US Features
Asia likes McCain's free trade, Obama's diplomacy (Feature)
By Deutsche Presse-Agentur Oct 26, 2008, 1:32 GMT
Bangkok One thing is for sure: the next US president will come to the White House with some first-hand experiences in Asia.
Republican John McCain, 72, a decorated war hero, was shot down on a bombing mission in 1967 over North Vietnam, captured and tortured in the notorious 'Hanoi Hilton,' where he was kept as a prisoner of war until 1973.
Democrat Barack Obama, 47, spent part of his peripatetic youth in Indonesia, where he attended a public Muslim school - not a Madrassah as some of his critics have alleged - in Jakarta between 1969-71.
Different Asian experiences indeed.
'Scholars tend to see Obama's Asian experience as more relevant to today's problems,' said Surat Horachaikul, an expert on international relations at Chulalongkorn University.
'At least, under Obama the war on (terrorism) will be revoked and other methods will be used to deal with terrorism. Islam needs to open up and they don't see Republicanism ideas as able to solve these problems,' added Surat, citing his fellow scholars in Muslim Indonesia and Malaysia.
Of course, the next president of the US will be judged in Asia by the performance of outgoing President George W Bush.
While Bush's domestic legacy may be a bitter one, battered by the sub-prime mortgage crisis, financial meltdown and looming recession, in Asia, his administration's performance has left good impressions in some places.
For instance, both Bush and wife Laura were staunch supporters of the pro-democracy struggle led by Aung San Suu Kyi in military-run Myanmar, still called Burma by some.
That policy is unlikely to change no matter who becomes US president.
'Burma is a rare bipartisan issue in US politics,' said Aung Din, executive director of the US Campaign for Burma.
'Both Republican and Democrat agree on strong US policy on Burma, which include imposing strong economic sanctions against the junta; increasing strong diplomatic pressure on China, India and ASEAN to work together with the US on Burma; and pushing the UN Security Council to take effective action on Burma,' he added, noting that both McCain and Obama were the major sponsors of the past three Senate resolutions against the junta.
Nor are dramatic changes expected in Sino-US ties.
China, although still riled by the recent arms sale to Taiwan, is relatively satisfied with their US relations, and convinced that neither candidate will alter those relations much.
'Although the two candidates might be a little bit different - Obama might take a protectionist policy on trade. McCain is really tough on security issues - we see that both of them claimed they would like to maintain the sound development of Sino-US relations,' said Shi Yinhong, an international relations expert at Peoples University in Beijing.
Given the serious US economic woes, the next president is likely to be keen to keep on Beijing's good side, and downplay such issues as human rights, he said.
'Any US president can hardly expect a more and more confident China to accept ... criticism from the US,' said Shi.
More interesting will be the next president's approach to India, where Bush can claim considerable achievements.
US-India relations saw an unprecedented transformation during the Bush administration, removing years of Cold War bitterness and leaving ties between the world's largest democracies at an all-time high.
Both the Bush administration and the Singh government count the recently signed bilateral civilian nuclear agreement as a significant foreign policy achievement during their tenures.
While McCain is expected to broadly continue the Bush administration's policies and foster a special and close relationship with India, Obama's ascent is viewed more circumspectly, particularly because of his views on economic issues, including his criticism of outsourcing of jobs to India as well as his earlier attempt to block the civilian nuclear deal.
'An Obama administration could have more emphasis on non- proliferation objectives, which could make the bilateral nuclear deal run into rough weather,' said one Indian foreign ministry official who asked to remain anonymous.
'But we are certain that he or anyone else will not be hostile to India. This is because the US-India relationship now has a dynamic of its own,' he added.
And then there is the economy, one Bush legacy which most nations would seem to want to leave behind.
Much of the world has blamed Bush and his deregulation policies for bringing the world to the brink of the worst financial crisis since 1929, and the financial crisis has delivered new support for Obama at home.
But although Asian markets have suffered, Asian governments are more worried about free trade and what a Democratic president like Obama could mean for globalization.
'McCain is for an open economy, has no problems with outsourcing and free trade,' said retired Major General Deepankar Bannerjee, director of Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, a New Delhi- based strategic think tank.
