It has been almost 90 days since General McChrystal asked Barack Obama for more troops. No decision has been made. The General still waits as our soldiers keep dying.

But that might actually be a better alternative to any decision Obama might make.

As awful as that sounds, new information is proving Barack Obama’s got his first major military decision disastrously wrong and the repercussions to our national security will be far reaching in light of China’s growing aggressiveness.

Back up to January. Barack Obama had just been sworn in to office and the Pentagon then began reviewing whether the F-22 Raptor program should get more funding. Despite lots of talk about saving and creating jobs, the Obama administration nudged Defense Secretary Robert Gates to kill the F-22, an advanced stealth fighter for which no nation has put up a competing system.

In April, Robert Gates said he intended to kill the program. In July, Senators tried to keep the funding alive citing threats from China. But, Barack Obama’s administration said those threats were overestimated and Obama threatened to veto the entire defense budget if F-22 funding were left in.

Gates said Monday he’d heard no “substantive” argument for keeping the jet for national security reasons, pointing out that China has no planes that can compete with the more than 1,000 advanced fighter jets the U.S. will have by 2020.

Gates said that the gap between the two countries’ aerial arsenals will only widen.

Unfortunately for the United States military, that turns out to be flat out wrong.

According to Aviation Week, China not only is building a 5th generation fighter to compete with the F-22, but they’ll begin testing it this year.

Beijing’s fighter announcement suggests a serious failing in U.S. intelligence assessments, mocking a July 16 statement of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates that China would have no fifth-generation fighters by 2020.

Note that China announced this while Obama was in China sucking up to them.

There’s a few in this one:

• Using a bloodthirsty Communist dictator to sell T-shirts.
• Watching quite a lot of administration pushback on the socialism thing get casually subverted by some guy in China trying to sell some T-shirts.
• The Chinese kicking off a visit that’s supposed to be about mutual cultural outreach by banning the T-shirt in question.

Although I suppose that the last one is an improvement.  Back in the day, they’d just have taken the vendors out, shot them, then charged their families for the bullet.

Moe Lane

PS: They’re available for sale here, which is a site that will cheerfully pander to both sides of the spectrum when selling you overpriced President-themed junk.

Because that’s AMERICA.

When Putin announced that Russia would no longer sell its oil and natural gas in dollars, there were the normal — its OK type statements from the financial world, and it was viewed by the Western financial cognoscenti as an anomaly.

However, since the Federal Reserve is printing an estimated $600 billion a year to give to bankers and brokers, who then buy U.S. Treasury bills to finance for our over-spending Federal Government with printed dollars — the value of the dollar drops due to the massive over supply.

Then, those countries holding the U.S. dollar as reserve currency start to speak up. They plead with the President and Congress to start balancing the budget and lowering the deficit.

Instead, President Obama and Congress has not decreased the deficit, it has grown four times it was under Bush, to record numbers — $9 Trillion — under President Obama and the Democratic Congress.

And President Obama, by pushing his trillion dollar health care plan is rubbing the world’s face in their concerns about U.S. spending. He simply does not care that the dollar is dropping and that the value of these country’s dollar holdings is also dropping.

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I understand that they can be easily enough removed with a combination of WD-40 and a razor blade. Some people should get cracking with that…

In an attempt to gain favor with China, the United States pressured Tibetan representatives to postpone a meeting between the Dalai Lama and President Obama until after Obama’s summit with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, scheduled for next month, according to diplomats, government officials and other sources familiar with the talks.

For the first time since 1991, the Tibetan spiritual leader will visit Washington this week and not meet with the president. Since 1991, he has been here 10 times. Most times the meetings have been “drop-in” visits at the White House. The last time he was here, in 2007, however, George W. Bush became the first sitting president to meet with him publicly, at a ceremony at the Capitol in which he awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress’s highest civilian award.

…because it’s just the first step. Given the passive-aggressive nature of this administration, the next step will be to see whether enough people squawk at this; if they don’t, they’ll start making it ‘difficult’ for the Dalai Lama to visit the United States. And if he passes away, expect the USA to keep its mouth shut and let the PRC do… whatever the PRC plans to do about the religious leader’s successor. All part of the task of the day - which is to improve the PRC’s IMF standing, apparently. Why it’s up to the USA to do that* is a reason known only to God and the President, and I’ll avoid the obvious sneer this time. It seems unfair to taunt people who now have to go out and do work on their cars because of this…

Moe Lane

PS: Via Below the Beltway - and, to answer Doug’s confusion as to which is worse; it’d be if this was done unilaterally. If we negotiated to this it’d at least imply that we got a concession in return, which would be something, from a realpolitik point of view.

