What a difference a year can make. On July 6, 1775, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, issued the Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms. Significantly, the document declared, “We have not raised armies with ambitious designs of separating from Great Britain establishing independent states.”

The rest of myTGIF column is here.

Surveying the landscape of political and policy troubles in Alaska, Gregg Erickson, an independent economic consultant in Juneau, concludes, “Everything she’s doing seems to be saying that there’ll be a problem in the future owing to her inattention, but she won’t be here to deal with it.”

Today, Palin announces that not only is she not going to run for re-election next year, she’s resigning as governor of Alaska later this month:

“Once I decided not to run for re-election, I also felt that to embrace the conventional Lame Duck status in this particular climate would just be another dose of politics as usual, something I campaigned against and will always oppose,” Palin said in a statement released by her office.

“It is my duty to always protect our great state. With that in mind, my family and I determined that it is best to make a difference this summer, and I am willing to change things, so that this administration, with its positive agenda, its accomplishments, and its successful road to an incredible future, can continue without interruption and with great administrative and legislative success,” she said.

Not running for re-election is a sensible move if she wants to run for president in 2012. Leaving office before she completes even one term, on the other hand, is not going to strengthen anyone’s confidence in her. Sounds like Gregg Erickson is on to something. (Or maybe Andrew Sullivan got to her.)

Update: Politico takes at face value the Palin camp’s claims that this is a way to save taxpayer dollars by curtailing ethics investigations of the Barracuda. Selfless pol steps aside for the greater good…

I saw President Nixon on several occasions during 1971-1972, and also after he resigned because of the Watergate coverup. I had been a speechwriter for Nixon during the 1968 campaign, writing his law-and-order speech (officially titled “Order and Justice Under Law”), which he delivered in Philadelphia. In 1972 Nixon himself was not campaigning and I would write speeches for his surrogates — as it would turn out, Texas Gov. John Connally and Ann Armstrong, also of Texas.

At one point during 1972 I visited Nixon in San Clemente. His office and other offices were in temporary structures at some distance from La Casa Pacifica. Nixon said, “Brezhnev was here last week. The night before we met he got pretty drunk at the Casa and was badly hung over at 9:30 in the morning. After he had a cup of coffee I said to him, “Mr. Chairman, before we go further I want to tell you this. If there is a Russian tank attack across the West German plain it will go nuclear within 15 minutes.” (Note: Nixon was referring to battlefield nuclear weapons, actually howitzer shells kept in underground concrete bunkers.) Nixon went on, “Brezhnev replied, ‘I’m glad you told me that, Mr. President. I will tell them that back in Moscow.’”

Realists respect realism.

Later, after Nixon’s resignation, I visited him several times, at San Clemente, at his Manhattan Town House, at his place in Saddle River, New Jersey. Once, at his office in San Clemente we walked to the large window that looked out upon the Pacific ocean. Nixon said, “That’s not Charlie the Tuna out there. It’s Jaws.” Nixon had a Hobbesian view of international relations. On the whole pessimistic. Realistic. Like Hans Morgenthau (In Defense of the National Interest,1951), Nixon understood that in international relations there is no “sovereign” (i.e., world government) and so national interest is the guide to foreign policy.

Thus his historic trip to China (“Red China”), downgrading our relations with Taiwan, which reconfigured the balance of our relations with both China and Russia to our strategic advantage.

At his town house in Manhattan Nixon had many Chinese objects, vases, chairs, and so on, gifts from the Chinese, I suppose, including some very potent liquor, cases of which he had been given by Zhou En Lai. This stuff was contained in small round flasks, and must have begun evaporating as you poured it. No smoking please.

In 1985, Harrison Salisbury, foreign correspondent and author of many books, published The Long March,about Mao Zedong’s long march to his army’s redoubt in northern China from which he later emerged to win the civil war against the nationalists. In 1985 I was writing a syndicated column for King Features, and I interviewed Harrison Salisbury over luncheon at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. Harrison told me that while in China he had visited Zhou En Lai in a hospital, where he was dying of cancer. At one point Zhou asked him whom he thought was the greatest American president of the twentieth century.

Harrison: Franklin Roosevelt?

Zhou: No. Nixon.

From his own perspective, of course. Nixon’s opening to China had strengthened China’s strategic position relative to the Soviet Union. Zhou was a realist.

In my view, Nixon could have been a near great president had it not been for his resentments and near paranoid belief that he had domestic enemies almost everywhere. Of course he did have enemies, but his reactions were such that they won and he lost.

This is unbelievable, but true! Can you imagine working for a company that has a little more than 600 employees and has the following employee statistics.
29 have been accused of spouse abuse
7 have been arrested for fraud
9 have been accused of writing bad cheque’s
17 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
3 have done time for assault
71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
8 have been arrested for shoplifting

21 are currently defendants in lawsuits
84 have been arrested for drink driving in the last year
Which organisation is this ?
It’s the 635 members of the House of Commons, the same group that cranks out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us inline.
What a bunch of bastards we have running our country - it says it all. And just to top all that they probably have the best ‘corporate’ pension scheme in the country!!
If you agree that this is an appalling state of affairs, please pass it on to everyone you know.