'Barack Obama on the other hand has said he would prevent outsourcing jobs and protect the US economy through restrictive practices that may not be helpful for India's economy,' he added, while noting that even so, Obama is certainly the more popular candidate among the Indian masses.
'Obama would largely be positive for the world and India,' said Cherian Samuel of the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, another Delhi-based strategic think tank.
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Older Talkback
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Barack Obama will give a driver’s license to any illegal who wants one. Obama’s plan gives illegals social security benefits and raises taxes for his health care plan to cover them.
Driver’s licenses and government benefits for illegals. Higher taxes for Americans.
Obama's Bud Bill Ayers Has New Book Coming out June of '09
Communist and unrepentant domestic terrorist Ayers is proud to introduce his new re-education book: - 'Race Course Against White Supremacy'
Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States (Not democracy) since its earliest days—and that it is still very much with us—the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education.
The book draws upon the authors' own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, (Murdering Police, planting bombs at the Capital and the Pentagon, Trying to kill the children of judges, etc.) reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.
Ayers met with Hugo Chavez in 2006:
President Hugo Chavez, … invited guests, comrades. I’m honored and humbled to be here with you this morning. I bring greetings and support from your brothers and sisters throughout Northamerica [sic]! Welcome to the World Education Forum. Amamos la revolucion Bolivariana! ...[...]
He ended his speech with these words:
Viva Mission Sucre!
Viva Presidente Chavez!
Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana!
Hasta La Victroria Siempre!
This is what Ayers' 'education reform' is all about - 'Viva La Revolucion.'
I wonder which they will love more in the next ninety days: Obama's diplomacy or McCains free trade stance? I guess they never heard about Obam's trip to Canada.
Why would a foreign government like one particular candidate over another?
Self Interest perhaps?
McCain is ranting away that Obama has never been south of the border. What a stupid statement when his partner in crime had hardly made it out of Alaska before this.
What do you mean with Obama a communist?
All your corporate tycoons are lining up in China to export their manufacturing jobs .Meanwhile they are financing the GOP.All the posts ranting about Obama causing a crisis or being a socialist seem to apply much more to your corporate tycoons,judging from reality.
1 percent of the population owes 38 percent of your wealth,the bottom 50 percent owes 2,5 percent.Tat and nothing else is the real scandal.All the republican ranting about nationalism ans patriotism is only meant to hide that ugly truth from you.No wonder theyare opposed to wealth distribution.They are so greedy ,there will never be enough money to feed them.They even managed to make you pay 750 billion dollars to them in exchange for nothing .
They always claimed the 20 billion dollars needed to provide health care to the poorest amongst you could not be found,yet they found 750 billion dollars in a matter of days to feed their own greed.Jst how long will they continue to fool you with empty talk about patriotism,nationalism.All values they never adhere to:they export their production to China and their money to the Cayman islands.
Will we vote for the same soothing siren song as our enervated allies?
Across the electric wires, the hum is ceaseless: Give it up, loser. Don’t go down with the ship when it’s swept away by the Obama tsunami. According to newspaper reports, polls show that most people believe newspaper reports claiming that most people believe polls showing that most people have read newspaper reports agreeing that polls show he’s going to win.
In the words of Publishers’ Clearing House, he may already have won! The battleground states have all turned blue, the reddest of red states are rapidly purpling. Don’t you know, little fool? You never can win. Use your mentality, wake up to reality. Why be the last right-wing pundit to sign up with Small-Government Conservatives For The Liberal Supermajority? We still need pages for the coronation, and there’s a pair of velvet knickerbockers with your name on it.
McCain vs Obama is not the choice many of us would have liked in an ideal world. But then it’s not an “ideal world”, and the belief that it can be made so is one of the things that separates those who think Obama will “heal the planet” and those of us who support McCain faute de mieux. I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls “a point of no return”. It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, “Jimmy Carter’s second term”, but something far more transformative. The new president would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation — the first being FDR’s New Deal, the second LBJ’s Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. The terrorist educator William Ayers, Obama’s patron in Chicago, is an exemplar of the last model: forty years ago, he was in favor of blowing up public buildings; then he figured out it was easier to get inside and undermine them from within.
All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can’t the government sort out my health care? Why can’t they pick up my mortgage?
