TIA Daily • June 3, 2010
President Obama can't offer a single idea about how to "plug the damn hole" in the Gulf, just an imperious order that it be done, somehow, by someone—and the threat of a boot on their neck if they don't succeed.
Top News Stories
- The Boot on the Neck, Part 1
- The Boot on the Neck, Part 2
- The Boot on the Neck, Part 3
- Non-Radicalized
- The Islamist Axis Expands
- Intellectual Climate Change
Submit articles, interesting links, letters to editor, or comments to editor@TIADaily.com.
Top News Stories
Commentary by Robert Tracinski
1. The Boot on the Neck, Part 1
In last Friday's comments on the Gulf oil leak, I argued that President Obama should mind his own business and stay out of the recovery and cleanup effort, on the grounds that the federal government is not responsible for everything—and because "'industrial accident cleanup' is definitely not among the enumerated powers granted to Congress in Article I."
I should add another reason: what the heck does Obama have to contribute? It is obvious that British Petroleum has an interest in capping the well, partly to reclaim what is clearly an abundant source of oil, and mostly to avoid the political crucifixion they are about to endure. (More on that below.) So if they haven't done it yet, that's because it is a very difficult engineering task.
But Barack Obama is not an engineer. Far from it. From what I can tell, he doesn't even know much about his own field (the law). And by all indications, he is a scientific and technological illiterate—which is fine, so long as he knows enough to get out of the way of the people who know what they're doing. But of course, he doesn't.
Obama's mentality is summed up in a revealing Washington Post report on Obama's supposed private reaction to briefings about the oil spill. The story was leaked, no doubt, to show how strong and "tough" the president is—but it actually makes him look like an ineffectual bully.
[T]o those tasked with keeping the president apprised of the disaster, Obama's clenched jaw is becoming an increasingly familiar sight. During one of those sessions in the Oval Office the first week after the spill, a president who rarely vents his frustration cut his aides short, according to one who was there. "Plug the damn hole," Obama told them.The hole continues to spew, however, in quantities now thought to be three to five times the 5,000 barrels a day originally estimated.
Funny how reality doesn't respond to presidential orders. The article concludes with this gem of a quote:
"If you could control an oil spill with lawyers and regulation-writers, and by signing papers and obtaining court injunctions...then maybe the US government could do something," said Byron W. King, an energy analyst at Agora Financial. "But really, Uncle Sam has almost no institutional ability to control the oil spill. For that, you need people with technical authority, technical skill, and firms with industrial capabilities."
But Obama has a different idea of what is needed. It was his Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, who named the administration's policy toward the oil spill and toward the efforts made by British Petroleum: "We will keep our boot on their neck until the job gets done."
This is all that Obama has to offer as his intervention. He can't offer a single idea about how to "plug the damn hole," just an imperious order that it be done, somehow, by someone—and the threat of a boot on their neck if they don't succeed.
Thus, we see the news that the administration—desperate to be seen as doing something—has done the only thing it can do: threatened the use of government force against anyone and everyone associated with the failed oil well.
The headline of the article below is admirably exact when it says that the administration has launched a criminal probe of the oil slick. That'll show it! Obama has been compared to King Canute for his preposterous claim that his election would be the moment when we stopped the rise of the oceans. But Canute knew that he couldn't stop the tides. Obama reminds me more of Xerxes, the Persian king who ordered the sea to be flogged as punishment for the failure of his bridge across the Hellespont. Except that instead of the lash, Obama sends lawyers.
Amazingly, this has done nothing to clean up the oil spill. But it has crashed the stock of British Petroleum and dragged down the stock market by reviving the fear of arbitrary government action—the fear of Obama's boot on our necks.
"BP Loses 15 Percent of Market Value as US Launches Criminal Probe of Spill," Steven Mufson and Theresa Vargas, Washington Post, June 2
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., during a trip to the Gulf Coast, announced that the Justice Department had launched criminal and civil investigations, adding to pessimism among BP investors reeling from the failed attempt to plug the leaking well over the weekend.BP, the world's fourth-largest company before the April 20 blowout on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, has lost a staggering $74.4 billion, or 40 percent, of its market value in six weeks.