It’s time to stand up to this lot ! 

 

The ouster had been ordered by the Supreme Court and approved by the Congress, as Zelaya was attempting an illegal referendum to change the Honduran constitution so he could run for another term.

Will someone please explain why this bloodless transfer of power to the civilian legislator first in line for the presidency, in a sovereign nation, is any business of the United Nations, the Organization of American States, Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers, or Barack Obama? For all have denounced the “coup” and demanded Zelaya’s immediate return.

The hypocrisy here is astounding.

Chavez was imprisoned for his bloody coup attempt in Venezuela in 1992. And to have Fidel Castro’s dictatorship of half a century denouncing a glitch in the democratic process of a Western Hemisphere republic is beyond parody.

What percentage of the 200 member nations of that septic tank of anti-Americanism, the United Nations, are democracies? How many leaders of its member states came to power through free and fair elections?

And what happened to the idea of non-intervention in the internal affairs of Western Hemisphere republics? At this writing, Honduras is not buckling.

“We have established a democratic government, and we will not cede to pressure from anyone. We are a sovereign country,” said Roberto Micheletti, who was named caretaker president to serve out Zelaya’s term, which ends this year.

Unlike Tehran, where hundreds of thousands protested the election, the streets of Tegucigalpa have remained calm. No one has been shot, beaten with clubs or run down by thugs on motorcycles.

Just whose side is Barack on in Latin America?

Though elected as a center-right candidate, Zelaya has moved into the orbit of Chavez, whose idea it was to change the Honduran constitution to get Zelaya another term. Hugo even provided the ballots. In Latin America, term limits have been written into constitutions to prevent a return to the time of the dictators and presidents-for-life. The folks who put Zelaya aboard that plane are friends of the United States.

Why are Obama and Hillary Clinton meddling in the affairs of a friendly country, to dump over a friendly government, to reinstate a friend of Hugo’s, whose goal is to bring Honduras into his anti-American “Bolivarian Revolution”?

Like Barack’s strange behavior in Trinidad, where he grinned away as Chavez handed him an anti-American tract, then listened for an hour to Daniel Ortega berate us for cruelty to Castro’s Cuba, without protest or retort, Obama is coming off as one who shares the international left’s view of the United States.

There is another issue raised by Obama’s denunciation of our friends in Honduras. Does he put ideology ahead of U.S. national interests? Does he prefer hostile democracies to friendly autocrats?

What comes first with Obama?

“He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB,” FDR said of one Latin dictator. What FDR meant was that, in those grave times when Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and Japanese militarists ruled most of Eurasia, America must take her friends where she could find them.

In World War II, we welcomed the alliance with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and the neutrality of the autocrats of Madrid and Lisbon. We partnered with Stalin. Gen. Eisenhower cut a deal with Vichy’s Adm. Darlan to get GIs safely ashore in North Africa.

From 1961 to 1979, Park Chung-hee was an authoritarian ruler of South Korea who sent 50,000 troops to fight beside ours in Vietnam. Was he not a better friend than Olof Palme of Sweden, Pierre Trudeau of Canada and Willy Brandt of Germany, who burnished their democratic credentials by scoring points off the United States?

For most Cold War presidents, U.S. national interests always trumped democratist ideology. Ike preferred the Shah to the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh. Richard Nixon preferred Gen. Pinochet to the elected Salvador Allende.

Even George W. Bush, who had pushed for Palestinian elections and insisted on Hamas’ inclusion, perhaps because he thought they would lose, did a somersault when Hamas won.

How to explain the universality of the attacks on Honduras —  when few United Nations members outside the West condemned Tehran and Hugo Chavez rushed to congratulate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — other than the fact that this “coup” removed an adversary of the United States?

Anti-Americans stand by their own, no matter how they came to power, or retain power. Only in the West do we seem always prepared to abandon our flawed friends who do not measure up.

This is a formula for eventually not having any friends.

That Obama finds himself in camp with Castro’s Cuba, Ortega’s Nicaragua and Chavez, who is openly threatening Honduras, should tell him something about where his ideology is taking him, and us.

One day, Obama is going to have to decide whether he wishes to be the darling of the international left or the unapologetic leader of the nation that is most resented and reviled by the international left.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

The comic got the laugh but missed the larger point (not to mention the Web site). Journalism’s most important question is not today or yesterday - or even print or digital - but considerably deeper: With the blogosphere expanding like the freeways of Atlanta, are readers going to want a little guidance with their news? Or will they simply navigate the Internet alone.

