All Nines

Unexplained
But beyond these problems, the failure to intervene early in Syria (when "leading from behind" might well have worked) has handed important victories to both the terrorists and the Russia-Iran axis, and has seriously eroded the Obama administration's standing with important allies. Russia and Iran backed Bashar al-Assad; the president called for his overthrow—and failed to achieve it. To hardened realists in Middle Eastern capitals, this is conclusive proof that the American president is irredeemably weak. His failure to seize the opportunity for what the Russians and Iranians fear would have been an easy win in Syria cannot be explained by them in any other way.

This is dangerous. Just as Nikita Khrushchev concluded that President Kennedy was weak and incompetent after the Bay of Pigs failure and the botched Vienna summit, and then proceeded to test the American president from Cuba to Berlin, so President Vladimir Putin and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei now believe they are dealing with a dithering and indecisive American leader, and are calibrating their policies accordingly. Khrushchev was wrong about Kennedy, and President Obama's enemies are also underestimating him, but those underestimates can create dangerous crises before they are corrected. (Walter Russell Mead, WSJ, 8/23/2013)

Outstanding article in the Journal by a former Obama supporter that deserves to be read in its entirety. It provides details and analysis to support the claim - one that RedStateVT has made repeatedly - that Obama's foreign policy approach is disastrous and it is dangerous. A docile America does not make the world safer. It makes it more perilous.


Changes
But there have been other changes, particularly in black family life, that are not so clearly positive. The percentage of blacks who had never married rose to 49 percent in 2011, from 23 percent in 1963, a jump that far outstrips the rise in that category among whites. Black households headed by a woman jumped by nearly 12 percentage points at a time when similar households for whites rose just under 4 percentage points. (NYT, 8/23/2013)

The Times writes about the many positive changes in American society for blacks fifty years after Martin Luther King's march in Washington. And then we get this paragraph on the black family with absolutely no analysis as to why these things occur. The Times would have you believe that it is because of lingering racism or perhaps the legacy of slavery. Honest black leaders like Bill Cosby and Herman Cain will tell you that it is because of dysfunction in many black communities including glorification of thug culture and a declining influence of the black church.


Wizardly
“But,” he (Obama) added, “let’s assume that we eliminated all discrimination magically with a wand, and everybody had goodness in their heart, you’d still have a situation in which there are a lot of folks who are poor, and whose families have become dysfunctional, because of a long legacy of poverty, and live in neighborhoods that are run-down and schools that are underfunded and don’t have a strong property tax base.”

His solution, he continued, was to promote programs like an expansion of early childhood education and his latest effort to make college more affordable — including, he said, making law school two years instead of three. Such policies, he said, “help lift everybody,” and therefore “everybody will be better off.” (NYT, 8/23/2013)

And - providing a wonderful contrast with Cosby and Cain - we get President Clueless. His answer to black poverty is apparently to graduate lawyers in two years instead of three. You cannot make up the nonsense that comes out of his mouth.


Kiss Off
Coupled with BT’s debt of about $17 million to the city that was secretly loaned during the administration of former Mayor Bob Kiss, the utility’s fiscal challenges partly account for Burlington’s recent series of credit downgrades, according to Moody’s Investors Service, a New York based rating firm. (Burlington Free Press, 8/24/2013)

Oh, yeah. Whatever happened about the crimes committed involving Burlington Telecom during the Kiss administration? Progressive misconduct is buried in Vermont.