In his first inaugural address, Calvin Coolidge said: “I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people.” That’s true in a more profound sense than he could have foreseen. In Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the nanny state: the bureaucracy’s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some of the oldest nation states on earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, “unsustainable”
More to the point, the only reason why Belgium has gotten away with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and Germany Germany this long is because America’s America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which western Europe has dozed this last half-century is girded by cold hard American power. What happens when the last serious western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?
“People of the world,” declared Senator Obama sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”
No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people — the Barack Obamas of the day — were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because “the world stood as one” but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire (notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived and the wall would still be standing. Senator Obama’s feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because it’s the easy option: Do nothing but hold hands and sing the easy listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.
To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving “fetuses” of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal – ie, the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex — voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely “present”?
The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting “present”, you can stand down.
An Obama Administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and UN foreign policy. Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a “point of no return”, the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.
If a majority of Americans want that, we holdouts must respect their choice. But, if you don’t want it, vote accordingly.
That same 1% of Americans, who supposedly own, pays 38% of all taxes, too. The head of Federal Express is in Saturday's Wall Street Journal explaining why he only bought 10 Boeing 777's instead of 12,or whatever, and the consequences of tax versus spend. Now, he could be biased, but he built that company by himself from nothing and he's not just a plummer from Cleveland.
So many companies are losing money, the idea of raising taxes is utterly laughable. People earning above $250,000 per year are the number one starters of new businesses, which the economy, at this moment, critically needs. Stripping them of capital is eating the seed corn of the nation.
At this moment we need higher taxes, at this moment, about as much we need to be sodomized. No matter what party you are in, liquidity and capital formation is about the only way out of this, the sooner the better. I may not be able to bring myself to vote for McCain, but this stance of Obama's flys in the face of reason.
LA Times Hiding Incriminating Video of Obama with Radical Palestinian Update: Ayers and Dohrn Attended Khalidi Party with Obama
Gateway Pundit says he contacted the LA Times to ask about a video showing Barack Obama at a party for former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi, mentioned by the LA Times in this article: Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Barack Obama.
At Khalidi’s going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances,” Khalidi said.
The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.
LA Times writer Peter Wallsten said he won’t release the video or reveal his sources: Confirmed: MSM Holds Video Of Barack Obama Attending Jew-Bash & Toasting a Former PLO Operative... Refuse to Release the Video!
If true, this is media malfeasance of an almost astounding degree. They have a video that could change the stakes in this election and they’re hiding it. And they’ve been hiding it since last April.
Contact the Los Angeles Times and demand that they release this video.
The leftist American press has gagged every unsavory fact it can to protect Barak Obama, while landing on a simple plummer, for a single comment. How afraid of an idea can you possibly be?
Take a good look.
It would be nice if the GOP smear campaign actually provided something else than smear.
Let's investigate just one accusation,Is Obama a friend of palestinian terrorists?
Try google,enter a key phrase from the posts claiminh that to be so:
MSM Holds Video Of Barack Obama
Now see what comes up:nothing at all except the same post smeared all over the internet as yet a new false accusation.Those GOP posters rely on bulk posting the smear in such quantities in hope the mud sticks.Unfortunately for them these robo-posts are carbon copies from each other.amongst all the copies of that smear you'll search in vain for something substantial or even remotely hinting at these allegations.
Does McCain condone lying to the american people?Yes he does.the GOP thinks you are gullible imbeciles swallowing the most rabid lies.They've just been caught red handed.
It is unreasonable to conclude Obama has some tenuous association with foreign terrorists based on some unfounded posts. In the age of instant information, most of it is tripe.
Fact is, Obama has a more-than-documented relationship with a bona fide domestic terrorist, Mr. Ayers. There is no quibbling over Mr. Ayers status, or Obama's association with him. He's another Timothy McVeigh, without the bodies to show for it. Mr. Obama, knowing full-well who and what he is, went forward with this relationship, and benefitted from it at the start of his political career.
Now, all that considered, it's only prudent to conclude that, if he has no issues associating with a domestic terrorists, why would he object to a relationship with a foreign terrorist body? I think it's only prudent to, now, examine these posts more carefully. Perhaps this is why he has no preconditions to talking with Iran?