Moe Lane

*But if the People’s Republic of China is looking for advice, here’s some for free: try being a democratic republic, run on open market principles. Yes, I know: physician, heal thyself. Still, it’s good advice.

Who knew the U.S. government has $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities?

The Chinese government warned the global financial community that it is very concerned about our massive printing of U.S. dollars and that we are using the magically printed money to buy our own T-Bills. We use the money from the “investors” who bought to the T-Bills to cut U.S. government checks. (Think California with the power to print its own currency.) Printing these billions is not done at the mint, it is done via keystroke, into a spread sheet. Type in the numbers and voila, instant U.S. currency is created.

These two facts make for a reasonable question, “Is the U.S. Government Bankrupt?” which was asked by Pete Morin in his article published today in American Thinker.

Here are some exerpts:

Before we continue to debate the merits of any Obama health care plan, we need to consider a few important facts.

“By any rational means, we must consider the present condition of our Government’s financial situation. An honest look at those finances would have a prudent person conclude that our government is tacitly bankrupt. Our unfunded liabilities far exceed our assets. Adding up all unfunded liabilities for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Government sponsored pension funds gives us a figure slightly in excess of $100 TRILLION dollars. That’s TRILLION with a ‘T’. The Federal budget deficit for fiscal 2009 will be approximately $1.84 TRILLION. That’s TRILLION with a ‘T’. Over the next ten years the projected deficit will be $9 TRILLION +. That’s TRILLION with a ‘T’. Of course, this projected deficit comes from the Congressional Budget Office and has to be considered a conservative estimate. In 1966 the feds estimated that the cost of the Medicare program by 1990 would be approximately $9 billion dollars/year; the actual cost was $67 billion dollars/year.

And,

“It’s time for Americans to realize that the good times have stopped rolling. There may be no return to a robust economy. Our future can take only one of two possible paths; either we accept our unsustainable debt and reduce government spending and taxation accordingly with a structured refinancing of the Federal debt, or face the prospect of a chaotic bankruptcy with a massive collapse of the dollar on the world market followed by a severely reduced standard of living. If it’s any indication of the way government has approached past difficulties, I’m betting on the chaotic. Stagflation on a large scale may well make the 1970’s look like high times. Job losses that will occur may well make the 1930’s look like a picnic.”

So, naturally the President of the United States is telling the nation that his health care plan will cost $1 Trillion and will not add one dime to the deficit. Seems like a completely rational statement in a world where we print our own money, to buy our own bonds, to pay our own bills.

And hey, it’s completely legal too.

Given the rational estimates that ObamaCare will, in fact, cost $2 Trillion and not $1 Trillion, then is it any wonder Americans simply no longer trust Congress and large segments of the population think the President is lying about ObamaCare not adding a dime to the deficit?

Diane Feinstein is notorious for supporting greater funding for China and cooperation with Chicom military authorities because, in part, her husband makes millions of dollars dealing with China.

It’s not just China. Feinstein has made out like a bandit from the Iraq War too.

As chairperson and ranking member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee (MILCON) from 2001 through the end of 2005, Feinstein supervised the appropriation of billions of dollars a year for specific military construction projects. Two defense contractors whose interests were largely controlled by her husband, financier Richard C. Blum, benefited from decisions made by Feinstein as leader of this powerful subcommittee.

That’s what happens when you’ve been in the United States Senate for 17 years. Who else has been in the United States Senate for 17 years? Kay Bailey Hutchison. And guess what? Hutchison looks like she could be sending taxpayer dollars to her husband just as much as Diane Feinstein:

In 2007, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison boasted how she helped secure $700 million in federal funding to expand a mass transit line in Dallas. But here’s what she forgot to tell you: The law firm of her husband, Ray Hutchison, worked on the bond financing for the same project, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in hourly fees.

In the long run-up before Hutchison officially announced her candidacy for governor this week, the popular GOP lawmaker has fended off criticism that as a member of the Senate appropriations committee, she helped dole out money to her husband’s deep-pocketed municipal clients.