To show us where they produce their guide to the big, scary web of knowledge, the NYT editors ran an enormous photo of their rather uninspiring conference room. It may not have nice art on the walls, but it is where they decide what’s fit to print.  A typical afternoon:

In Baghdad, vast parades for the withdrawal of American troops. In Minnesota, Al Franken wins a disputed senatorial election. In Honduras, crowds denounce the recently ousted president. And in Albany, the business of the government continues to be a joke.

Meanwhile, at the offices of The New York Times, a meeting was taking place. Eighteen editors had gathered at a table to discuss tomorrow’s news. The table was formidable: oval and elegant, with curves of gleaming wood. The editors no less so: 11 men and 7 women with the power to decide what was important in the world.

[...] Every afternoon at 4 o’clock, the top dogs at the nation’s paper of record descend upon a third-floor conference room to decide what news is truly fit to print.

The print version of the article invites the reader to go online for a 360-degree view of where this all happens. It’s rather bland for the anchor tenant of a $1 billion-plus Manhattan skyscraper. But most fascinating about this room is the nice seating for the lackeys not invited to sit at the main table. At Washington’s activist meetings, these backbencher seats are far less cushy and well-appointed. At the NYT editorial meetings, however, the seating gives the room the air of a parliamentary debating chamber (albeit with all the minimalist charm of postwar modernism à la the UN general assembly and EU Parliament). For people with no less than ”the power to decide what [is] important in the world,” they ought to get a better interior decorator. Maybe start with a White House Situation Room-like map of the world?

Lincoln-Douglas this U.S Senate campaign definitely was not and serves well as an example to why the 17th Amendament needs to be repealed. It was an unedifying brawl of back and forth accusations and counter charges that polluted the public airwaves for a year. Neither candidate was well liked outside of young Wellstonian leftists for Franken and neocon YRs for Coleman. Franken barely won despite Obama’s big win in Minnesota and Coleman let a 15-point lead over his rival slip away during the last month of the campaign. Instead of being big winners both candidates wound up losers, an election that was essentially a tie.

Watching Neocon Norm get his comeuppance is pleasing to the eye but he’s not done with politics just yet. The fact that Governor Tim Pawlenty is moving on to run for President gives Coleman a path back to public office he would not have had had Pawlenty decided to run for a third term. It made it that much easier to concede the race to Franken after the Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision instead of fighting to bitter end all the way to the U.S Supreme Court. Indeed one could say that Coleman now has the chance to run for the office he always wanted in the first place, the one he planned on running for before Dick Cheney shanghaied him to run against Wellstone back in 2002. Indeed, being governor will be a lot more fun than a minority senator. Whether he wins the GOP nomination, and the field will be a crowded one, depends on how Republicans react to him.  Are they bitter at what happened and will rally to his side, or will they support somone else, a fresh face? After all, Coleman is now 1-2 in statewide races and would have been 0-3 if Wellstone hadn’t died in a plane crash on the Iron Range. There’s no strong evidence he can someday carry a majority of Minnesotans. Plus he has to deal with lingering accusations of corruption against him

As for Franken, what kind of Senator will he be? Well he better not try to be another Wellstone even though he holds his old seat. Wellstone’s passion was genuine because he was a passionate man and and the passionate flowed from him so easily because causes influenced so much of his life. A passionate Franken comes across as an obnoxious partisan from the Twin Cities suburbs like the talk show host he was. Instead he had better recapture the wit and humor that he made his bones with for so long as a writer and actor which was suppressed in his campaign to its detriment. That’s what he’s good at, not polemics.

Debby Smith, 53, of Appalachia, Va., a volunteer for Obama’s political operation, fought tears as she told the president of her kidney cancer and her inability to obtain health insurance or hold a job. Obama embraced her and called her “exhibit A” in what he said was an unsustainable system that is too expensive and complex for millions of Americans.

In the video of this tender moment, Obama says that “someone was pointing” at Ms. Smith, an Obama political volunteer, before he calls on her. Did “Exhibit A” have to sign any kind of release before hugging the president?

Some American conservatives might buckle at reports of this quintessentially limey sport being played on their soil by immigrants from the developing world. I mean, how UnAmerican can you get?

In fact, however, cricket has a long-running and well-established heritage in the land of the free — George Washington is understood to have played some variant of the game. In shedding their British colonial yoke, Americans did not immediately also divest themselves of their interest in cricket. The game was popular in early days of the Republic, and has enjoyed several revivals at various stages American history.

Baseball, obviously, won out in the long run. But the possible (admittedly, still highly unlikely) return of cricket should need not be a cause of right-wing frowning. Cricket is at heart a conservative pastime: it is, in its traditional format, a very slow game, demanding patience and a dispassionate temperament. There is an old theory that cricket is one reason Britain never experienced revolution: the idea being that the village cricket match bound the rural classes together, the butcher could play against the country squire as an equal and so on.

That’s almost certainly rubbish. Perhaps, however, cricket, with its equanimous, soothing charm - its association with a gently declining empire — is just what America now needs. Or is it simply too alien to suit the modern American character?