Although investment analysts say the company has pockets deep enough to pay for mounting claims and cleanup costs, the political outcry for making BP pay has added to the uncertainty surrounding its future, especially while oil is still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.
President Obama vowed a "full and vigorous accounting" of the causes of the oil spill disaster in the gulf, telling the leaders of a new commission that they should pursue the trail of blame without limits.…
Calls for punishing BP intensified. Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said: "BP should pay. Not just for the cleanup, but for the lives lost and the natural treasures destroyed." And on the Web site Talking Points Memo, former labor secretary Robert Reich urged Obama to put BP's American operations into temporary receivership….
The prospect of criminal charges, especially if filed against the corporation as well as individuals, could threaten BP's leases with the Interior Department and weaken its position in claims negotiations. Criminal charges put the accounting firm Arthur Andersen out of business, but other companies that have been the subject of criminal probes have settled and paid fines.
While conceding that it is very difficult to convict a corporation of a felony, Robert Weiss, who represents vacation homeowners suing BP, said: "It would be nightmare for them to be convicted of a felony. It would have a tremendous effect on the ability of the company to do business as well as their subsequent liability."
2. The Boot on the Neck, Part 2
The administration's desperate urge to do something about the oil spill—or at least, to be seen to be doing something—is a panicked response to political pressure from both sides. Even far-left New York Times columnist Frank Rich has begun to criticize Obama, and his grounds for doing so are interesting. The administration's flailing response, he writes, threatens to "capsize the principal mission of the Obama presidency."
Of all the president's stated goals, none may be more sweeping than his desire to prove that government is not always a hapless and intrusive bureaucratic assault on taxpayers' patience and pocketbooks, but a potential force for good…. We expect him to deliver on this core conviction.
In other words, Frank Rich believes that the boot on the neck gets results—and he is mad at Obama for not fulfilling that illusion.
That indicates the one real opportunity that I think we have for a legitimate criticism of Obama's response to the oil spill: he believes that force is the answer to—well, to everything. He should just be able to give orders—and reality should snap into line.
That's why I found the article below from Michelle Malkin to be interesting. She describes Obama as being bored and disengaged in times of legitimate crisis. I think she's responding to something real, but she doesn't quite name it correctly.
Obama tends to be disengaged from details of any kind. Despite spending endless hours on television promoting his health care bill, he famously flubbed a response in an early town hall meeting, when he was asked about a controversial provision in the legislation and had to admit that he was unaware of it.
This is not an example of Obama being too abstract or "cerebral." Quite the opposite. It is a direct consequence of his believing in the power of coercion above all else. His job isn't to focus on the details, to figure out solutions to technical problems, to sweat the small stuff. His job isn't to think. His job is to give orders.
That's why he can summon no interest or engagement in an actual crisis, which calls for clear thinking and effective action. He can only summon passion for assigning blame (to other people), for issuing threats, and for vilifying political opponents as tools of the special interests.
He's interested in putting his boot on our necks—not in the thinking that goes on in the brains whose flow of oxygen he just cut off.
"Obama: Crisis Bores Him," Michelle Malkin, National Review Online, May 28
President Bush's harshest critics often described his look during moments of crisis as "deer in the headlights." After two years of Hope and Change, America has grown accustomed to President Obama's crisis face: eyes glazed over…."I am angry and frustrated," he heaved. Rather unconvincingly. He was "singularly focused," he asserted. Rather distractedly. The president did manage to work up enough energy to condemn BP and then turned to a moment of obligatory self-aggrandizement: "I'm confident that people are going to look back and say that this administration was on top of what was an unprecedented crisis."