That may be how they do things in Washington after 17 years of living there, but that’s now how they do things in Texas. The Washington way is not the Texas way, but that’s all Kay knows and that’s why she needs to be defeated.

The Commerce Department is running away from Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke’s statement this past weekend in China. While there, the Wall Street Journal reports, Locke said the United States should pay for China’s carbon emissions.

In his own words, Locke said:

“It’s important that those who consume the products being made all around the world to the benefit of America — and it’s our own consumption activity that’s causing the emission of greenhouse gases, then quite frankly Americans need to pay for that.”

In other words, China would have to do no carbon emission offsets. American consumers instead would cover the costs because China is making products for us.

That was Locke in his own words. We don’t always articulate what we mean. None of us do. Sometimes we say things we don’t mean. The problem for Locke is that the idea is gaining steam among prominent global warming priests that the administration pays attention to.

Not willing to let Locke’s comment become a distraction, his office later put a smoke screen around his comments, telling the Wall Street Journal

“Secretary Locke has been very clear on emphasizing the importance of fair trade as a part of the United States’ relationship with China. He believes U.S. companies should not be disadvantaged by Chinese imports not bound by responsible policies to reduce carbon emissions. China and the US must work together to ensure a level playing field and reduce our carbon footprints. The Secretary’s trip to China demonstrated his commitment to fair trade and his belief that both the United States and China can benefit from shared investments and cooperation in clean energy that will lead to commercial and environmental benefits for both countries.”

Of course, they did not actually deny that Gary Locke said what he said and meant what he meant.

Back during the 1980s, there were many left-right intellectual divides regarding the Soviet Union.

One of the forgotten ones was: How should we regard the “Soviet Union?”

Mushy-leftist types were fond of the notion that the Soviet Union was a relatively normal, basic “nation” - but one that was deservedly paranoid because of the 1941 German invasion (a line of thought conveniently stoked on a regular basis by Radio Moscow). In this view, the Soviet Union was really a cuddly little fuzzball, and if we’d just be gentle and reassuring it would cease and desist from its continual truculence - since if we could get across that we really, really, really had no aggressive intentions, the bear would purr. And, oh yeah, we could help this along by pledging that we would cheerfully recognize the extant possessions as a permanent Soviet “sphere of influence.”

More of us, though, took a different view - one that was more grounded in reality and history.

More below the fold.

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One of the central points in Senator Gregg’s op-ed about our debt is his warning about the Chinese government not buying our debt:

If the Chinese start to reduce their purchases of our government securities because of our need to borrow increasing amounts of money to finance all the spending that the president has proposed, we will have to start offering higher interest payments to potential lenders to make our securities more attractive.

As that interest on U.S. Treasuries goes up, so does the financial burden on taxpayers in the next generation. This would hit the next generation with a double whammy — unnecessary debt we’re already incurring, plus higher interest rates on our borrowing.

Actually, President Obama not only agrees with you Senator Gregg, but was more clear about what was going to happen than your statement above. Last week the President said there “is no doubt that at some point” the countries buying our debt will stop. Not may stop, but will stop.

Here is the President’s entire quote:

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From the diaries, by Erick.

As the health care industry collectively does a damage assessment of the Pelosi-Kennedy-Obama health care plans to their individual interests, one thing is clear: things have changed radically in the last week:

1. hospitals will be facing cuts of billions from Medicare and Medicaid;
2. big Pharma is facing a certain drug re-importation fight sooner than later, likely during the health care scrum;
3. the doctors are posting with a No to the public plan and irritation on medical malpractice;
4. the teabag teams have planned a national no-new-taxes-for-health-care reform day — in every state of the Union;
5. the slumber of the anti-tax, pro-business groups was jolted by the U.S. Chamber’s war-cry of No More Mr. Nice Guy, and now the Chamber is ripping the Senate Health Care bill;
6. the unions and some employers are spooling to fight the tax on health insurance planned by one Democratic faction, and the White House has announced its opposition;
7. the pro-lifers are now scrambling to catch up and be relevant on the most important government program to their interests;
8. the Move-On.org crowd keeps sending alerts to its base to hold the liberal’s feet to the fire on the question of a public plan;
9. the Heritage Foundation is coming under fire from its friends about their footsie with various aspects of the Democrats plans, especially mandates and the connector idea, which really began when President Obama ran an health care ad quoting the Heritage Foundation in support of one of then-candidate Obama’s Health Care Reform Plans;
10. Gun Owners of America is leading the charge against physicians who now feel empowered to ask if their are handguns in the house, and that information making its way into the great medical record computers in the vast U.S. government. GOA is asking its members if it wants their gun ownership showing up in their medical records;
11. Speaker Pelosi and President Obama’s commitment to a Public Plan option is being questioned by political moderates in the normally-fawning media; and,
12. there is growing consensus among those who are finding problems with the various and wide-ranging proposals that the 180 million Americans who have health insurance should be the real target of the attacks on the Obama plan: specifically, the idea that your health care plan will not change is going to be the focus of some serious and politically relevant attacks (I’ve heard it be told, anyway).