What's a plummer? Anything like 'Joe the'?
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Another one of Obamas Communist mentorsOct 26th, 2008 - 01:48:09
n fact, the mainstream media did no vetting. They seem to have all agreed, 'OK, none of us will get into this business with Jeremiah Wright, 'Tony' Rezko, Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers and everyone's impression of an angry Michelle Obama on 'The Jerry Springer Show.'' During one of the Democratic primary debates, Hillary Clinton was hissed for mentioning Syrian national Rezko, and during another, ABC moderator George Stephanopoulos nearly lost his career for asking Obama one question about William Ayers.
In the past week, TV anchors have taken to claiming that Obama 'refuted' John McCain's statement that Obama launched his political career at the home of former Weather Underground leader Ayers. No, Obama 'denied' it; he didn't 'refute' it. If 'denying' something is the same as 'refuting' it, then maybe the establishment media can quit harping on Palin's supposed lack of qualifications to be president, since she too 'refuted' that by denying it.
Back before the media realized it needed to lie about Obama launching his political career at Ayers' house, the Los Angeles Times provided an eyewitness account from a someone who attended the event:
'When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They were launching him -- introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.'
The Times has now stripped this item from its Web page, but the great blogger Patterico has preserved it for posterity on his Web page.
Obama's glib remark that 'Bill Ayers is a professor of education in Chicago; 40 years ago when I was 8 years old he engaged in despicable acts with a domestic group. I have roundly denounced those attacks' -- doesn't answer anything.
First of all, the fact that Ayers is a professor of education proves only one thing: He is dumber than any person without an education degree.
Ayers is such an imbecile, we ought to be amazed that he's teaching at a university -- even when you consider that it's an ed school -- except all former violent radicals end up teaching. Roughly 80 percent of former Weathermen are full college professors -- 99 percent if you don't include the ones killed in shoot-outs with the police or in prison -- i.e., not yet pardoned by a Democratic president.
Any other profession would have banned a person like Ayers. Universities not only accept former domestic terrorists, but also move them to the front of the line. In addition to Ayers, among those once on the FBI's most-wanted list who ended up in cushy college teaching positions are Bernardine Dohrn (Northwestern University), Mark Rudd (a junior college in New Mexico) and Angela Davis (History of Consciousness Department, University of California at Santa Cruz).
While others were hard at work on Ph.D.s, Susan Rosenberg was conspiring to kill cops and blow up buildings, and was assembling massive caches of explosives. This put her on the fast track for a teaching position at Hamilton College!
Despite having absolutely no qualifications to teach, having earned only a master's degree in 'writing' through a correspondence course, Rosenberg was offered a position at Hamilton within a few years of President Clinton pardoning her in 2001, releasing her from a 58-year prison sentence for participating in the murder of cops and possessing more than 700 pounds of explosives.
But Obama thinks it's a selling point to say that Ayers is a college professor....
The media keep citing the fact that the money Obama and Ayers distributed to idiotic left-wing causes came -- as The New York Times put it -- 'from Walter H. Annenberg, the billionaire publisher and philanthropist and President Richard M. Nixon's ambassador to the United Kingdom.'
Great Republican though he was, Walter Annenberg died in 2002. The money came from the Annenberg Foundation, which, like all foundations, distributes money to projects that its founder would despise. John Kerry ran for president on the late John Heinz's money. That didn't mean Republican Heinz was endorsing Kerry.
As John O'Sullivan says, any foundation that is not explicitly right-wing will become a radical left-wing organization within a few years. It could be the Association of University Women, the American Association of Retired People, the American Rose Growers, the Foundation for the Study of Railroad Engineers or the Choral Society of Newport Beach.
Left-wing radicals swarm to free foundation money, where they can give gigantic grants to one another and they will never have to do a day's work. That's exactly what Obama and Ayers did with Annenberg's money.
None of the Annenberg money went to schoolchildren. It went to Ayers' left-wing crank friends to write moronic papers that we hope no one ever reads.
Instead of teaching students reading and writing, Ayers thinks they should be taught to rebel against America's 'imperialist' social structure. In 2006, Ayers was in Venezuela praising communist dictator Hugo Chavez, saying, 'We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution.'
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