How "on top" was he? Well, not enough to take the time on Thursday morning before his much-hyped appearance to nail down the details of how and why his Interior Department chief of the Minerals Management Service, Liz Birnbaum, was no longer in office. "You're assuming it was a firing," Obama told reporters. "I don't yet know the circumstances." He explained that he was preoccupied with other matters and couldn't get ahold of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
Then, addressing all the ignorant Americans who have failed to appreciate his rescue efforts, Obama mustered up a semblance of indignation: "Those who think we were either slow in our response or lacked urgency don't know the facts. This has been our highest priority since this crisis occurred."…
The sterile performance was eerily reminiscent of his national-security announcement last December from Hawaii, when he appeared before the American people in tie-less informal island wear to read a bloodless, perfunctory statement about the Christmas Day bomber. Eyes down on his notes the whole time, he described the failed attack with the weariness of a small-town sheriff's deputy, rather than as the leader of the free world. Then it was back to the beach. This is Obama in crisis: disengaged, put upon, and impatient to get back to Me Time.
3. The Boot on the Neck, Part 3
President Obama has spent the past week trying to convince everyone that the Gulf oil spill is the first thing on his mind every morning when he wakes up. The problem is that if this is the first thing on his mind now—what will be the first thing on his mind next week? What will be his next brainwave about a problem that he absolutely must fix by issuing more presidential orders? That's the problem with a president who thinks there is nothing outside his domain of oversight and authority.
Here's one example. Under pressure from the unions, the administration has been threatening to crack down on unpaid college internships, subjecting them to minimum wage regulations and other controls which—rather than improving the internships—would probably make them illegal and economically unfeasible.
"Rules Push on Interns Worries College Chiefs," David R. Sands, Washington Times, May 30
A group of university presidents and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are expressing alarm over what they fear could be a coming crackdown by the Obama administration Labor Department on popular student internship programs.The Labor Department insists it has no plans to change the long-standing regulations on internships, but many educators and college officials say they fear a new regulatory push by the federal government and by a number of states will lead employers to simply drop their internship programs, seen by generations of college students and recent graduates as a key steppingstone into the work force….
"We all agree there should be guidelines, and we haven't seen any signs of abuse, so there's a real sense of 'Where did this come from?'," Mr. Maxwell said in an interview….
The Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division in April put out a "fact sheet" for employers on standards for intern programs, noting that private, for-profit companies must pay interns the minimum wage and overtime benefits if the internships do not meet basic criteria on training, oversight and work tasks.
The criteria are not new…. But the release of the fact sheet—and fears that the old rules would be enforced with new zeal by the Obama administration—have set off alarm bells that a crackdown is in the works.
Nancy J. Leppink, deputy administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, told the New York Times last month, "If you're a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren't going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law."
4. Non-Radicalized
I've been giving examples of the Tea Parties' "radicalization" of the right, including a much greater willingness to roll back the welfare state. Alas, that trend is not universal.
A National Review editorial complains about the reticence of congressional Republicans to back a simple, one-sentence repeal of ObamaCare. Acting like whipped dogs who cringe in anticipation of being beaten, these Republicans are terrified that they might be accused of not having their own solution for how government is going to solve everyone's problems, so they want to attach the repeal to a package of their own preferred reforms.
The National Review editorial correctly names why this is a tactical disaster. It gives "moderate" Democrats and "moderate" Republicans an excuse not to support the repeal. They can say they would like to repeal ObamaCare—but then they can cite their disagreement with the Republicans' reforms and oppose the bill that grounds, without actually having to defend ObamaCare.
As a matter of tactics, it's always best to keep things simple. Repeal ObamaCare in one sentence, forcing anyone who opposes this measure to stand in defense of the unpopular legislation. After that, propose a package of free-market reforms—and then turn the tables, accusing anyone who opposes this package as being "opposed to health-care reform."
But the problem goes deeper than tactics—much deeper. And so we see National Review's Jonah Goldberg coming out with a non-radicalized column of his own. His objection is not so much to the welfare state, Goldberg says, but to the fact that it is always getting bigger. Instead, Goldberg comes out in favor of a welfare state that is limited to being "big enough."
But that raises the question: big enough for what? If the moral goal is to force the producers to sacrifice to the non-producers, then there will be no limit to the demands of the welfare-statists. So long as anyone is producing anything, he will still have something to be seized. Ask the folks in Greece. Or Venezuela. Or any other socialist society on its way down to the "ant heap of collectivism," in Reagan's memorable phrase.