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People forget that the protests that June 4th were country wide, not just in Tiananmen Square.

Today, China is trying its best to shut down the internet and news sources to keep the remembrances silent. China tries to wipe out the memory of the protests as it tries to wipe out the protestors themselves.

We remember. We remember the tragedy. We remember that our nation embraces China as a partner. We know China is no partner and no friend of freedom.

From the diaries by Erick

The subject of the environment is a difficult one for conservatives. The Left has owned the discussion for years, always pitching the issue in the direst terms, decade after decade. When we have tried to point out reasonable objections to this extremist rhetoric, such as that there is less than a scientific consensus about climate change, we have been called “deniers” or worse.

This is doubly unfair because there are few things more conservative than conservation. There can be no doubt that being good stewards of our natural resources is necessary for human sustainability and survival. Unfortunately, in the public’s mind the Left has a monopoly on setting wise environmental policy. What we understand, as the Left seems unwilling to acknowledge, is that environmental and economic policies are often very closely associated. There are always tradeoffs for any change in policy.

Right now congressional Democrats, led by Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, are trying to use that conventional wisdom to pass a bill that could be destructive on both fronts. As even some on the left have pointed out, the bill may not actually establish binding caps on emissions, and may in fact actually contribute to worldwide pollution. This kind of up-is-down outcome is no surprise to those of us who understand how government is often less efficient at coming up with solutions than it is generating unintended consequences.

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Chinese hookers have a drinking problem. Obama has the answer: U.S. Tax money. So it appears that the President of “change” seems to be The One that drunken Chinese prostitutes “have been waiting for.”

Our informative friends at CNSNews.com discovered that the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse (NIAA) has been awarded $2.6 million U.S. tax dollars to help train Chinese prostitutes to “drink responsibly on the job.” Yes, I said Chinese prostitutes… in China. One wonders if the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse missed the salient fact that they have the word National in their moniker? Or perhaps the NIAA just missed that the nation in their title is supposed to be our nation, not China’s?

I guess it’s heartwarming that the NIAA cares so deeply about China’s FSWs (that is university speak for whores — Female Sex Workers), and all, but what of American prostitutes? Are they unworthy of the attention of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse? Don’t our oh, so intellectual university pinheads care about our own home-grown drunken whores?

Guess not.

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I frequently complain about Barack Obama not paying enough attention to Latin America. The region affects our security directly, yet the Obama administration gives little sign of recognizing the efforts of China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and others to build alliances against our interests. Two recent articles help illustrate the dangers. The first deals with Iran’s ongoing efforts to strengthen supporters in Latin America’s large Arab population:

Of course where there is Hezbollah and Hamas, the Iranian hand is not far away. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has openly worried about “Iranian meddling” in Central and South America, and Navy Admiral James Stavridis, head of U.S. Southern Command, expressed concern over Iranian support of Hezbollah and other militant operatives in the tri-border region and in Colombia.

But Iran’s subversive activity in lawless regions of the Americas is often overshadowed by its more public interactions with Latin American populists such as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, and Evo Morales of Bolivia. For example, in September 2006, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was welcomed with full military honors in Caracas, where he signed 29 economic cooperation agreements. Ahmadinejad embraced Chávez at the airport, saluting “all revolutionaries who oppose world hegemony.” Since then, Iran has funded economic projects and signed cooperation agreements with Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, not forgetting to take advantage of the convenient anti-American photo opportunity…

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As anyone who followed the Kyoto Protocols back in the 1990s can tell you, even if you believe that government action to stem carbon emissions would be desirable, Kyoto wasn’t a genuine effort to get a worldwide agreement on limiting emissions: it exempted seven of the world’s eight most populous nations (the U.S. being the lone exception) from its provisions, including rapidly growing economies like China (now the world’s number one carbon emitter) and India. And neither of those countries, with more than a billion inhabitants each, has any intention of being subject to the kinds of restrictions that President Obama’s carbon emissions “cap-and-trade” plan would impose on U.S. industries, much less during a global recession. Including industries that employ lots of the blue-collar union workers the Democrats purport to represent.

