational drug use. Cocaine use is so yesterday (the 1980s, to be exact) and is a declining problem. Even at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic in the mid-1980s, only 5.8 million people in a population of about 240 million were using the drug; the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that only 1.5 million in a population of 313 million use cocaine. In recent years, methamphetamine use has also declined. Lately, heroin use is up slightly but still affects a minuscule portion (less than .08%) of the American population.

Of course U.S. rebalancing is about China

By Justin Logan, Special to CNN

Editor’s note: Justin Logan is director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, and the author of a forthcoming policy study, “China, America, and the Pivot to Asia.”

Brad Glosserman has penned a provocative article arguing that America’s rebalancing toward the Asia-Pacific isn’t about “fear of China.” Fear may be too strong a word, but the argument is still wrong. Of course it’s about China.

It’s telling that Glosserman’s article itself is all about China. For instance, he mentions Washington’s support for freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. But the recent friction hasn’t been between Vietnam and the Philippines. It isn’t Malaysia claiming almost all the territorial waters there. No, the current panic in the South China Sea is all about China.

The Obama GITMO myth

New vindictive restrictions on detainees highlights the falsity of Obama defenders regarding closing the camp

By Glenn Greenwald

Accused Sept. 11 co-conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh is shown while attending his military hearing at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba. (AP/Janet Hamlin) Most of the 168 detainees at Guantanamo have been imprisoned by the U.S. Government for close to a decade without charges and with no end in sight to their captivity. Some now die at Guantanamo, thousands of miles away from their homes and families, without ever having had the chance to contest accusations of guilt. During the Bush years, the plight of these detainees was a major source of political controversy, but under Obama, it is now almost entirely forgotten. On those rare occasions when it is raised, Obama defenders invoke a blatant myth to shield the President from blame: he wanted and tried so very hard to end all of this, but Congress would not let him. Especially now that we’re in an Election Year, and in light of very recent developments, it’s long overdue to document clearly how misleading that excuse is.
Last week, the Obama administration imposed new arbitrary rules for Guantanamo detainees who have lost their first habeas corpus challenge. Those new rules eliminate the right of lawyers to visit their clients at the detention facility; the old rules establishing that right were in place since 2004, and were bolstered by the Supreme Court’s 2008 Boumediene ruling that detainees were entitled to a “meaningful” opportunity to contest the legality of their detention. The DOJ recently informed a lawyer for a Yemeni detainee, Yasein Khasem Mohammad Esmail, that he would be barred from visiting his client unless he agreed to a new regime of restrictive rules, including acknowledging that such visits are within the sole discretion of the camp’s military commander. Moreover, as SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston explains:

US: Remember Fast and Furious’s Mexican Victims – by Deroy Murdock

The “walked” guns draw blood south of the border.
The American people finally have heard of Brian Terry. He is the best-known victim of Fast and Furious, an Obama-administration conventional-weapons-proliferation program. Between November 2009 and January 2011, Team Obama arranged for licensed firearms dealers to sell guns to straw buyers, who transferred them to known violent criminals in Mexico. Two of these firearms, AK-47s, were found near Rio Rico, Ariz., where suspected smugglers fatally shot Terry, a 40-year-old former Marine, on December 15, 2010.
“I do not fear death,” Terry once wrote. “I do fear the loss of my honor, and would rather die fighting than have it said I was without courage.”

US: Caught in a green crossfire – by Paul Driessen

President Obama’s war on fossil fuels is hurting American workers, families, hopes and dreams
President Obama has waged war on fossil fuels for three and a half years – and American consumers and families are caught in the green energy crossfire.
They are getting hit with higher energy prices, dismal employment prospects and a floundering economy, as billions go to unfriendly overseas countries for oil we could produce in the USA, and billions of tax dollars are wasted on subsidy schemes designed to make “green” energy more competitive – by raising the cost of electricity and fossil fuels that really power our economy.

US: Cut Cuba-Syria Ties to Receive Public Funds – by Mauricio Claver-Carone

With only a single dissenting vote, Florida lawmakers passed and sent HB 959 to Gov. Rick Scott. The legislation prohibits state and local governments from contracting with companies doing business with brutal dictatorships in Cuba and Syria. In 2009, legislators also ruled out public contracting with companies doing business with Iran and Sudan.
The U.S. State Department classifies all four countries as “state sponsors of terrorism” and 24 other states have enacted similar bans against using taxpayer dollars to enrich corporations propping up anti-American dictators. To most Americans, cutting off dollars to terrorist states is a matter of common sense and to many it’s morally unconscionable to finance repressive states that do not respect basic human rights.

US: No New Property Waiver for Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega – by Ambassador Robert Callahan & Ray Walser

If the Obama Administration is serious about promoting democracy in Nicaragua, it can emphatically do so later this month when it decides whether to grant a property waiver to President Daniel Ortega’s corrupt and authoritarian government.
If it opts to withhold the waiver, it will compel the U.S. to oppose Nicaragua’s loan applications at the Inter-American Development Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank. This could cost Nicaragua millions of dollars in grants and concessionary loans.

Eyewitness: Mysterious Booms Return To Wisconsin

“Like someone slamming the earth with a big machine”
Paul Joseph Watson

Mysterious booms that plagued several towns in Wisconsin earlier this year appear to have returned, with an eyewitness reporting hearing the strange noises repeatedly over a 30 minute period last night.

Eyewitness: Mysterious Booms Return To Wisconsin 240712top3

The booms, described as a rumbling noise coming from deep underground, stoked intrigue earlier this year and a US Geological Survey investigation after being reported over several weeks in the town of Clintonville. The strange noises were also heard and felt in Baraboo and Montello.

Follow the Trend: Batman Shooter James Holmes Was On Hardcore Pharmaceutical Drugs

Anthony Gucciardi

Like virtually all massacre shooters before him, the notorious Batman shooter James Holmes is now reported to have been taking hardcore pharmaceutical drugs. In Holmes’ case, they happen to be the very same drugs that ultimately led to the early death of actor Heath Ledger. With a fix for ‘altering his state of mind’, the ‘Batman shooter’ was heavily hooked on the prescription painkiller Vicodin. Holmes even reportedly dosed up on a pharmaceutical cocktail just before the shooting.
Follow the Trend: Batman Shooter James Holmes Was On Hardcore Pharmaceutical Drugs 230712holmes2

Side effects of Vicodin use, even at ‘recommended’ levels which Holmes likely far exceeded, include ‘altered mental states’ and ‘unusual thoughts or behavior’.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012