I recently came across a mention on the Web of a bizarre thought experiment proposed by Adam Smith—who was a defender of capitalism in his capacity as an economist, but not as a moral philosopher. Smith asked whether you would be willing to cut off the end of your little finger to prevent a devastating earthquake that would kill tens of thousands of people in China.
Presumably, the answer is supposed to be "yes." But my immediate thought is: and what will I have to cut off next time, to prevent a famine in Chad? And then to build schools in Patagonia? And then to stop flooding on the Orinoco? If it were actually true that you could save other people by cutting off parts of your body, then you would be forced to refuse all such requests on principle, out of simple self-preservation.
But that whole supposition is, of course, a fantasy. As Smith's own economics demonstrated, we can't help others by cutting off parts of our bodies or by sacrificing our wealth. What actually improves the state of mankind is our production of wealth in pursuit of our own success, which leads us as if by—what's the phrase I'm looking for?—oh yes, as if by an "invisible hand" to aid other people's own pursuit of their interests. Smith didn't really get the whole moral lesson of his economics: that self-sacrifice is an impediment to the improvement of the human condition.
To bring that back to Jonah Goldberg, I will simply say that debating what kind of welfare state is "big enough" is like debating how many body parts are "enough" to cut off. It demonstrates that many conservatives still haven't absorbed the moral case against government control of the economy and are stuck making the practical objection that is goes "too far."
"In a Welfare State, How Much Is 'Enough'?" Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, June 2
The flames from Greece's debt-crisis protests have cast new light on the perils of our own overspending and overborrowing. You know the litany. California is imploding. Public-sector unions there, and across the country, are swallowing budgets. In California alone, pension costs have gone up 2,000 percent in a decade. At the national level, Obamacare has done little to fix — and much to hurt — America's long-term entitlement mess. Already, America's structural deficit has tripled since 2007. Economist Price Fishback has just published a paper finding that America spends more on social welfare than socialist Sweden (though we spend it differently)….Yet the Democrats want more. More what? More everything….
Indeed, the mess we have today is merely the natural result of a century-long battle over the size of government. When it comes to the welfare state, liberals want more, conservatives want less. It seems that nobody ever talks about "enough."
Except that's not entirely true. Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) offered an alternative vision of government in his famous "Roadmap." It was, in the words of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, a blueprint for a "conservative welfare state."…
William Voegeli, a scholar of impeccable conservative credentials,…argues that American voters (including most Republicans) will never fully eradicate the welfare state, because they don't want to. Therefore, conservatives should make peace with the idea that the federal government should help the truly needy, while rejecting both the sorts of middle- and upper-class entitlements that are bankrupting the country and the kind of government "dole" that breeds bad habits among the poor and able-bodied….
Governments do not generate wealth; they can merely distribute it. The challenge for both liberals and conservatives is simply to define how much distribution is "enough." What would an acceptable safety net look like? Who should be taken care of by taxpayers and for how long? Paul Ryan offered an answer to that question, and liberals scoffed because they reject the question. There's no such thing as enough, as far as they're concerned. That's what the Greeks thought.
5. The Islamist Axis Expands
The big foreign policy news story of the past week is the Israeli raid on a flotilla of "peace activists" trying to break Israel's blockade of the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. But this story isn't really about Israel. It's about Turkey.
Jack Wakeland gave me a good short summary of what happened when Israeli troops tried to board the ships, only to discover that the "peace activists" were violent Islamists:
"Some Israeli soldiers in the blockade-enforcement raid were armed as riot police—with pepper-gas paintball guns and pistols—while others were armed with automatic rifles. But the attempt to use non-lethal force failed when the first group of soldiers who rappelled from helicopters to the deck of the Mavi Marmara were overwhelmed by a crowd wielding steel rods, clubs, and knives, stripped of their weapons and helmets, and thrown off the top deck to a lower deck."
The armed Israeli troops then opened fire, killing nine Islamists.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explains why it is so important for Israel to enforce this blockade.