Those industries’ and unions’ solution, naturally, is even more government taxes and regulations: use trade barriers to try to inflict the same harm on foreign manufacturers as on American ones. Hey, why not start a trade war? Just remember, one thing, though: Senator Smoot and Congressman Hawley both lost their bids for re-election in 1932.

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Here’s the thing: I’ve met Michael Barone. I know that he’s smart. Frighteningly so, in fact. And I know that he pays attention to details, in ways that usually startle the living life out of people who aren’t used to it. In other words, this is an aware guy that we’re talking about.

So why the surprise, here?

All of which brings to mind the report of a conservative blogger who watched George W. Bush’s 2005 inaugural speech with a group of liberals. Every time Bush called for spreading freedom and democracy around the world, the crowd guffawed and groaned and jeered. For them, evidently, Bush was a figure of fun, and his calls for democracy and human rights laughable. The same people who decried his supposed authoritarian rule at home had nothing but contempt for his call for freedom and democracy abroad.

Beneath this stated contempt is, I think, something in the nature of secret guilt. Or rather, anger at the notion that Bush had stolen the issues of human rights and democracy from the liberals.

The desire to oppose the Iraq war root and branch, to denounce every aspect of it, imposed a duty to dismiss as laughable Bush’s stated objective — set out eloquently before the decision to take military action as well as after it — of advancing democracy in the Middle East. A duty to side with those, like the National Intelligence Council nominee, who have long held that governance in the style of Saudi Arabia or Syria is the best that can be hoped for in that region, and the best for all concerned. A duty to dismiss with contempt, or simply to ignore, the rather remarkable strides of the Iraqis themselves made after enduring decades of brutal tyranny.

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Let’s review the bidding: An ill-considered statement from the Treasury Secretary tax delinquent nominee concerning Chinese currency re-evaluation may very well start off a trade war between the United States and China. If that’s not enough, there has been little to no movement whatsoever on the part of Team Obama–stretching from the campaign to the present day–to indicate that there will be any serious effort to revive trade talks like the dormant Doha Round. This, naturally, leads people to think that instead of encouraging trade liberalization, the Obama Administration will seek to put the kibosh on it both through inaction on the trade diplomacy front and through the imposition of tariffs.

Gosh. Good thing that the nation’s economy–not to mention the world’s–is doing so well. Otherwise, stories like this one might cause a lot of concern.

Treasury Secretary-designate Tim Geithner was reported to have mentioned yesterday that he believes the Chinese are “manipulating” their currency, presumably downward against the dollar in an attempt to goose their exports.

This issue is going to get a lot of play in the next few months, because China’s mercantilist policy depends on an artificially undervalued currency. Since this causes tremendous imbalances in global capital flows, it’s long been US policy to encourage the Chinese to let their currency appreciate against ours.

And they came a long way, taking renminbi from about 7.5 to the dollar in late 2007, to the recent perceived target of 6.85. (The Chinese don’t let their currency float freely. Rather, the People’s Bank of China sets a narrow range in which it may float on any given day.)

China’s revaluation policy abruptly reversed last July as the global economy began to crumble. But it’s most important here to note Geithner’s use of the word “manipulation.” That’s a very special word, because the Treasury Secretary is required by law to report currency “manipulators” to Congress every six months, and may be required to take action against them.

The Chinese have retaliated swiftly to Geithner’s remarks. They let the yuan decline by 20 basis points overnight. And they caused a lot of minor banking officials to get quoted to the effect that, due to recessionary conditions in China, yuan would be considerably weaker yet, if the authorities weren’t holding it UP rather than down.

Paulson, who has been to China dozens of times and cultivated close relations with the power structure there as SecTreas, would never have allowed this to happen. I don’t know if Geithner and Obama are making a rookie mistake here, or if they’re signaling some misbegotten change in policy, or if they’re saying what they think the Senate wants to hear.

We don’t need a trade war with the people who are going to be lending us trillions of dollars over the next four years or more. If I can figure that out, you’d think The Smartest People In America™ wouldn’t have much trouble either.