I must admit I am excited by Nancy Pelosi's ascension to House Minority Leader. All else being equal, I enjoy seeing gender barriers broken. So as a woman, I am pleased. But as a Republican, I am even more so.
While Saddam may feel betrayed by Syria's vote in the Security Council, it must be reasuring to know that he still has an ally in the D.C. Council, which voted 10-3 against removing him from power.
Here's the text of the UN Resolution. And here are some of its key demands:
-- Iraq has to confirm within seven days of adoption of the resolution its intention to "comply fully" with its demands and cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors.
-- Iraq must declare within 30 days all weapons of mass destruction programs and related materials, including items that also could be used for civilian purposes.
-- Inspectors should resume their work no later than 45 days after the adoption of the resolution.
-- Inspectors are to update the Security Council 60 days after that but they can report any Iraqi violations sooner.
-- Inspectors are to get unconditional and unrestricted access to any place they want to survey, including President Saddam Hussein's palace compounds.
-- Inspectors may "at their discretion" interview Iraqi scientists and other officials as well as their families to leave the country for interviews.
-- Inspectors can "freeze" a site to be surveyed by declaring exclusion zones in which Iraq is to suspend "ground and aerial" movements.
-- The resolution recalls the Security Council has repeatedly warned Iraq it would face "serious consequences" as a result of continued violations of its obligations.
-- The resolution declares that Iraq has been and is still in "material breach" of its obligations. But Iraq is given "a "final opportunity" to comply with its obligations.
-- "False statements and omissions" in declarations submitted by Iraq and failure to cooperate fully in the implementation of the resolution would constitute a "further material breach" of Iraq's obligations and "will be reported to the council for assessment."
-- Inspectors are to report immediately to the Security Council any "interference by Iraq with inspection activities as well as any failure by Iraq to comply with its disarmament obligations." The council then meets immediately "to consider the situation."
This has been a good week for Dubya.
China is rejecting communism this week, apparently much to the dismay of NPR's Bob Edwards. He was talking this morning to Rob Gifford, NPR's correspondent in China. Gifford reported that as Jiang Zemin prepared to step down as Communist Party leader this week, he was embracing market economics. And Edwards, the anchor of NPR's Morning Edition, replied that, "perhaps it was good he was retiring!" I know shouldn't be shocked by this stuff anymore, but my jaw dropped like the AFLAC duck's.
China's move to a market economy has lifted millions of its citizens out of desperate poverty and into an new middle class. This shift has also occurred in India, and according to economist Surjit Bhalla the rise of a middle class in both countries has caused global poverty rates to plummet. Bob Edwards may still cherish his little red book, but fortunately the Chinese are finally adopting economic policies that will feed its people.
Dale Franks has a great piece in Tech Central Station on the success the left has had in demonizing their opponents on the right. As Franks puts it:
The left does not simply believe that the right is wrong on the issues, or that its policy prescriptions are misguided. The left holds as a matter of course that its opponents are morally deficient, simply because they disagree. [...]In the left's twisted view, Republicans aren't merely wrong about methods of achieving policy aims. No, Republicans are so evil that they do not wish good outcomes to be achieved. They don't want to reduce poverty or lower rates of uninsurance. They don't want black children to go to school or the air to be breatheable. It's one thing to make these kinds of crazy claims about your opponents in pre-election attack ads, but it's entirely another to actually believe them! As Franks, points out, it makes any means used against such enemies justifiable, regardless of the cost to the political system.In the 1994 election campaign, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) gave us the perfect example of this belief. Only racists, he said, could be in favor of lower taxes or the death penalty. Rangel opined that people used to call it "Jim Crow", but now they call it "tax cuts."
In other words, all those arcane, technical arguments about economic growth or increases in personal consumption and savings are really nothing other than window dressing. ...
Statements such as Rep. Rangel's serve some important purposes for the left. First, they free the left from having to make any substantive response to technical, empirical, or factual arguments. After all, such arguments are merely a posteriori justifications to an immoral policy, so there is no reason to address them. Second, they restrict the debate by intimidating the left's opponents. They serve notice to the electorate that the opponents of the left have transgressed the limits of acceptable thought.
The rest of the article is highly recommended.
Will wonders never cease? The New York Times runs an editorial this morning that I almost totally agree with. Employing a strange new approach of reporting facts as they are and not as they would like them to be, the editors acknowledge that the American people have sided with the President on the homeland security bill. And they urge the Democrats to compromise on that and terrorism reinsurance, as well.
Finally, they encourage extending unemployment benefits to the new year. I think that's a fine idea and would offer another. Earlier this year, the Democrats blocked a measure to help the unemployed buy health insurance with advancable tax credits. It was a despicable pander to organized labor, which sees any tiny move towards a health care system that is not employer-based as a threat to their collective bargaining agreements.
Kowtowing to labor on homeland defense has cost the Democrats the Senate. It is also costing them the moral high ground on health care, an issue they pretend to own. If they continue to stand in the way of real reform of the highly regressive employer-based health care system, though, they are going to be extremely vulnerable to Bush administration attacks-- from the left. That's a nightmare they could prevent by allowing the unemployed to have advanceable tax credits to buy health insurance.
Despite facing a well-heeled opponent who aspired to be Texas's first Hispanic governor, Rick Perry got one-third of the Hispanic vote and a record 15 percent of the black vote. The Democrats' hopes that minority voters would turn out in droves for their "dream team" of diverse candidates have come to naught. Like Democrats all over the country, they are scapegoating non-Anglo voters for their poor showing. But their whining over poor turnout just reveals how much they take black and Hispanic voters for granted. What were they offering that would really have helped working minority families?
What's saddest to me is that Tony Sanchez just flushed $60 million down the toilet in a year when El Paso needs $50 million to build a medical school. Wouldn't that have been a much better legacy for Mr. Sanchez than funding the most negative and costly gubernatorial race in US or Texas history?
According to Drudge, the AP tested its election returns systems today by broadcasting results it will likely see only in its dreams-- a GOP loss of 70 seats in the House and 10 in the Senate.
Governor Ventura had threatened to appoint a garbage man to Wellstone's seat. Instead he picked a crony.
Peggy Noonan says Norm Coleman won the debate. I just read the transcript and I agree. Coleman showed enormous discipline and restraint but still made his case on a number of issues.
Most disappointing was Mondale's trashing of poor Judge Pickering. He accused the embattled Mississippian of possessing "a very suspect record on civil rights." That "suspect" record, of course, includes testifying against the imperial wizard of the Klu Klux Klan in 1967, though it cost him the next election as local prosecutor.
UPDATE: Byron York agrees and notes that Mondale seemed not quite on point at times. When Coleman alluded to the 24 percent interest rates of the Carter administration (which, I must admit, boggle my 29-year-old mind), Mondale had a haughty retort about some of Carter's foreign policy failures. And, in a fit of dementia, he accused Coleman of taking money, not only from Enron, but also from a corporation he called "World Dot Com." Mondale's apparently not as familiar with the corporations on whose boards he does not sit.
The American Prowler concurs and declares Mondale the "same true blue lib he was when he ran against Reagan."
Stephen Hayes admits Mondale passed the "drool test," but thinks Coleman was too easy on Carter's Number Two. John Fund thinks so, too. I get the impression both Fund and Hayes would have loved to have had a go at Fritz themselves.
Kaus's take: "Mondale gave no indication (at least none I detected) that he's not the same doctrinaire prisoner-of-interest-groups he was in 1984."