He said Israel has a responsibility "to examine every ship going to Gaza, to stop the weapons and to let other cargo enter." If Israel had allowed the blockade to be breached, the flotilla "would have been followed by dozens, hundreds, of boats," Netanyahu said. "Each boat could carry dozens of missiles."…"Israel is told it has the right to defend itself, but when we do exercise that right we're condemned for it," Netanyahu said.
But like I said, the real story here is who sponsored this blockade-running effort: the formerly secular, formerly pro-Western nation of Turkey, which has now flipped decisively toward Islamism, cementing its alliance with Iran and Syria and becoming—with this incident—a fully fledged member of the Islamist Axis. Jack sent me a link to the article below, which reveals the Turkish government's role, along with these comments.
"In failing to stop a jihad 'aid' mission, Prime Minister Erdogan saw to it that Israel was attacked.
"The New York Times reports that it was when Turks organized privately that a dramatic increase in the scale of the pro-Gaza blockade-running movement became possible.
"Prime Minister Erdogan of the [Islamist] AK Party claimed that he had no authority to stop such low-grade private war-making, but surely his nation has something akin to America's 'neutrality act.' The Turkish prime minister has accepted the idea that citizens of his Muslim-majority nation can conduct their own foreign policy and pursue their own private blockade-running jihad against Israel—but the nation of Israel does not have the right to police its coastal waters or to declare them a war zone, off limits to belligerents and neutrals under the law of the sea.
"Will Prime Minister Erdogan next take the position that Turks who organize privately to murder Israelis with rifles, grenades, and suicide bombs—that Turkish terrorists (not 'merely' terrorist supporters)—are acting within their personal and private prerogatives as Muslims? Will he take the position that it would be immoral for the Turkish government to interfere with the Muslim man's religious duty to kill infidels?"
If so, then Turkey would become a state sponsor of terrorism. The main link below provides the facts about what Turkey is doing. A good article in the Wall Street Journal describes how we got to this point. Leftist anti-Americanism among secular Turks paved the way for Islamist anti-Americanism.
To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness. Imagine 80 million or so people sitting at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. They don't speak an Indo-European language and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them have meaningful access to any outside media. What information most of them get is filtered through a secular press that makes Italian communists look right wing by comparison and an increasing number of state (i.e., Islamist) influenced outfits. Topics A and B (or B and A, it doesn't really matter) have been the malign influence on the world of Israel and the United States….The obvious answer to the question of "Who lost Turkey?"—the Western-oriented Turkey, that is—is the Turks did.
But we had a role in making this possible. Turkey could move in the direction of the Islamist Axis only because the US has following a policy, since at least 2006, of appeasing and accommodating the central nation in that axis, Iran. And the Obama administration took the Bush administration's weak policy and made it much weaker.
Thus comes the news that Iran has developed enough uranium for two nuclear bombs—and General McChrystal's acknowledgement that Iran is supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
"Turkish Funds Helped Group Test Blockade," Sabrina Tavernise and Michael Slackman, New York Times, June 1
Since 2007, a small group of hard-core activists has repeatedly tried to sail cargo-laden ships into Gaza in an effort to thwart Israel's blockade. But when the Free Gaza Movement teamed up with a much wealthier Turkish organization to assemble a flotilla, it became more than a nuisance, supercharged by the group's money, manpower and symbolic resonance into what Israel sees as a serious and growing threat….On Tuesday in a bustling neighborhood in Istanbul, the Turkish organization was celebrating a strange success. "We became famous," said Omar Faruk, a board member of the group, Insani Yardim Vakfi, known by its Turkish initials, IHH. "We are very thankful to the Israeli authorities."
The group brought large boats and millions of dollars in donations to a cause that had struggled to gain attention and aid the Palestinians. Particularly galling to Israel is the fact that the group comes from Turkey, an ally, but one whose relations with Israel have become increasingly strained.
Israeli authorities say IHH bolsters Hamas, which runs Gaza and which they see as doctrinally committed to destroy the state of Israel. It also charges that the group has links to Al Qaeda and has bought weapons, charges the group denies….
The Turkish group is a charity, members said, but the Israel Project, a private nonprofit advocacy group, sent an Internet link to journalists with references to what it described as the group's "radical Islamic, anti-Western orientation." The link alleges that the group supports Hamas, in part through a branch it opened in the Gaza Strip, the charity it sends them, and in meetings and speeches by Bulent Yildirim, its leader, and Hamas officials….
"This is an Islamist charity, quite fundamentalist, quite close to Hamas," said Henri J. Barkey, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University. "They say they do charity work, but they've been accused of gunrunning and other things, and their rhetoric has been inflammatory against Israel and sometimes against Jews."
6. Intellectual Climate Change
First it came to Australia. Now it is taking over Britain. How long before the mainstream media containment wall collapses, and skepticism about global warming finally takes over here, too?
The American people are already highly skeptical, mind you, but the American media has so far maintained its monolithic dogma on global warming. But not if we follow the pattern of Britain, where the global warming dogma has collapsed since the Climategate scandal broke late last year.
How far have things gone? Well, revered environmentalist guru James Lovelock is now telling The Guardian, "Who knows? Everybody might be wrong. I may be wrong. Climate change may not happen as fast as we thought, and we may have 1,000 years to sort it out."
The Royal Society—Britain's prestigious scientific society—has been forced to back off its endorsement of the global warming hysteria.
The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution's official position on global warming. It will publish a new "guide to the science of climate change" this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.And best of all is the story below, about a debate at the venerable old Oxford Union, in which prominent skeptics defeated alarmists in a vote by the students—and by a good margin. Intellectual climate change is possible, and it is only a matter of time before it comes, in full force, to the US.The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: "Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect—there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements." This contradicts a comment by the society's previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: "The debate on climate change is over."
"Oxford Union Debate on Climate Catastrophe," SPPI Blog, May 27
For what is believed to be the first time ever in England, an audience of university undergraduates has decisively rejected the notion that "global warming" is or could become a global crisis….Last week, members of the historic Oxford Union Society, the world's premier debating society, carried the motion "That this House would put economic growth before combating climate change" by 135 votes to 110….
Mr. James Delingpole, a blogger for the leading British conservative national newspaper The Daily Telegraph, seconded the proposition, saying that–politically speaking–the climate extremists had long since lost the argument. The general public simply did not buy the scare stories any more. The endless tales of Biblical disasters peddled by the alarmist faction were an unwelcome and now fortunately failed recrudescence of dull, gray Puritanism. Instead of hand-wringing and bed-wetting, we should celebrate the considerable achievements of the human race and start having fun….
Lord Monckton repeatedly interrupted Lord Whitty to ask him to give a reference in the scientific literature for his suggestion that 95% of scientists believed our influence on the climate was catastrophic. Lord Whitty was unable to provide the source for his figure, but said that everyone knew it was true. Under further pressure from Lord Monckton, Lord Whitty conceded that the figure should perhaps be 92%. Lord Monckton asked: "And your reference is?" Lord Whitty was unable to reply. Hon. Members began to join in, jeering "Your reference? Your reference?" Lord Whitty sat down looking baffled.
Lord Leach of Fairford, whom Margaret Thatcher appointed a Life Peer for his educational work, spoke third for the proposition. He said that we no longer knew whether or not there had been much "global warming" over the 20th century, because the Climategate emails had exposed the terrestrial temperature records as defective….
Lord Monckton, a former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher during her years as Prime Minister of the UK, concluded the case for the proposition. He drew immediate laughter and cheers when he described himself as "Christopher Walter, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, scholar, philanthropist, wit, man about town, and former chairman of the Wines and Spirits Committee of this honourable Society". At that point his cummerbund came undone. He held it up to the audience and said, "If I asked this House how long this cummerbund is, you might telephone around all the manufacturers and ask them how many cummerbunds they made, and how long each type of cummerbund was, and put the data into a computer model run by a zitty teenager eating too many doughnuts, and the computer would make an expensive guess. Or you could take a tape-measure and"–glaring at the opposition across the despatch-box–"measure it!"
Copyright © 2010 by Tracinski Publishing Company
PO Box 8086, Charlottesville, VA 22906
To remove yourself from this mailing list, reply to editor@TIADaily.com with the subject line "unsubscribe."
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
